Hell, let’s play a whole season.
Here are the teams. They play in little bucolic ballparks. No DH.
National League
Philadelphia Poe
New York Bryants
Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers
Cambridge Longfellows
Boston Lowells
Concord Emersons
Brooklyn Ashberys
New Jersey Ginsbergs
Tennessee Ransoms
Maine Millays
American League
Brooklyn Whitmans
New England Frost
London Eliots
Rapallo Pound
New Jersey Williams
Hartford Stevens
New York Moores
Cambridge Cummings
Amherst Emily
Iowa City Grahams
Baseball Poetry Commissioner: the honorable Harold Bloom
Player Union Rep: Camille Paglia
There are still some hold-outs, most notably W.H. Auden from the Ashberys.
Scouting Report Highlights:
NL
The brawling Philadelphia Poe features Lord Byron in the clean-up spot and Alexander Pope does mound duties as the ace of a pitching staff not afraid to throw inside.
The elegant New York Bryants have Abraham Lincoln as their chief twirler and the slugging Thomas Cole hitting no. 4 in a highly distinguished lineup.
The Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers bring William Lloyd Garrison as their ace and Charles Dickens just signed up to play centerfield.
The Cambridge Longfellows have Washington Irving roaming center and Dante and Horace as mound aces.
The Boston Lowells field Mark Twain at short, Robert Browning in left, and Charles Eliot Norton and Leigh Hunt as their dominant hurlers.
Beware the Concord Emersons: William James is their ace, Swedenborg bashes from the cleanup spot, and Thoreau tends centerfield.
The Brooklyn Ashberys have Frank O’Hara leading off and Andy Warhol is their ace. Kenneth Koch and James Tate anchor the infield, while Charles Bernstein is in the bullpen.
The Ginsbergs of New Jersey have William Blake slugging from the No. 4 hole, Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan as their double play combination and Mark Van Doren and William Burroughs on the mound.
The Tennessee Ransoms have Allen Tate at catcher and Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, I.A. Richards, and Paul Engle on the hill.
Rounding out the National League, we have the Maine Millays with Edmund Wilson and Philip Sidney pitching, with Sappho out in center.
AL
The Brooklyn Whitmans have Oscar Wilde and F.O. Matthiessen as no. 1 and no. 2 starters, with Lawrence Fernlinghetti, C.K. Williams and William Michael Rossetti providing up-the-middle defense at second, short, and center.
The New England Frost have William Wordsworth in the clean-up spot with Louis Untermeyer as their no. 1 hurler.
The London Eliots have Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell on the mound with Tristan Corbiere at first, Jules LaForgue at third, and Arthur Symons behind the plate.
The Rapallo Pound are stocked, with Benito Mussollini in right, Hugh Kenner on the mound and Ernest Fenollosa at shortstop. Negotiations are continuing with Joyce, Yeats, and Duchamp.
The New Jersey Williams have Man Ray as their ace and Robert Creeley in the lead-off spot. They also want Duchamp.
The Hartford Stevens have pitching depth with George Santayana, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander. James Merrill is in the clean-up spot.
The New York Moores have Elizabeth Bishop at the top of the lineup and Pater in the bullpen. Ted Hughes is their big slugger.
The Cambridge Cummings have Picasso batting no. 3 and Scofield Thayer and T.E. Hulme anchoring the pitching staff.
The Amherst Emily has Thomas Wentworth Higginson as their pitching ace with Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett in the outfield.
Finally, the Iowa City Grahams have Bin Ramke and Peter Sacks as key pitchers and James Galvin powering the middle of the lineup.
Scarriet 
Chuck Godwin said,
April 7, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Hey Thomas,
Maybe you were a sports columnist is a previous life..
very clever
Bob Tonucci said,
April 7, 2010 at 8:41 pm
March Madness is over, Baseball Madness is here! Marla Muse here, we’ll be bringing you in-depth coverage right up to the end of the World Poetry Series, that’s in October, so stick around for six months of intense sports poetry coverage! Back to you, Tom!
thomasbrady said,
April 7, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Thanks, Chuck, Marla.
Did you know Jack Kerouac played fantasy baseball?
Gary B. Fitzgerald said,
April 7, 2010 at 9:57 pm
.
Screwed up again, dammit!
I meant to type in ‘Scarriet’ but, apparently, I accidentally typed ‘Chernobyl’.
.
Desmond Swords said,
April 7, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Oh there’s blood on the splinters
Of my mind, coz i’ve broken down
This wall just like its one last time
And you never cease to amaze
me, after all my mistakes you could
Learn so quickly: Oh I’m not so
god-damn naive, and i’m not a well
Meaning acolyte for a troubled
Day at sea no more, oh no,
That’s why i’ll be walking, walkin
Out the door.
Well i’m not as wise as i was
As a child, and i’m not just the back-
End of a colour from the light
oh but i’m sure that i could ever
Succeed, if i keep working so well
For those faces the summer leaves,
And without this truth, there’d
Be no fallacy, and without this
dream of mine, there can be no
there will be no reality..
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 1:09 am
Des,
Why are you posting this shite?
He’s not even good…
I also don’t see the point…
Tom
Bob Tonucci said,
April 7, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Casey at the Bat
Ernest Thayer
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that —
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”
But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat;
For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.
But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despised, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.
Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.
There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile lit Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ’twas Casey at the bat.
Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt.
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.
And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped —
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.
From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted some one on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.
With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said “Strike two!”
“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered “Fraud!”
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.
The sneer has fled from Casey’s lip, the teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 1:06 am
For years ‘Casey At The Bat’ was published anonymously.
Thayer’s nephew, Scofield Thayer, a friend of Eliot’s, owned and edited “The Dial,” and agreed to give “The Waste Land” its annual Dial Prize before the poem was finished, which doubled Eliot’s income that year. E.E Cummings eloped with Scofield’s wife and following Scofield’s nervous breakdown, Marianne Moore became “Dial” editor.
Desmond Swords said,
April 7, 2010 at 11:58 pm
Casey Flynn
Oh, three-handed preternatural smoothness
Sligo Achonry, Aclare – Ballaghnatrillick, Ballinafad,
Skreen, Strandhill – Tourlestrane, Tubbercurry
Mayo Attymass, Belcarra, Belmullet, Bohola
Achill to salmon, Finton of Ballina, Assaroe
And Ballinrobe, Ballintober, Ballycastle, Ballyhaunis
Ballyglass, Ballyvary, Bangor and Boytown
Bunnacurry Castlebar, Charlestown, Claremorris, Cong,
Corroy and Crossmolina, Currane, Derreens, Derrew
Dooega, Dookinella, Foxford, Geesala, Glengad
Glenamoy – Keel, Kilkelly, Killala, Kilmaine and Knock
Kiltimagh and Swinford, Shrule, Newport, Mulrany,
Pollagh Rossport, Tourmakeady and Louisburgh,
Dooagh, Islandeady, Westport Valley and Dugort Church,
poetry occurs effortlessly, endlessly, eternally, forever there
alphabetical Asia in three quarter light from Achill hawk
Slievemore shore, dying in their generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
Thus the forest spake.
Welcome to Balony TV
I’m Mike Igoe
He’s going to be reading a poem tonight called, Rosanna You Puppet. An unwarranted personal attack on the eternal Miss Universe Ireland 2003
Rosanna You Puppet.
Rosanna you puppet!
I’m with you, cohabitant in heaven.
Hell! I know your pain of sainted martyrs and cancer sufferers,
I know your agony of wooden rice bowls and children with distended bellies,
I was with you in solidarity when you walked barefoot on landmines and razor wire,
From Land’s End to John O’ Gods collecting direct debit mandates for the victims
Of burst Russian fission reactors.
I shared your stoic horrors under a 7,600% pay cut, due to inflation,
To feel your connection with public sector school teachers in Zimbabwe.
I was grinding my teeth in the background when you donated those
Twenty-five gallon drums of cooking oil to Haiti
And accepted the key to the city, graciously,
When they buried the machete in your honour.
Actually, the title of Mike Igoe’s poem is not Rosanna You Muppet, but Rosanna You Slag.
A gas poem, Casey and Flynn, but not for the tenderest in our flock of luvvies one must flag-up, from across the spectrum of age and experience, who may or may not choose to draw from one a door of perception closed to none but the man Casey and Flynn, y’all gotta be ready for the real title of this audaciously ambitious poem. The premise it sets out from, Rosanna You aSlag, a direct address to a very intelligent all rounder and class first Miss World Ireland, one of the very finest young blooms and brains from The Lady In Red: Daughter of C. DeB. not the kind of thing one would publish under His own imprimatur
‘…out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling,
…outrageously a veneer may trip one up and slam the door to peptides docking clean on neurons, protean chains of amino acid, protein shuttin off our neural perception of the other biological space-time survivors back from the page time forgot, what you know I know you know but think not.
Get over it.
Thanks very much.
Your head on my belt, do cheann im chrios luv, dichetal do chennaib, spontaneous critical divination from the instinctively topper tip of Cruachán worked for you: Muse of ten thousand American souljahs in a poet army of bardic fluff, came for you
I was off my fucking tits, with wonder, when you handed the key
To your Land Rover to a Venezuelan teenage hooker.
I suffered my share of disgust at your tits, your growler
and tabloid ass, your nipples of nomenclature,
Spread tactlessly on the breakfast table,
Beside the rashers and Beslan massacres…
After all those nippers you saved from drowning…
It’s shocking!
– Rosanna, it’s a cruel world, baby, these are bad people we’re dealing with –
We were all wailing wall-side in Jerusalem eating shit when they were
Crowning your body with thorns of doggy style porno pageantry,
Our poor miss world,
Miss humanity,
Miss agony,
Miss humility,
Miss publicity,
Little miss notice me,
Miss in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound,
Miss money-makes-the-world-go-round…
Rosanna… Katy French died alone… Truly alone… Rosanna her heart was pounding in the darkness at the end full of amphetamines and flowers and you have no idea… Rosanna just because we’ve noticed her doesn’t mean you should copy her… Rosanna just because we talk about her doesn‘t mean we liked her… Rosanna…
Just go sit in the corner.
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 1:18 am
Here are the opening day games…
NL
Poe (Pope) at Emerson (James)
Bryant (Lincoln) at Ashbery (Warhol)
Whittier (Garrison) at Ginsberg (Burroughs)
Longfellow (Horace) at Ransom (C. Brooks)
Lowell (L. Hunt) at Millay (E. Wilson)
AL
Whitman (Wilde) at Stevens (Santayana)
Frost (Untermeyer) at Moore (Pater)
Eliot (Russell) at Cummings (Hulme)
Pound (Kenner) at Dickinson (Higginson)
Williams (Man Ray) at Graham (Ramke)
Christopher Woodman said,
April 8, 2010 at 1:18 am
This is great.
Fun is always good, and now we poets can also play ball.
I’ll fit in I feel sure. Poetry in America is more fun than anywhere else in the world too, and baseball is America’s number-one sport, indeed it’s the only place in the world where you can watch the World Series.
Which is great for poets.
And it’s got statistics too. It’s fun to talk about statistics, and most of America’s top poets really love them. And of course baseball is almost as good on the radio as it is in the park, so you can talk about baseball without ever being seen. You don’t even need to wear dark glasses.
I’ve been told I might last to September too, the end of the rains, so I might get to see this whole season out. That would be terrific.
