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Vivo a vida como os poetas,
com sofreguidão.
Ao amor segue-se o ódio,
à raiva a paixão.
A alegria casa com a revolta
e o desalento dá a mão à felicidade.
Em cada dia nasce
uma nova esperança,
Em cada olhar teu, um sorriso,
uma ternura, um bem querer
que nunca se esgota.
A tua prisão é a minha liberdade
e assim, só assim, sou feliz!
European Passenger Services (EPS) Class 92, 92 045 "Chaucer" works a Transfesa intermodal service through Willesden Junction back in May 1999.
With the Nightstar (European sleeper) project dead in the water, the seven EPS 92s were being used and maintained as part of the shared pool of all 46 Class 92s by EWS.
However, the seven EPS 92s (including 92045 which had only been introduced in January 1996) were stored in late April 2001 when EPS could not find a buyer for them. Although they were bought by Europorte in 2007 - and subsequently transferred to GB Railfreight in 2014 - 045 (along with three of the other ex-EPS locos 021, 040 and 046) have not worked since.
All four are now spares donors for the remainder of the GBRf 92 fleet at the Brush works in Loughborough and will be very lucky to see service again.
(Unknown photographer. Scanned from print.)
Care to guess the age ?
....."It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere * :
.....A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night ;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be. "
..........Ben Jonson..... ( 1572 - 1637 )
.....British dramatist, poet.
..........' The Complete Poems. '
.....* sere = withered.
Lewis Martin Pederson, Bar U Ranch resident cowboy poet.
O Lord; Our Great Creator
We thank you for this ranch
we're grateful for the foothills
where the sparkling waters branch
The Poets Lunch,
Wine with grapes,
Empty bottles tossed aside,
Visions seen and lost,
Time goes very quickly,
The critics stop and stare,
The poets know when to stop,
At least thinks so,
No one can tell them what to do,
Nor write,
Least of all what to have for lunch,
The poets do many things out side the norm,
The poets are a one way street onto themselves,
The poets think they shall live forever,
The poets over emphasize their importance,
The poets think their words are special,
The poets mind can be their greatest enemy,
Leading them on a collision course with reality,
The poets dont have rules,
The poets try to fit in,
The poets seem to think,
They always know it,
The poets are full of wit,
The poets because of their superego shall soon end up in the pit,
So drink your merry lunches of words,
Talk your words of wisdom ,
Delude yourself with grandeur ,
For today's lunch may be your last.
Worry not,
At least you can be called a Poet!
Steve. H.
Prathibha Nandakumar is a poet, journalist, film-maker, translator and playwright. She has 21 books to her credit, including five books of poetry. Her awards include the Karnataka State Sahitya Akademi Award in 2000 and the Mahadevi Verma Kavya Samman in 2003. She participated in Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2018.
Hi everyone todays painting is called (The Poet In The Park)18x24in. inspired by a friend who I consider a great poet,the funny thing is when just taking a simple walk with a poet they have a way of seeing things that the non poet would just walk by without paying any attention, this isn't a jab at the non- poets out there, because I'm no poet myself believe me, but I enjoy the company of poets and writers more than any other artists, probably because its a craft I love very much, but cant do myself, its like watching a gymnast doing everything they do, you have to admire the skill behind the craft or art,so if you want a new adventure make a friend with a poet and have your eyes and mind opened like never before, and you don't even need any drugs, wow I just thought of something how about a poet on drugs? haha take care steve. p.s. if you cant see the poet the painting has a note to where he is at.
