Tag Archives: Writing

POETS Day! GK Chesterton Was a Merry Old Soul

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Photo by Adam Jones – Interior of Old King Cole Bar – St. Regis Hotel – Midtown – Manhattan – New York City – USA

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

Andrew J. Offutt was a science fiction and fantasy writer, respected in his field, very prolific, and who served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1976 – 1978. He also wrote more than four hundred erotic novels under the names Farrah Fawkes, Opal Andrews, Turk Winter, and fourteen pseudonyms.

Some years ago I read, “My Dad the Pornographer,” an article his son, Chris Offutt, wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. It’s behind a paywall now but the gist of the article is that the author’s dad died and left him a house full of binders filled pre-written sex acts. Apparently, Andrew Offutt would jot down any mechanics that came to him and when he needed to move a plot along (I know, but…) he’d reach for a readymade lewdness.

If I remember correctly, Chris wrote that his dad crossed out the ones he used with magic marker so they wouldn’t make a second appearance. Can’t have Farrah plagiarizing Turk. In some cases, there were sections of paper gone where naughty bits were literally cut out to be pasted into a working manuscript.

Andrew turned his down-low side hustle into an assembly line. If a scene occurred to him, he wrote it and found a use for it later. I think that’s brilliant and wish I’d been doing the same with POETS Day opening commentary so when I’m done with the main part about the week’s poet or poem I could reach for a binder filled with the joys of skipping away from the office or worksite for mid-afternoon weekend-style tomfoolery and presto, done. But I haven’t and I’m pressed for time.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, get out of work and all that.

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POETS Day! Arnold on Dover, Hecht on Arnold

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Photo by Dover Beach by Chris Whippet, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Cool is turning into hot, but humidity is still a few weeks away. This is prime seer-sucker time. Parks where ice cream vendors hang out are calling. Edwardian style military bands don’t play in gazebos anymore like they’re supposed to, but cell phones are everywhere and Amnesty International says cobalt used to manufacture yours may have been mined by children, but the chances will drop considerably by 2025 if the Democratic Republic of the Congo keeps their word and ends the practice by 2025. I’m just messing with you. Nobody thinks about that anymore.

Fire up your music app and stream something you’d think Sgt. Pepper’s would play if they weren’t The Beatles. Oompa band stuff. Fly a kite. Get a hotdog and wish you had one of those hats that feel like they’re made out of rice cakes and have a red, white, and blue band; the ones old politicians pretended they always wore.

Howsoever you spend your POETS Day afternoon, take a minute for a little verse. It’s good for you.

***

Matthew Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, stood as headmaster at Rugby School and took it as his mission to “change the face of education ‘all through the Public Schools of England,’” according to the anonymous biographer at poetryfoundation.org. He was a moralist and a strict Christian who was so identified with his school that when Thomas Hughes wrote his classic novel set at Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days, he didn’t bother to fictionalize the headmaster. The Doctor was an unavoidable presence at the school during his time and as much a part of the institution as the Old Quad Buildings. That means that in Hughes’s telling, it was Matthew Arnold’s father who expelled the bully Harry Paget Flashman, OBE, Victoria’s Cross, Knight Commander of Bath, Knight Commander Indian Empire, Congressional Medal of Honor (USA), Southern Cross of Honor (Confederate States of America), etc.

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POETS Day! A Bit of Light Verse

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

The school year is coming to a close and that means rough duty for POETS Day. The last couple weeks of students’ time is usually cordoned off for exam review and preparation, final essays, and such projects. That creates a bottleneck of extracurricular events now. Playoffs, tournaments, recitals, and plays need completion before testing. Such things require an audience and if you’re a parent or relative of a student in any end of term activity, you’re an expected attendee.

I’m joining the theater set for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a nephew in Legally Blonde tonight and then my son’s on stage for a three night run of Mamma Mia! I love this sort of thing even though they frown on leaving after your kid’s scenes are done (America, explain!), but I know others see these as slogs to suffer through. They’re a drain on weekend free time no matter which way you look at it, so do the right thing and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. A perfect day is the name of the game, and that starts with ducking out of work and indulging your wants and needs – after a little verse.

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POETS Day! Kingsley Amis with a Touch of Philip Larkin

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

I’m writing this on a Thursday and I just checked my son out of school early. In the office there’s a sign in/out sheet by an extremely oversized digital clock and I filled in the names. The time was two after two. You couldn’t miss it. I put it down. Above our line were six sign outs all listing two o’clock. There were only eight kids out all day. Six at the same time seems like a lot. Different last names and handwriting.

It’s POETS Day, so do all the regular stuff. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and bars, ballgames, swimming, and parks. Enjoy the weekend a few hours ahead of schedule. All that. But is there something I should know about Thursday? You wouldn’t call it POETF Day, but is there something like that? It’s just a lot of kids leaving at once. Is it a secret?

Read some verse. I’m going to look into this. If anyone wants to clue me in I can keep everything confidential.

***

I was planning on writing about Kingsley Amis without mentioning Philip Larkin. The two met at St. John’s College, Oxford, became roommates and formed a bond still strong when Amis said things at Larkin’s funeral. The little bits of their correspondence that I’ve read cracked me up. They shared a love of jazz, a distrust of posturing, and a wicked sense of humor. Often, when one is mentioned, the other pops up like a mischievous penny.

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POETS Day! Jorge Luis Borges as Translated by Richard Wilbur

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

“On the day before the burning of the Pyramid, the men who got down from their high horses scourged me with burning irons, to compel me to reveal the site of a buried treasure. Before my eyes they toppled the idol to the god, yet the god did not abandon me, and I held my silence through their tortures. They tore my flesh, they crushed me, they mutilated me, and then I awoke in this prison, which I will never leave alive.
– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Writing of the God”

That’s a terrible attitude. I should note that he didn’t despair and by the end of the story achieves an enlightenment which renders his physical circumstances moot, but POETS Day esteems escapism. Constricting circumstances shouldn’t be tolerated. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s an afternoon waiting to be played with.

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

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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