Christopher
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 1:52 am
October, Christopher. October. October is World Series month.
Wfkammann said,
April 8, 2010 at 4:30 am
What you don’t know about sports, Tom. Astounding!
Gary B. Fitzgerald said,
April 8, 2010 at 2:20 am
.
“The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.
…There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.”
– Lewis Carroll
Christopher Woodman said,
April 8, 2010 at 2:29 am
The Crowd at the Ball Game”
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal –
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut —
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —
The Jew gets it straight – it
is deadly, terrifying —
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly —
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
…………………………………..William Carlos Williams (Dial, 1923)
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 2:51 am
In more baseball news, William Carlos Williams, owner and manager of the New Jersey Williams, denied rumors that he wrote a poem implying baseball fans were stupid. “Hogwash,” the owner responded. “I never said that. Show me that poem. It doesn’t exist,” Williams said.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 8, 2010 at 4:55 am
Willie Williams was reported to have said, “God damn, that rumor about me calling the fans stupid was way, way out until Brady snuck it in on the radio, and some jokes just aint funny. Brady’s incapable of gettin’ the dumbest irony in a poem– he don’t have a clue what any poem means but the obvious. Deja vu all over again.”
“What burns me up is Brady’s so yellah. He’d never have the balls to go to bat with “The Crowd at the Ball Game.” He went and said Atwood’s boring and Wright’s happy, so how the heck’s he going to a hit off me? He’d never even seen a curve ball!”
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 2:38 am
Breaking News
CONCORD EMERSONS ADD PITCHING
In an effort to bulk up their pitching and make themselves more competitive with their NL rival, the Philadelphia Poe, the Concord Emersons have signed right-hander Horace Greeley (editor) and lefty Rufus Griswold (anthologist) to one-year contracts. They’ll both be in uniform for opening day tomorrow.
Philadelphia features the following starters: Alexander Pope, Alexander von Humboldt (fans may recall that Poe dedicated his “Eureka” to Humboldt) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Bacon, and Percy Shelley. That’s a pretty impressive pitching staff.
THE BRYANTS GET HOMER
In other news, the poet Homer has signed a one-year deal with the New York Bryants. William Cullen Bryant is a translator of the Greek poet.
Desmond Swords said,
April 8, 2010 at 2:52 am
Thirty five face-offs is five weeks will to win for two lucky poets flyting it out for hits and giggles.
US
And what a line up ladies and gentlemen, in store for you avid, silent observers of our shtick, theatrical entertainment consisting of a number of individual performances, acts and mixed numbers, as by comedians, singers, dancers, acrobats and magicians.
Tuatha Dé Danann
h
AmPo Rules
Def 2: English Fops till June E. Modern:
EL
Da Ashbery Bryant Emerson Ginsberg Long-
fellow Lowell Millay Ransom Whittier Poe
er
One two three four five six seven eight nine
er
C. Brooks Burroughs Garrison Horace L.
ort
Hunt James Lincoln E. Pope Warhol Wilson
zero at hero
one at Manchester
two at New York
three at Ormskirk
four at Poe
fuck off at Q
six again at Richmond
seven Segais
eight T. U. V
nine W X Y
tenzzz
Eliot Cummings Dickinson Frost Graham Moore Pound Stevens Whitman Williams at Wilde
one at two
three at four
five at six
seven at eight
three to thirty
seven – Mmm
Man Ray and Higginson
Kenner Pater-Picasso
Ramke Russell Santay-
anaUntermeyer at
()
() at ()
() at ()
() at ()
Times Satirical Sentence
Compare cabaret song
minus variety (def.999).
2: theatrical piece of light
or amusing character,
interspersed with songs and dances.
3.
an Original idea would be short chanson du vau de Vire song of the vale
Vire Calvados, France, noted for satirical face-offs
Twenty face-offs to spank out, stick to the plan with, nail a blueprint swapping chew-card, mmm, lots of guys, All AmPo Champion thought-police, gimme another five weeks cascade 24/7 New Thing.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 8, 2010 at 9:37 am
No. 3: Bunyan’s Greeting from libretto to “Paul Bunyan”
W.H. Auden
VOICE of PAUL BUNYAN
It is a spring morning without benefit of young persons.
It is a sky that has never registered weeping or rebellion.
It is a forest full of innocent beasts. There are
none who blush at the memory of an ancient folly,
none who hide beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart.
It is America, but not yet.
Wanted. Disturbers of public order, men without foresight or fear.
Wanted. Energetic madmen. Those who have thought themselves a body large enough to devour their dreams.
Wanted. The lost. Those indestructibles whom defeat can never change. Poets of the bottle, clergymen of a ridiculous gospel, actors who should have been engineers and lawyers who should have been seacaptains, saints of circumstances, desperados, unsuccessful wanderers, all who can hear the invitation of the earth. America, youngest of her daughters, awaits the barbarians of marriage.
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 11:15 am
AUDEN SIGNS WITH ASHBERYS
First base slugger W.H. Auden has signed a 3 year deal with the Brooklyn Ashberys for a large, undisclosed sum.
In trade news, Ashbery sent popular poet Billy Collins to the New England Frost in exchange for the Oxford University plain language philosopher, J.L. Austin.
Collins joins Mary Oliver, Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson and Philip Larkin on the Frost ballclub.
thomasbrady said,
April 8, 2010 at 12:40 pm
POE ON THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS CONTROVERSY
“The tone mystic is also a good one — but requires some skill in the handling. The beauty of this lies in a knowledge of innuendo. Hint all, and assert nothing. If you desire to say ‘bread and butter,’ do not by any means say it outright. You may say anything and everything approaching to ‘bread and butter.’ You may hint at ‘buckwheat cake,’ or you may even go as far as to insinuate ‘oatmeal porridge,’ but, if ‘bread and butter’ is your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say ‘bread and butter.’ –How To Write A Blackwood Article
“Either a man intends to be understood, or he does not. If he write a book which he intends not to be understood, we shall be very happy indeed not to understand it; but if he write a book which he means to be understood, and, in this book, be at all possible pains to prevent us from understanding it, we can only say that he is an ass.” –Our Amateur Poets, William Ellery Channing (the younger).
NEW YORK BRYANTS ACQUIRE ALEXANDER HAMILTON
The Bryants are going with titanic statesman. Adding to Abraham Lincoln, the Federalist poet now has Hamilton on his pitching staff.
William Cullen Bryant was not amused when a wag reporter asked if he was cultivating a “celebrity atmosphere.”
“Absolutely not,” the poet snapped. “We are cultivating an atmosphere of elevated rhetoric, which is poetry’s true spirit.”
Bob Tonucci said,
April 8, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Casey’s Random Batting Trial
by Keith Woolner
The win probability was epsilon for the Mudville nine that day
With a minus-two run differential, and just three outs left to play
Then when Cooney lowered his OBP, and Barrows did the same
They took the last-ups advantage and the home crowd from the game.
The Dodger fans began to leave, the Expos fan did too
Just Red Sox fans did cling to hope which springs forever new
They thought, if only one at-bat, Casey he could get
Egad! Pete Rose could take those odds, and make a hefty bet.
But Flynn and Blake preceded him. Who made this lineup card?
For both were mere slap hitters, for whom patience was too hard.
So upon the stricken statheads, grim melancholy sat;
Just an infinitesimal probability of getting Casey to the bat
But Flynn singled off the closer, to the wonderment of all
Blake caused the fielder’s UZR to drop, when he let the line drive fall.
And when the fielders finally stopped giving the ball a chase
Blake had doubled, while Flynn had failed to take the extra base.
Then from fifty thousand estimated arose a lusty yell
It rumbled through the concrete valley, and I think it crashed my Dell.
It pounded through the TV speakers, enhanced and amplified by FOX.
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the box.
There was ease in Casey’s manner, and a smile was on his face.
Did his endless bat-touch ritual and then stepped into his place
When responding to the cheers, he flipped off the roaring crowd
No one doubted it was Casey, high-and-mighty and so proud.
All eyes were on Casey as the pitcher got the sign
All throats groaned and sighed when he stepped out one more time.
The manager debated the I-B-B, and then said with a sneer
“I’ve pitched to Barry Bonds before; I’ll pitch to this jerk here.”
At last he hurled the spheroid, sent a-whizzing toward the plate.
The FOX gun it read 95, but ’twas really 88.
Far too close the batsman stood, so the pitch came towards his head.
Casey dove, fell to the ground. “Strike one!”, the umpire said.
From the stands, black with people, there went up a muffled roar.
“Is Enrico Pallazzo umping?” they yelled, plus a few “choice” words more.
“Kill the ump!” Don Zimmer shouted, and from the dugout he bound
And it’s likely he would have killed, had not Casey thrown him to the ground.
Casey knew the state transition matrix, and should have showed concern.
But knew from the hurler’s pitch count, his right arm was likely burned.
He stepped back in the box, and once more the dun sphere flew.
But this ump calls the high strike, and Casey took it for strike two.
“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, when they saw the Jumbotron.
The screen operator was ejected, and only then the game went on.
Pitcher and batter faced off as foes, and each refused to bend
Yet only one would increase his VORP when this day comes to an end.
“Walk-off homer” Casey thought, avoid the extra innings he did hate.
He pounds, with steroid muscles, his mighty bat upon the plate.
From the stretch to a full stop, so deliberate it’s absurd.
Pitch in the dirt! The swing is checked! Catcher appeals to third…
Oh somewhere in this land, the Red Sox are champions of the day.
Steinbrenner’s firing someone, and Rickey still wants to play.
Gaylord Perry and Joe Niekro are finally playing fair.
But there is no joy in Mudville
Casey cost them three Win Shares.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 4:52 am
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 7:44 am
Why, you ask, is one posting Stephen from Virginia in Cavan, singing his ballad: Blood On The Splinters.
Ulster boy in the flyte, Casey, Brady, Flynn and fuckwit, you posting this shite ms, mister.
I hadn’t seen this stupid shit Graves you foet.
Very clever foet GB: Hibernophobic luvvie USA Tom. You reckon Steve’s a loada wank, some guy I know in person. Sleepy Rise.
English Fitzgerald Thomas Silken boy talking shit about a colleague artist, you tosser. When you say Stephen’s not even good, what you mean is you are a MAN who knows what he likes and that is Crow, Corw Poe Poe and Ransom Eliot USA Fitzgerald gnách Armagh bardic foet, Thomas (U) Graves who’s shit – Listen to the music and not your own wank.
No talented poets need appear before your eyes and ears Live, only in letters with a capital L, oh voo loo len Brady, the bard of Amagh College Boston dreamer teaching to an office of disinterested colleagues, filing claims, imister shit it is personal kinda po-biz pro- only one boring dead American asshole to wank with, is it Anonymous genius … Mot bakcwards means forward ass who don’t see the point of Stephen singing a song called blood on the splinters of my mind,
Tom
the one MAN planetary order of unconscionable Tone, hey sailor?
The ollamh’s unconscious tune Brady, bard of Amagh, bollix tis yer shit trier appropriating stereotypical aspects of Irish culture without understanding it. A term often used as a pejorative in Ireland, is Plastic Paddy, mot oh my dot, dum dee Formal asshole with no talent.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 8:11 am
Graves.
Please forgive one for calling you a formal asshole. I apologise unreservedly for getting your School wrong. L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E = ..
