ROUND TWO GAME SEVEN

October 17, 2020 at 5:28 pm (Anthony Hecht, Ben Mazer, Boccaccio, Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Delmore Schwartz, Desiderius Erasmus, Guido Cavalcanti, Larry Levis, Leo X, Marge Piercy, Maya Angelou, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandro Botticelli, Yusef Komunyakaa)

Poet, author Maya Angelou dies at 86 – East Bay Times
Maya Angelou—her hit wins it for the Universe

The Universe defeats the Banners 10-6 in a wild game capped with a grand slam by Maya Angelou, as Phoenix advances to the World Series against the Dublin Laureates. Home plate umpire Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the starting pitcher for the Florence Banners, Dante Alighieri, were at odds from the start. Dante bitterly said after the game: “The honorable judge does not know the strike zone.” Dante likes to work the inside of the plate, and he plunks the occasional hitter. Dante put Bob Dylan on his back in the first inning. With Ruth Ginsburg calling inside pitches for balls, as the game progressed, Dante became increasingly livid. But his downfall came when he was on offense. First base umpire E.O. Wilson ejected Dante in the fifth inning, following a scuffle involving many players, including Angelou, the Universe’s catcher. Dante, as the base runner, became tangled up with Universe first baseman Anthony Hecht, as Dante tried to beat out a slow roller to the mound, the ball picked up by Universe starting pitcher Raymond Carver. Dante complained Hecht interfered with his base running, and Hecht objected just as vociferously that the opposite was true. “Why did they throw Dante out of the game, and not Hecht? They say Dante put his hands on [umpire] Wilson, but that’s not true,” Desiderius Erasmus told the press after the game, “but we accept the loss. We congratulate the Universe.” The hitting of Henrik Ibsen and Chuck Berry gave the Universe a 6-3 lead after five complete innings, but in the top of the sixth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti singled, Ben Mazer doubled him over to third, and Guido Cavalcanti homered to tie the game, 6-6. Marge Piercy relieved Carver for the Universe and kept the Banners in check, until she handed the ball over to Jean Cocteau, who earned the win—his third win of the playoffs, with a 0.00 ERA. Meanwhile, Giovanni Boccaccio, relief pitcher for the Banners, began the ninth inning, with the game tied, 6-6, and walked three straight hitters—Delmore Schwartz, Philip Levine, and Larry Levis. Desiderius Erasmus, the manager of the Banners, was thrown out of the game by home plate umpire Ginsburg as he disputed her calls. Pope Leo X, the pitching coach of the Banners, relieved Boccaccio and inserted Sandro Botticelli, who fanned Yusef Komunyakaa and Chuck Berry. With the crowd roaring, and the count 3-2, Maya Angelou advanced the Phoenix Universe into the World Series against the Dublin Laureates with a tremendous home run to left center field.

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GAME FOUR RESULTS

October 5, 2020 at 7:14 pm (Albert Einstein, Arnaut Daniel, Boccaccio, Charles Dickens, Cole Porter, da Vinci, Dante, Delmore Schwartz, Edgar Allan Poe, Garrison Keillor, Guido Cavalcanti, Handel, Hans Christian Anderson, Hilaire Belloc, Jean Cocteau, Joe Green, John Betjeman, John Townsend Trowbridge, Leigh Hunt, Marsilio Ficino, Martin Luther King Jr, Mikhail Lermontov, Mirza Ghalib, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Phillis Wheatley, Stephen Cole, Yusef Komunyakaa)

Italian Humanists (Six Tuscan Poets), 1554 - Giorgio Vasari

BANNERS 9 SECRETS 4

The city of Florence is on the verge of a huge celebration. The no. 1 seed Boston Secrets are one game away from being eliminated by the Wild Card Banners. Guido Cavalcanti hit a grand slam and drove in six runs to lead Florence to a 9-4 win in game 4, who are now up 3-1 in the series. A shutout by Plato is the Secrets’ only win. Dante Alighieri will start game 5 in Florence against Edgar Allan Poe. If the Secrets win, the series will return to Boston. Leonardo da Vinci earned the victory, fanning 7 before leaving in the sixth inning, when Nathaniel Hawthorne hit a 3 run homer, making the score 6-3. Mikhail Lermontov of the Banners and Stephen Cole of the Secrets also hit homers. Moliere took the loss for the Secrets. Giovanni Boccaccio and Marsilio Ficino came out of the bullpen to seal da Vinci’s win.

