Tag Archives: Poem

POETS Day: Crow, by Ted Hughes

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The NFL season is over. College (real) football is self-immolating, buying and transferring talent as teams vie for one of the fitty-leven shiny new slots or the inevitable newer ones in the regular season diffusing expansion of the playoffs. Half the teams in the NBA make their playoffs, so there’s no point in watching that feigned drama. College basketball was visionary. They shed non-March interest long ago, and even that doesn’t kick in until post Ides. European soccer is in stasis. The beginning of the season is exciting. The cutthroat ending is exciting. What happens now won’t matter for a while.

Thank God for baseball. Spring training is here, consequence free but heraldic. I put on the Dodgers at the Padres yesterday. Didn’t even watch it. Just background. Baseball’s magic that way. It’s a comforting presence in an uncertain world. Today, I think I’ll put on KC v Texas. The big prize is tomorrow: Red Sox at Orioles. I’ll have a hard time not watching that.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work a few hours ahead of schedule and ignore a ball game. First pitch at 2:05 Central. Happy POETS Day.

***

You’d think the most interesting thing about one of Great Britain’s Poet Laureates would be his poetry, but Ted Hughes first wife killed herself. She turned on an unlit oven and passed. At the time of her suicide, Hughes had moved out and was living with another woman. He would continue living with the other woman until six years later when she too killed herself; also by turning on an unlit oven.

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POETS Day! Hartley Coleridge

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He looks okay to me. Tiny hands, maybe.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My kids are out of school again today. This is becoming a regular thing. There have been holidays, teacher workdays, snow days, bad weather forecast days, and one power outage. It’s gotten out of hand. They’re off Monday too.

Part of this can be put down to the extended school year. Back in my day, school ended on Memorial Day and didn’t pick up again until Labor Day. Elementary school kids knew a freedom more expansive than their concept of time passage. Middle schoolers re-invented themselves, returning in the fall with a deeper voice and a few Led Zeppelin t-shirts. High school kids got jobs, went to science camp, or rehab. There was time to know an unshared existence.

The Germans may have lost the war, but they also lost the next war. After beating them twice, the rest of the Western world carried on their loser Prussian school system as if nothing had happened. Fredrick gave the Generallandschulreglement, and we still march on. Der Realschule is never satisfied. It wants year-round classes.

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POETS Day! More Seamus Heaney and Thoughts on Touching Stuff

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Seamus Heaney

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Last week’s POETS Day was about Seamus Heaney, and I seemed to have found myself in a moment, albeit a miniscule one. Douglas Murray featured Heaney in his regular Sunday column, “Things Worth Remembering,” over at The Free Press and then the latest issue of The New Criterion arrived with a review by Paul Dean of both The Letter’s of Seamus Heaney and The Translations of Seamus Heaney. I got swept up in it all and the books I borrowed aren’t due back until the day before Valentine’s, so l’m going to keep it going.

I’m pulled by the urge to say “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s…” and then substitute something about the Super Bowl for the usual “Saturday,” but I’d have to include “Bowl.” It’s not POETSB Day. I can’t write “Super bowl” to de-emphasize half of what is a well-known proper title, and even if I did, it looks stupid. I’ll keep it “Saturday” and assume you know the drill. I’ll stay away from Taylor Swift cracks too.

***

My wife and I, weather permitting, try to walk every day along the creek that runs near our house. Today I was telling her about Heaney, what I’d read that afternoon. He left a sizable collection of literary papers and works to Emory University. They have his along with collections from other Irish poets: Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, and others. That’s about a two-hour drive from Birmingham and I was thinking maybe we’d take a day trip. And then I thought, “Why?”

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POETS Day! Listening to Seamus Heaney

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

As always, it’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but this week you may not have piss off quite as early. I’m not suggesting you stay at work. Don’t do that. Get the weekend started early as per usual, but today we have an audio component. If you have a cushy desk job and a pair of earbuds, you can take time for a little verse right there in the discomfort of your cubicle.

