Tag Archives: Writing

POETS Day! Katherine Mansfield

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Section from Anne Estelle Rice’s Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

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

Is it birthday season where you live?

Lord, we have a passle of them going on right now. August is supposed to be the most popular month for U.S. births, but the bleed into September is more Romanov than slight. We’ve had four in the last two weeks with three on deck and that’s just in town immediate family that, though Catholic, doesn’t have a single nuclear branch that wouldn’t fit in an modest Protestant preferred sedan.

Statistics say your family clustered as much as ours, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work early and enjoy the afternoon/kick off the weekend early. It’s probably your birthday. Treat yourself. If it’s not yours, take a moment to wrap a present and sharpen a suddenly dulling cake knife. Maybe try to figure out why grade school kids shout “Eat more chicken” followed by an ever changing litany after the birthday song. (How do they know each week’s new variation? Those who aren’t parents of small children will have no idea what I’m talking about but kids add to the birthday song – my nephews from Albuquerque in sync with the kids here in Birmingham because they somehow know even though it changes from week to week, water park pavilion to pizzeria long table. They’re like druids receiving unwritten arcana.)

First, a little verse.

***

I thought about doing this week’s POETS Day about one of the Bloomsbury Group because I have a knee jerk dislike of them and I was feeling snarky. They were mean cool-kid gatekeepers. Nepotism involves relatives. Cronyism describes promoting friends. For the Bloomsbury clique I need a new word; one for promoting the person you’re having an affair with to make your spouse take notice and prove how cosmopolitan he or she is by sleeping with that person too, before, as a couple, dropping the promotee and pretending neither ever had anything to do with that middle class climber. I feel like the word should also convey mocking laughter in the direction of Roy Campbell. Nasty little hive of lit-rury hornets.

Wikipedia has a decent list of Bloomsbury members, satellites, and associates. You have to do a little digging to find out who was discarded for getting too clingy, but it’s a handy reference. What caught me was the few listed after the sentence “writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not ‘Bloomsbury’.” T.S. Eliot was mentioned. Good man. As was the Campbell wife seducing Vita Sackville-West. Good story. I’d never heard of Katherine Mansfield, but she was listed among people of interest with the good sense to be distinctly not “Bloomsbury,” even if Vita was at the very least more than Bloomsbury-adjacent until she became a middle class climber. That’s despite Vita’s being a brilliant gardener and real-deal inbred baroness.

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POETS Day! Yeats and Graves and the Moon

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Years ago, I was writing a POETS Day about the Australian poet Judith Wright. I’ve written here that I’m a fan of Poetry Foundation’s website because they do a great job putting together mini-bios of poets with links to their works, etc. There wasn’t one for Wright even though they mention in the mini-bios of others that this poet or that was winner of the prestigious Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

I sent an email to whoever the intern is that has to answer @info type email and surprisingly got a response. “Thank you for pointing out the oversight…”, “We need to rectify…”, etc. Most importantly, they asked me if I had any suggestions about which of her poems to feature along with her bio page.

There’s still no bio page, but that’s unimportant. Poetry Foundation is an outgrowth of the legendary Poetry magazine founded by Harriet Monroe. She had a bigger hand in shaping Modern Poetry than most; maybe than anyone. She consulted giants like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And now, through other means, her publication was consulting me. This led to my frequently making irrefutably truthful statements like, “Poetry magazine, which has sought editorial advice from people like Eliot, Pound, and me…”

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POETS Day! From Henley to Plath

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I go on for a bit below so I’ll keep this part short.

College football starts this Week! Whatever files need filing or rivets need riveting, leave them be. They’ll sit til Monday. It’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

There’s Auburn to route against Friday night and hated Tennessee against a Syracuse team I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with opinions on playing Saturday morning, both looking across the line as if in a mirror and thinking “They look like idiots in those orange uniforms.”

Then there are proper teams playing.

– Alabama @ Florida State – Saturday 2:30 CT on ABC

– LSU @ Clemson – Saturday 6:30 CT on ABC

– Tons of other less compelling but long awaited games bracketed between Boise State @ South Florida at 4:30 CT on Thursday on ESPN and Utah @ UCLA at 10:00 CT on Saturday.

If you’re reading this on Friday and were unaware, you’ve missed the Thursday slate but there’s plenty left to see if you have gumption. Get pissing off early. There are games need watching.

We made it through the desert. First, a little verse.

