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.
This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…
This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…
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Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.
During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.
On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”
Just when you thought it would never end, classical mechanics saves the day. We’ve spun through another week and that blessed moment when the whistle blows, it’s time to punch out, and traffic swells is almost upon us. Why wait? It’s P.O.E.T.S. Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s no reason to stick around when even the boss has mentally gone fishing. You’re not going to get anything done. At least not done well. Get out of there. Dissemble, obfuscate, ignore the niceties that lubricate the engine of society. There are mid-major basketball games to watch. Head on down to the bar a few hours before you’re “allowed” and have a happy hour beer. No one’s going to notice. Head to the park or the zoo. Browse a book store with a sleeved cup of that overpriced coffee they sell there. I wouldn’t go fishing because the boss might decide to slip out early too and that could get awkward, but hey, it’s your time. Take it. Do with it as you will. That said, may I suggest in homage to the mighty acronym, setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the niceties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
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This week’s poet is Hart Crane and his poetry can be a bit hard to grasp. That’s not just me being obtuse. Harrison Smith from the publishing house Harcourt, Brace wrote “I feel certain you are a genuine poet-and there are not many genuine poets lying around these days. . . . It really is the most perplexing kind of poetry. One reads it with a growing irritation, not at you but at himself, for the denseness of one’s own intellect.” The critic Edmund Wilson wrote he had “a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was … not … applied to any subject at all.”
It was though. His style was applied to a great many things as he aptly explained to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine in the 1920s, in a letter responding to her concerns about his submission, this week’s featured poem, “At Melville’s Tomb.” Previously Marianne Moore wrote to him, when rejecting an earlier poem for publication in Dial, “its multiform content accounts, I suppose, for what seems to us a lack of simplicity and cumulative force.” T.S. Eliot passed on the same poem for The Criterion. I imagine Crane jumped at the opportunity Monroe offered to explain his poetic choices, or his “rationale of metaphor,” to the editor of one of the more influential periodicals.
Sometimes I feel bad for people who don’t speak English and are stuck calling their master lyricists words like poeta, digter, imbongi, or tusisolo that don’t form tidy acronyms encouraging their better hedonist angels. Thankfully we are blessed by the vision of William the TBA who noticed that Godwinson was busy in York dealing with family issues and figured even if Harold could get to Hastings in time, he’d have to force march his men with out any bathroom breaks. William won and French words marginalized German words. Instead of the dubious Diners In Cardiff Hate Tasting English Rarebit we get the dulcet Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, so Happy POETS Day! Disassemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park or cemetery, take a schvitz, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty Norman acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
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In October of 1944, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien spent an evening in discussion with Roy Campbell, this week’s featured poet. Lewis was put off by Campbell’s, according to Lewis, “particular blend of Catholicism and fascism.” Tolkien, who was writing The Lord of the Rings at the time, reportedly took Campbell as inspiration for a mysterious hobbit character named Trotter who he would over time rewrite as a man, rename Strider, and reveal as Aragorn. People didn’t react mildly to Campbell. Even when they were ostensibly friends and admirers of each other’s literary abilities and fellow members of The Inklings, Lewis wrote a mean poem at him.
The Columbo Game 