Some may say, “Listening to non-work-related material on company time is like stealing!”

Yes, it is. Delicious stealing.

***

Harold Bloom wrote about everybody. As editor of the Modern Critical Views series, he got his name on a mess of book spines. They’re essay collections, and a hell of a resource – each focused on a particular author or movement and each with an erudite introduction by Bloom himself. A quick count on Goodreads shows one hundred and seventy-nine volumes dedicated to individual authors. There’s not a decent cover amongst them.

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POETS Day! My Problems with Walt Whitman

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I live in a city that is not prepared for cold weather. My northerly relatives laugh when we shut down for snow or icy conditions but we don’t have all the toys they have. If these were regular enough occurrences to justify a snowplow corps or whatever you call the truck that salts the road, we’d have one. But they aren’t. So we don’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t.

The truth is, we like the snow days – “snow days” being a catch all for any day off due to snow, freezing rain, or because James Spann or one of the lesser weatherfolks says there might be snow or freezing rain. Nobody can get to work except the people who own a liquor store and everybody can get to the liquor store. Kids, in particular, love snow days. Every so often we get a real event where cars are abandoned on highways and schools have to host impromptu sleep overs in the gym. Those are important because they give cover when the county preemptively calls a for closings when the weather forecast indicates the chance of something threatening and everybody wants a day off to go to the liquor store. “Better safe that sorry,” says the thirsty school board.

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POETS Day! John Skelton, Cyndi Lauper, and Phonies

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Photo by Rene Sears, in the park, with a Pixel

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’m sure you’ve heard that there are only nine shopping days left until Christmas. I’m acutely aware, kept up to date by radio, tv, and internet. If I somehow managed to avoid all those electronic reminders, there’s the traffic. There’s no correct lane switching strategy with an army of Amazon vans suffocating every intersection and left averse UPS trucks double parked three to a block. Fed Ex drivers like to park in the median. Maybe they train in Philadelphia.

We let the holidays get hectic. It’s commercial and too often anxiety reigns. “Do I have a present for Dad?” “What do I get my sister?” The buildup was already an ordeal and then advertisers got shifty and started using “gift” as a verb. What gets lost in all of this is what’s important: that there are only three Fridays left to lie, scheme, and dissemble in 2023.

Carpe diebus. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. This is the last one before your penultimate chance of the year. Don’t let the weekend just happen. Be an instigator. Fake a cough, arrange an “emergency call.” Whatever you have to do. Start your weekend on your terms and slip out a few hours before The Man™ deigns to give leave. Have a ball, but try to fit in a few minutes for a little verse. It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.

***

“I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton.” – The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis

There is a park across the street from my house. It runs along Shades Creek, a feeder to the Cahaba River and part of the watershed that provides drinking water for the Birmingham area. That’s terrifying considering how much trash we get from upstream.

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POETS Day! Fugglestone St. Peter’s own, George Herbert

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

POETS Day snuck up on me this week. I try to extend some lifeline, no matter how flimsy it may be, to give plausible rational for skipping out of work early, but I’ve done a lot of these now. Finding a new excuse every week isn’t as easy as it may seem. Don’t let that deter you.

You don’t need me to supply you with a reason. It’s right there: TS. Piss Off Early comes with its own why. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Admire the fulgence of the anagram’s fullness and start the weekend at a time of your choosing.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Catch a ball game at a bar. Take a walk in a park. On average, we only see 4,113.2 Fridays in a lifetime and at minimum 2% of those are 13ths. Don’t waste one clock-watching.

If you do manage to get out, take a moment to read a poem or three. Maybe these.

***

My wife and I honeymooned in Vancouver. It was 2002, three years after the British ceded Hong Kong to Communist China. Refugees scattered all over the Pacific Rim. These weren’t the poor. I read that British Columbia absorbed thirty thousand souls. We were told to expect amazing high-end Chinese cuisine and we found amazing high-end Chinese cuisine.

