I wrote it.
Jennifer Compton <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Bit confused. This amazing story below - who wrote it? I love it.
regards - jen
----Original Message Follows----
From: joe green
Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Garrison Keillor on poets
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:49:51 -0800
I read the poem at the age of nine.
I started my great writer fantasy baseball league back in 57 when the
poet X was living with my mother in our place in Cape May, N.J. he was just
one of my mother's poetic lovers. In fact, you can pick up an old Oscar
William's anthology and see most of these guys. The ones that were my
mother's lovers all died fairly young, but more about that later. Anyway,
the poet X and I started playing "Authors" during my mother's more than
occasional absences (with, as it turned out, Poet Y). I can still see the
poor guy in a ratty old sweater of my father's sipping Scotch and holding
the cards in his shaky hands: "Do you have any Louisa May Alcott?" Poor
jerk.
After about the third day of a drizzly November (he wrote a little verse
about that waiting beginning "In the Impossible November," so you can find
out who he was if you want) he came downstairs early before I could escape
with little pictures of all these authors pasted on index cards. He cut them
out from my mother's books. He had about 100 cards. All the big guys were
there complete with their stats. The poet X was big on the 18th century so
he had Jane Austen leading the league in R.B.I.s. Alexander Pope (whom I
eventually acquired in a trade and called "Sparky") was a great little
shortstop, and so on. I can still remember my team and how the poet X
cheated me. He talked me into picking Johnnie Keats for right field. "Look
at this guy, Joe. He's young -- just 24 -- and has more promise than anybody
in the league." He said almost the same thing about Chekhov ("Has a lot of
heart.") so I had him at third base.
We'd go through a season in about a week. One season, one year in fantasy
time. I was really pissed when both Keats and Chekhov died in the middle of
next season. "Tuberculosis, Joe. You can look it up." It was a lot of fun
anyway. Poet X had Old Possum Eliot on the mound and every time he would
strike someone out the poet X would cackle: "I do not think that they will
sing to thee." My mother would call in the middle of one of these games and
the poet X would take the call in the library. Muffled cries, whispers. My
mother would ask to talk to me: "The poet X isn't doing too well, dear.
Perhaps you two should go looking for Cape May diamonds."
I didn't ask how the poet Y (who later threw himself off a bridge) was
doing. I could hear the Vibra-Bed humming. My mother was quite fond of them.
All of this comes back to me because my mother recently died and I am
sorting through her effects. I came across book after book by young poet
after young poet with inscriptions to my mother: "Snowflakes on stained
glass." Peter "To the latest flake of Eternity" Trevor Not their real names,
of course.
God, how this boy's life comes back to me. I remember hating the poet Z.
I was only about seven when he "boarded" with us. He's the guy who wrote the
poem about the starfishes copulating. I remember that he read it to us and
then went walking with mother on the beach. I followed with a sharpened
stick and impaled every starfish I saw. (I know. "Who knows but that every
starfish who mucks the moisty way is not an immense world of delight closed
by your senses five?") But those starfish had to pay the price and I liked
to imagine that they "screamed" "Haie, it is a good day to die!" as I pinned
them wriggling each to each all on that misty moisty morning.
One after another they ended up falling in love with my mother and I
ended up with them as my mother went "To Rienzi's to meet a friend." The
poets -- not the starfish.
Poet Z had a face like a thermometer. I remember sitting across from him
at dinner, lamb dripping from his chin (these guys loved lamb) as he called
my mother "the pure product of America I am crazy about." All these guys
would have to tell me why everything meant something when it happened to
them when I would rather have been resting by some tidal pool reading _Bomba
the Jungle Boy_. Is still liked the poet X though.
He kept coming around every few years and mostly started hanging around
with me. The scotch got to him and he would make up stories about the
wonderful time he and my mother hadd in the "Pension Beaurepas," and greet
my mother with "Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas" on the
mornings when she would come down to breakfast. (Though the power is
lacking, the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy). He also gave me a snowglobe
(those little worlds so popular in Nabokov stories) inscribed with "All
nature is a Heraclitean fire. Pray you, avoid it." He was a funny guy. My
mother came back from the hairdresser with her hair a fiery red. The poet X:
"See, see how Christ's blood streams in the permanent!"
Ah, hell. She was quite fond of Marlowe. His happiest times were years
ago in my mother's bedroom, the "Damnation of Faust" playing on her old
hi-fi. I think she tied him up. It all comes back in nightly visions
unimplored. "Bases loaded. Bottom of the ninth. And here comes Leo Tolstoy
from the batter's box." My mother read all their long and marvelous letters
and kept them all. I'm told that the Poet X's graffito can still be found
next to a urinal in the City Lights bookstore. But, this is strange.
A few nights ago I was going through my mother's books and found her old
Oscar William's anthology with pictures of poets X and Y and Z (and Q and W
and R). There is a big black X across each of their faces and, at the bottom
of the page, in my mother's neatest Palmer penmanship: EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!
Stephen Vincent wrote: > San Francisco must have been
weirder than I thought.
No, this was in Riverside, California (UC Campus). A desert, reactionary
provincial town. Frank Bidart was a classmate. (Later, Billy Collins
actually did his Ph.D at Riverside). So the isolation of the location
probably induced a gothicism saturated with anglophilic profs pretending
they were somewhere else beside the sagebrush and orange grove laden
outback, or, bush. An erotic test let me tell you.
The sins of Los Angeles were two hours away by a very slow bus.
Stephen V
>
> At 10:09 PM 2/22/2007, you wrote:
>> Alright, how many guys here read Prufrock aloud to a girl friend in
either
>> high school or as an undergraduate?? Retrospectively, that poem is/was
such
>> an odd 'turn on' - its implicit impotence, etc. But the guy, 'the
>> speaker'!, I recollect, had/has pretty good rhythm, an impressive
resonant
>> sense of authority - a kind of curious, eccentric charm! (As much as
>> Eliot's work was made complicit with New Criticism, the poem could still
>> trump the anguish of learning that particular critical practice.)
>>
>> Now trying to remember what poems went well with 'courtly practice.' I
>> suspect Miles Davis/ Gil Evans 'Round Midnight' trumped them all.
>>
>> And what poems when young (or older), if I can ask, moved, so to speak,
>> women here.
>>
>> Ah, 'poetry and practice.'
>>
>> Stephen V
>> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I first heard it read by Alec Guinness, in a programme that had Stephen
>>> Spender talking about Eliot by way of introduction. Spender had already
>>> explained the Italian before the reading began, and Guinness didn't
read
>>> that bit.
>>>
>>> P
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to
>>>> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>>>> Behalf Of Jon Corelis
>>>> Sent: 23 February 2007 00:46
>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>> Subject: Re: Garrison Keillor on poets
>>>>
>>>> On encountering Prufrock as a midwestern teenager myself I
>>>> immediately liked it and didn't worry about the Italian,
>>>> which I couldn't read either, or about trying to understand
>>>> it. The important thing was that it sounded neat. That's
>>>> probably a good description of what is still my aesthetic position.
>>>>
>>>> I've always felt the full effect of Prufrock would be brought
>>>> out by having Boris Karloff read it.
>>>>
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