Tampa Bay Area Spoken Word Poet
Tampa Area Strobist Meet-up # 1 - Ybor
Cam left - 285hv with 12in snoot pointed at guitar body @ 1/8
Cam right - 285hv w 6in DIY straws grid pointed at face @ 1/8
Cam right - sb-600 bare pointed at tag on wall @ 1/32
cybersync triggers
This is a Magic Lantern slide dating from the late 1880s showing the Coronation Chair in St. Edward the Confessor’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey. By the side of the chair are the seven-foot-long, two handed sword and the leather covered shield of King Edward III. The Coronation chair was made around 1300 to accommodate the “Stone of Scone” or the “Stone of Destiny”. The stone is a rectangular piece of red sandstone weighing 4cwt, it was the stone on which the Kings of Scotland had been crowned at Scone Palace near Perth. In 1296 King Edward I removed the stone to Westminster Abbey where it was placed under the seat of the chair. All British Monarchs beginning with King Edward II have since been crowned sitting in the Coronation Chair. The chair led a fairly uneventful “existence”, various bits fell off, were appropriated or damaged over the centuries. It doesn’t seem to be in good condition judging by the photograph. In June 1914 a militant Suffragette placed a bomb packed with nuts and bolts behind the chair, it was early evening and there were not many visitors. The bomb exploded tearing off one of the arms and damaging the back of the chair and surrounding panelling in the chapel, it was clearly meant to maim and kill. No persons were arrested except for two Danish ladies who were in the Abbey at the time of the explosion and who could not speak English, they were quickly released. At 6am on Christmas day 1950 the Westminster Abbey night watchman discovered that the “Stone of Scone” was missing from its place in the Coronation Chair. The stone had been stolen by four Scottish students with Scottish Nationalist sympathies a couple of whom had dragged the stone to the Poet’s Corner entrance and a waiting car, damaging the stone in the process. Despite a Police search and the closing of the border between England and Scotland, the first time in 400 years, there was no trace of the stone or the culprits until it was deposited at Arbroath Abbey on 11th April 1951. The stone was quickly returned to Westminster Abbey and reinstalled in the chair. The authorities discovered the identities of the four students but it was decided to take no action about what was called an act of “Vulgar Vandalism”. This is the bit where I come in, On Thursday 5th September 1974 I was on night duty and on foot patrol not far from the Abbey when a call came over the radio that the Westminster Abbey alarm had gone off, to be honest the alarm was always going off and was always a false alarm, mice or wind or whatever but on this occasion, it was the real thing. The officers first on the scene entered the Abbey and found David Carmichael-Stewart, a 24-year-old labourer who claimed to be three quarters Scottish, halfway to the exit in Poet’s Corner with the “Stone of Scone” and a homemade trolley which had collapsed under the weight of the 4cwt stone. I spent a few hours securing my part of the perimeter of the Abbey whilst it was searched for accomplices, but he was on his own. I always remember that after this the Abbey alarm still went off at regular intervals and I was always amazed that the car which usually got there first was the City of London area car, they had BMWs at the time and the Met didn’t. Carmichael-Stewart appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court on Tuesday 22nd October and pleaded guilty to Criminal Damage for which he was given a three-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £150.00 compensation and £75.00 costs. He also apologised to the court for his actions. In 1996 the “Stone of Scone” was returned to Scotland by John Major’s Government in response to continuing Scottish pressure for some sort of devolution which eventually came after Labour was elected in 1997. The stone is exhibited in Edinburgh Castle and will return to Westminster Abbey at the next Monarch’s Coronation. The Sword and Shield can now be seen in the brand-new Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey.
The poet, short story writer and activist for peace and justice, Grace Paley, died at home on August 22, 2007, at the age of 84.
Grace Paley (left with megaphone) and Gloria Steinem (center), writers and feminists, lead a demonstration in NYC in support of the brave women of Iran, who risked their lives to demand their rights during the 1979 revolution. This photo appears in Lilly Rivlin's film. "Grace Paley:Collected Shorts."
how do I phrase
we are an illusion
on the surface
a long winding path
from here to eternity
we embrace ...
by God's grace ..
stolen dreams we chase
what we lost we can't replace
gone without a trace ..
#beggarpoet
digitally defaced
Portrait of Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, ca. 1843.
Questions? Ask a Schlesinger Librarian
This is the Warrior Poet, a cocktail created by Tyson Buhler for Death & Co in 2014 and published in Death & Co Welcome Home in 2021. Complementary flavor pairings, like color theory, are opposite from each other, but go well together. The standout flavor pairing in this cocktail is a complementary combination of coconut and celery, which didn't make sense when I first read the recipe. That changed after I tried it out. The pairing works in the same way the vegetables like bell pepper or celery work well in a thai coconut curry. The core of the cocktail is built like a manhattan, with rye whiskey and sweet vermouth, but the base spirit is split with aquavit. The aquavit naturally pairs well with rye whiskeys and gives some extra depth to the cocktail. It all comes together beautifully as a pleasant sipper with an odd twist that still feels natural.
