you posted that sometime before. it's a delight to read.
<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.">
that cracked me up bigtime.
On 04/11/2007, joe green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> >
>
>
>
> --
> 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"
>
> Brought to you by Zenith Trans-Cosmic Radio
>