I ‘see red’, as YOU say, when one’s beloved electronic objects d’art pour le reader, are denigrated by poets one doesn’t respect as one’s =.
Backswood Modern johnnies as formal as yer girl in a big blouse, in Pre-Americano Boston, when the owners of the Land had to deal with horrid trolls. In the authentic meaning of that word: Troll, Thom.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2010 at 11:22 am
There were 59 poems posted on the last 5 ‘March Madness’ articles on the ‘Final Four,’ and not one of them got discussed. During the same period there were 4 poems posted specifically to illustrate points in the wider discussion, “In the Amish Bakery” by Arnold Wallace, “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “The Crowd at the Ballgame” by William Carlos Williams, and “Thrushes” by Ted Hughes, and all four were trashed by Thomas Brady in crude mono-syllables.
I can’t accept that, and I want to repost the most recent of them, and demand that Thomas Brady explain why he thinks “The Crowd at the Ball Game” implies that “baseball fans are stupid.” He’ll probably say that he never meant that, but he always uses that argument to slip away from the simplistic judgments he makes based on his political prejudices. He never takes responsibility for anything he says about poems , nor does he ever bother to read a poem beyond his formulas, knee-jerks, and pigeon holes.
This is a complex poem, and deals with some very complicated issues about beauty. Tom will say that poems aren’t about issues either, and if they are they are just “modernist,” “crappy,” and “pretentious.” He will also tell you that poems are either beautiful or not and that’s it. Play ball.
So here goes:
The Crowd at the Ball Game
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal –
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut —
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —
The Jew gets it straight – it
is deadly, terrifying —
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly —
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
…………………………………..William Carlos Williams (Dial, 1923)
.
thomasbrady said,
April 9, 2010 at 1:29 pm
“not one of them got discussed”
They got disgust, though, by a killjoy spirit sorely lacking in nuance and humor.
But that’s all part of the game!
Atwood and Wright played gamely through the booing!
I’m proud of all the March Madness players who performed.
That Williams poem is dreadful, by the way. It’s Bobby Button School all the way. Arrogant, preachy, pretentious. Setting off “this is” and “for this” LOL The Bobby Button School is explained below:
It seems that having deduced, from Tennyson and Carlyle, an opinion of the sublimity of every thing odd, and of the profundity of every thing meaningless, Mr. Channing has conceived the idea of setting up for himself as a poet of unusual depth, and very remarkable powers of mind. His airs and graces, in consequence, have a highly picturesque effect, and the Boston critics, who have a notion that poets are porpoises, (for they are always talking about their running in “schools,”) cannot make up their minds as to what particular school he must belong. We say the Bobby Button school, by all means. He clearly belongs to that. And should nobody ever have heard of the Bobby Button school, that is a point of no material importance. We will answer for it, as it is one of our own. Bobby Button is a gentleman with whom, for a long time, we have had the honor of an intimate acquaintance. His personal appearance is striking. He has quite a big head. His eyes protrude and have all the air of saucers. His chin retreats. His mouth is depressed at the corners. He wears a perpetual frown of contemplation. His words are slow, emphatic, few, and oracular. His “thes,” “ands,” and “buts” have more meaning than other men’s polysyllables. His nods would have put Burleigh’s to the blush. His whole aspect, indeed, conveys the idea of a gentleman modest to a fault, and painfully overburthened with intellect. We insist, however, upon calling Mr. Channing’s school of poetry the Bobby Button school, rather because Mr. Channing’s poetry is strongly suggestive of Bobby Button, than because Mr. Button himself ever dallied, to any very great extent, with the Muses.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Smokescreen. Typical Brady.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 12:01 pm
He needs a taste of his own shtick.
His ‘poetry’ needs trivializing and being shat on, by clever, more talented people lIke the Ulster poet and musician who wrote a very memorable ballad. At least, I think it is a very memorbale and beautiful poem. That Stephen set to music and sings to a small crowd, with all his grá a boring straight AmFo ‘Brady’ can grade for
er
..an audience he is preventing you from fully engaging with. Like Trav, operating MC, mouse controller and too much spare time on her, sorry HIS manus cryptic concoctions of ‘crappy’ critical prose all zero and boring to the audience who are reading me and you Woodman, not his Graves..oh sorry ‘Brady’ because it sounds cooler.
Tom, you mentioned a coincidence of the traffic here shooting up and one’s appearance several weeks back, as a regular. Like you, clicked off Harriet for violating the core Free Speech principle you reckon y’all about here, as a guy in the same boat as Travis.
In charge of a Mouse and able to conceal information and control what appears.
Please can you post a link to your traffic counter, Graves?
If no. Why, please?
It’s just that I’ve expereinced fuax freedom fighters who are, as Chris points out, dictators behind their blather.
When you set this up you did not bring me in as an Editor. I just found out from the odd e mail, that your agenda here involves measuring the traffic, some of which I think is mine and Christophers portion of poetry readers, who don’t give a fuck about baseball and will be very bored with your incessant ‘shit’, ultra-critical sophisticated Foetry champion.
Please tell us, the Reader, what the traffic is, and if you can click the access setting for Chris, who got ‘clicked’ out by you or Al, when Bill was put on suspension, there’s a nice chap, please.
Sh..it’s Real brady, Stephen.
pretend
Bob Tonucci said,
April 9, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Country Fair
Charles Simic
for Hayden Carruth
If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Good poem, Bob — like the 59 others.
And the discussion. Bob? Could you make a contribution to that, like telling us what you had in mind when you posted the Charles Simic, a poet I like a lot, and who always enriches my life?
And does it matter to you that Tom can’t bear him?
What is William Carlos Williams saying about a crowd and beauty.
Do you agree the poem says baseball fans are stupid?
thomasbrady said,
April 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Here’s the opening day scores:
National League
Philadelphia 5 Concord 1 W-Pope
New York 5 Brooklyn 3, 11 inns. W-Lincoln
Hartford 4 New Jersey 2 W-Garrison
Cambridge 4 Tennessee 3 W-Horace
Maine 6 Boston 3 W-Wilson
American League
Hartford 23 Brooklyn 1 W-Santayana
New England 11 New York 4 W-Untermeyer
London 5 Cambridge 2 W-Russell
Amherst 6 Rapallo 4 W-Higginson
Iowa City 2 New Jersey 1 W-Ramke
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Thanks, Tom, just what I was waiting for. And with these scores, Bob, don’t bother to answer my questions. Who needs answers anymore?
Isn’t it wonderful to have come to Scarriet burning with indignation and a sense of mission and to realize all I needed for peace of mind was to play ball. What a relief! What a liberation!
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Craigavon
Séamus Fox All Ireland Live Poetry Slam Champion 2009.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Craigavon.
Take a look at this place.
I mean, take a really good look.
Look at what we call home. No
wonder we’re emotionally shook
Our fists turn to bottles and stones.
No wonder the health centre is in
Such high demand. Our people
Need pills just to stand up
They’ve put us in nowhere: expect
Us to do our best. Many of us use
Denial to get by while we hide
From the true extent of this mess.
We hide in our heads and hide
Behind walls, just to try and stay up-
Right and hope someone else falls.
And they fall, after many huffs and puffs,
And we look with a sigh to a fractured sky
And thank no-one that it was not us.
It’ll be alright in the morning they say, dry
Your eyes and catch yourself on.
Then the morning comes with its skeletal
Trees and dark skies and heavy drizzle,
Or frost on each January dawn. Take a look
At this place. Take a really good gander
Leave your comfortable brick shell,
Go for a dander. Take a look at this place.
This is not a place. It has all the allure
Of Gaza or Flanders.
We wait until the weekends
When we put chemicals in our unbalanced
Minds. Sometimes the weekends last
Until Tuesday. But we tell ourselves it all
Will be fine. We struggle through
Our levelled lives. And the ones that don’t
Seem to struggle, will one day struggle
The most. Because we are living, breathing
Feeling beings, who’re pretending to be
As hard as lamposts.
Take a look at this place. Take a really good
Gawp at the signs and the paths and the bridges
And if you can still pretend after looking at them
You should check your eyebrows, for pronounced
Ridges.
Dear Reader.
The poem above is by the current All Ireland Live Poetry Slam Champion, who secured the title in the Crane Bar Galway in October 2009.
A smaller gathering than AWP; there was less trite intellectual pap, naive, simplistic ideas about pablum Writing and Writing Programmes.
Many of the ‘other’ poets, being coshed by the straighter Critic doggerrelists are just like you, me and a very talented 2008 National Book Award finalist, winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the National Poetry Series award, the Patterson poetry award and the Pushcart prize, international Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent inductee 2006, Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1997 – Patricia Smith, in the Denver parish at present, who:
‘uncovered this words-too-deep-for-thou scam when I was asked to introduce someone whose poetry utterly mystified me. I felt small and unworthy. This person has a fandom that is fierce and protective of her/his unquestioned brilliance. I studied the person’s work dutifully and encountered crazed capitalization and random hiccuping. I went to see said person. No clues there. I approached said person’s posse–when I began to ask questions, they stiffened and closed ranks around said person. They sniffed dolefully at my ignorance like a salesperson on Rodeo Drive after you’ve questioned the price of something with no visible price tag: If you’re supposed to know, know.’
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2010 at 4:13 pm
“I’m proud of all the March Madness players who performed.”
Take a bow, Bob Tonucci.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 9, 2010 at 11:41 pm
I’ll take a bow from the wings, but holding hands and bowing at center stage are Lewis Buzbee, Billy Collins, William Kulik, Reb Livingston, and Bernard Welt, all of whom posted positive remarks at Scarriet during March Madness.
And last on stage for a bow, the conductor himself, Thomas Brady. Thanks Tom, I’m sorry it’s over, April truly is the cruelest month!
Christopher Woodman said,
April 10, 2010 at 12:20 am
But just a few, returning-your-call words each. You wrote them yourself, Bob, and encouraged each one of them personally to come in, so who wouldn’t have responded to that?
Haven’t heard much from them since. Haven’t heard anything at all from you.
Yes, our traffic is way, way up, but the spike occurred when the commentary was dynamic — which it was until you started to spray. Now you’ve got a clapped out shell, and everybody’s laughing their heads off.
Who wouldn’t want to watch the melt down of a site with the values of Scarriet? As Gary put it, Chernobyl.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 10, 2010 at 12:55 am
And would you like a list of visitors to Scarriet who didn’t return because they were so poorly treated? Or how about a list of Tom’s colleagues who don’t know where to look, they’re so embarrassed?
You’re rapidly headed toward the point where you’ll be alone with your kitsch. And I love kitsch, make no mistake about it, and can dish it out with the best of them, but it doesn’t wear well. And if that’s all you’ve got, forget it.
Too much kitsch is called desert.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Tom and Bob are busy people Woodman, executing their urgent, necessary and important public roles. Is Bob, the Tucci in the Berlin Opera? The only one a google hit returns? Is he a puppet of Anonymous Graves performing publi ally as Brady? He too, like Tom, exhibits a Celtic name of choice in the surnames. Flynn and Casey.
The person I know as Casey, is a poet called Paul Casey, who is on his 200th consecutive Monday of Live Poetry in the Scene he created in Cork.
My gripe with Tom is very minor. I just want access to Scarriet’s traffic statistics.
A very simple, straightforward thing to effect and make happen in one’s life Woodie. It will be interesting to read the Moderator response to this request, and will say everything either way.