LAUREATES 19 GAMERS 14

Charles Dickens hit 2 more homers and the Dublin Laureates held off a furious rally in Los Angeles, as the Gamers fell short 19-14, and now trail the best-of-seven series 3 games to 1. John Betjeman and Joe Green continued their hot hitting for the Gamers—7 RBI and a homer by Betjeman, 4 RBI and a homer for Green. The Laureates led 13 to 2 after 5 innings. Samuel Johnson, who got the win, imploded in the sixth—which could have been a much bigger inning for the Gamers, but Arnaut Daniel was thrown out trying to score in a controversial call. The home plate umpire, Albert Einstein, said Daniel missed home plate sliding in to beat the throw. Daniel attacked Einstein and was thrown out of the game. John Townsend Trowbridge and Mirza Ghalib also homered for the Laureates, as Woody Allen was gone by the second inning. LA did tie it, 13-13, in the seventh. However, the Laureates’ Leigh Hunt and Hans Christian Anderson shut out the Gamers the rest of the way, and Dickens hit a grand slam in the 8th off Garrison Keillor. Lewis Carroll will try and keep the Gamers alive tomorrow in LA, against Jonathan Swift.

UNIVERSE 4 CRUSADERS 1

Delmore Schwartz belted a 3 run homer off George Handel to break a 1-1 tie as Martin Luther King Jr and the Universe stopped the Crusaders in Phoenix, tying up the series 2-2. Yusef Komunyaaka and Anthony Hecht hit back to back doubles to give the Universe a 1-0 lead in the second inning. Handel then retired the next 14 hitters in a row. Meanwhile the Crusaders scraped together a run to tie the game in the 5th, with singles by Hilaire Belloc, Phillis Wheatley, and Leona Florentino. Lionel Trilling relieved King in the 8th with the bases loaded and got Aeschylus to pop up to end the inning, and Jean Cocteau set down the side in order in the ninth. The game one starters, Harriet Beecher Stowe of the Universe and Ludwig Beethoven of the Crusaders, will face off again in game 5.

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SCARRIET POETRY BASEBALL—HERE WE GO!

