Tag Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! Poems Found While Reading an Essay by Anthony Hecht

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

There’s a constant drip to my life now. A background sound would imply direction. This isn’t that. This ubiquitous drip, this relentless hydro-metronome, reverberates from the porcelain of the bathroom behind me, the steel of the kitchen I’m in, and somehow through two bedroom doors from the other bathroom. It is of the house.

In 2010, a cold snap came. We were newly minted homeowners, landed for only a week at the time. The inspection report showed an open heating duct in the crawlspace so I donned my fiscal responsibility hat and had the duct capped immediately on moving in. The pipes froze a few days later and one burst a day or two after that. Chesterton’s fence was under my house.

In Wisconsin and other Big10 locales, pipes are insulated or designed to expand somehow. I’ve read about systems where conductive wires are wrapped around water pipes to provide warmth when switched on. This is all Star Trek stuff to Alabamians. Nobody has that here so we drip our faucets.

It hasn’t been above freezing for three days now. The drip haunts me. Mocks me. Its maddening report more assault than assurance. But what if it stops?

Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Nothing gets done at work on a Friday afternoon anyway, so go do fun stuff. Or if you live in Alabama, go home and listen. Listen and fear.

Drip. Drip. Dri…

***

I have a copy of Anthony Hecht’s Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry I keep on hand when I’m in the mood. It sits in a stack with Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History by William Logan, the collection of T.S. Eliot essays, Poetry and Poets, and a few like. Sometimes I think I enjoy reading about poetry, criticism and commentary, more than I like reading actual poetry. That might not be odd, but I think it is, and it warms my vanity as personal idiosyncrasies will.

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POETS Day! Stephen Crane

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

It’s the last POETS Day under the Biden Administration. Put an early Friday lid on it and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Hit the beach and take a nap, ride a precarious bike, have some ice cream and meet the people. That hair ain’t gonna smell itself, Jack. Whatever you do, don’t waste the day working. It’s practically the weekend.

Literally take a minute for a little verse first.

***

In 1897, Stephen Crane was on a ship that sank. Subsequently, he spent thirty or so hours in a lifeboat with the ship’s captain and two crewmen. After getting safely back to New York, he wrote a short story called “The Open Boat” about the adventure. It’s harrowing.

“A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats… As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water.”

He does a good job putting you in the boat – putting anxiety in you – surrounded and claustrophobic in the troughs and hoping while knowing better you’d glimpse salvation somewhere on the horizon from the crests. Eventually the lifeboat flipped and they swam for it. Three made it to shore, Daytona Beach, sixty-two years before it was a NASCAR draw.

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POETS Day! Skipwith Cannéll’s “Nocturnes”

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Birmingham may have gone out over its skis and declared a POETS Day pre-emptively. We don’t have snowplows, our shovels are sewing scissor-esque in that they’re solely for burying kin, and nobody can find the other glove. An inch of snow will paralyze us. The schools shut down and no one can get to work except liquor store owners who’ll do three Christmases and a mid-week Valantine’s Day worth of business in twelve hours. There’s a prediction of one to two inches by tomorrow morning.

I got the closing notice for my youngest’s school yesterday. My eldest’s sent an email this morning (I’m writing this on Thursday night) with an ominous pair of sentences about on-line assignments to follow (Mwu-hah-hah!). I can’t blame them for being overly cautious after the flash blizzard (three inches) of 2012 left teachers and students (not mine) stranded overnight. Rare snows put us in a bind, but I’ve been at home through more dire warnings that didn’t pan out as expected than I can count, leaving a city of day drinking dog walkers.

Nobody in my neck of the woods needs a POETS Day plan. We can’t Piss Off Early even though Tomorrow’s Saturday, because we’ll already be home. Good luck to the rest of you and your Northern ways. Fake a cough, maybe?

Whatever you gotta do, get out and have fun. But take time for a little verse first.

***

I’m pretty sure we all had the same initial thought, but this week’s featured poem was published in 1914 and the World War I biplane made by Sopwith and named the Camel due to an aerodynamic hump over the guns in the original design, wasn’t introduced until 1917. The similarity had no effect on Cannéll’s poetry; no resentment at being teased or bravado from a name evoking brief air superiority for a three year period before rapid development of technology tempered by the pressures of war led to predictable obsolescence.

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POETS Day! Edward Thomas

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

It’s a brand-new year with a brand-new slate of sick days tempting you to do evil. Don’t waste those quite yet. A half day’s like a skip day you didn’t sleep through the first half of and if you playthings right, there’s fifty-two of them. That’s a lot. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Happy New Year.

