Patricia Neal in two of her most memorable films.

Aw, I feel tur’ble bad for having made fun of Edgar Guest’s poetry in the previous post. Is he corny? Well, yeah. Sentimental? By the truckload. Do his poems not meet the lofty standards set by the poets of Academe? Well, I guess not, but, c’mon, have you ever tried reading their stuff? Go ahead, pull down one of their collections from your bookshelf and… What’s that? You don’t have any of their collections? Oh. Well…

Here, then is a snippet from contemporary poet Mary Jo Bang’s The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity. (I am NOT making this up.)

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity

We were going toward nothing
all along. Honing the acoustics,
heralding the instant
shifts, horizontal to vertical, particle

to plexus, morning to late,
lunch to later yet, instant to over. Done
to overdone. And all against
a pet-shop cacophony, the roof withstanding

There are seven more verses of this. If the suspense is killing you, you can read the rest of them HERE.

To be fair, the real contemporary comparison to Edgar Guest, whose work appeared in newspapers for the pleasure of ordinary readers, would be to the brilliant minds behind popular song lyrics. If we’re going to laugh at Edgar Guest (and we are!), then how much ridicule should we heap on these immortal lines of Bono:

Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait.

Wow, that’s painful, and I don’t meant the bed of nails. But if that doesn’t make you wince, try this bit o’ hokum from Coldplay — lines treated with utmost seriousness by critics (”a leap towards greatness” says the LA Times):

Violet Hill

Was a long and dark December
From the rooftops I remember
There was snow
White snow…
Priests clutched onto bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft
… and so on…

Just how big are those hollowed-out bibles? Well, anyhow, we’re in no position to make fun of the popular verse of previous generations.

Back in a high school English class, we were once given two snippets of verse to compare and for which we were asked to express a preference. One was some anonymous bit of fluff: “Just to be meek/Just to be mild./Just to be God’s own/Little child.” Or something like that. The other was from Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Pied Beauty: “Glory be to God for dappled things — /For skies of couple-colour like a brinded cow;”. Well, most of the class was shrewd enough to know the dice were loaded: we were supposed to applaud Hopkins and scorn the nursery rhyme. One girl, though, was stubborn in her championing the simple sentimental lines. She was marginalized, of course — we laughed at her — and thus were we guided to feign good taste. To know we were supposed to prefer, say, T.S. Eliot over Walter de la Mare — without being able to articulate why in a way that would hold water. In other words: we were educated.

What’s this have to do with that Dufy painting up there atop this post? In that same school, same year, we were asked at the outset of a painting class to name our favorite painter. I was young and dumb enough to be honest and cited Raoul Dufy, a choice which raised the eyebrows of our pseudo-intellectual art teacher so high he looked like Cap’n Crunch. We were supposed to like Rauschenberg or Stella or some such bore. I was embarassed, but I learned my lesson: Suppressed my personal taste, never mentioned Dufy again throughout all my art schooling. Didn’t so much as look at his stuff even though I never stopped loving those exhuberant colors, unfettered lines and delightful subjects.

But now I’m all growed up. I like what I like what I like. That Dufy painting, The Orchestra in Arles, is a scan from the calendar that hangs defiantly to the left of the table at which I type this. Take that, “educators!” Or, as the Great Bard of Michigan once wrote:

I have to live with myself, and so
I want to be fit for myself to know

What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by thrusting our hand one more time into the foaming barrel of American poetry and fetching up…

Ooh. What have we here?

Why it’s Edgar Guest!

Or as he was sometimes called, “The People’s Poet.” But how to select from among the 11,000 poems — all gems — penned by Michigan’s one and only Poet Laureate? Well, at random, of course.

Here’s a bit extracted from Good Books:

Good books your faults will never see
Or tell about them round the town.
If you would have their company
You merely have to take them down.

Then there’s this first verse from Raisin Pie:

There’s a heap of pent-up goodness
in the yellow bantam corn,
And I sort o’ like to linger
round a berry patch at morn;
Oh, the Lord has set our table
with a stock o’ things to eat
An’ there’s just enough o’ bitter
in the blend to cut the sweet,
But I run the whole list over,
an’ it seems somehow that I
Find the keenest sort o’ pleasure
in a chunk o’ raisin pie.

