Tag Archives: Writing

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.

***

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! 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.

***

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.

***

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

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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Unprovoked Rant

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I’m reading A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. This struck me:

“Yet the sonnet theory can be provoked in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian dramatic theories can be provoked in his plays.”

The sentence is in service of the authors view that it’s not enough to present as evidence of experimentation an excellent poem as excellent poems may have in them borrowings as well as innovations. I very much liked the use of “provoked.”

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POETS Day! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

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

I started POETS Day with the Idea that there’s a roguishness to poets that pairs well with the modern end of workweek encouragement to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I see them as day seizers.

They aren’t all outwardly roguish. It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot or Christina Rossetti so much as swiping a cookie, but I’m sure they had a mischievous side. Even poet by night and brisk morning walk to work/insurance agency vice president by day, Wallace Stevens, got rambunctious enough for Hemingway to punch, and he lived in Connecticut. They all have shades of misbehavior in them.

I think of them as blends, taking on, to degrees of little or lots depending on the poet, traits of three archetypes.

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POETS DAY! Theodore Roethke

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Tribute, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils (Latvia), October 2017 by Traqueurdelumieres

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

I’m usually a one check a year guy. J.T. Smallwood has been our tax collector since 2002 so each year I write my property tax check out directly to him, which seems nefarious but is done out in the open in a courthouse with badged officials and efficacious lanyards directing people between various stanchions connected with retractable nylons. There are several signs on the walls and copied sheets clear taped to the counters directing property owners at sufferance to “Make checks payable to J.T. Smallwood.” Credit cards are not accepted.

I wonder what happens when someone wants to write a check to J.T. Smallwood. A neighbor pitching in for a block party, say.

I pay my property tax in December, so I’m past the novelty of the new year and always get the date right. Younger generations will find this hard to believe, but there is no auto-correct for payment dates on checks and the possibly apocryphal rule that a check is good for a full year or six months, depending on who you listen to, was ignored for checks written between Dick Clark and Valentines for human frailty reasons. For all our penicillins, moon launches, and bread slicing, we’re not very good at the small stuff. Habits of the previous ten and a half months carried over. Every check written during that changeover period carried the uncertainty of a Super Bowl winner’s season of victory.

I had cause to write a check yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I wrote 2024 with no hint of hesitation. Was it the novelty of the act? I can’t say. I can say that the new year is off to a paper-saving good start.

Let’s keep the good start going and make use of that paper credit. There are blank notebook pages in desperate need of exercise regimens, weekly diet menu plans, lists of great books you always meant to get around to reading, or names of friends who can tell you if Rosetta Stone is better than Duolingo and which monthly “Soltanto Francais” get togethers serve the best merlot. Resolutions don’t get planned while work is being done so do yourself a favor and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make 2024’s first one a resolute POETS Day.

Try reading a little verse first. The line breaks excite the list maker’s bullet point urge.

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POETS Day! John Skelton, Cyndi Lauper, and Phonies

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Photo by Rene Sears, in the park, with a Pixel

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

I’m sure you’ve heard that there are only nine shopping days left until Christmas. I’m acutely aware, kept up to date by radio, tv, and internet. If I somehow managed to avoid all those electronic reminders, there’s the traffic. There’s no correct lane switching strategy with an army of Amazon vans suffocating every intersection and left averse UPS trucks double parked three to a block. Fed Ex drivers like to park in the median. Maybe they train in Philadelphia.

We let the holidays get hectic. It’s commercial and too often anxiety reigns. “Do I have a present for Dad?” “What do I get my sister?” The buildup was already an ordeal and then advertisers got shifty and started using “gift” as a verb. What gets lost in all of this is what’s important: that there are only three Fridays left to lie, scheme, and dissemble in 2023.

Carpe diebus. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. This is the last one before your penultimate chance of the year. Don’t let the weekend just happen. Be an instigator. Fake a cough, arrange an “emergency call.” Whatever you have to do. Start your weekend on your terms and slip out a few hours before The Man™ deigns to give leave. Have a ball, but try to fit in a few minutes for a little verse. It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.

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“I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton.” – The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis

There is a park across the street from my house. It runs along Shades Creek, a feeder to the Cahaba River and part of the watershed that provides drinking water for the Birmingham area. That’s terrifying considering how much trash we get from upstream.

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POETS Day! Fugglestone St. Peter’s own, George Herbert

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

POETS Day snuck up on me this week. I try to extend some lifeline, no matter how flimsy it may be, to give plausible rational for skipping out of work early, but I’ve done a lot of these now. Finding a new excuse every week isn’t as easy as it may seem. Don’t let that deter you.

You don’t need me to supply you with a reason. It’s right there: TS. Piss Off Early comes with its own why. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Admire the fulgence of the anagram’s fullness and start the weekend at a time of your choosing.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Catch a ball game at a bar. Take a walk in a park. On average, we only see 4,113.2 Fridays in a lifetime and at minimum 2% of those are 13ths. Don’t waste one clock-watching.

If you do manage to get out, take a moment to read a poem or three. Maybe these.

***

My wife and I honeymooned in Vancouver. It was 2002, three years after the British ceded Hong Kong to Communist China. Refugees scattered all over the Pacific Rim. These weren’t the poor. I read that British Columbia absorbed thirty thousand souls. We were told to expect amazing high-end Chinese cuisine and we found amazing high-end Chinese cuisine.

We went to an elegant place near the harbor for dim sum. It was in a hotel lobby; a huge room below a series of mezzanines with an open wall of glass extending up several floors. Neither of us had ever eaten dim sum before but we were told that instead of a menu there would be a cart full of food that would visit tableside and you chose what you wanted from there.

That’s what happened. A cart came by and there were dumplings and bao, which may or may not be a dumpling as well but seems distinct to me. I think there was soup and definitely spicy vegetables. Little strips of sticky meat. Everything was fantastic. What we didn’t know was there would be a series of carts with different offerings making the rounds.

We loaded up on the first thing that came by and though we loved what we got, we saw what we didn’t. The duck on the third cart looked impossibly crisp. There was a lesson to be learned; a variant on “Don’t make fast friends.” Get the lay of the land before you commit.

I didn’t learn that lesson.

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