1 oz rye whiskey (Buhler uses Wild Turkey 101)
1 oz Aquavit Linie
0.75 oz sweet vermouth (Buhler uses Carpano Antica)
0.25 oz Kalani coconut liqueur
1 dash Bitter Truth celery bitters
Combine all of the ingredients into a mixing glass. Add ice and stir until arctic cold. Strain into a chilled coupe glass or Nick & Nora glass. Express a lemon peel of the drink and discard.
© Chase Hoffman Photography. All rights reserved.
Simulating Film agfa vista 800
In 1979 there appeared a book of poetry that puzzled both readers and critics of the time: Purgatory text was titled, making direct reference to Dante's Divine Comedy. On the cover, a photo in black and white showing a close-cheek-the poet Raúl Zurita author with a deep mark as a geological depression, which was finally the self-inflicted burn scar on his face. On the back it read: "And now, Zurita, who shaved and burned makes you the art."
This book was the first step in a project to restore the author's life-his mind, his body, his martyrdom in poetry, in the manner of Antonin Artaud and the tenets of surrealist André Breton in 1924. Abolish Manifestos misnamed contrary, was the slogan of the first vanguards collecting Raúl Zurita, with other poets of the Generation of 1980, as Diego Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz and Carlos Cociña, among others, to build a movement that became known as "neovanguard" or "advanced Scene" and that, finally, was a form of resistance to the totalitarian regime of the time. Perhaps there is no before or after Zurita, but his gesture, literary and artistic, was a radical and transgressive gesture not occurred since 1973.
Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago in 1951 and studied engineering in metal structures in the University Federico Santa María de Valparaíso. It was in this same city where, in the early 1970s, he met Juan Luis Martínez, with whom he developed an intense creative activity. In parallel, he was an active member of the Collective Actions of Art (CADA), which also includes Eltit, Lotty Rossenfeld, Fernando Balcells and Juan Castillo.
The Manuscripts magazine, directed by Cristián Huneeus and edited by Ronald Kay in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Chile, served to support its first publication in 1974: the series "Green Areas". His first two books, Purgatory and Anteparaíso (1982), presented in the opinion of Rodrigo Cánovas, a liberation from repressive codes throughout history have sought to subjugate the language. In Purgatorio, the poet assumes the task of creating an impersonal work, a hybrid between poetic language, the code of mathematical theorems and logical statements, challenging the existential and social reality. To Anteparaíso, meanwhile, reserved Zurita the existential journey, transit pain to glory, the incursion into human anguish, expressed through a poetic innovative product of his free imagination and textual relationships with key works of literature universal, such as that Comedy by Dante Alighieri, prehispanic texts such as the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya tradition or a particular reading of Pablo Neruda's Canto General. In 1983, Raúl Zurita published his essay "Literature, Language and Society", which develops holistic approach to their aesthetic project, which is constantly crossed by these three axes.
Three years later, the raid on the subject of human anguish was intensified in a more collective way Canto her missing love. In it, the author makes us partakers of pain and death, violence and loneliness, reflecting the political context by spanning Chile in 1985. Two years later, takes these motifs in Love Chile, relating this time with the geography of our country.
In 2000, Zurita received the National Prize for Literature. Two years later he began writing Zurita (2011), a work considered by critics specialized as a "literary event". In this book of nearly 800 pages, whose production took ten years Zurita realizes desolation in a poetic story that has as background the hours before the September 11, 1973.
View on the Golfo dei Poeti, looking from Portovenere, Liguria, Italy. The area inspired the poetry of, among others, Shelley and Byron, hence its name. It still is a magic place.
The Poet.
They hinged on his every word.
Trying to find something to throw in him the bowels of the Tower of London.
The idiots didn't realized he was writing fiction.
Well sometimes at least ha,ha.
He played them to the tilt.
So they looked for other ways to put him away.
The more they tried,
the more sleep was lost.
As he slept as a lark.