***

This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald is my favorite of the genre, but there’s also Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce or Pere Goriot by Balzac if you’re in a Contenental mood. There are plenty, a whole grip, to borrow an elastic phrase a chef friend is fond of, of semi-autobiographical first novels written by young writers with more desire than experience, so they run their hero though naivete-shedding travails and leave him wiser and poised to conquer. It’s been forever since I’ve read any of them so they’ve all gotten mushed together in my mind but at least one of them ends with the author stand-in character in a cemetery shouting a version of “Look out world. Here I come!” That’s the synecdochic scene for me.

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POETS Day: LSU and Robert Penn Warren

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Photo and fiddlin’ with it by Rene Sears

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

I’ve spent a lot of this last month’s non-rainy days in my backyard making noise. The constant noise comes from a small but surprisingly loud bluetooth speaker that subjects my neighbors to (lately) Elvis Costello, Blondie, Joe Jackson, and whatever the Amazon Music algorithm associates with albums by those three. Blondie does a particularly good cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” so the when that comes on the neighbors get to hear it repeat at least a second time. The intermittent noise comes from my new table saw.

We redid the living room and dining room, by which I mean we turned the living room into a office for my wife and I with a big TV to watch muted baseball games on all day, turned the dining room into a living room, and realized that we always eat at the kitchen table and don’t need a dining room. To decorate the living room formerly known as the dining room, we pulled old prints and paintings out of the closet and took them to a framer.

The largest was a Willem De Kooning print from a 1994 National Gallery exhibit. I’m fond of the print. I went to that exhibit to keep a friend company and came out interested in art. It’s odd shaped; 39 ½” x 30 ½”. We picked out a green distressed painted frame with gold trim and learned there were types of glass. The woman told us it would cost $325 to do the job. That’s a very fair price, it turns out, but if you haven’t had anything framed in over a decade and come in with no frame (sorry) of reference as to price, it’s a bad number. I had five other pieces I needed framed.

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POETS Day! Percy Wyndham Lewis

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’ve been in Italy, so I missed a few POETS Day Fridays, or “Fridays” as the Italians call them, but with an accent (everybody over there except one Salerno cab driver speaks English, and I have my suspicions about him.)

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Cut out of work while the sun’s still out and enjoy a heat-staving scoop or two of gelato at any one of whatever block’s you happen to be on many gelaterias. Gather a few friends and put your heads together to figure out why you’re encouraged to touch this Coliseum wall but get snipped at by security if you touch that identical one. Hold up a lemon bigger than your head. Swim in ridiculously blue seas while staying determinedly out of any body called a canal. Very refreshing.

First, a little verse.

***

Augustus John’s portraits tell stories. Frightful stories on occasion. I read somewhere some time ago, so forgive the lack of attribution, that he could be so insightful – and equally capable of conveying his insights – as to be “cruel.” His Roy Campbell adorns the cover of Peter Alexander’s biography of the poet. Campbell, pre-paunch and balding, looks impressionable in his Spanish countryman get-up. John’s painting sets the stage for Alexander’s telling of a man of immense talents swayed by passions he mostly grasped. It’s a great book, but I judge the cover better.

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POETS Day! Philip Pain and MJ

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

We’d swarm around my old neighborhood on BMXes with one or two banana seat hand-me-downs trying to keep up. There were a thousand kids kicked outside until dark every summer morning along four suburban parallel streets we considered our patch. Tractors came in 82 or 83 and clear cut a huge swath of wooded land; seven or eight football fields worth to build an office park. It was glorious.

We’d sit on the hill watching all afternoon and then descend when they broke for the day around three or four. Daylight Savings left us four- or five-hours sunlight to slop through upturned roots, climb hulking yellow diggers frozen like Bilbo’s trolls, and color blue jeans rusty with Alabama clay. I got my foot stuck in that clay one time and it took two other guys to pull me loose. Somewhere under the Embassy Suites with obligatory Ruth’s Chris that stands there now is a ten-year-old boy sized red Converse All-Star, the right one I think. Couldn’t get it out.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make it a POETS Day, go outside and play while there’s still four or five hours of daylight left.

First, some verse.

***

I know very little about Yvor Winters, but from what I’ve read he liked to think himself immune to or outside the influence of popular opinion. He’s tagged as eccentric and a proponent of clarity and precision in form. Over his thirty-plus years as a professor of English at Stanford, he had to contend with giants. You can’t ignore the greats, but he seemed to get a kick out of championing lesser-known poets.

