Here is more about my mother. And about the great writer fantasy baseball
league. In fact, you can hear a game if you go here
http://thejeunessedoree.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=191097
Poetry baseball as it is meant to be played!
The Avalon Archers versus the 20th Century Limiteds
The Archers
Coach W. H. Auden, John Keats, John Donne, John Milton, William Wordsworth,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
20th Century Limiteds
Coach Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Allen
Ginsberg and Ron Silliman
Broadcast from Don Schaeffer Memorial Stadium on the Sunny Slopes of
Parnassus!
But...more about my mother.
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!
On 11/4/07, MC Ward <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Joe G.,
>
> I thoroughly enjoyed your Salinger analysis, but
> thought you fell short (maybe when good old Mom came
> to mind) in asking how we can reconcile _Catcher_ with
> "Bananafish." The answer's in your own exegesis--the
> fish, man, the fish! The _Catcher_ cabbie's anxiety
> about the fish is a reference to Seymour's
> suicide--maybe even an omen if the story came first
> (can't remember).
>
> Tell me more about your mother, sez Ms. Shrinkydinks.
> Is she like Fat Bessie? She scares me already, and I'm
> glad she lives at least as far away as Coatsville, PA.
> (Don't, for heaven's sake, tell her that I smoke! And
> I wouldn't breathe a word about Heidegger, tho' I
> might huff & puff a bit about Arendt.)
>
> You're a damn talented guy, Joe Green, and the
> university's loss. Don't waste your smarts on ad
> hominem fights; just get on with your poetry, satire,
> and lit'ry analysis. So endeth today's posts--
>
> Candice
>
> __________________________________________________
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>
--
Joseph Green
The Pleasant Reviewer
Headmaster, St. John Boscoe Laboratory School
Switchboard Captain, Hollywood Colonial Hotel
All complaints shall be directed to:
Camelopard Breathwaite
The Fallows, 200 Fifth Avenue, Fredonia City
"That's Double Dependability"
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