Tag Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! The Admirable Oliver St. John Gogarty

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

There’s a bar near me that goes all out for the Masters. It’s a corner place with a small walkway it annexed from the development by subtle encroachment; a table here, now two, now six tables and outdoor TVs on the wall. I don’t think they own the “patio,” but it’s theirs now.

A few years ago, sections of the windowed front were replaced by glass garage doors. In good weather, weather like today, they open up the place and it’s all one big breezy space. All of it, the interior and the squatters-rights walkway, are covered in sod for the Masters. Not rolled out astroturf. They bring in real grass. I wouldn’t think it’d look good – ripped up in seconds by beer and wine guzzler feet I assumed – but it somehow does. They have drink specials, bands at night, and always one of the best hamburgers and bowls of chili in town.

My wife and I want to head out for a bit this afternoon and hang out. We hate golf. And crowds. This stinks.

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out of work asap and get the weekend started. The Masters is on. If you’re in Birmingham, try Otey’s in Crestline, but don’t expect a seat this weekend. Damn golf.

First, a little verse.

***

“Twelve years ago Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow. His poetry fits the incident, a gay, stoical—no, I will not withhold the word—heroic song. Irish by tradition and many ancestors, I love, though I have nothing to offer but the philosophy they deride, swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men; yet I do not think that is the sole reason, good reason though it is, why I gave him considerable space, and think him one of the great lyric poets of our age.”
– W. B. Yeats, from the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935

Oliver St. John Gogarty was a dear friend of Archie Griffith and with him, a founding member of Sinn Fein. He variously carted around Irish Republican Army members as surreptitiously as allowed by the canary yellow Rolls Royce he drove, volunteered his house as a safe house, and otherwise behaved anti-Englishly. He sided with Griffith in supporting a treaty despite internal opposition to peace within the revolutionary movement, and sat as a Free State Senator, a designation considered by many in the IRA such as Liam Lynch, as traitorous capitulation to the crown. Lynch ordered the IRA to shoot the office holders and that led to Gogarty pretending diarrhea and the escape Yeats refers to above.

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POETS Day! Yeats’s Folly

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’m off for Louisiana for a crawfish boil despite my allergy to crawfish. It’s a five hour drive so no POETS Day this week for me; more of a Piss Off Really Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Happy PORETS Day.

Crawfish boils are where I eat chicken fingers and warmed over French fries with all the kids. It’s an annual event and I’ve seen youngster chat turn with the years. Bouncy houses were all the rage once. Nerf guns next. Sports and video games discussion got animated as they grew older. My Birmingham nephew is making the trip with us. He’s fifteen and has a girlfriend. I can’t wait to tell the other kids so we can all tease him.

After we eat I’ll go hang out with the adults again. I can’t wait to tell them about my nephew’s girlfriend so we can all tease him.

For the rest of you, kick off before the boss says it’s time. Catch a ball game if the weather’s nice or pull up a barstool and watch one with something cold and delicious if it’s not. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a little verse first.

***

Maud Gonne was an actress and activist. That’s all the rage now.

Every starlet with a guest spot on the CW has a cause. Animal rights are a great public ingratiator, especially if you stick with pets. Saving various darters is great, but people want to strike what’s near them from a safe distance. Liking the tweet of a Hollywood pretty person who says she advocates (hate that word used that way) for the ASPCA is how an average American who thinks their jerk neighbor leaves his dog outside too long can feel involved. Cancer advocacy (counter to a strict reading with diseases but still gets used) is big. Emma Watson only wears ecominical clothes. The actors I most admire fight against injustice. Somebody has to.

There are issue advisors and advocacy directors for the indecisive. It’s not enough to be good at pretending to be other people. You have to be down with a cause if you’re going to stand out in today’s Hollywood or basement with a backdrop for your YouTube channel. Everybody’s an activist.

Maud founded Sinn Féin.

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POETS Day! George Gascoigne, Birth of the Modern

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

As a kid, I had a lot of Doonesbury books. Zonker was my favorite character. I particularly liked his professional tanning arc, prepping for the George Hamilton Classic. There was one strip where he was laying out for two panels with his tanning coach by his side. In the third, he sighs and says, “The thrill is gone, Bernie,” to which Bernie responds in the fourth, “It’s just a passing cloud.”