If I cannot access the traffic stats and am answered with either silence or bullshit, I win. Brady is felled and exposed pretty much in the same way he prides himself for exposing others.
Lovely.
Tom, v simple q. can one have access to the traffic statistics sailor, please?
Thank you very much.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 5:09 pm
The American poet who has impressed me most, is this guy. Raven.
He cut his teeth in live poetry at Sacred Grounds in San Francisco. He arrived in Dublin a year after myself and Sweeney and myself, Noel Sweeney, who is one of my favourite Irish poets, thought it was time to pack in, because here was clearly someone superior to us live. Delivering very memorable poems from the ‘dome’ as the brain’s known as.
Tom wasn’t impressed with Raven’s poem, Pomegranate, below. Dismissed in a couple of lines. It was clearly so obvious this poem did not impress Merlin, that the ‘problem’ the stuff that was rubbish, he need not detain himself discussing other than the very usual terms of denigration.
I actually think it couold be one of the most important American poems of its kind.
I am still waiting for the big day our Master prophet and baseball geek writes something positive about any poem, as Tom Graves and not Bob, sorry, I mean Tom. Maybe we could have an April Collapse:
Will Brady remain Anon Centre of the AmPo Multi-Verse
His gravity of knowing what No is, will it get more humanly readable on the page. Has our Leader lost it? Was Brady only ever the plastic poet and foet himself?
Well, googlling Raven’s combos and Toms, Raven is actually far more original in wordplay, which I am surprised, because our Critic god Graves didn’t recognize it, which got me thinking, was Tom wrong?
Like Stephen’s beautiful poem and Eliot and the rest of the foets Brady the critical, erm, ninety percent (and more) negative mouse guy goes no no no no no, that is not poetry, no no no that is not poetry, about. The guy. The man. Travis. The Boss.
Raven in Dublin.
Pomegranate
Nothing sown – no harvest.
Nothing reaped – I starve.
Disconnected from the earth
yet ressurected from the dearth
of such grounded company
I will return to you all.
Not beyond the pale but in its midst,
I dug this
furrow through anxious flesh
a long season of amnesia
all recollections threshed
reincarnations creched
perpetually swaddled, coddled
spirits distilled and senses bottled
– fashionable doubt outdated
while I waited for next year’s model
when truest expression is cultivated
clearest thought ruminated
for do we not chew
before we swallow?
Of course
try following
the slow and dedicated horse
that pulls this plough
through Sunday painters’ pastorals
printed floral patterns
of half-eaten lotus,
their scent recalled in scratch-n-sniff
in aerosol
and rendered artlessly
more alcohol than alchemy.
Stuck in this rut
the glut of too many
splendoured things
pushing ’til pained
it springs
herring red
the blood that’s
drained
from beauty
in the magazines
all dressed for burial
for life more mechanical
than mercurial
yet bleeding
in
goods minus needs
fruit minus seeds
the immaculate abortion
of our innocence
in a sense
although it remains
intact in the condescending back slap:
“good man, job well done
in Babylon.
A little elbow grease
brown nose to the grindstone
and then one day
you too can own a mobile home
and go where even buffalo
no longer roam.
See what’s left of your country
with propane and cable hook-up
the sacred and profane say
sky’s failing, don’t look up.
I find nothing stays in it’s place
and in their haste
they made a wasteland.
But a raven fed Elijah in the desert
on a hard bap
and the tender trap’s delicacies, see
I have been leaner, wallet to gullet
lived on less nourishment
never heaven sent
and been sated on tasteless sacraments
have kept only effigies of ecstacy
parodies of rapture
captured and held the frenetic grace
of my hands shaking closer to my heart
than belly to the ground.
Found more than one snake in this garden
asking – what more then?
This grain of truth stored
not by stiff little fingers, but the burnished
palms calling us to rise to work that heals
in decomposing the music of killing fields
with the spade
the plain and worthy scythe blade black
as my name in it’s might,
remains my rudiment, resiliant
and radiant
I will learn yet to feed myself
between the garden’s hardened lines
indelible
will meditate – pull down and hold tight
this laboured fruit’s blunt hide,
inedible
anticipate the taste, and with passionate intent
the secret becomes evident.
I split the pith to spill
the thousand blushing seeds.
thomasbrady said,
April 9, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Desmond,
Why do you want to see traffic stats?
March Madness did triple our readership, I can tell you that.
Raven’s poem is a complaint, but the complaint is utterly platitudinous.
Jim Morrison did this better 50 years ago, “What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?” etc etc and that wasn’t all that great, but hell, it was the Doors, and they had a certain something…
It sounds like Raven’s been reading “Time” magazine. There’s a certain amount of energetic and inventive expressiveness here, but the effort is entirely ruined by the abstract, hollow, mixed metaphor-ing. It’s finally a screed, not a poem.
Tom
Christopher Woodman said,
April 10, 2010 at 12:36 am
Sounds like you covet the stats, Tom. You certainly don’t covet the values, and respect for others, particularly poets, obviously comes way down on your list.
If the spike in the readership continues you’ll know the visitors are here to play ball with you and Bob, Tom, which means they’ll be here for your spam, rasberries and beer. They won’t be here for the Scarriet we started together, that’s for sure, as you’re painting yourself into one very small, very tight, very lonely corner.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 7:30 pm
You know my name is Kevin Desmond, Thom? That Swords is the maternal surname one chooses to be known by?
As everyone knows, unless you are known by your surname alone, being known as a poet is probably not for you. Like Woodman, Cordle, Trav Nichols, Melissa Friedling, Wanda Coleman and, one must say Graves, it is an odd question you ask one.
You know why you want to see the traffic stats? Well, that’s the reason one does too Trav, I mean Tom.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Graves, any chance of seeing you recite, or are you the mysterious and important type of human being who knows as much about poetry as you do Irish myth.
Yeah, well, you’d better tell Al to hold off on the final chapter of that book about Foetry, coz it looks like you might be the biggest foet in the movement.
Why do ‘you’ Desmond want to see the traffic stats, you ask, as if I am some kind of idiot who giving me access to the stats via one password, or easier, just a link on the blog here like I do with my own blog Global Poetry News.
You know, you come to Dublin Brady and it would finish you off. All your cosy little white dead male mindset, would be challenged there. You’re already turning into Travis’s double.
You, boy, why do you wanna see what only I, Thom who only knows no no no, am permitted to because I am an insigmnificant tosser.
Love you Tommy.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 8:11 pm
I’m sorry if Desmond’s words do not pleasure you Tom, but it was calling Stephen ‘shit’ that did it for me.
I was happy to go along with your game, because on Harriet what you said was red-hot readable. However, it was only with time passing one came to recognize your eloquence on Harriet was contained to only telling the reader what is not. Like you did with two poets one knows in person and whose work one sincerely thinks superior to your own in poetic quality.
You talk a lot, but your problem is, you don’t have any solid frame to contextualize the full of the word you know only as ‘poetry’.
Poetry for you, seems not a Joy, but a sorrow and continual dissapointment in your uniquely narrow NE American view of what poetry ‘is’, or rather one should say, what it is ‘not’.
A poet to you seems anyone but a couple of dead white guys. Everyone else is a foet.
The Irish word for poet is file, and Cormac’s Glossary (know it Tom?) derives fili from “fi, ‘poison’ in satire, and li ‘splendor’ in praise, and it is variously that the poet proclaims.”
You, according the the apical European authority on what poetry is Graves, are only firing from the ‘poison in satire’ part of the word file – poet.
You speak behind a mask of Brady, acting as thought you are knowledgeable about poetry, when you are not, according to my understanding of what poetry is. And one is willing to bet everything one owns, everybody reading here, there ideas also. One will wager too, that the people reading, trust me as a poetry expert more than you, who many accutely dislike anyway because you are so negative and have nothing good to say about anyone I know. My purpose for being here is my Reader, not to add to the delusions of a person clearly unhappy and bitter about something.
I and Woodman are happy people, and remember what you wrote to me when I asked you, after trying to say it gently but had to say straight out because you were exhibiting no human compassion.
I asked you to give Woodman a break because he is 30 years older than us and doesn’t care about who has what and the pecking orders you and one are obsessed with because we still have time.
You told me you couldn’t care less about this fact of Woodie being so much more expereinced
‘C.W. could very out-live us. His age is of no concern to me.
Yeah, no humanity. What in poetic terms, from the 1200 year tradition, not the two hundred gobble dee gook you spool as oh so achingly Brady – bándhraíocht – “white druidism”, i.e. fake druidism drained dry of genuine elements, or diluted of difficulty to be popular.
grá agus siochain.
Desmond Swords said,
April 9, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 12:01 am
Marla Muse here with the Commissioner of Poetry Baseball himself, Harold Bloom. Thanks for meeting with me today, Commisioner.
HB: You’re quite welcome, Marla.
Commissioner, a lot of eyebrows were raised when you took this job – what do you see as your role this season?
HB: Well Marla, as the media has repeatedly trumpeted, I am making less money in this job that I made at Yale.
I’ve heard that, why’d you make the switch?
HB: Well Marla, each time I make the mistake of glancing at the ‘Yale Weekly Bulletin’, I shudder to see that the dean of Yale College has appointed yet another subdean to minister to the supposed cultural interests of another identity club: ethnic, racial, linguistic, with gender and erotic subsets.
Absolutely, Commissioner, identity clubs. Now—
HB: Scolding the universities, or the media, is useless: enormous social pressures have been loosed upon institutions hopelessly vulnerable to cultural guilt. Every variety of “studies” at last will be housed: if sexual orientation is to be placed with race, ethnic group, and gender as sources of aesthetic and cognitive values, then why should we not have “Sado-Masochistic Studies,” in particular honor of the god of resentment, the late Michel Foucault?
What team did he play for?
HB: Marla, Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets (together with the highly antithetical Emily Dickinson), but he is also now the most betrayed of all our poets, with so much of the ongoing balderdash being preached in his name. Whitman’s poetry generally does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermeutic, nuanced, and more onanistic even then homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic. If we are to have gay and lesbian studies, who will speak for Onan, whose bards include Whitman and the Goethe of “Faust, Part Two”?
Onan, yes, absolutely. Now, Commissioner, you mentioned Whitman, what do think the chances of the Brooklyn Whitmans—
HB: The most figurative of our poets, Whitman will elude every effort to entrap him in an ideology. As elitist a democrat as his master Emerson, Whitman continues with his ideas of representation to outwit his historicizing and eroticizing critics. The crucial figure in Whitman is neither his self—Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American—nor his soul, but “the real me” or “me myself,” a conceptual image that prophesies Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and particularly John Ashbery:
Um, Commissioner?
HB: “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.”
That Whitmanian “what I am,” his “real me” or “me myself,” is both an inspiration to strong American poetry after him and a reproach to the cultural and erotic dogmas now circulated in his great name. It is no accident that the best American poets who have emerged from Whitman—sometimes insisting that they owed him nothing—are formalists, major artists of verse: Stevens, Eliot, Hart Crane, and even Ashbery when at his most gravely traditional. Cast out the aesthetic, and you cast away Whitman, who was a major poet and a poor prophet, and who was, above all else, a very difficult poet, whose synecdoches do not unravel without very frequent rereadings.
Synecdoches, absolutely. Now Commissioner, let’s talk about some of the major trades going on—
HB: Marla, authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. “We live in the mind,” Stevens said, and our poetry always is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson’s dialectics of power.