Our editorial plural mouth is watering! But before we we go sink our collective teeth into a chunk o’ raisin pie, we will leave you with the first verse of Out Fishin’:

A feller isn’t thinkin’ mean,
Out fishin’;
His thoughts are mostly good an’ clean,
Out fishin’.
He doesn’t knock his fellow men.,
Or harbor any grudges then;
A feller’s at his finest when
Out fishin’.

The Nice Work Culture Committee admit to having had a setback in our effort to raise the tone of this joint, but we are not so easily discouraged as to let creators’ rights hold us back forever. We decided to dig sufficiently deep to find someone dead long enough for his copyrights to have expired too. After much sweaty spadework we unearthed…

The Hoosier Poet

That’s the nickname of James Whitcomb Riley who has long been reabsorbed into his beloved Indiana soil. He was born in… oh, you can look up his birth and death dates as easily as we can, and besides, do you really care? He lived somewhere in that spacious time between powdered wigs and Model Ts. Fill in the details yourself.

For this, our little Poetry Nook, we chose one of Riley’s most famous poems, When the Frost is on the Punkin. Understanding the modern reader’s impatience with unaccompanied lyric poetry, however, we present only the first and last couplets.

When The Frost is on the Punkin

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock…

(yadda yadda yadda)

…I’d want to ‘commodate ‘em–all the whole-indurin’ flock–
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Looking back over the posts here I’ve noticed that there’s way too much space devoted to community organizers like Tony Soprano, and Cheese in Gone Baby Gone, and the guy Denzel plays in American Gangster. It’s time to class this web log up a bit.

How about a little poetry? I was searching the web for some dimly remembered verse about Samuel Morse. It shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, because there just isn’t a lot of Samuel Morse verse; “dit” and “dah” can’t be made to rhyme. But, as usual when looking something up, I got sidetracked for an hour or so by This, That and the Other Thing.

Amid T.T.& O.T. I found a really sweet poem by Robert Frost I thought you, my erudite readers, would enjoy.

I don’t mean this vulgar parody:

Stopping by the Woods with Homer Simpson
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village…D’Oh!

And not this parody either:

Fire and/or Ice
Some say the world will end in ice
Some say in fire
I say not either one because
I’m a climate-change denier.

No, I mean a real honest-to-gosh Robert Frost poem. Here it is:

ahem..

The Telephone
“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today
There was an hour
All still
When leaning my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say –”

…oops! Wait a minute. At the bottom of the poem is a notice that it’s still protected by copyright! It is the intellectual property of one Lesley Frost Ballantine. Is it “fair use” to quote an entire poem? I don’t know. Oh well, go buy the book.

Didn’t see it. Won’t.

Stayed home and read a couple of books. Watched Frasier, Season 4, on the big TV. Watched The Sopranos on my itty-bitty iPod.

Remember The Sopranos? It was a comedy from way back when about a beleaguered Community Organizer trying to juggle his work and domestic responsibilities. Married, With Wise Guys.

In this still, we see James Gandolfini wincing with inner pain as he ponders how TV executives, seeking to duplicate the success of The Sopranos, will ignore everything good about it — the acting, the dialogue, the humor, the pacing — but will take all the obscenity, violence and nudity and come up with unwatchables like Deadwood, Rome and The Wire.

Next up: a review of Wanted. Just kidding. Not going to see that one either.

Saw Rosy-fingered Dawn do her stuff this morning. Was up earlier than usual to take la wife to O’Hare for her 6 AM flight and so I was able to enjoy all those pink clouds I’d normally snooze through.

The sunrise display caused me, as always, to wonder how Homer got it so wrong. Granted, he was blind, but couldn’t someone have told him the clouds at dawn look more like ribs than fingers? If Dawn is said to look like rosy fingers, doesn’t that evoke a picture of clouds radiating from from a central palm? (See figure 1.)

Figure 1

That seems all wrong. Homer nods indeed. If one fine morning we saw a giant pink hand looming over the horizon, we’d be sure the end of the world had come.

No, not fingers. I think Homer would have done far better to call her “Pink-pancake Dawn.” (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2

There. Now that’s more like it. Pink-pancake Dawn: a better metaphor visually, and as a bonus it carries a suggestion of a delicious breakfast treat.