There are deficiencies in describing a comic strip where nuances may be lost, so trust me when I tell you that it was funny. As to the story, Zonker took a break from the rigors of training, refreshed, and got back to it. He won the Hamilton.

Sometimes you need a break in order to do well in the long run. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, read this.

***

“He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write.” – Robert Tofte, 1615

from The Steel Glass
George Gascoigne (c.1535-1577)

O knights, O squires, O gentle bloods yborn,
You were not born all only for yourselves:
Your country claims some part of all your pains.
There should you live, and therein should you toil
To hold up right and banish cruel wrong,
To help the poor, to bridle back the rich,
To punish vice, and virtue to advance,
To see God serv’d and Belzebub suppres’d.

Continental poems had been translated into English in blank verse. There were dramas written in it as well, but above is the opening of first known original English poem written in blank verse. It’s not great. In his book Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use, Robert Shaw faults first word repetition as seen in the lines above, and in these he gives as example:

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POETS Day! Lascelles Abercrombie

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I sold my basketball fandom to my wife when we were dating. It wasn’t a big deal. This was back in 99 or 00, so Alabama was mid to bad and she’s a Duke grad. I don’t really care for the game anyway and it didn’t seem to be much of a conflict since Alabama and Duke were unlikely to cross paths in any meaningful way on the court. I got her football fandom in the trade for the same reason.

Now that Alabama is as good as they are, I should care more. I want them to do well, but it’s bouncy hoopty ball. It helps that I’m a jinx. I don’t watch Alabama games anymore. When I do they lose, and that’s bad because football recruits like to go to schools with good basketball teams too. All-around success by the whole athletic department is claimed as a draw for them. I’ve tuned into a game the Tide is winning and watched the lead slip away, turned it off, and checked my score app to see it reestablished. It’s uncanny.

I do my best to support non-college-football tournaments and such for the spectacle. They’re fun. In 2023, I foolishly hopped in a car with my brother in-law and headed to Louisville where I made Bama lose a Sweet Sixteen matchup with San Diego Sate University. Seriously. San Diego State.

Conference playoffs are afoot. I won’t be watching Alabama’s tip off at 7:15 tomorrow night against TBA, as of this writing. I may watch Duke play UNC at 6:00. I will definitely head to a restaurant for some of the day games even if I don’t pay too much attention. You don’t need a dog in the hunt or even a like of the game to enjoy the excitement of a basketball tournament like you don’t need to be a golf fan to have Augusta on your bucket list.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Take a POETS Day and watch the fast-paced game fans say they love devolve into an hour of last minute fouling, free throw, fouling, free throw. Keep a baseball game on your phone in case you get bored (Braves v Nats, 12:05 CDT).

Try a little verse first. Roll Devils.

***

It is our tariff on imported books. Unless an author is almost certain to appeal to a large audience, in which case his book will be manufactured in America, the publisher can import only a small edition in sheets and sell it at a relatively high price. That means that he cannot do any thing to push the book, and so the author who is not known, so to speak, to begin with, has very little chance with the American public…

That Mr. Abercrombie’s early work did not immediately surmount the handicap of being imported in a very small edition is due in part to its character and in part to our taste.
               – Llewellyn Jones, The North American Review, Dec., 1924

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POETS Day! Dryden and Marvell were Mean Girls

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I survived the Oscars thanks to Tom Hanks. My weekly Sunday night dinner crew is cavalcade of wonderful people with one tragic flaw that flies in bitter conflict with my own. Theirs is that, despite many degrees, they love watching awards shows. Mine is that I never check the award show calendar so I know which weeks to pretend to be sick and stay home.

I was warned this go round. I bemoaned my predicament mid Grammies on Twitter and a friend responded with the date and air time of the next trap, the dreaded Academy Awards. I forgot. Thankfully, three time Best Actor Award winner Tom Hanks, in what I see as a clear attempt to shut the door behind him and broach no competition, is narrating a great nature show about ‘Merica that aired opposite the movie self-love fest. If there’s one thing my Sunday dinner crew likes more than awards shows, it’s nature shows. Thank you, Tom. You’re showing God’s work.

The show was beautiful, and it’s all right here stuff. We’re in America. You should go out and see it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and spend an afternoon admiring the bounty we’re soaking in. If it’s raining, see if Tom’s show is streaming.

First, a little verse.