April 12, 2020 at 10:54 am (A.C. Barnes, A.E. Housman, Adil Jussawalla, Alan Seeger, Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, Alexander Pope, Alfred Tennyson, Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, Allen Tate, Amelia Welby, Amiri Baraka, Amy Lowell, anais nin, Anand Thakore, Andre Gide, Andrew Marvell, Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, Anne Waldman, Aphra Behn, Aristotle, Arthur Rimbaud, Audre Lorde, Basil Bunting, Baudelaire, Ben Franklin, Ben Johnson, Ben Mazer, Bertolt Brecht, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Boccaccio, Byron, Camille Paglia, Carl Phillips, Carl Sandburg, Carolyn Forche, Catullus, Charles Bernstein, Charles Bukowski, Charles Dickens, Charles Simic, Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Marlowe, Chuck Berry, Claudia Rankine, Cole Porter, Czeslaw Milosz, D.H.Lawrence, da Vinci, Daipayan Nair, Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Delmore Schwartz, Derek Walcott, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Burke, Edmund Wilson, Edna Millay, Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth Bishop, Emerson, Emma Lazarus, Erich Remarque, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Francis Scott Key, Frank Bidart, Frank O'Hara, Fred Seidel, Friedrich Schiller, G.E. Lessing, Garcia Lorca, Gary Snyder, Geoffrey Hill, George Harrison, George Santayana, Gerald Stern, Gertrude Stein, Glyn Maxwell, Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gregory Corso, H Bloom, Hafiz, Harold Bloom, Harriet Monroe, Harry Crosby, Hart Crane, Heinrich Heine, Helen Vendler, Henry David Thoreau, Heraclitus, Herman Melville, Hilda Dolittle, Homer, Horace, Howard Nemerov, HP Lovecraft, Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, James Joyce, James Merrill, James Tate, Jeet Thayil, Jim Morrison, Joe Green, John Ashbery, John Berryman, John Betjeman, John Crowe Ransom, John Dewey, John Dryden, John Gould Fletcher, John Kerry, John Lennon, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, JRR Tolkien, Jules Laforgue, Kanye West, Karl Marx, Kay Ryan, Kenneth Koch, Khomeini, Lao Tzu, Larry Levis, Longfellow, Louis Simpson, Louise Bogan, Madame De Stael, Mao, Marcel Duchamp, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Fuller, Marilyn Chin, Marilyn Hacker, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Rothko, Mark Twain, Marla Muse, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Oliver, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Maya Angelou, Michelangelo, Mick Jagger, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nietzsche, Noel Coward, Ogden Nash, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Pablo Neruda, Paul Engle, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Pete Seeger, Petrarch, Philip Larkin, Philip Levine, Plato, Poetry Baseball, Pushkin, R.H. Horne, Randall Jarrell, Richard Howard, Richard Wagner, Rimbaud, Robert Bly, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Robert Creeley, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Robert Herrick, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Southey, Rod McKuen, Rousseau, Rudyard Kipling, Rumi, Rupert Brooke, Rupi Kaur, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sappho, Sara Teasdale, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare, Sharon Olds, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Stanley Kunitz, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Stephen Crane, Stephen King, steven spielberg, Sylvia Plath, T.E. Hulme, T.S.Eliot, Ted Hughes, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hood, Tishani Doshi, Tony Hoagland, Victor Hugo, Vikram Seth, Virgil, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Voltaire, W.H.Auden, W.S. Merwin, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Walter Pater, Wendell Berry, William Alexander Percy, William Blake, William Burroughs, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Cullen Bryant, William Logan, William Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, Woody Guthrie, Wyndham Lewis, X.J. Kennedy, Yoko Ono, Yvor Winters)

Lord Byron In Albanian Dress - 1813 Painting by War Is Hell Store

George Byron in a pensive mood, before taking part in the opening day Scarriet baseball ceremonies.

Happy Easter!

Scarriet has expanded and restructured its baseball league!!

Gone the 2 leagues of 20 teams led by 20 American poets—Eliot, Pound, Frost, Poe, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Dickinson, Millay, Jorie Graham, Ginsberg, Ransom, Cummings, Whittier, Whitman, Bryant, Longfellow, James Lowell, Ashbery, and Emerson.

Now poets like Emerson, Eliot and Poe can be player/managers—to contribute to their teams both at the plate and in the field.

The field is more international—Scarriet Poetry Baseball is now 25 historical teams from all over the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The gods and muses must be pleased with our ten years of Poetry March Madness and our first Poetry Baseball season, where poetry is worshiped through time and space in a manner which no one has ever seen.

Fortunately one of the Muses has always been here to help us, Marla Muse.

Marla Muse: They are indeed pleased, Tom!

You have spoken to the other muses who live in other realms, in those shadowy timeless realms where time is one and poetry lights up suns distantly—

Marla Muse: Yes, and they approve! The stars in the heavens love you more than you know… I would rather die than see poetry die.

This baseball season is different. Mysterious and wealthy owners throughout time and space are bidding, some in secret, for players to fill their rosters.

In the Great Emperor League, we have the Broadcasters. Their motto is “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” and they feature Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Gregory Corso, Anne Sexton, Bobby Burns, Omar Khayyam, Rilke, Coleridge, Leopardi, Anacreon, Sappho, and Ingrid Jonker.  They are rumored to be owned and funded by a business group led by Federico Fellini, and their ballpark is in Rimini, Italy.