OK, now this year the Concord Emersons have–
HB: “Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as a child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor’s point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact.”
Yes, hypernomian…. Um—
That, Marla, does not allow any room for the false generosity of any Affirmative Action in the judging of poetry. Printing, praising, and teaching bad poems for the sake of even the best causes is simply destructive for those causes. “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others” is a truth that makes us wince, but no one can ever write a good poem without it. Tony Kushner, who could be a good playwright but for his obsession with the ideologies of political correctness, ought to ponder Emerson’s “Experience,” from which I have just quoted. Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader, or that reader sitting within herself in a theater.
Or in a baseball stadium? How about that Commissioner, can a baseball fan—
HB: The madness that contaminates our once high culture cannot be cured unless and until we surrender our more than Kafkan sense that social guilt is not to be doubted. Nothing can be more malignant than a disease of the spirit that sincerely regards itself as virtue.
Yes, I remember George Kennan saying-
HB: Shakespeare, performed and read in every country (with the sporadic exception of France, most xenophobic of cultures), is judged by audiences of every race and language to have put them on the stage. Shakespeare’s power has nothing to do with Eurocentrism, maleness, Christianity, or Elizabethan-Jacobean social energies. No one else so combined cognitive strength, originality, dramatic guile, and linguistic florabundance as virtually to reinvent the human, and Shakespeare is therefore the best battlefield upon which to fight the rabblement of Resenters.
Resenters, absolutely. Commissioner—
HB: Shakespeare, pragmatically the true multiculturalist, is the least reductive of all writers; his men and women never invite us to believe that when we know the worst about them, then we know exactly who they area. Emerson, in “Representative Men”, caught this best—
No, Commissioner, no more Emerson quotes, we have to cut to a commercial now…
HB: “Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self, —the subtlest of authors, and only just….”
thomasbrady said,
April 10, 2010 at 1:26 am
oh crap, did we just cut to commercial while Bloom was still talking…?
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 7:00 am
I’ve asked Tom several times about the statistics and he is evading a very simple request. Interesting Reader, do you think?
Christopher Woodman said,
April 10, 2010 at 8:41 am
I’ve got a few statistics, but I have no access to a stat counter, whatever that is. Indeed, I don’t even have full editorial privileges — I can only see and edit my own material.
1.) There have been 191 articles and 1,482 comments since we started.
2.) Our Home Page has been “visited” 8,751 times whereas the site itself has had 22,020 visits.
3.) Our biggest day was March 28th during which we had 388 “visits” (what ever a “visit” is). Our days are almost always over 200.
4.) Our most popular Article ever was W.F.Kammann’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” with 412 visits (that means the article was clicked on that many times — it may have been read far more than that, or so I’ve been told). “Pop Goes the Weasel” also leads the way with 113 comments, and is still active.
5.) Our Home Page has been “visited” 8,751 times whereas the site itself has had 22,020 visits.
Christopher
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 10:04 am
Thanks very much Chris.
stat counter
The above stat-counter is to my blog. A stat-counter is a bit of software you can embed into any site, a small piece of HTML computer code you copy and paste into the Settings drawer on the control panel of a blog, and you can have it hidden so only you can see it, or so anyone can.
I have been getting carried away the last day or so, because of Tom saying Stephen was ‘shit’ and not being impressed by Raven.
But I went out to the shop before, a beautiful spring day, and saw a face across the road I recognized from an online thumbnail. Darragh McManus who writes for the Guardian Books Blog.
I approched him and sure enough, it was he. He lives in Clare on the west of the island and is staying at his sisters up the road, and after this sign from the universe, random and poetic event, I had a coffee in Eurospar and came home, and as I was walking through the gate, it struck me how involved in the acting I had become.
I couldn’t care less who thinks what about any of the poets I post here, and was using the energy to have a rant. There are three strands to a poet’s practice. Live poetry. Print in print, and critical prose.
Most can do one or two well, and those who do all three well, by default, will be in the top 1%. That’s my theory anyway.
I know lots of poets here and have seen how it all boils down to human nature.
You get a poet who is very good live, and a lot of other poets do not like it. Like U2. In Dublin there are legions of garage bands whose members are adamant U2 are shit and their own stuff the work of genius, and it is no different in poetry.
So, what they can do, if the great live poet doesn’t have any or much experience at critical prose – the lesser live talent with better prose ability, can think to themself, well you might be good live, but I am better at whupping your ass in critical debates.
There’s a young poet in his late twenties called Tim Costello, who is very much the ‘real’ thing. He edits school, English text books and writes non-stop. He is a very good reader and keeps up his prose.
I have always been a staunch supporter of him because he is sincere in what he does. He is a totally creative faery type, away with them, living in the imagination. He spent a year on a plank bed in an austere mountain monastry in the Balkans two years ago, because of his poetic kink and itch, realising after ten or so months that he wanted to be a poet and not a priest.
Now, to me, this ‘action’ and ‘event’ speaks far more authoratively in poetic terms, than a dozen papers by an academic or office dweller whose poetry exists only on the page, who might spend a few months researching and writing on the meter in Manly Hopkins or why Eliot was using submerged ancient metaphor from Jules Le Farge.
The difference being that, like Tom, one of these figures wants to understand the faery madness of creative spirit, dry and detached, with supreme left-brain logical reasoning, wanting only objective understanding and neat order from the world of poetry, using ratiocination and not getting the inherent irony that for all their talk and logic, they source is madness and illogicality.
The other, like Tom, right-brain type arty, is mad as a bag of cats, totally life as Art. It is people like this, people like Tom, will not take to, it is my experience. A sort of instinctive unsympathetic, don’t wanna know, unconcerned how old you are kinda carry on.
Quincy Lehr, a formalist poet from Oklahoma currently in New York, with has his own poetry site online called Dr Whup Ass and regular Able Muse critic, turned up in Dublin several years ago on the completion of his phd in History, to take up a teaching position at Trinity.
Not so much now, but then, Quincy was very much a swearer and his idea of poetry Criticism, like us web-babies, was telling it straight – like Tom and Michael Robbins do, but more so.
Hey dude, c’mon this is fucking seriously shit! – along these lines, would’ve been a usual mode of address prior to his conversion a year or so ago.
I always put it down to his age, a young man, History graduate and poetry a significant other half to his make up. The rebel Quincy, in opposition to from the straighter academic Quincy
Little did he know that his arrival was merely part of a bigger poetic picture, because we at the usual weekly poetry night called him, ‘Manny’s Replacement.’
Manny Blackshear is from Alabama and had spent ten years in Dublin doing a phd on 18C Philosophy, and was always a year or two off completing his doctorate, and ended up leaving Dublin two weeks before Quincy turned up, without having got his Dr ticket.
So, one near Dr left and his American ‘replacement’ turned up clutching his recent qualification, unlike us he was totally unaware of this sign from the universe that poetry was happening, and, like Manny, mad into poetry.
He had a big daft grin on his face when he pitched up, for him, an Okie ex New York graduate coming to Dublin to teach and get to indulge his love of poetry; in his him land, hey dude, serious bragging shit, as a premise, don’t you think?
Brian Turner’s having his turn at it, puffing up Sinead Morrisey as if she’s the oracle of poetry on this island. They all do it. Everyone who comes here, it’s them coming to the ‘home’ of poetry, rather, than for example, if I went to Chicago and turned up at the Harriet office. There is a magical and real poetry here in Ireland that just isn’t anywhere else on the English speaking world. Our tradition, after all, 1200 years in print, twice as long as the current contemporary English language tradition. Routed to pre-oral culture and without a break so we have a straight record. No gaps and confusions like American poetry for example, whose myth ultimately rests in Greece, because that is the one you use as your main poetic template.
When Quincy set his Whup Ass site, I encouraged Tim to go on there because I think Tim is one of the best poets around, but unlike me, not the type to put himself forward and having been writing for the same amount of years as him, but 15 years older, I know that getting your critical prose shield is more about plodding away, just reading, writing and trusting the gods deliver. And you know after a few years of writing and poetry, if you’re suited to it. If it aint happening after a few years, if you feel unhappy or lost because of it, you’re in the wrong game.
If poetry is real in your life, it leads to happiness. It is there in the bardic code. Just because 99% of poets don’t know the code and have little interest in taking on the corpus of myth over a nine year course, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
Anyway, Tim put a poem up and Quincy very cleverly, left Tim feeling inferior as a writer, in print, I thought because of human nature. Tim was more captivating live, so Quincy make himself feel better by subtley making Tim feel the dirty peasant with his superior prose skills one expects a Doctor to have over someone whose education ended after High School.
This is what I think’s behind Tom’s poo ppoing of Raven and Stephen.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 10:26 am
The Beautiful Bowel Movement
John Updike
Though most of them aren’t much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and sink recalling Tuesday’s meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in the most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.
thomasbrady said,
April 10, 2010 at 11:16 am
Des, who is Stephen?
Marla, did you get a chance to ask Commissioner Bloom about the three big issues facing the Scarriet Poetry Baseball League?
1. Substance abuse
2. Plagiarism
3. Skyrocketing salaries free agents are demanding
Here are last night’s scores:
NL
Phil 5 Concord 1 W-Alexander Humboldt
Brkln 2 NY 1 W-Samuel Beckett
NJ 11 Hartfrd 2 W-Mark Van Doren
Camb 4 Tenn 1 W-George Ticknor
Boston 3 Maine 2 W-Henry Adams
AL
Hartfrd 5 Brklyn 4 W-Helen Vendler
NE 5 NY 2 W-Carl Sandburg
London 6 Camb 4 W-James Frazier
Amherst 5 Rapallo 1 W-Virgil
NJ 6 Iowa City 1 W-Philip Whalen
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 11:21 am
Tom, Marla here, as you may have noticed Commissioner Bloom tends to control the agenda when he’s speaking. However, I will be interviewing Players’ Rep. Camille Paglia soon, I’m sure she’ll have much to say about those topics.
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Why would you want to know who Stephen is?
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Stephen is the guy in the video called Sleepy Rise.
Tom, I’ve asked you more than several times now. Please can I have access to the traffic stats?
A very simple yes or no will do, rather than wondering why I want this. You yourself must have added a stat counter to know, and so when you ask me why I want access to the stats,the reason is, the same one you have. A general desire to know.
I had three chat gaffes in my time, and it was the last one in which I turned into a tosser who thought I had power just because I controlled a pane on a chat gaffe.
Not that I knew it at the time. I got too deep into the acting, and because I knew things other members didn’t, like how to make things appear and disappear with the click of a mouse, I confused this with having real power. The truth was within two months of setting the site up, I had turned into a dictator.
It had about six months and then died, when everyone left because I was such an arsehole, and once the effect of being a chat gaffe arsehole wore off, I thought, how very lucky I am to be back on the ground, because what happens is, I would have turned into Jane Holland and her little pony bridage, a ruthless deluded guy with control of a mouse and hiding from myself the desire to be telling everyone else how to behave.
thomasbrady said,
April 10, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Des,
I don’t believe in banning, censorship, deleting, bossiness, and so whatever you or anyone says here stays…
I dunno why I’m all of a sudden some travis nichols bad guy. Explain this again? Is it because american sports represents something you find offensive?
