And a Happy New Year to You, Too

The year sheds skin and time and cash.
The firedrake burns down to ash
His habitation. The road is clear
All the way home to Happy Year,

Coming soon. With the proper friends,
Nobody notices when it ends,
This derelict calendar. The few,
The consequent, have naught to do

But watch the helicopters tow
The End behind them as they go
West, of course, and into the spring,
Where next year’s lark prepares to sing.

The Importance of Titles

Given the time of year, I'm getting lots of visitors who typed "sentimental christmas poem" into their search engines and were referred to my poem titled, oddly enough, "A Sentimental Christmas Poem." I don't know why I never seem to learn from this sort of thing. I could attach titles like "Taylor Swift Wants to Kiss You" or "End of the World Megan Fox Bikini" or "Guns Don't Kill People, Bullets Do" to pretty much any poem, and people would just think I was whimsical or cutting edge or annoying. But they'd probably arrive here in greater numbers. Don't know if they'd read poems once they'd arrived, though. Probably not.

Poe No More

Today's Quote of the Day on my Google page is from "Ligeia."

In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream – an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

God, I detest Poe. Take a red pencil to this, and all that would remain would be "of," "an," and "the."

"Followers"

is a singularly unattractive term for those who read here, especially for those of us who cut our teeth on "Subterranean Homesick Blues."  I see I lost one recently.  I hope she's in a better place.  There must be one.

Fan mail from some flounder?

Yesterday I had mail from Anonymous (he writes often).  This time he said,

i followed your blog because i think its awesome! lol please follow mine! I think you have a great sense in literature! =) keep it up!

I have a number of comments, all of which, after time to reflect, seem superfluous.

Harlot Read

Tomorrow, when the men pick up the trash,
I'll lose a little more. Sure, I can spare,
God knows, some surplus. Every box and drawer
And cupboard bulges. Still, it took my life
To fill them up, and emptying them out
Means few forget-me-nots for you and yours
To harvest, left behind. As though you would
Endow occasions with irrelevance
Like that, forthcoming in your sequined dress
Of harlot red that 30 years have not
Fashioned for your figure, under the face
You carry off at banquets, marriages,
And Celebrations Of A Life Well Lived.
We used to call them funerals. We burned
Bodies just like the paper we collect.

And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be

I'm reading with great interest a short biographical dictionary of English literature (I believe it's called A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature -- http://archive.org/details/shortbiographica00cousuoft ) written in 1910, just before The Great War.  It's always worth remembering, and being reminded, how literary judgments evolve.  Tennyson is praised in terms we'd reserve for Shakespeare and maybe Milton.  Hawthorne is pronounced the greatest American author of imaginative literature and Melville dismissed in a couple sentences, the biographical lexicographer clearly of the opinion that Typee was his most important work.  Hardy and James and Yeats were still alive, so are not mentioned.  Everyone who knew of the existence of sex, and mentioned it, is downgraded for crudity.  (Of Tom Jones our author says, "All critics are agreed that the book contains passages offensive to delicacy, and some say to morality.")  (Alas, my delicacy was hopelessly offended a long time ago.  I think it was mortally wounded when I tried to read Shelley without smirking.  Of Shelley our biographer says that some of his shorter poems "reach perfection."  Of course he also says that Sir Walter Scott's work, whether considered for quantity or quality, is "marvellous," which, though I am an admirer, seems somewhat overstated.)  Emily D doesn't make the cut.  Our biographer likes Clemens/Twain more than you might expect, though not as much as Fenimore Cooper.

You might think of this book when next you gush -- or rail -- over the latest Idol of the In Crowd.

Be patient, and look elsewhere

I have removed "The Heart of Holy Moses" and "The Complete Henriad" following their acceptance by the Anglo-Aussie online journal Angle.  Someday they'll return.  (If you can't wait, call me, and I'll read them to you over the phone.)

Gol-darned new-fangled contraption

I am sorry to have switched to a newer format, but Blogger wouldn't provide access to all its features unless I did.  So many tekkies confuse change with improvement.