***

“Dan Brown?” This was after a few hundred feet of pondering.

“He was hugely popular.”

“Yeah, and his books are objectively not good.”

“He sold something like 80 million copies.”

“Something like that.” We went left towards the put-in. Our afternoon walks go left towards the put-in when weather allows and whim concedes a longer go along the creek. Right takes us home. “What about Stephanie Meyer?”

“She sold a billion.”

“Yeah, but if you played a drinking game and drank every time someone’s eyes were described as golden or bronze, your liver would fall out. Oh! Fenimore Cooper.” When my wife, when anybody, drops the James in James Fenimore Cooper, you know she’s thinking about Twain’s “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.” That’d be fun to read again.

“What about Carrot Top?” And there, crossing the little rill that bisects the westernmost widening of the park as the first owl of the still lit evening sounded from somewhere back a ways on the far bank, I realized that I was seriously thinking about how to interpret Carrot Top’s career.

The thing is, I’ve laughed at his stand up. I’m not a fan, but from what I’ve seen he gets one in every so often. He has throngs of fans. Just not my thing. He is the butt of a lot of jokes, though.

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POETS Day! Talkin’ Chaucer at the Godsibbing Fense

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’m listening to a book about free speech and the necessity of, and the author went on for a few minutes about punishments meted out for violations of English law in Colonial America. It was amazing stuff. They’d cut off your ears for offending the Crown’s reputation, even for questioning it. Lucky loudmouths might get off with a cropping where they’d just trim off the ear tops. Tongues were bored, ears were nailed to pillories, many whippings of designated number and severity were prescribed.

One sorry SOB had his tongue bored, his arms broken, and then with his arms “dangling,” according to the author Jonathan Turley, was forced to run a gauntlet as men beat him with rifle butts.

What the hell did he say?

I hope he said it loudly. Clearly and from a high place on a stark, windy day. I hope his wind aided preferably bass voice carried across the land and turned the head of every man, woman, and child. I don’t know the content, but I hope he got the most from it.

This isn’t a segue to slippery slopes and non-crime hate incidents. It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and read a book. There are a lot of them out there. I’m enjoying Against the Country, by Ben Metcalf. Listening to a book, as I’m doing in the car with Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, doesn’t count. That’s not really reading, even if it is fun. Maybe read the Turley book, though. I’ve heard good things.

In any case, take time for a little verse first.

***

ITEM:

On May 4, 1380, Cecelia Chaumpaigne signed a quitclaim releasing Geoffrey Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus.” That’s a translation. The entire statement was recorded in Latin, as was customary. The word “raptus” is left untranslated and italicized as no one was quite sure exactly which of its uses common as legal terms at the time was intended in this case.

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POETS Day! William Makepeace Thackeray

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I was chatting with a guy from New Jersey yesterday. It was cold and glum in Alabama. He was making fun of me for acting as if temperatures in the thirties were Armageddon-ish and I shook my head and mumbled something like “…wouldn’t last a second around here in August… humidity.”

He showed me an amazing foul weather trick so epoch shaking I might deign to call it a life-hack. “If you are ever bothered by the weather,” he said, “take out your phone, pull up your weather app, and bring up Iowa City, Iowa.” He demonstrated. It was 9° with a blue subscript that read “feels like 7°.”

According to Wikipedia, there are 171,000 people living in the greater Iowa City Metropolitan Area. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s POETS Day. Look outside. Now look at your phone weather app, type in Iowa City, Iowa, and look outside again. There are 341,000,000 people in this country, and in comparison, no matter what it looked like out that window, 340,829,000 of you just realized what a beautiful day you’ve been blessed with.

It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Have at it.

First, a little verse.

***

I usually come across one or two odd and interesting facts when looking into the lives of poets for these posts, and want as I might, I can’t shoehorn or wrestle them into sense with even the loosest narrative, and I can get pretty loose. I found two this week while reading up on the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and I like them too much to discard. I don’t know if it’s still an aside when you haven’t begun anything to momentarily distract from, but a couple of quick asides if you… whether you mind or not, I guess.

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POETS Day! Leigh Hunt

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I think you call this a “study,” so this is a study on Louis Édouard Fournier’s “The Funeral of Shelley” as painted by Rene Sears. That’s Hunt in the middle of the trio.

