Tag Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! Ovid’s The Amores

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

My beach book choices tend towards mystery or comedy. I see a lot of thrillers on condo rental shelves and a few romances. People hide romances though, so I’m sure what I’ve seen is not representative. Elmore Leonard deserves a category of his own unless he wants to share it with Carl Hiaasen. Whatever gets sold in an airport likely fits the beach book bill. That and Ovid.

Romance readers are voracious. My wife’s in publishing so I pick up tidbits here and there I can repeat with an unearned air of authority. Romance is the highest earning genre. 2022: 33% of books sold in mass market paper back have Fabio ripping someone’s bodice featured on the cover. Formats that don’t require readers to tear off or otherwise hide from judging eyes Fabio’s rippled abs and radiant pecs account for 60% of all the genre’s sales. E-books let Romance fans read while hanging out by the pool without a miscued cabana boy thinking the lady needs comforting or raised brows from fellow vacationers or worse (in-laws.)

With no burly-esque cover art, e-readers are free to move about the country. Perception matters. People don’t want to have to explain themselves or be thought of as lesser. A kindle denies any stigma apportioning, but that’s all it does. In the big ledger of literary respect from strangers, staying out of the red is important, but what if you want racy tales that put you in the black?

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POETS Day! Paul Laurence Dunbar

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It’s rare when a POETS Day featured poet comes complete his own POETS Day call to arms, but such is the case with Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Sympathy,” one of his most popular works, contains the iconic line “I know why the caged bird sings.” Many know the 1899 poem and appreciate it on its merits, but most these days more are likely to know it by association with Maya Angelou’s eponymously titled autobiography. The poem, or at very least the line, is startling in the ready empathy it evokes; now an expression of black oppression and a powerful image for civil rights movements.

In 1897, Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, soon to be Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, moved to Washington D.C. where Paul had been hired as an attendant, which I assume is sort of clerk, at the Library of Congress. It must have seemed an exciting opportunity for the literary-minded poet. He hated it with a mad (poetic) passion. Alice told him to quit and focus exclusively on writing. I don’t think he was hard to convince. She wrote about what prompted him to write the poem in 1914.

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POETS Day! The Poetry of Ninth Grade English, Revisited

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

I was in a used bookstore downtown, earlier today. It’s a ramshackle place with books and old magazines stacked on warped piles of records and rolled up blueprints and “Mardi Gras 1977” posters leaning against assumed tables; probably enough kitschy crap to deck out a whole reinvigorated warehouse district worth of lesbian coffee houses.  The poetry section shines. Either the owner’s tastes or the resale temperament does a commendable job filtering out new age gibberish and incongruent anthologies plus he shelves criticism with the criticized. I picked up a book of T.S. Eliot essays on Elizabethan drama. Last time I found a collection of poets’ views on Yeats. Five bucks, both.

While I was perusing the poetry a young woman, attractively in her mid-twenties or so, came in and struck up a conversation with the owner. She was in town for business, she said, doing a three-day project that only took two. She didn’t know anybody in town. Could he suggest anything? Sights? A place for lunch?

The only other person in the shop was a young guy, roughly her age, perusing local history and thumbing through old magazines. I knew he heard. The place was too small not to have. I’m old and happily married. The owner, older still. I don’t know local history guy’s story. I don’t know any of attractive work tourist’s story beyond what I’ve shared either, but what I had always considered a laughable cliché – a used bookstore hook up – was not unfolding before me despite the stage being improbably set. Local history didn’t so much as look over his shoulder.

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POETS Day! The Rape of the Lock

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

The week’s winding down despite the extra insert day February stuck us with. It’s POETS Day again, time to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sneak out of the nine to five closer to two. Seize the few hours left in the day and get a head start on evening.

There are all manner of things to do and if you’re of the POETS Day bent you’re probably not a free time naif. You know where happy hours are, what ball games are on, and whether or not the pool is open. All noble pursuits, but have you thought about vegging out in front of the TV (television)? Water cooler shows aren’t really a thing anymore; so many viewing choices make it unlikely that any one program will achieve the reach of Seinfeld or other shows of old.

People still talk about TV at work, though. The shared viewing conversation has been replaced by a recommendation marketplace. “You seen anything good lately?” turns everyone within ear shot into Ewan McGregor from Rogue Trader (YouTube – Free, Amazon Prime – $5.99 rental, $11.99 to buy), barking on the Singapore Stock Exchange floor. They may not wear the garish brokerage house team jackets like those worn by the traders in Singapore – unless they work as traders in Singapore – but they’re just as enthusiastic.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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! Vita Sackville-West

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

Veda Sealbinder Bonds and Vita Sackville-West were not alike. One was an award-winning poet who had lady sex with Virginia Woolf and the other was a put-upon innocent who made do speaking with only her tongue and lips as her jaw was clenched rictus fast when she said things like “Yew liddle brayats!”

They inhabit the same rhythmic space despite Veda bringing an extra syllable along for the ride. The -er in Sealbinder is nearly dropped and the -ville in Sackville is drawn out so they’re exchangeable timing wise. I wish I could say that Sealbinder is a dactyl substitution but I always over think feet. Veda Sealbinder Bonds could be trochees followed by an iamb? It’s enough to say that if you were writing a song about Vita and suddenly roved an eye toward Veda, an eraser’s all you’d need. Three stresses and the song remains the same. I think of one and the other comes along mnemonically.

Two friends in seventh grade scoured the phone book for strange names, and poor Veda’s made them laugh. For a decent chunk of 1984 or 85 she was subject to increasingly elaborate though decreasingly coherent prank calls with a giggling chorus of their fellows listening in on other phones throughout the house. Her name was so funny to us.

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POETS Day! My Problems with Walt Whitman

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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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