Speaking of Poetry and Baseball. . .

John Newbery's 1744 children's book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer, reminds us that B is, of course, for Baseball.*



And maybe it's just because I've been reading Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism, but the "moral" linking British mercantilism to base running is cracking me up something fierce.

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*Also, recall the wisdom of Uncle Shelby: "X is for xylophone, because X is always for xylophone."

The Extemporaneous Poetry of Vin Scully

We've been slack of late, I know. The reason? The Dodgers.

Apropos of the playoffs, the other night Mary and I were discussing whose jersey we would purchase, were we so inclined (and moneyed - those things are like 200 bucks, and that's cash that could be better spent on tickets). Mary was leaning towards Garciaparra - a classy guy, indeed - but there's only one name I'd want on mine: Scully. He is, after all, the poet laureate of baseball and one of the patron saints of this blog.

Seriously, imagine for a moment the yarns that would be spun at a dinner party made up of Vin Scully, Eugene Walter, Everette Maddox, and Elaine Dundy. The mind boggles.

Some might deride ol' Vin for rambling on at times, being too "flowery", or talking too much.

Heathens, all.

Consider this, from the third and final game against the Cubs last week:

(transcript via LAist - we were too busy gnawing our fingernails off to take such good notes)

"And the Dodgers are one out away. One sweet beautiful marvelous out away. They will take it any way shape or form. Strike out, ground ball, fly ball, fair ball, line drive, any way they can get their hands on it. That precious thing called the final out.

Broxton delivers, swung on and missed. And now it’s not one sweet precious out, it’s one sweet precious pitch. Listen to this crowd.

No balls and two strikes to Soriano. Broxton ready. Half swing strike three called and the Cubs are dead! [...]

And as the Dodgers mob each other traditionally out in front of the mound, the lost Cubs - a lot of them, Aramis Ramirez, Derrek Lee - sitting motionless in the dugout, just staring like kids outside a candy store or like the uninvited to the party. Just staring, waiting, watching, knowing there’s nothing left but go back to the dressing room and fly back to a disappointed Chicago."

I swear, the man's voice is a time machine that takes me back to the years before steroids, ridiculous salaries, and the @)#&^% designated hitter.

So in the spirit of October goodness, here's Vin Scully's play-by-play for Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 against the Cubs.

And better still, here's audio of Vin calling Hammerin' Hank Aaron's big hit - he starts at about 54 seconds in, after two lesser broadcasters whoop it up for a bit.

Mad Men: "Six Month Leave"

This week's episode of Mad Men made me think of a Sharon Olds poem from her collection The Dead and the Living.



"The Death of Marilyn Monroe"

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close the
mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the sides, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn--one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him--a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Friday Top 5: Poems I Will Read Recreationally

5. "Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers

Sure, it's a little melodramatic, a little over the top in its exultation of the rough, rugged, and arrogant; but with language like this, it's hard not to get caught up in the idea.

4. "Stella oft sees the very face of woe" by Sir Philip Sidney

Ever get disgusted with yourself when a stupid movie makes you cry, and real life stuff doesn't? You know a poem is great when it's as true today as it was in the 16th century -- and the last three lines get me every time.

3. "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" by James Wright

If you grew up in a small industrial town where all the factories and plants and mills were shutting down one by one, and that town had a high school football team, then you will understand why I love this poem.

2. "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

I still remember running into my friend, Dave Wheat, the day after we studied this poem in college:

Me: Dude! Wallace Stevens!
Dave: Dude, nothing that is not there!
Me: And the nothing that is!
Together: Hell yeah!

1. "Thirteen Ways of Being Looked At By a Possum" by Everette Maddox

Because the best poems aren't the ones that are trying to say big and important things in big and important ways. Reading this always makes me wish that more poets weren't terrified of being funny.

And yours?

Sir William the Bloody

Chances are good that you never studied the poetry of William Topaz McGonagall in school, and that his work is not available at your local library. This 19th century Scottish poet is an overlooked gem, though not for the usual reasons.

To call McGonagall a dreadful poet does not quite do him justice, because the marvel of his work is in how inventively dreadful it is. Rather than describe it, I'll let the work speak for itself.

From "An Address to Shakespeare":

Immortal! William Shakespeare, there's none can you excel,
You have drawn out your characters remarkably well,
Which is delightful for to see enacted upon the stage
For instance, the love-sick Romeo, or Othello, in a rage

From "Calamity in London: Family of Ten Burned to Death":

Oh, Heaven! if was a frightful and pitiful sight to see
Seven bodies charred of the Jarvis' family;
And Mrs Jarvis was found with her child, and both carbonised,
And as the searchers gazed thereon they were surprised.