While we ‘re on the subject: Don’t you think Rudyard Kipling is way off base when he says, “An’ the dawn come up like thunder?” Well, I do. Maybe the dawn thunders “outer china ‘crost the Bay on the Road to Mandalay” but it barely squeaks around here. Oh, man. I’m going back to bed.

First Jack Reacher, now John Paul Keller.

Two of my favorite Junk Fiction anti-heroes: gone for good. And all in the space of three weeks. First, the British writer of tuff-guy thrillers, Lee Child, changes his ex-MP brawler, Reacher, from a sort of Libertarian Lone Ranger into a Greenpeace activist. (See my mournful review.) Now Lawrence Block transforms his epitome of evil, the hitman Keller, into a Sword of Justice in his new novel, Hit and Run.

Keller’s previous appearances in Hit Man, Hit List, and Hit Parade gave no warning that he would metamorphose into a good guy — or what passes in Lawrence Block’s world for a good guy. He had been an emotionally blank, unimaginative, conscienceless professional murderer. The guilty pleasure of those books — one novel and two linked-story collections — lay in Block’s luring the reader into siding with this charmless psychopath. Imagine Patricia Highsmith writing The Talented Mr. Ripley with Chauncey Gardiner (from Kosinski’s Being There) in the lead.

Sadly, in his latest, Block turns Keller into a righteous left-wing hero. Keller crosses the country avenging the assassination of an Obama-like presidential hopeful by killing Republicans on the golf course. No, really. At one point he executes a Bible-thumping NRA yokel in Indiana who sleeps with an Ann Coulter blow-up doll. Ho ho. Look to your laurels, Al Franken.

It gets worse, but why go on? Politics ruins everything. If Block wanted so badly to chime in this election year with some ham-fisted lefty satire, hey, more power to him. Free country. But did he have to suborn Keller?

Many of you have slipped plaintive little notes to me asking, “Oh, Kevin, Kevin. What is the meaning of that black and white drawing in the header up there? The one with the little kid guarding a pile of… of… well, of who knows what? What does it all mean?”

Mean? Why, it means nothing now, but at the time — The Turn of the Century — it resonated deeply with the fearful masses. I drew it for a magazine article (Milwaukee MetroParent) about how tiny children would cope with the disasters many people expected to come when the change from 19 to 20 as the first two digits in the year would cause all the computers in the world to simultaneously say, “Wuh?” Traffic lights would flash like strobes. Planes would fly backwards. Ships would spin like tops. The Four Horsemen would turn off their alarm clocks and start climbing into their work clothes.

I did not believe such a catastrophe was in the offing, so I treated the subject facetiously. I pictured a little kid as a survivalist, hoarding batteries and battery-powered toys, and junk food. He was protecting the stash with a toy light saber.

It seemed like a nice pic to pop in the header. That’s all. I’ll post a less distorto version of the drawing over on my freelance illustration web:

Kevin Atherton’s Drawings

But not today. Today I play.

Stop me before I download again. I’m having too much fun watching itty-bitty TV shows on my iPod.

Look: There is a stack of improving books on my bedside table. But they go unread while I follow the comic misadventures of Brenda Leigh Johnson in The Closer as she fights crime in Los Angeles. (Think Beverly Hillbillies meets Columbo.) I know all this iTunes spending is wrong, but I just can’t stop.

Odd how compelling that 2.5 inch screen is. Like your own secret window into the screwy brains of Hollywood screenwriters. Reminds me of the short story by H.G. Wells, “The Crystal Egg” about a London antique dealer who becomes obsessed with the images he sees in the titular object. Turns out it’s a television link to Mars. I’m not kidding: that’s the story. Read it yourself: EGGEGGEGGEGG.

Or maybe it’s the intimacy of the stereo headphones. Television drama after all these years is still fundamentally radio drama. The voices are so distinct and so hyper-expressive you can enjoy most shows pretty well with no picture. Or maybe it’s Kyra Sedgwick’s big, red…

Oops! What happened? I seem to have downloaded another episode… When? How? I must have slipped into some kind of a fugue state. Gosh… Well, whatever. Bye!