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POETS Day! The Honorable Archibald MacLeish

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

There is a sound my car makes. It’s used but I just bought it, so it’s “new to me.” I’ve had two mechanics look to try to find the cause. The sound only happens in very specific circumstances. There’s a clank, like the spare tire is sliding around when I brake quickly. Maybe it’s like the sound a metal gas can makes when you push in the side and release. The first thing I did was remove the tire and jack, get in, accelerate, and brake short. The sound was still there.

My wife and I disagree about the origin. I think it’s over the right wheel. She thinks middle rear. The first mechanic didn’t hear it at all until I drove her around. The second claimed he didn’t hear it at all. He’s insane. Both pros are clear: the car is sound, right as rain, hunky dory (honky doory, because it’s a car.) I’m allowing the Carvana send-back date to pass and keeping it.

In any case, I know how to make the sound and have learned how not to make it. Regular stopping was never an issue. Any stop that’s abrupt enough for the driver to say, “Sorry about that,” to passengers and cu-clank. But I learned to ease off the brakes at the very end. That doesn’t quite describe it. Anyway, I’ve adapted and the noise that maybe only my wife and I can hear is no longer an issue.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s a beautiful day for a drive and the roads are more fun pre-rush hour than during. It’s safe out there again. I’m not randomly braking to see if the maybe-phantom sound is still there anymore. Much.

Just in case: If you see a silver Nissan, don’t tailgate for the next couple of weeks. First, some verse.

***

Archibald MacLeish wanted to put on a musical retelling of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and take Broadway by storm. The play would be a torch passing. Bob Dylan would write the score. MacLeish won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1933, again in 1953, and another Pulitzer for his free verse drama, a retelling of the book of Job, J.B. Dylan was the counterculture balladeer sensation. Producers had to be happy.

It was a disaster. The established poet and hip-with-kids next generation songwriter didn’t work well together.

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POETS Day! Walter James Turner, “Australia’s Georgian Poet”

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

This is too easy. There’s a new Pope, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell your boss you’re going to mass to pray for the newly anointed Vicar of Christ. Odds are good that you’re not going to mass, so that’s a lie and lying’s a sin. Most churches offer Confession on Saturdays. Just don’t go stepping in front of buses or licking electrical sockets for twenty-four hours and you’ll be fine. (Pro tip: Save time at Confession by cutting in line. Minimal exposure.)

If your boss is Catholic, you’ll be out in seconds flat. If not, you’ll still be out in seconds flat because non-Catholics have no idea when obligations fall. If you aren’t Catholic, pretend you are by Googling and learning a few Latin phrases to say around the office: “May I borrow your stilus?” “Sorry I’m late, hora concursus traffic.” Etc. They’ll get it.

Happy POETS Day and enjoy your work-free afternoon. First, a little verse.

***

I put “Australia’s Georgian Poet” in quotation marks in the title because I found them on a website providing a quote from Dominic Sheridan, Professor and/or lecturer at the University of Gdansk in Poland who researches Australian War poets of World War I in particular. “Australia’s Georgian Poet” is itself in quotation marks in the Sheridan quote, so he got it from somewhere too. Whether it was a sobriquet that followed Walter James Turner, one invented by Sheridan, or something quoted from yet an earlier source, I have no idea, but I like it. This is my roundabout way of letting you know I’ve found an interesting new (to me) website called Forgotten Poets of the First World War. There are some five hundred posts going back to 2014 and sourcing at least as far as from wherever they’re based as Gdansk. Worth a look for the curious. Looks useful.

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POETS Day! Anne Bradstreet

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is out!

It came out in 2006, but it came out again this week. It’s remastered and pretty and still has the Patrick Stewart voiceover. This was it for a lot of us – the video game that fulfilled the dream of a pixilated Dungeons and Dragons. The guild quests and coliseum fights are still there while the infuriating leveling system that trapped you into confidence and forced a restart because of misallocated experience perks is gone. And it looks great, on par now with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Not everyone cares. I understand. But please be courteous to those of us who do. We’ll be taking a POETS Day to defeat monstrous deadra and save the land of Cyridil. There’s a power vacuum in the wake of Emperor Uriel Septim VII’s assassination (AP, Chicago, and MLA all tell me the “’s” comes after the numerical in a possessive with a numerical name but it only looks mildly worse than “Septim’s VII.” There is no satisfaction.) so we gotta get on that. For the rest of you, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday for whatever reason draws you. You have my permission as soon to be head of the Assassin’s Guild.

First, a little verse.

***

from The Prologue
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672)

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen all scorne I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I doe prove well, it wo’nt advance,
They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance.

That’s the fifth stanza of the first published work of poetry from the English colonies in the New World. Defiant from the start.

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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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