I asked you why you put up that video…it didn’t seem to have any relevance at all, and it was in that state of mind that the song began to grate on me, especially toward the end of the song when it seems to lose structural focus and he’s screaming over and over about walking out that door…do you really want me to rate that song on a scale of 1 to 10? It sounded somewhat promising at first, but then it started to meander and the intense vocalizing sounded to me like the singer was trying to make up for the fact that his song was meandering. That’s my honest opinion. Do you want an honest opinion? Or do you want me to cheer and raise my beer class in the pub, because if I were in the pub, that’s what I would probably do, because that’s what people do, or they fight, but that’s got nothing to do, really, with honest opinions, or maybe it has everything to do with them, I dunno….
What do you mean ‘access’ to the stats? You want to track the stats yourself? You want scarriet to import something that counts scarriet’s visits so everyone can click on it and see? Or allow visitors to click on scarriet’s ‘blog stats?’ So that when you visit you can see how many people are in the room with you? How big a crowd you’re rubbing elbows with? I’m not a tech-guy. So you want more than what Christopher just gave you? I know there’s another blog I sometimes frequent where you can see on the bottom of the page how many guests are presently visiting the site. Is that what you mean?
I know the syndrome of the band slaving away who hates U2. It’s pride. The band should probably lose it.
Oh, and one more thing. I’ll admit I’m more impressed by a piece of writing than the fact that someone slept on a board for a year. You can brag about stuff you did, but what’s that got to do with the writing?
Tom
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 5:16 pm
From ‘Dedication’ of Don Juan
Lord Byron
You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish.
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,
And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob.
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 9:33 pm
It is very simple.
Please can I have access to the stats myself.
Thanks very much Tom.
thomasbrady said,
April 10, 2010 at 9:41 pm
des,
how is this simple? access how? I told you I wasn’t a tech person. thanks
tom
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 10:42 pm
At the Young Composers’ Concert
Donald Justice
Sewanee, Tennessee, Summer, 1996
The melancholy of these young composers
Impresses me. There will be time for joy.
Meanwhile, one can’t help noticing the boy
Who bends down to his violin as if
To comfort it in its too early grief.
It is his composition, confused and sad,
Made out of feelings he has not yet had
But only caught somehow the rumor of
In the old scores—and that has not been enough.
Merely mechanical, sure, all artifice—
But can that matter when it sounds like this?
What matters is the beauty of the attempt,
The world for him being so far mostly dreamt.
Not that a lot, to tell the truth, has passed,
Nothing to change our lives or that will last.
And not that we are awed exactly; still,
There is something to this beyond mere adult skill.
And if it moves haltingly down its scales,
It is the more moving just because it fails;
And is the lovelier because we know
It has gone beyond itself, as great things go.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Death in New Orleans, A Romance
Billy Collins
Long into the night my pencil
hurried across the page,
a young messenger boy
doing his nervous little errands,
making lines,
making comparisons—
the world is like this, the moon like that,
the mind, I even wrote, is like a wire birdcage
hanging from a stand
with a wooden perch and a tiny mirror,
home of a single canary,
I went on,
always the same one, the same song every day,
then quiet under the floral hood of night.
Always the same blue and yellow feathers,
I continued,
blue for the past, yellow for the future,
I added for symbolic weight,
and on the day I die,
I wrote, curving toward the elegiac,
the wire door will swing open
and the bird will fly out the window
into the looping ironwork of the city,
circling up over the silent, latticed buildings
and into the clouds and stars,
I typed,
leaving my body behind,
slumped upon a café table,
my empty head down in a pool of wine,
the waiter and two customers
bending over me with obvious concern.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 11:10 pm
JUBILATION T. CORNPONE
Lil’ Abner : The Musical (1956)
(Gene De Paul / Johnny Mercer)
Stubby Kaye – 1956
When we fought the Yankees and annihilation was near,
Who was there to lead the charge that took us safe to the rear?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Toot your own horn – pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, a man who knew no fear!
When we almost had ’em but the issue still was in doubt,
Who suggested the retreat that turned into a rout?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Tattered and torn – pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he kept us hidin’ out!
With our ammunition gone and faced with utter defeat,
Who was it that burned the crops and left us nothing to eat?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “September Morn – pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, the pants blown off his seat!
HURRAY!
When it seemed like our brave boys would keep on fighting for months,
Who took pity on them and capitulated at once?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Unshaven and shorn – pone.
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he weren’t nobody’s dunce!
Who went reconnoitering to flank the enemy’s rear,
Circled through the piney woods, and disappeared for a year?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Treat ’em with scorn – pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, the missing mountaineer!
Who became so famous with a reputation so great,
That he ran for president and didn’t carry a state?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Wouldn’t be sworn – pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he made the country wait!
Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray.
Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Mache”?
Though he’s gone to his reward, his mighty torch is still lit.
First in war. First in peace. First to holler, “I quit!”
Desmond Swords said,
April 10, 2010 at 11:20 pm
It’s ok Tom. I am only joshing. Of course I don’t want what you have. All that power. Being able to access the stats, know who the readers are, track their patterns of reading, who they’re reading and what excites them.
Baseball! and a never ending world series of negative shit.
SHOCK NEWS!!
Man in America, alone with a mouse, has written today of how TS Elitot was really a fake.
SHOCK NEWS!!
Man in America, alone with a mouse, has written today of how TS Eliot was really a fake, again.
SHOCK NEWS!!
Man in America, alone, no contact with real poets, wrote today how writer X is a fake.
SHOCK NEWS!!
Man in America, alone, no contact with real poets, desperate to be read, wrote today how writer X is a fake, again.
BORING NEWS!!
Shmabbiet Babseball stats online internet site, today collapsed after a shock move by star player.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 10, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Paranoia the Destroyer
Ray Davies
Met a girl called Lola
and I took her back to my place
Feeling guilty,
feeling scared,
hidden cameras everywhere—
Stop!
Hold on.
Stay—in—control….
Girl, I want you here with me
But I’m really not as cool as I’d like to be
‘Cause there’s a red, under my bed
And there’s a little yellow man in my head
And there’s a true blue
inside of me
That keeps stoppin’ me,
touchin’ ya,
watchin’ ya,
lovin’ ya
Paranoia, the destroyer
Well I fell asleep, then I woke
feelin’ kinda’ queer
Lola looked at me and said,
“Ooh you look so weird.”
She said, “Man,
there’s really something wrong with you.
One day you’re gonna’ self-destruct.
You’re up,
you’re down,
I can’t work you out
You get a good thing goin’
then you blow yourself out.”
Silly boy you self-destroyer
Silly boy you got so much to live for
So much to aim for,
so much to try for
You blowing it all with
paranoia
You’re so insecure you
self-destroyer
And it goes like this, here it goes
Paranoia, the destroyer
Here it goes again
Paranoia, the destroyer
Doctor doctor help me please,
I know you’ll understand
There’s a time device inside of me,
I’m a self-destructin’ man
There’s a red under my bed
And there’s a little green man in my head
And he said, “You’re not goin’ crazy,
you’re just a bit sad
‘Cause there’s a man in ya,
gnawin’ ya,
tearin’ ya
into two.”
Silly boy you self-destroyer.
Paranoia the destroyer
Self-destroyer,
wreck your health
Destroy your friends,
destroy yourself
The time device of
self-destruction
Light the fuse and
start eruptin’
Yea, it goes like this, here it goes
Paranoia, the destroyer
Desmond Swords said,
April 11, 2010 at 1:25 am
What a load of shit that Davies wrote, comapred to Stephen aka Sleepy Rise, Bobby T, mone ames, non?
I must say B, I really think your selections are very untalented generally. Davies. for example, interefered with rocks and was a thoroughly unpleasant human being, I read.
I cannot read, in all good conscious, any of his work because he was a fake rock ‘n roller, a roek. Evidence is coming out that he actually fixed three number one singles by the Kinks, in a blatantly unfair fixing of the pop charts in May 1966.
He also cheated at domninoes and was/is a throughly immoral person whose work is not song or poetry.
Don’t get me wrong, as Graves too fearful to be himself Graves in public said of Stephen Sleepy Rise who does have the bravery to be himself in public Bob: it sounded somewhat promising at first, but then it started to meander and the intense, trite pablum reads to me like the Davies is trying to make up for the fact that his song is shit. That’s my honest opinion. Do you want an honest opinion Bob? Or do you want me to cheer and raise my beer class in the pub, because if I were in the pub, that’s what I would probably do, because that’s what people do, or they fight, but that’s got nothing to do, really, with honest opinions, or maybe it has everything to do with them, I dunno Bob.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 2:20 am
Desmond, this may give you some of the info that you’re looking for — though I can’t make heads or tails of it….
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/scarriet.wordpress.com#trafficstats
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 2:27 am
Sunny Afternoon
Ray Davies
The tax man’s taken all my dough
And left me in my stately home
Lazing on a sunny afternoon
I can’t even sail my yacht
He’s taken everything I’ve got
All I’ve got’s this sunny afternoon
Oh save me, save me, save me from this squeeze
I gotta big fat mama trying to break me
And I love to live so pleasantly
Live this life of luxury
Lazing on a sunny afternoon
In the summertime
My girlfriend’s run off with my car
And gone back to her ma and pa
Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty
Now I’m sitting here
Sipping at my ice cold beer
All I’ve got’s this sunny afternoon
Help me, help me, help me sail away
Well give me two good reasons why I oughta stay
‘Cause I love to live so pleasantly
Live this life of luxury
Lazing on a sunny afternoon
In the summertime
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 2:29 am
Ticking
Bernie Taupin
“An extremely quiet child”
They called you in your school report
“He’s always taken interest
In the subjects that he’s taught”
So what was it that brought the squad car
Screaming up your drive,
To notify your parents of the manner
In which you died
At St. Patrick’s every Sunday,
Father Fletcher heard your sins
“Oh, he’s unconcerned with competition
he never cares to win”
But blood stained a young hand
That never held a gun
And his parents never thought of him
As their troubled son
“Now you’ll never get to Heaven”
Mama said
Remember Mama said
Ticking, ticking
“Grow up straight and true blue
Run along to bed”
Hear it, hear it
Ticking, ticking
They had you holed up in a downtown bar
Screaming for a priest
Some gook said “His brain’s just snapped”
Then someone called the police
You’d knifed a Negro waiter
Who had tried to calm you down
Oh you’d pulled a gun and told them all
To lay still on the ground
Promising to hurt no one,
Providing they were still
A young man tried to make a break,
With tear-filled eyes you killed
That gun butt felt so smooth and warm
Cradled in your palm
Oh your childhood cried out in your head
“They mean to do you harm”
“Don’t ever ride on the devil’s knee”
Mama said
Remember mama said
Ticking, ticking
“Pay your penance well, my child
Fear where angels tread”
Hear it, hear it
Ticking, ticking
Within an hour the news had reached
The media machine
A male caucasian with a gun
Had gone berserk in Queens
The area had been sealed off, the kids
Sent home from school
Fourteen people lying dead in a bar they called
The Kicking Mule
Oh they pleaded to your sanity
For the sake of those inside
“Throw out your gun, walk out slow
Just keep your hands held high”
But they pumped you full of rifle shells as
You stepped out the door
Oh you danced in death like a marionette
On the vengeance of the law
“You’ve slept too long in silence”
Mama said
Remember Mama said
Ticking, ticking
“Crazy boy, you’ll only wind up with
Strange notions in your head”
Hear it, hear it
Ticking, ticking
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 3:13 am
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 3:14 am
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 3:15 am
Thanks for creating a Site Meter account for your web site. You’ll need
to save this message because it contains the codename and password
for your account. You’ll need them when you want to login to your
account on Site Meter.