We went to an elegant place near the harbor for dim sum. It was in a hotel lobby; a huge room below a series of mezzanines with an open wall of glass extending up several floors. Neither of us had ever eaten dim sum before but we were told that instead of a menu there would be a cart full of food that would visit tableside and you chose what you wanted from there.

That’s what happened. A cart came by and there were dumplings and bao, which may or may not be a dumpling as well but seems distinct to me. I think there was soup and definitely spicy vegetables. Little strips of sticky meat. Everything was fantastic. What we didn’t know was there would be a series of carts with different offerings making the rounds.

We loaded up on the first thing that came by and though we loved what we got, we saw what we didn’t. The duck on the third cart looked impossibly crisp. There was a lesson to be learned; a variant on “Don’t make fast friends.” Get the lay of the land before you commit.

I didn’t learn that lesson.

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POETS Day! John Donne

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome to POETS Day! The John Donne Edition, so prepare to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. By the time this post is published you still won’t have voted yet so feel free to make your workplace a haven for free speech. Who will end up holding the reins of power is on quite a few minds. People say that it’s impolite to talk about politics or religion in public, but people love to talk about politics and religion. Once they get going it’s Katie bar the door. Indulge their desires by giving the people what they want and don’t hold back. If people are reticent to speak up start assigning positions like a debating coach. “Sally, you defend congressional stock trades. Bill. Abortion. I’ve got you down for anti. Tommy, pretend to be above it all and keep saying that there’s no real difference between the parties.” Have fun with it. Maybe designate a supply closet as the penalty box. I’ll give it thirty minutes before everyone is at each other’s throats and forty-five before the walk outs begin. Follow suit. You aren’t going to get any work done in this environment. Hit the bars, grab a matinee, surf PornHub for the articles, take a walk along a creek, or otherwise indulge yourself. It’s the weekend and it comes early to those willing to seize it. But first, some metaphysical stuff.

Samuel Johnson had some harsh words for the metaphysical poets. He thought they were showoffs always trying to impress on the reader how learned they were. He’s probably right about that. He also had issues with their devotional poetry. He felt that any communication with God was by de facto divine and attempts to improve the experience by framing it poetically were attempts wasted. The divine exists above poetry. I’m not a Johnson aficionado so I have no idea whether or not he had similar issues with devotional poetry by non-metaphysical poets, but I have read a few lines of his explaining why it was okay when Milton did it. I just skimmed his Milton excuses, but it seemed to me like he was protesting too much.

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POETS Day! Cecil Day Lewis

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’d love to wish you a joyous POETS Day, but I don’t see my wishes making any difference. You’re still encouraged to embrace the POETS Day ethos, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but this time your motivation is not an early happy-hour beer and tolerably spicy chicken wings. It’s not a refreshing walk in the park with that fetching he or she that has caught your eye. It’s not even to declare independence and lay claim to time that should rightfully be yours to waste. It’s Halloween weekend, and though the actual holiday may not be until Monday, do you think those bratty little trick or treaters, hiding behind their oh-so-cute Davey Crocket, Nancy Drew, or misnamed Frankenstein costume, are going to innocently while away the time until the clock green lights their mischief? I’m telling you they won’t. They have a whole weekend, and they know that school ends at three and most homeowners don’t get to leave work until sometimes after five, giving them a free Friday reign of terror through neighborhoods unprotected by adults. Not even the cover of darkness will so embolden them. So lie, cheat, fake, disgrace yourself in front of your co-workers – whatever it takes to get out of work early to protect the homestead lest the Kinderly Ones get there first and egg your house, roll your trees with toilet paper, or sacrifice your cat at one of their Johnson’s Baby black masses.

Today I chose a selection from Cecil Day-Lewis, British Poet Laureate from 1968 – 1972, one time very active but eventually reformed Communist, friend and devotee of Auden, popular mystery writer (under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake) and father of four – among them Academy Award-winner Daniel Day-Lewis. His relation to the actor means he comes with a ghost story, which fits in nicely considering it’s the Halloween weekend.

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