The Millennial Pedestrian

R. S. Gwynn’s “Fried Beauty”

Poet — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:13:04 +0000

This poem came my way via another poetry site, "American Life in Poetry," hosted and edited by the former Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. It makes me want to know more about the work of R. S. Gwynn, and to eat something unhealthy. It helps if you’re familiar with "Pied Beauty," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. If you’re not, look it up and try reading it aloud. Tricky. But "Fried Beauty" is pretty great on its own.

Fried Beauty
By R. S. Gwynn

Glory be to God for breaded things–
Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,
Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim
With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,
Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,
That in all oils, corn or canola, swim

Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!);
Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry
On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim,
These greasy, battered bounties of the South:
Eat them.

Commercial Intrusion

Poet — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:44:12 +0000

Commercial Intrusion

At last! A comprehensive guide to the best places to eat in my new home town, Providence, RI. It’s a great city for dining and one that has sadly been withoout an up-to-date, comprehensive restaurant guide for about five years. Now, thanks to a year of dedicated research, that yawning void has been filled.

The Providence Guide — 91 Best Restaurants and more is the reason you haven’t seen more original poetry on TMP lately. I’ve been too full. If you’re planning a trip to or through Providence anytime soon, I recommend it. It’s user-friendly, fun to read, and compact (4" x 6" paperback).

For a good look at the product (and to order!), visit www.providencerestaurantguide.net.

And thank you.

Willam Matthews’s “Cheap Seats…”

Poet — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:58:29 +0000

This little look back into adolescence by Bill Matthews appears in a new book called The Making of a Sonnet, edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavon Boland (Norton). Even if you never saw an NBA game with a date in the late ’50s, if you’re male, you can identify. And if you’re not, you can at least empathize.

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959

    By William Matthews

The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils

of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue,

particulate, the opposite of dew.

We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls

had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt

like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped

and two nights out of three, like us, they’d lose.

But "like us" is wrong: we had no result

three nights out of three: so we had heroes.

And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name

among that hazy company unless

I brought her with me. This was loneliness

with noise, unlike the kind I had at home

with no clock running down, and mirrors.

Hilaire Belloc’s “Henry King”

Poet — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:58:08 +0000

There were complaints about the Billy Collins poem, “Parade.” Some found it morbid and depressing. To address this issue, here’s another poem about death! This one’s from the inimitable Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of the early 20th Century whose classic work is Cautionary Tales for Little Children. In these delightfully macabre poems, Belloc describes the awful things that happen to misbehaving children, making particularly effective and amusing use of the initial capital letter. One of my favorites is below.

Henry King

Who chewed bits of String, and was early
cut off in Dreadful Agonies.

   By Hilaire Belloc

The Chief Defect of Henry King
    Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
     Itself in ugly Knots inside.
Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
“There is no Cure for this Disease.
Henry will very soon be dead.”
His parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,
Cried – “Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires . . .”
With that, the Wretched Child expires.

Billy Collins’s “The Parade”

Poet — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:14:43 +0000

The Parade
   By Billy Collins

How exhilarating it was to march
along the great boulevards
in the sunflash of trumpets
and under all the waving flags –
the flag of desire, the flag of ambition.

So many of us streaming along –
all of humanity, really –
moving in perfect sync,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,
the rows of roadside trees,
the huge blue sheet of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered
off the broad turnpike
into a pasture of high grass,
heading toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.

Generation after generation,
we shoulder forward
under the play of clouds
until we high-step off the sharp lip into space.

So I should not have to remind you
that little time is given here
to rest on a wayside bench,
to stop and bend to the wildflowers,
or to study a bird on a branch –

not when the young
keep shoving from behind,
not when the old are tugging us forward,
pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

Kay Ryan’s “Dutch”

Poet — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:50:49 +0000

TMP is going on vacation – all the way to New Zealand, where we’ll be biking on the South Island. It may be inspiring (I hope so) but there won’t be any opportunities to stop and post poetry. So until early in March, the blog will be idle. That doesn’t mean you can’t stop by and browse – there are a lot of poems here now. And although I’ve never written a poem about New Zealand, I did do one called “Tasmania” a while ago.

Meanwhile, here’s a poem for the road. It, like “Tasmania,” is geographic, but not really. By Kay Ryan, it’s called “Dutch,” and in a very short span it creates a surprising number of memorable, sharp ideas and images. While she uses a kind of cartoon Dutchness to characterize “much of life,” I think it works. I especially admire “black-suspendered” to, in one stroke, tell you exactly what you need to know about the tulip magnates.