Fires are a popular topic in McGonagall's work. From "Burning of the Exeter Theatre":

It was the most sickening sight that ever anybody saw,
Human remains, beyond recognition, covered with a heap of straw;
And here and there a body might be seen, and a maimed hand,
Oh, such a sight, that the most hard-hearted person could hardly withstand!

And my favorite, "The Pennsylvania Disaster," on the Johnstown flood:

And when the merciless flood reached Johnstown it was fifty feet high,
While, in pitiful accents, the drowning people for help did cry;
But hundreds of corpses, by the flood, were swept away,
And Johnstown was blotted out like a child's toy house of clay.

All you ever wanted to know about William Topaz McGonagall and more is available at McGonagall Online.

Something for National Poetry Month and the PA Primary

Last week,Pages Turned dedicated a poem to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. I thought that on this, the day before the primary of my semi-beloved home state, I'd put it up again:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter—bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.

--Stephen Crane

Plus, best last lines ever in a poem, except perhaps Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man":

And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

That one always gets me.

Everette Maddox Website Returns!

The Poetry of Everette Maddox, an online reference to the life and work of New Orleans's eternal poet laureate is back up and running.

The site includes the complete text of hard to find Maddox poems from the increasingly rare and pricey Everette Maddox Song Book, as well as his later titles.

Even more exciting are the audio files of interviews and poetry readings, tribute poems, letters, and a good bit more.

Three cheers to Tom Woolf for compiling this truly awesome site. And to those of you who wonder why we never shut up about Maddox here, you can finally see for yourself.

14th Way of Looking At a Possum, Redux

As some of you might remember, there was a heated possum poetry competition here this summer in honor of the blog's eternal poet laureate, Everette Maddox.

And today, perhaps a late entry?

There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose on the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

- from "The Oldest Living Thing in Los Angeles" by Larry Levis (via The Millennial Pedestrian)

nobody, not even the rain has such small hands

I couldn't suggest a finer accompaniment to your turkey coma tomorrow than Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen's best and perhaps the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made (granted, there's probably not a large pool of those).

In one of the most inept flirtations in screen history, Elliot (played by Michael Caine) buys Lee (the luminous Barbara Hershey) a collection of ee cummings poetry, saying that "I read a poem of you the other day and thought of him." Then tells her to read "somewhere i have never travelled". Smooth.

The film also contains one of my all-time favorite movie lines: "If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

In the holiday recipe round-up today: no-knead dinner rolls and a pumpkin praline cheesecake that may just be the prettiest dessert I've ever seen.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

UPDATE: Hannah and Her Sisters may be the post-dinner Thanksgiving movie, but the best Thanksgiving movie to put on while you're cooking is definitely The Last Waltz.

Poetry Noir: Black Maria by Kevin Young

Black Maria: Poems by Kevin Young

Like Jessica Seinfeld sneaking spinach into her kids' brownies, Kevin Young has tricked me into reading contemporary American poetry with the kind of page-turning delight I usually reserve for my sleazy crime novels.

As any Tom Waits fan can tell you, Black Maria ("rhymes with 'pariah'") is slang for either a hearse or the paddywagon. Young's collection is a film noir in five "reels" of verse, featuring the misadventures and near-misses of a private eye named AKA Jones and Delilah Redbone, his femme fatale, a struggling actress who's fallen in with bad company.

One of my favorite writers, Megan Abbott, has said some interesting things about the problem of writing noir today when all the tropes of the genre approach parody, kitsch, or cliche. Through his collection, Young provides an interesting solution to the problem. The language of noir has been trodden into a soft-boiled mush, but by placing that language into verse, it once again reverberates with the melodramatic heft that makes classic noir work so well.

The couplet form that Young prefers is particularly well-suited to a genre that milks one-liners and terse, staccato dialogue for all they're worth. And like most of my favorite noir films, the caper itself is less important than individual scenes, or in this case, lines.

A few of my favorites:

I've given, like gin
Her up, again

And,

If despair had a sound
it would be: DO NOT DISTURB

If despair has a sound
it's the muffled, raised

Voices of the pair next door
who've lived here

In One-Star Manor forever
yet still pay by the week

--Love's an iffy lease--

And,

He'd taught me how

to fall, to cry
on cue, & now

that's all I do.

It's a smoldering, badass read, and really, when was the last time someone said that about a collection of poetry?

More Fun With YouTube

Okay, clearly we haven't quite caught up with our reading yet post-Blogathon.

But who needs book reviews when you can have trippy video footage set to a recording of Sylvia Plath reading "Fever 103"?

Dig it, man.

