AdamSmith

Stu, please don't feel bad. I was glad you and others even read such a thread, much less contributed. I like all the interaction here. Maybe I just have no standards! Anyway -- with marcanthony as my guide! -- more is more. "One impulse from a vernal wood / Is not enough to do much good!" One of my secret heroes is urbanity's very namesake -- Fr. Urbain Grandier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Grandier

lookin, you're too kind. And too attentive -- I just quoted; you wrote. Humbling. True story about staid, straightlaced Wallace Stevens: He came into a meeting at The Hartford one day and ebulliently repeated a joke he had just heard. "You know why they're called nuns? 'Cause they ain't never had none, and they ain't never going to get none!"

Just possibly, providing we call for the spittoon and not the cuspidor. And if we bear in mind that remarking a woman has a nice pair of bristols a la Kingsley Amis comes across in America as very very gay. Come to think of it, many things elegant in Britain sound gay in America. P.S. To those of us who grew up south of the Manson-Nixon line: (1) Did your grandma dip snuff? (2) For a spittoon, did she carry around the house a tall Dole pineapple can stuffed with Kleenex? http://www.tspb.state.tx.us/SPB/Gallery/HisArt/06.htm

My $0.02... I was surprised how irritated I was by Obama's debate aside emphasizing that he got tested for HIV with his wife. If he presented it as a half-joke, still jokes like this show what someone is really thinking. In the LOGO debate, he seemed respectful, at ease personally, and knowledgeable about a number of the issues. But his tortuous conflation of civil marriage with the freedom-of-religion issue of each denomination's right to determine what forms of relatedness it will and will not recognize -- he knows better. At least Hillary did not resort to such a reach in defending her own civil-unions-but-not-marriage position. I don't like it but for some reason I can accept her holding that position as an art-of-what's-possible-for-now compromise. To me, Bill Richardson could arguably be the best Democratic candidate. Except -- can he win? And could he lead? But I agree his maricon crack was pretty ugly, and I don't buy his excuses. Exposing what amount to my own prejudices, I have seen firsthand too many Hispanic parents' violent reaction to a child's revelation of being gay, to the point of disownment. I cannot think of Richardson and gay issues without this shadowing my perceptions. Back to the LOGO debate -- I was a little surprised how John Edwards seemed nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. Not too surprised, though. His ignorance of the issues, compared with almost everyone else, was interesting to see. In his closing remarks, just one example, he mentioned people facing job discrimination due to "sexual orientation," missing completely the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity -- the reason behind the firing of the transgender person in the audience whom he was alluding to. In watching him, I've come to think he learns issues only to the depth of a lawyer preparing his summation. (As I've noted here before, I know many dyed-in-the-wool Democrats in N.C. who came to view him as a big phony during his Senate term. That is to say, an even bigger phony than most politicians.)

Ahh, La Parker. Welcome to the thread, lookin. Didn't you have a quatrain in this form about, shall we say, Trapper John...?

You keep reminding me of my age. First the "Men" lyrics; now Rickety Rackety, which rings a bell but which I too couldn't complete from memory. Google came up empty on "rickety rackety," but "higgledy piggledy" dredged up one relevant link. Higgledy-piggledy Hans Christian Andersen Sat with some towheaded Lads on a shelf, Mythopoetically Hoping that fairytales Aided in keeping his Hans to himself. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,843497,00.html ...Anthologized in Jiggery Pokery. http://www.amazon.com/Jiggery-Pokery-Antho...5133&sr=8-1

"Vers"-atile?! Few things are more versatile than the form called the "Clerihew," invented by one Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The idea is to start with the name of a famous person, then rhyme it with some nonsense. Sir Christopher Wren Said, "I am going to dine with some men. If anyone calls, Say I'm designing St. Paul's." Sir Humphrey Davie Detested gravy. He lived with the odium Of having discovered sodium. My favorite, on account of making no sense at all: Edward the Confessor Slept under the dresser. When that began to pall, He slept in the hall.

...Who stuffed his ass With broken glass And circumcised the vicar! Or less permanently... From a niche in the church of St. Giles Came a scream that resounded for miles. "Oh, my goodness gracious!" Cried Father Ignatius. "How was I to know the bishop had piles?"

The end.

X The personae of summer play the characters Of an inhuman author, who meditates With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night. He does not hear his characters talk. He sees Them mottled, in the moodiest costumes, Of blue and yellow, sky and sun, belted And knotted, sashed and seamed, half pales of red, Half pales of green, appropriate habit for The huge decorum, the manner of the time, Part of the mottled mood of summer’s whole, In which the characters speak because they want To speak, the fat, the roseate characters, Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry, Complete in a completed scene, speaking Their parts as in a youthful happiness.