The poet became famous ,
as the idiots threw up their arms.
We must find something to stop him from writing.
As they stomped their feet.
His words can't be made public,
Because (WE) will be made to look like complete idiots,
and everyone knows we are the powers that be.
This poet is our nemesis that is infecting society.
Would you want (YOUR) future generations to read him?
NO of course not ,
after all what if (HE) inspires other poets to write in this way,
The Tower isn't large enough,
To lock all his clones away.
Then what are WE going to do?
As you can see this poet must be taken care of,
before he takes cares of us!
Steve.D.Hammond.
Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, worked with over sixty A-Level students from Trinity School on a project exploring photography portraits and self-identity in their work. The group visited the 'Picture the Poet' exhibition and then took part in a 'masterclass' with photographer Madeleine Waller, whose work appears in the exhibition.
The group used the portraits on display along with artefacts from the Tullie House collection (chosen to reflect the theme of self-identity) to produce the photographs shown here. The group greatly enjoyed working with a professional photographer and using the objects to inspire their pieces.
Find out more about Picture the Poet:
Jamaican poet, author of the wonder collection of poems - The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.
For more about my drawing and writing, see linktr.ee/Patrick_ten_Brink
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
. . .
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like -"
"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."...
Anyway, I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field or rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
—excerpts from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
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"Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to - there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around."
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
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John Keats
John Keats
John
Please put your scarf on.
Do I go on about my brother's poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes. I go on about my brother's poetry too much. I'm being garrulous. And I care. But my reasons against leaving off multiply like rabbits as I go along. Furthermore, though I am, as I've already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I'll take my oath I'm not now and never have been a merry one; I've mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts. For example, it hasn't just this moment struck me that once I get around to recounting what I know of Seymour himself, I can't expect to leave myself either the space or the required pulse rate or, in a broad but true sense, the inclination to mention his poetry again. At this very instant, alarmingly, while I clutch my own wrist and lecture myself on garrulousness, I may be losing the chance of a lifetime - my last chance, I think, really - to make one final, hoarse, objectionable, sweeping public pronouncement on my brother's rank as an American poet. I mustn't let it slip. Here it is: When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have had only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few. Not overnight, verständlich. Zut, what would would you? It's my guess, my perhaps flagrantly over-considered guess, that the first few waves of reviewers will obliquely condemn his verses by calling them Interesting or Very Interesting, with a tacit or just plain badly articulated declaration, still more damning, that they are rather small, sub-acoustical things that have failed to arrive on the contemporary Western scene with their own built-in transatlantic podium, complete with lectern, drinking glass, and pitcher of iced sea water. Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) And I'm reminded, too, that once when we were boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father's Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes - fools, no. It seemed to him well worth waking me up for, but if I admit that it was (and I do, without reservations), I'll have to concede that if you give even poetry critics enough time, they'll prove themselves unfoolish. To be truthful, it's a thought that comes hard to me, and I'm grateful to be able to push on to something else. I've reached, at long last, the real head of this compulsive and, I'm afraid, occasionally somewhat pustulous disquisition on my brother's poetry. I've seen it coming from the very beginning. I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there - with your enviable golden silence.)
I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour's poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It's regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it's surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of a grace, I don't have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heartshaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I'd say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse's mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can't see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They're naive, they're alive, they're enthusiastic, they're usually less than right, and they're the hope always, I think, of blase or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can't believe I've deserved, I've had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I've taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he's been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I'd written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter's supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw - an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I'm still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I'm still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, a la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson's gentle and effective style, the young man asked me - after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause - if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can't at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour's poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.
It would be absurd to say that most young people's attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet's life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses - most of them seniors, all of them English majors - to quote a line, any line from "Ozymandias," or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote "Frankenstein" and another who drowned herself.* I'm neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don't think I'm even complaining. For if nobody's a fool, then neither am I, and I'm entitled to a non-fool's Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we've all reached, our gusto for the lurid or partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour's hundred and eighty-four poems - a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I've read - is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor's laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I'm having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don't relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.
(How can I record what I've just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I've known in my life.)