Dutch

   By Kay Ryan

Much of life
is Dutch
one-digit
operations

in which
legions of
big robust
people crouch

behind
badly cracked
dike systems

attached
by the thumbs

their wide
balloon-pantsed rumps
up-ended to the
northern sun

while, back
in town, little
black-suspendered
tulip magnates
stride around.

Larry Levis’s “The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.”

Poet — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:58:26 +0000

This poem is a good example of poetry doing a small thing so much better than prose could. A possum tries to cross a busy L.A. intersection: the raw ingredient for a "Metropolitan Diary" piece in the N.Y. Times. In the hands of Larry Levis, this minor urban vignette takes on the weight of history, prehistory, and our nightmare fears, while never losing its sense of humor.

The Oldest Living
Thing in L.A.

   By Larry Levis

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
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.

Roy Blount’s “Song to Onions”

Poet — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:54:57 +0000

Well, in winter’s dreariest hours, food, drink and poetry about food and drink can lift our spirits. Roy Blount was a Sports Illustrated writer when I worked there in the promotion department many years ago. He was a joy to read back then and it turns out he’s still got that down-home way with words that went so well with football. In fact, Blount wrote one of the best football books ever, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, about the Pittsburgh Steelers. And here he is doing for onions what he did for Mean Joe Greene.

Song to Onions
   By Roy Blount, Jr.

They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion’s a group.

Peel back the skin, delve into tissue
And see how an onion has been blessed with issue.

Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you’ve got three then you find you’ve got fovum.

Onion on on-
Ion on onion they run
Each but the smallest one some onion’s mother
An onion comprises a half-dozen other.

In sum then an onion you could say is less
Than the sum of its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess –
In food and in the arts.

Things pungent, not tony.
I’ll take Damon Runyon
Over Antonioni –
Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion.
I’m anti-baloney.

Although a baloney sandwich would
Right now, with onions, be right good.

And so would sliced onions,
       Chewed with cheese,
Or onions chopped and sprinkled
       Over black-eyed peas.

Black-eyed,
   grey-gravied
       absorbent of essences,
            eaten on New Year’s Eve
                peas.

Hindenburg

Poet — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:24:35 +0000

In E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair there is the most wonderful description of the German dirigible Hindenburg’s 1937 passage across the Bronx as she headed for her mooring in Lakehurst, NJ: "She sailed incredibly over the housetops, and kept coming right toward me, … and kept coming and kept coming and still no sight of the tail of her. She was tilted toward me as if she were an enormous animal leaping from the sky in monumental slow motion… The ribbed planes of her cylindrical balloon, thick in the middle, narrowed at each end, reflected the sunlight, flaring sunlight in striations, as if a deck of cards were being shuffled… The enormity of her was out of scale with everything, out of scale with the houses and the cars on the street and the people now shouting and pointing and looking up: she was like a scoop of sky come down to earth, or a floating building, or a populated cloud. I could see little people in the cabin, they were looking out the window and I waved at them."

Hindenburg

Incurious teals looked
At or through the windows
As we sailed among them.
We felt ourselves a fresh species
Able to immerse ourselves in sky
As no other humans could.
Our Diesels were so far away
They were inaudible,
And gusty winds did not disturb
The Zeppelin’s unruffled flight.
We were of the air, not in it
And we ate our breakfast muesli
With the zeal of eagles.

As we neared our journey’s end
We called it a migration, thought
Ourselves quite avian.
Our shadow fell serenely down on
Gardens, parks and highways,
City streets and country farms.
People ran outdoors just to point and wave.
We made them happy, made them
Call hellos to us, made them smile
To see the future so benignly
Soar above them, one with nature.

When we fell in flames we thought of Icarus;
It’s most surprising but
One definitely does have thoughts
As one falls burning
Through the air.
Rueful recognition in this case:
We surely overreached ourselves,
Our earthbound natures, projected
Far too much upon our long sleek bag of gas.
Next time, we thought, let’s not be so oblique.

W. H. Auden’s “A Walk in the Dark”

Poet — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 05:12:38 +0000

The stars don’t care what we do, let alone how long we live. Auden’s poem seems especially apt at this time of year, this time in life, and this time in our history, as it must have to Auden when he wrote it in 1947. (The phrase "lacrimae rerum," by the way, is from the Aeneid and refers to tears shed over man’s fate on earth, specifically by Aeneas when he sees a Carthaginian mural depicting fallen comrades in the Trojan War.)

A Walk After Dark
   By W. H. Auden

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be as shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to dislike the young,
I am glad these points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more of an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at age seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.