IX Fly low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole. Let Your brown breast redden, while you wait for warmth. With one eye watch the willow, motionless. The gardener’s cat is dead, the gardener gone And last year’s garden grows salacious weeds. A complex of emotions falls apart In an abandoned spot. Soft, civil bird, The decay that you regard: of the arranged And of the spirit of the arranged, douceurs, Tristesses, the fund of life and death, suave bush And polished beast, this complex falls apart. And on your bean pole, it may be, you detect Another complex of other emotions, not So soft, so civil, and you make a sound, Which is not part of the listener’s own sense.

VIII The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through The sky. It is the visible announced, It is the more than visible, the more Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries This is the successor of the invisible. This is its substitute in stratagems Of the spirit. This, in sight and memory, Must take its place, as what is possible Replaces what is not. The resounding cry Is like ten thousand tumblers tumbling down To share the day. The trumpet supposes that A mind exists, aware of division, aware Of its cry as clarion, its diction’s way As that of a personage in a multitude: Man’s mind grown venerable in the unreal.

Let 'em try. http://www.clantongang.com/oldwest/trade.htm Hmm -- on t'other hand, maybe you have a point.

Let me work on it. OK, prose. Start a thread!

VII Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object. Deep in the woods They sang of summer in the common fields. They sang desiring an object that was near, In face of which desire no longer moved, Nor made of itself that which it could not find. . . Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed The object, grips it in savage scrutiny, Once to make captive, once to subjugate Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim The meaning of the capture, this hard prize, Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.

VI The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth. It rises from land and sea and covers them. It is a mountain half way green and then, The other immeasurable half, such rock As placid air becomes. But it is not A hermit’s truth nor symbol in hermitage. It is the visible rock, the audible, The brilliant mercy of a sure repose, On this present ground, the vividest repose, Things sustaining us in certainty. It is the rock of summer, the extreme, A mountain luminous half way in bloom And then half way in the extremest light Of sapphires flashing from the central sky, As if twelve princes sat before a king.

Whoops. My sin. No question divine Emily is the best America has produced. To say the least. Nice selection.

V One day enriches a year. One woman makes The rest look down. One man becomes a race, Lofty like him, like him perpetual. Or do the other days enrich the one? And is the queen humble as she seems to be, The charitable majesty of her whole kin? The bristling soldier, weather-foxed, who looms In the sunshine is a filial form and one Of the land’s children, easily born, its flesh, Not fustian. The more than casual blue Contains the year and other years and hymns And people, without souvenir. The day Enriches the year, not as embellishment. Stripped of remembrance, it displays its strength— The youth, the vital son, the heroic power.

Comfort ye. I promise no posting from Bonnie Bobbie Burns.

IV One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene. There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye And the secondary senses of the ear Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs, Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds With nothing else compounded, carried full, Pure rhetoric of a language without words. Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees And mingling of colors at a festival.

III It is the natural tower of all the world, The point of survey, green’s green apogee, But a tower more precious than the view beyond, A point of survey squatting like a throne, Axis of everything, green’s apogee And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns. It is the mountain on which the tower stands, It is the final mountain. Here the sun, Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests. This is the refuge that the end creates. It is the old man standing on the tower, Who needs no book. His ruddy ancientness Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased, By an understanding that fulfils his age, By a feeling capable of nothing more.

Stu, dinna worry. No offense taken. Except that I date myself by recognizing what you posted! Here, drink this. You'll feel better... There is something about a Martini, A tingle remarkably pleasant, A yellow, a mellow Martini -- I wish that I had one at present. There is something about a Martini, Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, It is not the vermouth-- I think that perhaps it's the gin. Ogden Nash

II Postpone the anatomy of summer, as The physical pine, the metaphysical pine. Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek. Fix it in an eternal foliage And fill the foliage with arrested peace, Joy of such permanence, right ignorance Of change still possible. Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

Small Town Holds Annual Gay Shame Parade GRAND PLAINS, NE—A tight-knit rural Midwestern farming community commemorated the demonization of homosexuality Sunday with its annual Gay Shame Parade, a three-decade-old tradition that has become a cornerstone of the town's cultural identity. ... http://www.theonion.com/content/news/small...nnual_gay_shame

Here in New England, at least, summer hardly gets underway before it surprises you how far spent it is. Like the hour, evening, week with a beautiful other; like so much else. Heaving on through middle age, I get more and more solace, of a sort, from what follows. Perhaps it could also stand as elegy for escorts we knew who left the world too soon. If this is too little, too much, or out of place here, pass over it. Credences of Summer Wallace Stevens I Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered And spring’s infuriations over and a long way To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble. Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers. The fidgets of remembrance come to this. This is the last day of a certain year Beyond which there is nothing left of time. It comes to this and the imagination’s life. There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt And this must comfort the heart’s core against Its false disasters—these fathers standing round, These mothers touching, speaking, being near, These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.