These ballclubs are timeless, in every sense of the word (these teams compete, with actual statistics, where chance unfolds out of space, out of time) but real money, blood money, purchases these players.  We know JP Morgan, for instance, wanted Shakespeare and bid heavily to get him.

The Pistols, who play in Berlin, are said to be associated with Eva Braun, but this cannot be confirmed; one older muse claims to have overheard Eva say, “I take care of this. Adolf is too busy talking to bankers and architects. He doesn’t have time for poetry.” But honestly we cannot say who owns the Pistols.

Nahum Tate, owner of the Laureates, for those who do not know, re-wrote a popular King Lear with a happy ending (after Shakespeare’s death when, for a long period, the Bard was out of fashion,) and was chosen as Poet Laureate of England in 1692. 

Dick Wolf produces Law & Order on television, and appears to have a controlling interest in the Laws, playing out of Santa Barbara.  He’s got Aristotle, Lord Bacon, and Horace.

John Rockefeller opened his purse to get Walt Whitman, and he thinks that will be enough to win a championship.  We don’t know.  We do know baseball is all about pitching.  All you need is a few good arms which dominate, defense behind them, and some clubhouse chemistry, and not too many injuries. It’s a crap shoot, in many ways, and this is why Rockefeller grumbled he wasn’t going to waste money on superstars who hit home runs and have a high batting average. He’s probably right.  A team that wins 2-1 is better than a team that wins 7-4, by pure mathematics, even though the former score wins by 1 and the latter by 3 runs. It’s the ratio that counts.  2-1 = 2. 7-4 = 1.7  This simple reason is why defense wins in every sport. Rockefeller is using this formula, and the oil baron was also advised that you can’t buy a pennant—throwing money at sluggers doesn’t do any good; it’s 90% pitching and luck. Just put a a poet with critical depth on the hill and three good versifiers in the infield and sit back.

Some of the rosters might have some question marks, but that’s what happens in a free market.  It’s an historical fact that Longfellow did meet Queen Victoria in person. But no one expected him to play for her!

And W.H. Auden just “wanted to play for Napoleon, I don’t why.”

Marla Muse: I can’t wait for the season to begin!  Spring is in the air! Around Rome, and in those still fairer isles… Let’s forget about plagues and the starvation for awhile. Songs are going to sing.

Here then, are the Teams, their Mottoes, and the preliminary rosters—they are always changing (there’s a big minor leagues!)

~~~~~~

THE GREAT EMPEROR LEAGUE

Federico Fellini, Rimini  The Broadcasters [Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name]
-Mick Jagger, Sappho, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Paul Valery, Anne Sexton, Omar Khayyam, Robert Burns, Ben Jonson, Coleridge, Jim Morrison, Edmund Waller, Nabokov, Rilke, Giacomo Leopardi, Anacreon, Ingrid Jonker, Swinburne

Napoleon, Corsica The Codes [Let the more loving one be me]
-W.H. Auden, Homer, Hesiod, Racine, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Mina Loy, William Logan, Irving Layton, Villon, Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard, Wole Soyinka, Jules Laforgue, Derek Walcott, Callimachus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius

King Philip II, Madrid The Crusaders [If in my thought I have magnified the Father above the Son, let Him have no mercy on me]
-Saint Ephrem, G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien, Thomas Aquinas, Hilaire Beloc, John Paul II, Saint Theresa of Lisieux, Joyce Kilmer, Saint John of the Cross, Mary Angela Douglas, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Countee Cullen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aeschulus

Charles X, Paris  The Goths [Every great enterprise takes its first step in faith]
-A.W. Schlegel, Baudelaire, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Sophocles, George Herbert, Heinrich Heine, Robert Herrick, Clement Marot, Ronsard, Saint-Beuve, Catulus, Thomas Gray, John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Theophile Gautier

Pope Julius II, Rome  The Ceilings [They also serve who only stand and wait]
-Milton, Michelangelo, William Blake, Robert Lowell, Petrarch, G.E. Lessing, John Dryden, Klopstock, GE Horne, Ferdowsi, Ariosto, Luis de Camoens, Swift, Tulsidas, Edmund Spenser, Kwesi Brew, Pindar, Euripides