Seize the afternoon and enjoy the remains of a Friday on your terms. But first, some verse.

***

Everybody knows Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.” Most of us, myself included, are told that it’s an anthem, a call to individualism, by a teacher. It’s presented to us young. Someone gives us the gist – usually in lauding, reverent tones – and we read it as accepting sponges.

I never questioned the received assessment. For years I unfairly filed the poem, and Frost too, away as starter kit stuff; Johnson’s Baby Poetry, to mangle a line from P.J. O’Rourke. People with a desire to seriously immerse themselves in a subject like poetry—dive in and learn the whats and whyfores—need to shed assumptions. I didn’t do that. I assumed that since I “knew” about Frost and “The Road Not Taken,” it couldn’t be all that great; jingoistic popular stuff. I wanted the esoterica. That was dumb.

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POETS Day! The Author of “A Visit from St Nicholas”… Again

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

In the spirits of POETS Day and Christmas, I’m phoning one in this week to spend more time with my wrapping paper. Below is a reprint of “POETS Day! Clement Clark Moore” from December 23, 2022. I’ve rearranged a couple of sentences that infuriated me on reread and found a spelling error that need not be repeated, but otherwise, it is as was.

Have a wonderful Christmas, or Holiday Season if you pray otherwise. Bless you all.

***

“Not a mouse stirring.”
– Hamlet Act I, Scene I

This is another one of those weekends where there’s really not much need for a POETS Day. Heresy! You might say, and I’d be tempted to agree with you, but even those that don’t celebrate Christmas are the beneficiaries of an act of Congress marking the 25th of December as a federal holiday and that designation pretty well spills over to the days before and after in fact if not in practice. Even if you are at work, whoever you are supposed to be calling on or transferring funds to is probably tilting at last minute shopping or stuck in an airport because the U.S. is now apparently Hoth so it’s a wasted week. If you don’t work retail, you’ve likely already been given a pass to leave work early on Friday if you were expected to show up at all. There’s no need to adhere to the dictate Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but that doesn’t mean there’s no need for a bit of poetry. On the contrary, this is an excellent time to get all doe-eyed and the kind of overplayed optimistic cheerful that makes grown men cringe and wish they’d never heard the word ebullient and say, “But it’s always time for poetry!” I think that’s true. Hope you do too.

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POETS Day! John Clare

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Linocut by Rene Sears

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

You may have to shop. If you get too much from Amazon, they know. The thought actually counts and a bit of wear on your shoe leather should be on display.

It’s like wrapping. A perfect bow with the curly ribbons you get from running a scissor along the length real quick like you’re pull starting a chainsaw is wonderful to look at, but if you’re a twenty year old college guy with stylishly unkempt hair and smell like cherry vape, everyone knows you didn’t wrap that gift yourself. Small tears on the corners and a piece of masking tape, because the scotch tape ran out, lets grandma know you care.

That doesn’t mean shopping should impinge on regularly scheduled loafing time. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of a useless lame duck Friday afternoon. Shopping isn’t fun, but getting out of work always is.

Before you do, take a minute for some verse.

***

“Many reviewers greeted John Clare with enthusiasm, hoping for a noble savage, an uncomplicated mind, freed from the artificial systems inculcated by formal education. Such fanciful suggestions of his isolation from the world of books have proved remarkably persistent. His eagerness to see his work in print has too often been forgotten in the various dubious attempts to portray him as innocent of the vicious preoccupations of the publishing trade.” – Paul Chirico

Several things had happened. In 1800, Robert Bloomfield erupted from seemingly nowhere selling a quick twenty-five thousand copies of The Farmer’s Boy; a labor class (labour in la lingua anglaise) kid whose little formal education but increased talent folded into a public taste bent towards Wordsworth and his Romanticism. The idea that poetry sprung from nature, pure and unadulterated by aristocratic letters was heady stuff in the early 1800s. The even larger eruption of George Gordon, Lord Byron on the scene in 1819, showed a public thirsty for, and kindled the concept of, stardom.

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POETS Day! Richard Aldington

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

It’s POETS Day.

Do what you must. Lie to your boss. Fake a cough at school. Invite Jamaal Bowman to do his thing. Nothing productive gets done on a Friday after lunch anyway.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, take time for a little verse.