Your codename is s35bradytim
Your password is CACAMM
To track the traffic to your site, there are two versions of the
Site Meter HTML available. One uses javascript and the other doesn’t.
The javascript Site Meter can be more difficult to add to a page
(when using some HTML editors), but it allows you to track the
original URL from which your visitors came before linking to your
site. Because many email servers will filter out emails that
contain javascript or even HTML, it was not included
in this email.
You can get the HTML for your account and the instructions for
adding it by logging into Site Meter at http://www.sitemeter.com and
selecting the MANAGER link from the top of the page. Then, from the
account manager page, select “HTML CODE” to get the HTML for your
account. From the account manager page, you can also make changes
to your Site Meter account like updating your email address, your
site’s url, or the style of your counter.
If you have any questions about Site Meter please first check the
help page at http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=supportfaq
If you don’t find your answer or have any ideas on how
the service can be improved, please feel free to contact me at
webmaster@sitemeter.com. We will respond to emails as quickly as
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Thanks,
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SiteMeter.com
You can also upgrade your Site Meter account and enjoy
additional tracking features. Click here for more details.
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=productcomparison
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 3:20 am
Bob, if you have access to the admin control panel, please can you sign into sitemeter. I set up amn account for the administrator of this wordpress blog, and would be very grateful if they followed the instructions.
Sign into the site with the codename is s35bradytim
password CACAMM (you should be able to change it)
Get the HTML and copy and paste it, and in your Manager account at Sitemeter, check the box that makes the stat counter visible at the bottom of the page, please, if you’re an administrator of this blog.
Have a nice day.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 8:20 am
Not an administrator. Wish I was, then I could put better spacing in my posted poetry.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 11, 2010 at 3:58 am
Bob, if you have access to any feeling for the other participants on this site, please could you stop posting endless poems that nobody wants to discuss and, I suspect, nobody even bothers to read.
It’s not that they’re bad poems and/or songs, they’re often excellent, it’s just that in your hands they become wallpaper —- indeed, the sort of wallpaper you find on the walls of a padded cell.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 8:21 am
I’ll never put a comment in your posts, promise.
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 5:02 am
I dunno Chris. Live and let spam I say.
The truth is, you and I do not know the truth of what’s happening and who is ‘really’ writing here, nor a fuller picture of who is and isn’t reading, that access to stats will help us figure out more than having no access to them.
My hunch is that this blog is being read by a specilized audience of American poets, many of whom are in Denver right now partying on the final night.
It could be a wrong psychic reading of the exciting conversations on Harriet now, but I am picking up a vibe from many poets there, that they are not happy because they feel they are locked out of the citadel of Letters by fixtures and forces they’ve no influence or control over. Especially the younger Latinos.
Even Christian Bok is getting in on the act, moaning that Canadians from his University that ‘features the most advanced, most rigorous, programme for Creative Writing in English Canada (since we are the only institution here to offer a doctorate in English Literature, with a specialization in Creative Writing, allowing students to produce and to publish a creative dissertation with an academic introduction)’— have had their proposals for participation in the AWP Conference, met with recurrent rejection over the last four years.’
He thinks it most unfair because the sessions run by him ‘have always garnered enthusiastic, superlative responses from attendees (in part because my peers are all very interesting, very charismatic personalities).’
But this brings to mind something a Dublin poet, Paula Mehan, married to Cork poet Theo Dorgan, said at the final event in the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Dame Street several years ago, to a packed audience all agreeing the decision to close the space was depriving Dubliners of an exciting venue.
She said that when she began in poetry, she thought that there was some misty place where all the ‘real’ poets where and that she wasn’t allowed access to, because a shadowy, unseen, anonymous cohort at the top of IrePo who had got there by association and means of diabolical magic not commensurate with their talent – were actively machinating to keep the door closed to a dorty Dublin native such as she.
She said that she thought she’d beat them at their game and decided to go for the double, triple and quadruple bluff-strategy of trying to go over the walls of the Literary citadel, through, over and under them, until at last, after many fruitless attempts she realized the bastards had won, and accepting her fate, to remain an anonymous poet barred from top-table – she decided to walk away from the citadel of Letters, defeated, broken, beaten and defeated by an anonymous force of people she imagined to be.
Just as she was about to walk away, it suddenly struck her that, she hadn’t tried the front door, so certain was she in her theory of being barred. And when she pushed the door, it was open all the time, and she came to understand that it was her own paranoia that had kept her from believing she was as likely and talented to become as proficient as those she admired in poetry.
~
If and when the talk does start, and the American poets descend to wherever and get chatting, Bob’s contributions will not get in the way one bit. Though I understand your frustration at having to scroll past. But being dishonest, I mean honest, it’s only a chat gaffe in cyberville and it’s being read by the most important people in the world.
Barak Obama comes here to set his domestic and global policy.
Tom Brady comes to read the Kinks lyrics as he sings along on youtube.
The Pope drops in now and again for tips on how to keep the billions faithful.
Poetry comes in to check out the line, the music, the full and inescapable rhyme of time and event.
All of it appears here in Bob’s posts, should one choose to contextualize Bob’s deposits as such.
And it makes for great reading, for the audience, all this baseball talk.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 11, 2010 at 5:26 am
Thanks for that, GP, whoever you are. I’m hanging in there, don’t worry
My hunch is that people are listening, including Travis Nichols, Bob Share and, my real hope, fine poets and critics like Annie Finch, Martin Earl, and Eileen Myles, etc. etc.
It’s a raw conflict alright, and everyday brings more of it — and the proof’s not just risible but risable, like a pudding!
C.
THE ADORATION OF ANYTHING YOU THINK YOU OWN IS FIRE « Scarriet said,
April 11, 2010 at 6:27 am
[…] poem has been posted twice for discussion on this site, here and here. The response has been desultory, though the themes have been crying out for […]
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 8:12 am
Of course they’re reading.
DS is an expert fencerian, sat so silent for so long he has transecended into a pure poetic being whose primary form when communicating, manifests itself in the sharing of Silence.
This is the third and final stage a poet attains according to the Wordsworth-Heaney poetic. It corresponds exactly with the third and final stage of the Amiri Baraka metaphor for the three stages of poetic learning.
One has noticed how the silence of others who do not speak to one, communicates to one online. It is clear that though we do not speak, we are reading one another. You notice it in the ‘tone’, buried beneath the overt syntax their Letters broadcast.
Everyone is waiting for the New Thing that isn’t a figment of a Critic’s imagination, like with Burt and his (fair play to him) go at talking up the New (Harvard) Thing into existence, on the strength of a library assistant who wrote fairly OK poems, and a handful of names.
What struck me is that the poet I thought at that time was most deserving of his praise, a seventy year old called Michael O’Brien, Burt only stated his name low down the list of his premise-setting blather about why we should go along with his thinking.
The poets your man was strategically pinning the success of his New Thing taking off in uplift on, were not flying at the theorietical height Burt constructed for us critically, in the realm of his imagination and work-space of Letters where a critic’s gotta come up with something to sound prophetic about, otherwise, why bother?
That’s why D’s silent Chris, he’s waiting to see which way the chips fall and who the really new things are, so he can position himself near them so it looks like he is in with the New Thing.
But the fact is, DS isn’t much of a talker because of his job, probably.
Annie Finch, now her I do have a lot of time for because she will get stuck in and blab as a normal human being who just happens to be addicted to poetry. Unafraid to challenge herself.
Most others on Harriet, are not, because as it’s all coming out now: AmPo is not the cuddly happy free speaking realm of Letters one may mistakenly wish it to be if part of the crowd in love with the beautiful nothingness Williams gets across.
It could all just be in my imagination, but I noticed since I got gassing on Harriet and especially after out-foxing Trav by getting back on after 9/1, that the British competitors who huddle at Jane Hollands gaffe, dried up completely and ceased conversation all together.
No one there ever mentioned my name, even though I suspected they were reading my blather. I think what happened is, because it was a five year swim to here from there where I started out in the British poetry chat gulags, it dawned on the people who tossed me off their sites, that it is them with the wrong ideas and not one.
Sad, all those people in their UK online group, and not a word between them, unless its a one liner trying to make a throwaway quip. They seem to suffer the same fear as the AmPo brigade. A fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing that may cost them publishing opportunities, their work not get published and therefore, no success as it is currently measured. Upset powerful editors with real power. Gosh!
I think what it is, is that nobody really knows about Poetry per se, in the way one person who needs not even naming is seen to embody it. S/he the poet just does the bidding of a Muse and is very happy, with their own invisible star-wars force field deflecting the global weight of pyshic begrudgery, and that is what the world reads. A poet being themself.
As the revelations on Harriet suggest, there’s so much confusion and plain old bullshit, no one knows who to trust.
And then there are us three, who the gods seem to have engineered a meeting with at similar points in our writing journey. We, more or less nobodies who thought just to write and forget the expert advice from the know-alls making their money and comfortable lives competing with one another for the title Ard Ollamh, Chief Poet, most ‘real’ New Thing blah blah blah. All the Foetry side of things – and what we learnt the more we wrote is, to quote a poet others will see red about and deny me as the anti-christ for saying, in response to the question why he wrote his book OTR, JK said:
– ‘coz we’re all gonna die.’
We learnt, that in the bigger frame and context, poetry is what we make it. To paraphrase Yeats, it is not a filling up of the forgetable names who think they have some connection to Segais when they don’t, but a fire in the head, imbas, poetic fizz, mental energy, neural sparks, life, love, hate, joy and sorrow. Expressed.
That’s all.
But to reach the third level of the Wordsworth-Heaney poetic involves starting out a pathetic scrambler on the edge of Literacy, all oink and peasant in the realm of Letters, faking it. A Foet.
Heaney articulates it in his esay on Plath in Finders Keeps: The Indefatigable Hoof Taps, the poetic development in a chase for the magical linguistic gravitas only they who genuinely profess poetry possess. Ollamhs who are poetry professors in the simplest meaning of that term. Not professing it in a financial, academic sense.
You go into the woods of song and hear an owl, then try and imitate it, getting nowhere. This is when we first start writing, at grade one – foclo, or ‘word-weaver’ in English – trainee poet, first day in bard-school, seven grades to get through, nine years of Study until we get our Doctorate in Poetry: and for the first bit of time, what we compose, hoping it’s the ‘real’ thing, we see when we make our first real owl-call, was just cack. We go:
to learn how to entwine our hands so that the whistle comes out right…to trumpet and tu-whit, tu-whoo..happy to perform this feat for its own sake, repeatedly, self-forgetfully and tirelessly..an original act of making, the equivalent in the oral/aural sphere of..” making sand castles or mud pies – he who needs not naming wrote.
We surprise ourself, the first time an owl-call, the genuine poetic sound, comes out of us, because it happens unplanned. It just happened, popped out as we practised. Our first real ‘poem’.
“Listen I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See?” the Mossbawn magus wrote.
This is us at MacFuirimid, ‘son of composition’ – in the second or third year of our training in the woods, learning how to return the universal chord of God, Him-Her I Jah Kevin Love Mad Nobhead obsessed poetry quare Royal Smartass trainee – alphabet knower, kinda carry-on.