~~~~~

THE GLORIOUS LEAGUE

Eva Braun, Berlin The Pistols [A life subdued to its instrument]
-Ted Hughes, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, DH Lawrence, Alistair Crowley, George Santayana, F.T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Richard Wagner, Jung

Queen Victoria, London The Carriages [Theirs but to do and die]
-Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Longfellow, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Hazlitt, Paul McCartney, Geoffrey Hill, Henry James, Andrew Marvel, John Suckling, Virginia Woolf, Theocritus

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence The Banners [The One remains, the many change and pass]
-Percy Shelley, Dante, William Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, DG Rossetti, John Keats, Marlowe, Guido Cavalcanti, Glyn Maxwell, Ben Mazer, Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Moore, Philodemus, Virgil, Stefan George, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci

P.M. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Devon The Sun [A good indignation brings out all one’s powers]
-Emerson, Horace Walpole, Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Sir John Davies, Margaret Fuller, Robert Southey, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo, Basil Bunting, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Nahum Tate, Dublin  The Laureates [Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands]
-Ghalib, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Sara Teasdale, Pasternak, Louis Simpson, Dana Gioia, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Aphra Behn, Rod McKuen, JK Rowling

~~~~~

THE SECRET SOCIETY LEAGUE

Harvey Weinstein, Westport CT The Actors [I am no hackney for your rod]
-John Skelton, Langston Hughes, Henry Ward Beecher, Chaucer, Amiri Baraka, Lord Byron, Hafiz, Thomas Nashe, Marilyn Hacker, Petronius, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jim Carroll, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Jimmy Page, Andre Gide

David Lynch, Alexandria VA  The Strangers [So still is day, it seems like night profound]
-Jones Very, Alexander Pope, William Burroughs, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Weldon Kees, Berryman, Mary Shelley, Rabelais, Charles Simic, Eric Satie, Labid, Roethke, Camille Paglia, HP Lovecraft, Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett

P.T. Barnum, Fairfield CT  The Animals [Majesty and love are incompatible]
-Ovid, Gerald Stern, Robinson Jeffers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Jack Spicer, Kay Ryan, Leslie Scalapino, Mary Oliver, W S Merwin, Melville, Camille Saint Saens, Edward Lear, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gerard de Nerval, Robert Bly

J.P. Morgan, Madison Avenue  The War [The fire-eyed maid of smoky war all hot and bleeding will we offer them]
-Shakespeare, Louis Untermeyer, Apollinaire, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, Rupert Brooke, Sir Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, James Dickey, Harry Crosby, Keith Douglas, Wilfred Owen, Howard Nemerov, Stephen Crane, Erich Remarque, Alan Seeger

Ben Franklin  Philadelphia  The Secrets [We come in the age’s most uncertain hour and sing an American tune]
-Paul Simon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Key, Cole Porter, Plato, Hawthorne, Pushkin, Walter Raleigh, Moliere, William Cullen Bryant, Amy Lowell, Emma Lazarus, Carl Sandburg, Pete Seeger, Natasha Trethewey, Amelia Welby, Woody Guthrie, JD Salinger, John Prine, Kanye West, Stephen Cole, Bob Tonucci

~~~~~

THE PEOPLE’S LEAGUE

Sajyajit Ray, Calcutta The Cobras [Is it true that your love traveled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?]
-Tagore, Allen Ginsberg, Jeet Thayil, Rupi Kaur, Anand Thakore, Dhoomil, G.M. Muktibodh, Rumi, A.K. Ramanujan, Samar Sen, Daipayan Nair, R. Meenakshi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Hermann Hesse, Persius, George Harrison, Adil Jussawalla, Tishani Doshi, Sushmita Gupta, Vikram Seth

