Tag Archives: Ted Hughes

POETS Day! Moments in The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

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

The purpose of POETS Day is to follow the acronym and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work mid Friday afternoon, read a little poetry and enjoy life. Free time is always better when it’s illicitly gotten. Towards that end, in the past I’ve encouraged untruths and subterfuge, recommended apps that show incoming hospital calls on your caller ID, invented religious exemptions, and advised on recruiting co-conspirators.

I recently picked up a copy of The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, billed as “a World War II-era document created by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to provide guidance to resistance groups on how to disrupt enemy operation through covert means.”

There’s a lot in it about slowing down deliberative processes; recommending committees, enthusiastically suggesting an idea be fully explored into oblivion, and otherwise crippling organizations by inviting bureaucratic involvement. There are instructions for stopping up toilets too. I confess to being less than wowed by most of the entries. I expected it to be more like The Dangerous Book for Boys but with Tatiana Romanova in tow.

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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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