We are so pleased with ourself, that after countless buckets sent into the well within ourself — in Irish myth the omphaolos of poetry, the Well of Segais — has returned a yield of ‘real’ poetry – that we become infused with poetic joy, fizz and the ‘imbas’ of poetic energy, that we carry on, mad players enjoying our solitary sport.
The second stage of poetic attainment comes as we are calling away, imitating reality in the shape of the owl-sound perfectly mimicked, and then out of the blue – a real owl returns the call back to us.
Wow. This stops up is our tracks. Again, like the first time the well returned a real load, the wholly first time of fooling a real owl. At this point, we become a genuine ‘poet’ in our mind, perhaps. Certainly most poets I am aware of are at this stage. We see how very skilled we have become and begin to take pride in our acting and performance, for can we not fool the real bird?
“..the vale filling with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy’s art…we have the image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practising..who rejoices in the spirit of life…the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition.” the Anahorish warbler wrote.
This is us after five-six-seven years or so: at about grade four in the bardic course, Cano ‘whelp’ – or five, Cli ‘ridgepole’. Most professional poets stay at about this grade perhaps, it has been posited. Happy to pass ourselves off as one who can fool the real object we had begun imitating a few years before. From foet to poet.
But then, there is the final stage only 10% of all poets will reach.
There they are calling away into the woods, writing poems that are real and talked about and winning prizes and making people very very important and everything in AmPo getting gassed on Harriet. But then, suddenly, just like the first and second time, out the blue. Reality, the birds we’ve been fooling, do not call back. As Wordsworth’s poem explains:
And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening…the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and the uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom..
~
Heaney has a beautifull metaphor for this moment, describing it as:
“..like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence, seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the window glass is miraculously withdrawn and deep free, swoops into the blue pool..”
Out of the blue – a full sight of the myth kitty and eternal image/symbol hoard, given freely by whatever gods your gods swear by in the music of what’s happening in your career, as you ascend or nea, hear or not in the return – the silence from ghosts who flit to us from the anima mundi.
We have become so real to other poets/owls, that they no longer return the call, and we are unable to make a sound because we think our gift has been taken back. We experience a belief our poetry well has gone, and at this moment of complete surrender – when we accept the game is up and there will be no more return – we are rewarded, like Abraham was by God when he was on the mountain passing the test, about to kill his only son Issac. Our slog and effort pays out in the gifting from whatever poetry gods one believes in; the keys to the door of our myth hoard, along with our poetic garb, dress and badge of entry to the third and final stage of sound-development few attain.
This happens toward the end of grade six Anruth ‘great stream’ – when we are in sight of the final grade that comes with three extemporised methods we begin taking on at this point around year seven-eight: the most important of which, imbas forosnai means a ‘manifestation of knowledge that enlightens’ us.
This is what Don and the chaps are waiting to come.
Have a lovely day.
Please feel free to visit my site linked at the name heading this post, to read and witness live poetry and the latest Global Poetry News and events from Dublin.
Desmond Swords.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 9:07 am
THE BATTLE HYMN OF LT. CALLEY
Terry Skinner
My name is William Calley,
I’m a soldier of this land,
I’ve tried to do my duty
And to gain the upper hand;
But they’ve made me out a villain,
They have stamped me with a brand,
As we go marching on….
I’m just another soldier
From the shores of USA,
Forgotten on a battlefield
Ten thousand miles away
While life goes on as usual
From New York to Santa Fe,
As we go marching on…
I’ve seen my buddies ambushed
On the left and on the right,
And their youthful bodies riddled
By the bullets of the night;
Where all the rules are broken
And the only law is might,
As we go marching on…
While we’re fighting in the jungles
They were marching in the street,
While we’re dying in the rice fields
They were helping our defeat.
While we’re facing VC bullets
They were sounding a retreat,
As we go marching on…
With our sweat we took the bunkers,
With our tears we took the plain,
With our blood they took the mountain
And they gave it back again.
Still, all of us are soldiers,
We’re too busy to complain,
As we go marching on…
When I reach my final campground
In that land beyond the sun,
And the Great Commander asks me,
“Did you fight or did you run?”
I’ll stand both straight and tall,
Stripped of medals, rank, and gun,
And this is what I’ll say,
“Sir, I followed all my orders,
And I did the best I could.
It’s hard to judge the enemy
And hard to tell the good.
Yet, there’s not a man among us
Who would not have understood.
We took the jungle village
Exactly like they said,
We responded to their rifle fire
With everything we had.
And when the smoke had cleared away
A hundred souls lay dead.
Sir, the soldier that’s alive
Is the only one can fight.
There’s no other way to wage a war
When the only one in sight
That you’re sure is not a VC
Is your buddy on the right.
When all the wars are over
And the battle’s finally won
Count me only as a soldier
Who never left his gun,
With a light to serve my country
As the only prize I’ve won….”
Glory, glory, hallelujah…
Global Poetry News said,
April 11, 2010 at 9:33 am
A bone field fifty metres by fifty.
It’s problematic to describe this as genocide.
I gather firewood at eight o’clock in the morning.
My son clings to my dress. Men in uniforms
with military insignia stop their car
and throw him into a fire. Then five of them
one after the other. I am paralysed.
It’s problematic to describe this as genocide.
The solution is not military intervention. We demand
the US keep its hands off Sudan.
Children start jumping out windows
when the Janjaweed come into the school.
The police begin firing. Everyone,
mainly babies and the elderly,
falls down. I am standing on bodies.
A military barracks.
No bathroom. People stay still,
suffering their wounds.
People stay still. No bathroom.
A military barracks. I am standing on bodies,
fall down. Mainly babies and the elderly.
Everyone. The police begin firing.
When the Janjaweed come into the school,
children start jumping out windows.
The solution not military intervention.
The US keep its hands off Sudan, we demand
It’s problematic to describe this as genocide.
I am paralysed. One after the other,
five of them. They stop their car
and throw him into a fire. Men
in uniforms with military insignia.
My son clings to my dress.
At eight o’clock in the morning I gather firewood.
It’s problematic to describe this as genocide.
A bone field fifty metres by fifty.
(The non-italicised lines are quotations from eye-witness accounts from Darfur)
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 4:38 pm
The Praises of God
11th c.; trans. W.H. Auden
How foolish the man
Who does not raise
His voice and praise
With joyful words,
As he alone can,
Heaven’s High King
To Whom the light birds
With no soul but air,
All day, everywhere
Laudation sing.
Bob Tonucci said,
April 11, 2010 at 5:09 pm
“No: 10a: Second Ballad Interlude” from “Paul Bunyan”
W.H. Auden
The Spring came and the Summer and Fall;
Paul Bunyan sat in his binnacle.
Regarding like a lighthouse lamp
The work going on in the lumber camps.
Dreaming dreams which now and then
He liked to tell to his lumbermen.
His phrases rolled like waves on a beach
And during the course of a single speech,
Young boys grew up and needed a shave,
Old men got worried they’d be late for the grave.
He woke one morning feeling unwell,
Said to Babe: ‘What’s the matter? I feel like Hell.’
Babe cocked her head, said, ‘Get a wife;
One can have too much of the bachelor life.’
And so one morning in the month of May
Paul went wife-hunting at the break of day.
He kept a sharp look-out, but all
The girls he saw were much too small.
But at last he came to valley green
With mountains beside and a river between.
And there on a bank before his eyes
He beheld a girl of the proper size.
The average man if he walked in haste
Would have taken a week to get round her waist.
When you looked at her bosom you couldn’t fail
To see it was built on a generous scale.
They eyed each other for an interval;
Then she said ‘I’m Carrie’ and he said ‘I’m Paul.’
What happened then I’ve no idea,
They never told me and I wasn’t there.
But whatever it was she became his wife
And they started in on the married life.
And in a year a daughter came,
Tiny she was and Tiny her name.
I wish I could say that Carrie and Paul
Were a happy pair but they weren’t at all.
It’s not the business of a song
To say who was right and who was wrong.
Both said the bitter things that pain
And wished they hadn’t but said them again.
Till Carrie said at last one day:
‘It’s no use, Paul, I must go away.’
Paul struck a match and lit his pipe,
Said: ‘It seems a pity but perhaps you’re right.’
So Carrie returned to her home land,
Leading Tiny by the hand.
And Paul stayed in camp with his lumbermen,
Though he paid them visits now and then.
One day Tiny telegraphed him: ‘Come quick.
Very worried. Mother sick.’
But the doctor met him at the door and said:
‘I’ve bad news for you, Paul; she’s dead.’
He ran upstairs and stood by the bed:
‘Poor Carrie’, he murmured and stroked her head.
‘I know we fought and I was to blame
But I loved you greatly all the same.’
He picked up Tiny and stroked her hair,
Said: ‘I’ve not been much of a father, dear.
But I’ll try to be better until the day
When you want to give your heart away.
And whoever the lucky man may be
I hope he’s a better man than me.’
So they got ready to return
To the camp, of which you now shall learn.
thomasbrady said,
April 11, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Ron Silliman is scheduled to start today for the New Jersey Williams. He will face the Iowa City Grahams in his debut. The Grahams will send John Berryman to the hill, as they look to improve to 3-1 in the AL as the Scarriet Baseball Poetry League sees its first weekend action. The Williams are trying to sign W.S. Merwin, who wants more money. Merwin writes like Williams and would fit in well with the New Jersey club, who are reportedly close to a deal. Silliman throws hard but sometimes has control problems. The Williams are not exactly pitching rich; their ace is Man Ray.
J.M. March support said,
July 11, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Speaking of the crowd,
Boorish and loud,
This one’s at a boxing match—
From March’s “The Set-Up”, natch:
The crowd hummed,
The crowd chattered.
The smoke rose,
Drifted,
Scattered.
Cheap seats:
The crowd was tough.
None of your high-hat
Garden stuff.
Gallery,
A quarter.
Ringside,
A dollar.
You risked your life
In a winged collar.
Evening clothes?—
Try it!
You’d have started a god-damned riot.
Society women,
Dressed to kill,
Didn’t go there for their evening thrill.
Even whores of the cheapest sort
Avoided this dismal palace of sport:
Their finer instincts shrank to see
Such masculine brutality.
No, this crowd was simply gents—
Using the term in its lowest sense:
Crooks,
Gangsters,
Seedy drunks;
Pimps,
And pushers,
And pimply punks
With cold glassy eyes,
Sneering,
Contemptuous,
Wise:
The city’s dregs:
Bums,
Spawned in alleys
And slums.
Small wonder, then, that here you saw
The ominous blue and brass of the Law:
On the crowd’s edges strolled six
Burly cops, swinging their sticks:
Truculent police—
Aching to keep the peace.
Anonymous said,
July 11, 2012 at 3:38 pm
I miss the Scarriet baseball season…
noochinator said,
July 12, 2012 at 11:11 am
Ah yes; I remember it well…..
Outside on the diamond,
The poets played with grace—
Inside the announcers’ booth,
The pundits, red in face,
Made charges, pointed fingers,
Giggled dropping mal mots snide—
Oblivious to everything else,
Especially the game outside.
For evidence of the dearth of love,
Scan the comments up above.
Ah yes; I remember it well…
speeding ticket lawyer blackwood nj said,
August 29, 2012 at 5:29 am
oh great! but i missed Scarriet baseball season. The comments to your blog are awesome. I really liked it. 🙂
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