Oh, and thanks

I am grateful to all of you who read here, you know, even if most of you are too wonder-struck to comment.  (The last three comments I received, and rejected, were thinly disguised ads for an editorial service, which is not exactly overwhelming, as compliments go.)  Keats may have found unheard melodies sweeter, but poems like to be read.  They told me so.

If you're following the Dunbar regimen,

you can find me at FB (richard.epstein.3) and Google+ .  There you will find it easy to ask if you can publish my poems.  (Unless you edit The Horst Wesssel Review, the answer is almost certain to be yes.)

Agitprop

Just as a working hypothesis: if your readers are arguing about the paraphrasable content of your poem, your poem is not a success. What's the first thing you think about when you think of, say, "Sunday Morning"? "Death isn't really the mother of beauty -- that's a neo-capitalist platitude, designed to distract labor from its dire plight"? No, I didn't think so. Or "Leda and the Swan" -- "If the campus administrators had issued her a really powerful whistle and properly trained her in Krav Maga, this could all have been avoided"? No?

Like a Requiem

for Michel, in loving memory of his wife, Lili

On mornings when there's no one else to tell
the paper still arrives. The milkman makes
dogs bark at 5 a.m. The sun comes up,
unjustly bright, exactly as you saw
it overspread your coffee and bad news.

The news read round the clock is uniform.
Everyone is dying for more life,
the radio says. The mailman's on his way,
bringing the bills that say how much it costs
to see the sun again. When you were here,

day smelled like mint and sage. Nobody had
the same day you had. Stars took special shapes,
the constellations Ampersand or Love.
Here in our garden grass grows now. The sun
rises, shines some, and passes down the west,

like requiems, which, skillful, sound the same,
whoever writes or plays them. It is not
events which give a form to forms; it was
you, and the grass grows, dogs bark, men drive off
to do what men do when they have no choice.


I wrote this poem on commission from Michel Brochetain, who wanted it for his splendid Russian art site,

www.brochetain.ca

It's worth your time and attention.

as the body is one, and hath many members

As time goes by, my verse seems to become more supple, more flexible, which makes it the mirror image of my physical body. Let us hope that the body of my verse and the body of my body demonstrate that "as the body is one, and hath many members and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body."

from Days of Our Lives

9
That year I saw 3, maybe 4 great men.
I don't recall what pearls they had to drop,
what they looked like, the timbre of their voices
or suits. I talked once, maybe for 3 minutes,
to a lapis-eyed blonde who didn't know my name.
I knew hers, remember every word,
and have concocted several dozen lives
of swift conclusion. All end up inside
her. At 2 a.m. at the Rockybilt counter,
hard and bright as a Hopper, I could drink
coffee, mop up secret sauce, and wonder
how anyone had ever finished James,
if Strether would find Bohemia in Paris,
whether he'd "live" and why anybody cared.

from Days of Our Lives

15
The chemlab flash fired in a sunburst
of eyebrows and steam, the alarms claiming
the end of class, the sprinklers playing April,
and happy singees coughing into the sunlight.
Learning seeps in, pore-wise, or explodes in-
appropriately in the absence of
loco parentals. So under dormers,
beneath graduation gift patchwork quilts,
the love of clear-cut classes multiplies
beyond reason, without regard, ungraded,
and altogether traditionally.
If by the next day the glass is swept up,
the puddles all expunged, the windows boarded,
youth blooms eternal, for a little while.

Google's quote of the day,

from Flannery O'Connor: Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Thank you, Ms O'Connor.

If you have to choose

Well, yes, you can find me on Facebook, and I'll be happy to note your favorite movies and relationship status; but if your time is limited, and you have to choose, visit me here. Here be poems.

Nepotism? Anyone?

If any of you regular readers (you know who you are, all 3 of you) have close family members who are like Carly Simon's father, don't be embarrassed to point them in this direction. I'm like Arlo Guthrie -- "I'm not proud...or tired."

For Dr Feldman: After Martial

Your standards, Burton, force you to condemn
A verse not passed into an apothegm.
Forgive me, will you, if I do not die
To earn the moist approval of your eye.