***

“As for ‘free verse’, I expressed my view twenty-five years ago by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old; it was an insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes before form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by each other.”
                             – T.S. Eliot “The Music of Poetry”

I very much enjoyed Paul Johnson’s book, The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage. I took a great deal from it but one of the things I most remember coming away with was an admiration for his practical appreciation of Catholicism.

He was very fond of the age and history of the Church, the scholarship and arguments – even those about angels and pin heads, which is a punch line though it shouldn’t be – of two thousand years. He felt a weight lifted. There may be facets and tenets that made no sense or seemed at odds to him, but he could put doubts aside and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that wiser and more learned heads than his had considered, deliberated, and concluded. He found faith.

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POETS Day! Thomas Hardy Learns About Dames

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

We’re suffering Sudden Onset Fall. The leaves all dropped yesterday. Crunchy steps echo in the dark because dusk is a five minute period between school pick-up and the dog expecting dinner. I need a sweater to take my evening walk with my wife and by the time I get to the creek – I assume there’s a creek because there was a few days ago though I can’t see it without a flashlight – I need a coat.

When my wife and I started dating we were free and laughing, uncaring and unworried about what others thought. We’re all that stuff now, but with worse knees. Still, I’m suddenly caring about what others think a great deal when walking next to my bride as she’s decked out in a halogen beaming nylon harness get-up with safety red lights warning traffic off us. It’s a ridiculous get-up that I find prudent only because it’s so bright no one can make out our faces for the glare.

Make it a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t let work pin you in and take what little sunlight God and Congress have allowed. Get out of there and enjoy yourselves.

Wear a sweater.

***

I’ve read praises of Thomas Hardy from Auden, Pound, Ransom, Larkin, and Frost. That’s a short list with recognizable notables to make the point that he’s respected by those whose respect is worthy of attention, but that list is far from exhaustive. Hardy was considered by many to be the greatest literary mind of his time and Max Gate, as his home in Dorchester was known, the end point of pilgrimages by Sassoon and Graves; again, not exhaustive. He was held in awe.

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POETS Day! Horace: Ode III, XXX

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

EnterpriseAppsToday’s web site has a number of statistics related to work place time wasting. It’s eye opening. Some selected bits – a few iotum or datum if you know not much latin:

In the United States, during 8 hours of working time, employees waste an average of 2.9 hours by doing no effective work.

31% of workers waste a minimum of 1 hour each workday.

6% of employees waste around 3 hours each day at work.

4% of workers claim they waste at least 4 hours daily in the workplace.

If employees in general waste 2.9 hours each, but only 6% waste 3 hours and 4% waste 4 hours, and 31% waste 1 hour, then the remaining 59% have to waste 3.89 hours a day. I don’t think people present 6% at 3 hours and 4% at 4 hours when there’s a whopping 59% at 3.89 hours going unmentioned. That’s not how you present facts. If you’re trying to show that time wasting at work is rampant, do you leave out the biggest cohort at almost the highest time waste rate but leave in 6% at a measly 3 hours? No. They made all of that up.

Even the people who compile employee time wasting figures aren’t giving the matter proper attention. Don’t feel bad skipping out of work early. Nothing’s getting done there anyway. Have a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First though, take a minute for some verse.

***

Suetonius writes that Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to most of us as Horace, was military tribune under Brutus. This was two years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, so there was no “Shocked!” moment or questions about honor when Horace took up arms with the man. He was at Philippi for Octavian’s victory and would later claim to have left his shield behind and fled, but running off without a shield was an act claimed by Greek poets he admired and was probably a joke.

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POETS Day! Muriel Spark

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’d take a POETS Day for certain this week as I’m not sure what we’ll be up to next week. Doubtless we’ll be wondering how Argentina and pretty much everybody else gets to know who won their election a few hours after the polls close and we have to wait eons for plumbers to come and fix our water main. There will likely be uncertainty.

So this week, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sneak some fun free time off this week because this time next, you’ll probably be boarding up windows or fitting pepper spray proof goggle and face mask combos, depending on whether things seem to be going your way.

“Democracy dies in darkness” is the current take. I prefer “A good many thing go on in the dark besides Santa Claus.” Hoover meant by that that there are back room dealings and secrets not shared and we have no idea… I always liked to think he meant fun stuff; trysts and forbidden fruit tastings and the like.

Go do the fun stuff for tomorrow (or through Tuesday, unless you did it at leisure during the last few weeks depending on where you live) we vote.

***

I read a Muriel Spark book. The experience prompted me to read another. And read other’s takes on what I read. And reconsider. And re-read. It’s an endeavor. I still struggle not to say Sparks.

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