Kurosawa,  Tokyo  The Mist [In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto]
-Basho, Hilda Doolittle, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, D.T. Suzuki, Yone Noguchi, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Kobayashi Issa, Lady Izumi Shikibu, Cid Corman, Sadakichi Hartmann, Heraclitus, Richard Brautigan

Chairman Mao, Beijing  The Waves [Death gives separation repose. Without death, grief only sharpens]
-Tu Fu, Lucretius, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Rousseau, Guy Burgess, Amiri Baraka, Brecht, Neruda, Li Po, Li He, Bai Juyi, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Ho Chi-Fang, Yen Chen, Billie Holiday, Khomieni, Lu Ji , Wang Wei, Lao Tzu, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Wendell Berry

Dick Wolf, Santa Barbara  The Laws [In poetry everything is clear and definite]
-Ajip Rosidi, Aristotle, John Donne, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Donald Justice, Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Campion, Frederick Seidel, Antonio Machado, Mark Van Doren, David Lehman, Lord Bacon, Martial, ML Rosenthal, Horace, Gottfried Burger, Yvor Winters

Merv Griffin, Los Angeles  The Gamers  [He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife]
-Lewis Carroll, James Tate, E.E. Cummings, Tony Hoagland, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Eugene Field, W.S. Gilbert, Thomas Hood, Noel Coward, X.J. Kennedy, John Betjeman, Wendy Cope, Tristan Tzara, Heather McHugh, Charles Bernstein, Jack Spicer, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Green, Menander, Morgenstern

~~~~~

THE MODERN LEAGUE

Pamela Harriman, Arden NY The Dreamers [not the earth, the sea, none of it was enough for her, without me]
-Sharon Olds, Edna Millay, George Dillon, Floyd Dell, Dorothy Parker, Stanley Burnshaw, Richard Lovelace, Stevie Smith, Louis MacNeice, Louise Bogan, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Marge Piercy, Carolyn Forche, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Valentine, May Swenson, Propertius, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir

Andy Warhol, East 47th St The Printers [the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag, that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.]
-John Updike, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, James Merrill, Hart Crane, Lorca, Thom Gunn, Stephen Burt, Frank Bidart, Mark Rothko, Marjorie Perloff, John Quinn, Duchamp, Aristophanes, Christopher Isherwood, Andre Breton, Lou Reed, John Cage

John D. Rockefeller, Chicago The Buyers [Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?]
-Walt Whitman, Alcaeus, Edgar Lee Masters, Kenneth Rexroth, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler, Jorie Graham, Franz Wright, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Paul Engle, William Alexander Percy, Richard Hugo, Carl Philips, Harriet Monroe, Duke Ellington, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Sigmund Freud

A. C. Barnes, Philadelphia  The Crash [But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us]
-Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, John Crowe Ransom, John Dewey, Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, Walter Pater, Wittgenstein, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Archilochus, Anne Waldman, Stanley Kunitz, Jackson Pollock, WC Williams, Luigi Russolo, Stephen Spender, Richard Howard

Steven Spielberg, Phoenix AZ  The Universe [I know why the caged bird sings]
-Maya Angelou, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bob Dylan, Margaret Atwood, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Claudia Rankine, Harold Bloom, Alice Walker, James Wright, Juvenal, Chuck Berry, Stephen King

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Ballpark Road Trips in Review: 2018 - Ben's Biz Blog

 

 

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BOCCACCIO BATTLES SIDNEY

June 3, 2014 at 1:42 pm (Boccaccio, Christ, March Madness, Philip Sidney, Plato)
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Philip Sidney: loved Christ, poetry and Plato

BOCCACCIO:

They say that poetry is absolutely of no account , and the making of poetry a useless and absurd craft; that poets are tale-mongers, or, in lower terms, liars; that they live in the country among the woods and mountains because they lack manners and polish. They say, besides, that their poems are false, obscure, lewd, and replete with absurd and silly tales of pagan gods, and that they make Jove, who was in point of fact, an obscene and adulterous man, now the father of the gods, now king of heaven, now fire, or air, or man, or bull, or eagle, or similar irrelevant things. They cry out that poets are seducers of the mind, prompters of crime, and, to make their foul charge fouler, if possible, they say they are philosophers’ apes, that it is a heinous crime to read or possess the books of poets; and then, without making any distinction, they prop themselves up with Plato’s authority to the effect that poets ought to be turned out-of-doors.