Contest: Eugene Walter Memorial Doggerel Competition

"I'll celebrate all wayward things
From man's mind born:
The private elves of disprespect
No less than unicorn."
--Eugene Walker, "The Fireworks at Versailles"

Eugene Walter was a man of many talents: prose, poetry, essays, cookbooks, marionette shows, socializing. Upon his return to Mobile after years spent in New York, Paris, Italy, and the Arctic Circle, Eugene moved back to Mobile and took up residence in a house lent to him by the city.

It was promptly trashed by Hurricane Frederick. Eugene threw a dinner party the next evening. As he put it in Katherine Clark's excellent life history/oral autobiography Milking the Moon, "Today may bring money in the mail. Today may bring a hurricane. You have to be ready for either one. In either case, give a party."

I'll be posting a review of his prize-winning novel, The Untidy Pilgrim, later tonight. But now I'd like to open up the Eugene Walter Memorial Doggerel Contest.

Your job? Compose a couple or a few lines of nonsense/less-than-serious verse. Verse, as the back jacket of one of Eugene's poetry collections puts it, that is "satirical, lyrical, comical, paradoxical, dipsical, doksical, hortatory, plumatory, amatory, bibliophilic, astrophilic, botanophilic, ailerophilic, gustatory, fun-cranky, and whoopsical". Post 'em in the comments.

Difficulty: No limericks.

To get you started, here's a link to an mp3 (scroll down and click) of Eugene reading the "The Fireworks of Versailles", brought to you by the good people at Nomad Music Studio, where you can purchase a cd of Eugene reading his poems and stories, and singing his songs.

And here's one of my favorites of his:

"Young Poet to Old Anthologist"
by Eugene Walker
(From The Pack Rat & Other Antics, 1937-1987)

When I tear the sun from his socket
And rearrange the stars in rows,
Cause the sea to blacken and churn,
Casting up green goblins on prosaic shores-
When you behold me, on a moonless night,
Clad in ire and white fire,
Then O then indeed
You shall be very sorry
You were not listening when I spoke.

King of the Dirty Old Men

I just finished watching Bukowski: Born Into This, then toddled over to the computer to look at Fark, where I learned that Charles Bukowski died 13 years ago today.

Spooky, eh?

I have mixed feelings about Bukowski's work, as I find myself completely unable to take him as a flawed, but complete package. He makes me laugh, but he's a pig. But not completely. And the punk kids are always stealing his books from the library. But at least they're reading them. And he was a lay-about wastrel. But that's just my Protestant work ethic talking. Aw, at some point, I just throw my hands in the air and decide the guy's alright in my book.

I like this poem a lot. Also, I once heard a clip from one of his readings, a poem about being in bed with a woman and farting so loudly that it wakes her up. There's a line that goes something like: "I fart more often than I f***. I am pleased to be mistaken for a foghorn passing in the night."

It cracked me up, but I can't seem to find the poem. Send me the citation, along with your address, and I will send you a shiny prize.

Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

There was a time when I knew a lot about poetry. I read it, explicated sonnets, wrote long, critical essays on the structure of Robert Creeley's verse, memorized Sir Philip Sidney, and, at one point, carried on a correspondence with a contemporary experimental poet of some renown.

But gradually, the stuff began to wear me down. It was either form without function, or confessional whining, or meditations on the oak tree in one's yard in New Haven, or dense and impenetrable for the sake of being dense and impenetrable. And if it wasn't any of those things, it was probably boring.

So, until yesterday, I'd ditched poetry, making an exception only for Everette Maddox, and sometimes, Anne Sexton and James Wright. Then, while I was at work, events transpired to bring me to the Wallace Stevens poem, "The Snow Man."*

This dredged up a slew of memories from the semester during college when I spent a lot of time thinking about concupiscent curds, high-toned old Christian women, and the genius of the sea. Those were the days when the blackbird was involved in what I knew, and it was like nothing else in Tennessee.

Good times.

I feel bad about having thrown Wally out with the bathwater all those years ago, and hope he and I can be good buddies again.
________________________
Here it is, one of poetry's most famous run-on sentences, complete with a nice little staring-into-the-abyss moment at the end.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

More Everette Maddox

I missed this comment on my Everette Maddox post awhile back, so I figure y'all did, too. Anyways, I'm snagging this book ASAP.

Two things: 1) Grace Bauer and I (Julie Kane) have just co-edited a book of essays, poems, short stories, and even song lyrics about Everette, containing work by fifty writers including Ellen Gilchrist, Rodney Jones, William Matthews, etc. The title is Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, and the publisher is Xavier Review Press (2006). It can be ordered from the publisher's website, www.xula.edu/review, or from amazon. 2) Bill Roberts of Pirogue Publishing (which published Everette's second book, Bar Scotch, in 1988) told me he still has some copies of it and that if you contact the Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans (504 862-0008), he will fill any requests for it through them.

