Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

For Poetry Monday:

“The evening darkens over,” Robert Bridges

The evening darkens over
After a day so bright
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.

The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.

There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.


While Bridges was Poet Laureate 1913-30, I confess I mostly think of him as Hopkins’s university friend and literary executor.

---L.

Subject quote from The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written by Ewan MacColl, sung by Peggy Seeger. (Roberta Flack covered it later.)

For Poetry Monday:

The Llano Estacado, John Poch

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere
like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas,
a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway
of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt
the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them
with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.


First published in Poetry issue July/August 2009. The Llano Estacado is a large mesa/plateau in west Texas and easternmost New Mexico, extending from Amarillo through Lubbock and down to Odessa. The name is often translated as “staked plain,” with a folk etymologies explaining that its dry grassland is so featureless that Native Americans supposedly put up markers to guide their way (and Coronado famously did find it confusing), but the actual origin is probably “stockaded/palisaded plain,” referring to the escarpments of its eastern and western edges. The sharp-shinned hawk is a common small hawk of the region. The elms, which are not native, would have been grown by a former homesteader by irrigation from wells.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.

For Poetry Monday:

Tired, Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.


---L.

Subject quote from Vuelvo al Sur, Astor Piazzolla & Fernando Solanas, though I confess I prefer the Gotan Project cover.

For Poetry Monday Tuesday (because spent yesterday hiking in the mountains), another Francis:

Hallelujah: A Sestina, Robert Francis

A wind’s word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
Is what God’s for. Why didn’t they call my father
Hallelujah instead of Ebenezer?

Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,
Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).
Daniel, a country doctor, was his father
And my father his tenth and final boy.
A baby and last, he had a baby’s praise:
Red petticoats, red cheeks, and crow-black hair.

A boy has little to say about his hair
And little about a name like Ebenezer
Except that you can shorten either. Praise
God for that, for that shout Hallelujah.
Shout Hallelujah for everything a boy
Can be that is not his father or grandfather.

But then, before you know it, he is a father
Too and passing on his brand of hair
To one more perfectly defenseless boy,
Dubbing him John or James or Ebenezer
But never, so far as I know, Hallelujah,
As if God didn’t need quite that much praise.

But what I’m coming to; Could I ever praise
My father half enough for being a father
Who let me be myself? Sing Hallelujah.
Preacher he was with a prophet’s head of hair
And what but a prophet’s name was Ebenezer,
However little I guessed it as a boy?

Outlandish names of course are never a boy’s
Choice. And it takes some time to learn to praise.
Stone of Help is the meaning of Ebenezer.
Stone of Help; what fitter name for my father?
Always the Stone of Help however his hair
Might graduate from black to Hallelujah.

Such is the old drama of boy and father.
Praise from a grayhead now with thinning hair.
Sing Ebenezer, Robert, sing Hallelujah!

---L.

Subject quote from Don't You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds.

For Poetry Monday, something I think is a repeat but can handle a repost:

Ancient Music, Ezra Pound

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
              Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
              Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
              So ’gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.


Parody ofc of the Middle English round “Sumer is icumen in.”

---L.

Subject quote from Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty.

For Poetry Monday:

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson, Ursula K. Le Guin

A black and white cat
on May grass waves his tail, suns his belly
among wallflowers.
I am reading a Chinese poet
called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.
The cat is aware of the writing
of swallows
on the white sky.
We are both old and doing what pleases us
in the garden. Now I am writing
and the cat
is sleeping.
Whose poem is this?


—L.

Subject quote from Time in a Bottle, Jim Croce.

For Poetry Monday, chronologically a little late but still appropriate for this subtropical climate:

November Night, Adelaide Crapsey

Listen …
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.


Crapsey (1878-1914) was a teacher and prosodist as well as poet, and this was first published in her (posthumous) first collection, Verses. The form is a cinquain, a fixed syllabic stanza based on Japanese tanka that she developed in her last year of life, before dying of tuberculosis.

---L.

Subject quote from Windy,” The Association.

For Poetry Monday:

Stills, R.A. Ammons

I have nowhere
to go and

nowhere to go

when I get
back from there.


---L.

Subject quote from The Boxer, Simon & Garfunkel.

For Poetry Monday, a more famous desert poem also from Crane’s first collection:

“In the desert,” Stephen Crane

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.”


Crane was a little too early to be a Modernist (as a prose writer, he was part of the pre-modern Realist and Naturalist movements, not that I can tell the difference between those), but he was a strong proximate influence on especially the Imagists.

---L.

Subject quote from How to Save a Life, The Fray.

Book meme via naraht and others: The Seven Deadly Sins of Reading —

Lust, books I want to read for their cover:
- The Moonlight Mistress, Victoria Janssen
- The Beauty’s Blade, Feng Ren Zuo Shu
- Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao

Pride, challenging books I’ve finished:
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
- Gravitation and Cosmology, Steven Weinberg
- 古今和歌集 (in the original)

Gluttony, books I’ve read more than once:
- Persuasion, Jane Austen (and the rest of Austen, but that the most)
- The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer (and several other Heyer, but that the most)
- Protector of the Small, Tamora Pierce (and Circle of Magic, but that the most)
- Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin (and several other Le Guin, but that the most)
(and many many more …)

Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest:
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake

Greed, books I own multiple editions of:
(not counting multiple translations of the same work)
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
- The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

Wrath, books I despised:
- The Jade Mountain, tr. Witter Bynner
- A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, tr. William Porter
- Outlaws of the Marsh / Water Margin

Envy, books I want to live in:
- Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Annals of the Former World, John McPhee
- Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai

Actually, just replace the other two with Always Coming Home a few more times.

---L.

Subject quote from I Want You, Savage Garden.