Poetry proceeds from the bosom of God, and few, I find, are the souls in whom this gift is born; so wonderful a gift it is that true poets have always been the rarest of men. This fervor of poetry is sublime in its effects: it impels the soul to a longing for utterance; it brings forth strange and unheard-of creations of the mind; it arranges these meditations in a fixed order, adores the whole composition with unusual interweaving of words and thoughts; and thus it veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction. Further, if in any case the invention so requires, it can arm kings, marshal them for war, launch whole fleets from their docks, nay, counterfeit sky, land, sea, adorn young maidens with flowery gardens, portray human character in its various phases, awake the idle, stimulate the dull, restrain the rash, subdue the criminal, and distinguish excellent men with their proper meed of praise: these, and many other such, are the effects of poetry. Yet if any man who who has received the gift of poetic fervor shall imperfectly fulfill its function here described, he is not, in my opinion, a laudable poet. For, however deeply the poetic impulse stirs the mind to which it is granted, it very rarely accomplishes anything commendable if the instruments by which its concepts are to be wrought out are wanting—I mean, for example, the precepts of grammar and rhetoric.

 

SIDNEY:

 

Now for the poet, he doesn’t affirm, and therefore never lies.

The poet never makes any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. He cites not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calls the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in truth, not laboring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be.

Shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious? Poetry may not only be abused, but that being abused, by the reason of its sweet charming force it can do more hurt than any other army of words, yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should give reproach to the abused.

Now Plato his name is laid upon me, whom I must confess, of all the philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence, and with great reason, since of all philosophers he is the most poetical. Yet if he will defile the fountain out of which his flowing streams have proceeded, let us boldly examine with what reasons he did it. First, truly a man might maliciously object that Plato, being a philosopher, was a natural enemy of poets: for indeed, after the philosopher had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forthwith putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness, beginning to spurn at their guides like ungrateful apprentices, were not content to set up shops for themselves but sought by all means to discredit their masters; which, by the force of delight being barred them, the less they could overthrow them, the more they hated them.

Plato hated the abuse, not the poetry. Plato found fault that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence, and therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions. The poets did not induce such opinions, but did imitate those opinions already induced. For all the Greek stories can well testify that the very religion of that time stood upon many and many-fashioned gods, not taught so by the poets, but followed according to their nature of imitation. One may read in Plutarch the discourses of Isis and Osiris, of the cause why oracles ceased, of the divine providence, and see whether the theology of that nation stood not upon such dreams, which the poets indeed superstitiously observed, and truly (since they had not the light of Christ) did much better in it than the philosophers, who shaking off superstition, brought in atheism. Plato therefore (whose authority I had much rather justly construe than unjustly resist) meant not in general of poets to misuse, but only meant to drive out those wrong opinions of the Deity (whereof now, without further law, Christianity hath taken away all the hurtful belief), perchance (as he thought) nourished by the then esteemed poets. And a man need go no further than to Plato himself to know his meaning: who, in his dialogue called Ion, gives high and rightly divine commendation to poetry. So as Plato, banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banishing it, but giving due honor unto it, shall be our patron and not our adversary.

 

We love how Sidney understands that “Plato hated the abuse, not the poetry.”  Sidney is more subtle than Boccaccio, handling the same theme: poets are bad/good. If only poetry had a monopoly on “lewd;” it would be more popular: Boccaccio is right of course, as is Sidney, poetry can be naughty or nice; it isn’t poetry that is ever the problem—the question is, who is using it and what are they using it for? Today we don’t ask this question: we merely whine that no one reads it—without defining what it is.

 

WINNER: SIDNEY

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