Call the man, and get your NOLA on.

Queenie Was a Blonde

The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March, illustrated by Art Spiegelman

This dirty little poem about vaudeville types and their low-life friends boozing it up and falling into bed indiscriminately was banned in Boston after its initial publication in 1928, then faded into semi-obscurity. Art Spiegelman's delightfully saucy and wicked illustrations steal the show, but even on its own, the verse crackles with a glorious depravity:


"The party was getting under way
Stiffly, slowly.
The way they drank was unholy.
They hovered around the glass-filled tray
Ravenously,
Like birds of prey.
White, intense;
With mask-like faces
Frozen in rigid, gay grimaces.
They chattered and laughed
Stony-eyed:
Impatient:
Hasty:
Preoccupied.

They drank swiftly, as though they might
Drop dead before they were properly tight."

If you like...: the works of Edward Gorey, this book is for you.

The Real Lady Lazarus

Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook*

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath once took a poetry class together, and were paired up at some point for a class exercise. In Plath's journals, she writes about this as "an honor," then proceeds to fret about needing a better haircut and to "get fixed up."

I love that Sexton could unleash Sylvia Plath's inner girly-girl.

The two are often compared, but for my money, Anne Sexton is the quintessential lady poet of the 20th century (with all the baggage, good and bad, that goes along with that). For starters, she was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking knock-out who gave sultry readings in a tight red dress. She was the poster child for The Feminine Mystique. And of course, she was suicidally crazy, carrying around a purseful of what she called her "kill me pills" (so I guess Courtney Love is a fan).

Middlebrook is an ideal biographer because she somehow managed to get all the relevant parties onboard for the project. Linda Gray Sexton, Anne's daughter and executor of her literary estate gave Middlebrook full access to everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything right down to her taped therapy sessions. On top of that, Middlebrook does a good job of balancing a thoughtful analysis of Sexton's deceptively accessible poetry with the more salacious aspects of her life. And despite the fact that Sexton was a self-absorbed, child-abusing, philandering confessional poet (shudders), she was also a sympathetic charmer, passionately devoted to her craft.

If I could choose any person, living or dead, with whom to get trashed in a hotel bar in the middle of the afternoon, it would totally be Anne Sexton.

If you ever went through a confessional poetry stage in college, if you're interested in the plight of pill-popping middle-class women in the 50s, or if you appreciate psychoanalysis in a retro-kitschy kind of way, this book is for you.
_______________________________
* I've seen many photographs of Anne Sexton wearing this halter dress. I covet this dress.

A Week of Southern Lit, Part 3

During his lifetime, Everette Maddox was the unofficial poet laureate of the French Quarter and founder of the Maple Leaf Bar reading series, which has been going strong since 1979, and even in these post-Katrina days, convenes each Sunday at 3pm.

After Maddox died in 1989, a memorial was placed on the patio at the Maple Leaf which reads simply: "He was a mess."

Maddox's poems call to mind Tom Waits' drunken reels and ballads, steeped in Berryman, Stevens, and Wordsworth, with a little Keatsian melancholy thrown in for good measure. Even the titles of the poems are great - "Joseph Conrad Meets All My Friends," "Thirteen Ways of Being Looked At By a Possum," "God's Last Words To the Stars," but my favorite one is this:

Irrelevant
by Everette Maddox

I'm not going to
dignify Mozart
or metaphysics
any longer by
pretending they touch
me. I won't even
say I like these leaves
except as they swirl
against a special
emptiness. Nothing
is relevant since
losing you is what
my life is about.

Maddox published three collections of poetry during his lifetime, but never achieved widespread success or renown; however, his work and his legacy are well-remembered by the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and have spawned a documentary, a play, and two posthumous collections, none of which you will be able to see or lay your hands on very easily.

It is goddamn tragic that we live in a world where the pretentious and unreadable works of Jorie Graham are readily accessible, but Everette Maddox is out of print.

I have tracked down a few places where you can acquire his work in piecemeal:

1. Rette's Last Stand, a posthumous collection of his works, some previously unpublished, is available for a very reasonable price at Abebooks. (The Everette Maddox Songbook is also available here, if you're willing to drop $150 for it)
2. American Waste, another posthumous collection, and The Maple Leaf Rag, a collection of 100 writers from the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series, are available at Portals Press, out of New Orleans.
3. Several works are included in The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry
4. The 1994 Fall/Winter issue of the New Orleans Review features a Maddox interview, several essays, a series of letters he wrote to a friend, and several poems, and can be ordered here.

So little published poetry actually matters. This stuff is worth finding.