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

My nephew’s twelve years old. He just started little league practice for the spring season. That sounds crazy to me because it’s not baseball weather. It’s not even Valentine’s Day. Now, kids’ sports require commitment that was never asked of me when I was young. Whether or not youth athletics are too structured or too demanding is an interesting question, but not one I’m planning on addressing right now.

I bring up my nephew because he’s frogspawn, blossoms, buzzing bees, and W-2s in the mail: a sign of coming spring. He’s at practice, the herald signaling greater things and right on cue, MLB pitchers and catchers started reporting. The Cubs were the first to get going on the 9th. By the 13th, every battery in the league is scheduled for post-workout ice baths; by the 18th, full squads.

POETS Day is never purposeless, but soon – maybe not soon, but in the foreseeable future – you’ll Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and there’s a Friday afternoon game on. Thinnest line on the horizon. Barely in sight. It’s beginning though, and a little league shall lead them.

Take off, enjoy the anticipation and the afternoon. First some verse.

***

In 1844, Leigh Hunt published a collection of essays called Imagination and Fancy. I couldn’t find a copy of it online. It seems like something Project Gutenberg would have, but no. us.archive.org has Essays of Leigh Hunt: Selected and Edited by Reginald Brimley Johnson. It doesn’t contain the whole 1844 collection, but it has the essay “An Answer to the Question, What is Poetry?” I was after. That’s the one where, I’ve read, he famously lays out his philosophy of poetry. Reginald Brimley Johnson was kind enough to select and edit that one.

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POETS Day! John Keats at Last, Apparently

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Illustration by Rene Sears, who defensively replied “I don’t know. Ask him why he had so many wings in his poetry.”

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

I’m making meatballs for the weekend, and like all the best meatball recipes, the key ingredient in mine is lies. There’s a lot of time spent between minimal exertions of effort. It really is easy, but there’s a fine tradition of pretending to pretend that you didn’t mind cooking – which you barely did – at all. You have to master saying “Oh, it was nothing,” when it really was nothing so it sounds like it you were saying it was nothing when we all know it was something, but you guys are worth it. Oh, Stop it. Really.

I wrote about the recipe and duplicitous grandmotherly types at OT almost a year ago. Feel free to give it a go, but if you’re going to pretend to take a long time putting dinner together, you’d best cover your tracks and get work complicit in the cover story by ducking out of the job mid-Friday. That way, if anybody doubts you spent all day slaving over a hot stove instead of mixing stuff up in a bowl, popping it in the oven while you do gods know what, and then briefly checking in to finish things off with a few hours of unattended simmering, you can say, “Oh yeah? Well, I wasn’t at work, though I’d prefer you not check because then they might think I wasn’t really sick.”

It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Mangia!

But first, some verse.

***

I could have sworn I’d already done a POETS Day on Keats. This week I’ve been reading about him with a mindset intent on shutting out basic biography I must have covered previously. I figured that, mistakenly but mistakenly was ascendant, having done Keats I’d done “Ode on a Grecian Urn” because that’s the one you have to do even if you’re going through the motions to have it behind you, field cleared for stuff people might not already know.

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POETS Day! A Few Poems by Kingsley Amis as Pretense to Discuss One of His Novels

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I don’t like poinsettias and take comfort in the fact that they usually do the honorable thing and die shortly after Christmas time. They’re fine in season I suppose, but so are ugly sweaters and bells on adult shoes.

They’re poisonous flowers, I think. I read that people who don’t like cats but somehow ended up with one buy poinsettias intending to plead ignorance later and get on with their lives. Ours is still in the kitchen thriving in its pot so I daydream about adopting some sort of reverse cat that’s poisonous to poinsettias.

I’m supposed to be encouraging you to take a POETS Day, but I’m distracted by this velveteen-flop looking plant with one petal beginning to wilt and a couple of dozen more that won’t follow its example. I’m distracted like you might be on a Friday afternoon, so preoccupied with weekend thoughts that you can’t get any poinsettia work done, sitting performatively, wasting your time. You should Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a poem first.

***

I’ve written about Kingsley Amis in this space numerous times (see here, here, here, and here). I’m an unabashed fan so an unapologetic writer though I don’t claim any “Best” titles for him. There are better novelists, better poets, better editors, and your average park bench made for a better husband. He simply seems to be the writer I like most most of the time.

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