—poem and excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Seymour An Introduction
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I was staring, as I remember, directly in front of me, at the back of the driver's neck, which was a relief map of boil scars, when suddenly my jump-seat mate addressed me: "I didn't get a chance to ask you inside. How's that darling mother of yours? Aren't you Dickie Briganza?"
My tongue, at the time of the question, was curled back exploratively as far as the soft palate. I disentangled it, swallowed, and turned to her. She was fifty, or thereabouts, fashionably and tastefully dressed. She was wearing a very heavy pancake makeup. I answered no - that I wasn't.
She narrowed her eyes a trifle at me and said I looked exactly like Celia Briganza's boy. Around the mouth. I tried to show by my expression that it was a mistake anybody could make. Then I went on staring at the back of the driver's neck. The car was silent. I glanced out of the window, for a change of scene.
"How do you like the Army?" Mrs. Silsburn asked. Abruptly, conversationally.
I had a brief coughing spell at that particular instant. When it was over, I turned to her with all available alacrity and said I'd made a lot of buddies. It was a little difficult for me to swivel in her direction, what with the encasement of adhesive tape around my diaphragm.
She nodded. "I think you're all just wonderful," she said, somewhat ambiguously. "Are you a friend of the bride's or the groom's?" she then asked, delicately getting down to brass tacks.
"Well, actually, I'm not exactly a friend of--"
"You'd better not say you're a friend of the groom," the Matron of Honor interrupted me, from the back of the car. "I'd like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that's all."
Mrs. Silsburn turned briefly - but completely - around to smile at the speaker. Then she faced front again. We made the round trip, in fact, almost in unison. Considering that Mrs. Silsburn had turned around for only an instant, the smile she had bestowed on the Matron of Honor was a kind of jump-seat masterpiece. It was vivid enough to express unlimited partisanship with all young people, all over the world, but most particularly with this spirited, outspoken local representative, to whom, perhaps, she had been little more than perfunctorily introduced, if at all.
"Bloodthirsty wench," said a chuckling male voice. And Mrs. Silsburn and I turned around again. It was the Matron of Honor's husband who had spoken up. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He and I briefly exchanged that blank,uncomradely look which, possibly, in the crapulous year of 1942, only an officer and a private could exchange. A first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, he was wearing a very interesting Air Corps pilot's cap - a visored hat with the metal frame removed from inside the crown, which usually conferred on the wearer a certain, presumably desired, intrepid look. In his case, however, the cap didn't begin to fill the bill. It seemed to serve no other purpose than to make my own outsize, regulation headpiece feel rather like a clown's hat that someone had nervously picked out of the incinerator. His face was sallow and, essentially, daunted-looking. He was perspiring with an almost incredible profusion - on his forehead, on his upper lip, and even at the end of his nose - to the point where a salt tablet might have been in order. "I'm married to the bloodthirstiest wench in six counties," he said, addressing Mrs. Silsburn and giving another soft, public chuckle. In automatic deference to his rank, I very nearly chuckled right along with him - a short, inane, stranger's and draftee's chuckle that would clearly signify that I was with him and everyone else in the car, against no one.
"I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "Just two minutes - that's all, brother. Oh, if I could just get my two little hands -"
"All right, now, take it easy, take it easy," her husband said, still with apparently inexhaustible resources of connubial good humor. "Just take it easy. You'll last longer."
Mrs. Silsburn faced around toward the back of the car again, and favored the Matron of Honor with an all but canonized smile. "Did anyone see any of his people at the wedding?" she inquired softly, with just a little emphasis - no more than perfectly genteel - on the personal pronoun.
The Matron of Honor's answer came with toxic volume: "No. They're all out on the West Coast or someplace. I just wish I had."
Her husband's chuckle sounded again. "What wouldja done if you had, honey?" he asked - and winked indiscriminately at me.
"Well, I don't know, but I'd've done something," said the Matron of Honor. The chuckle at her left expanded in volume. "Well, I would have!" she insisted. "I'd've said something to them. I mean. My gosh." She spoke with increasing aplomb, as though perceiving that, cued by her husband, the rest of us within earshot were finding something attractively forthright - spunky - about her sense of justice, however youthful or impractical it might be. "I don't know what I'd have said to them. I probably would have just blabbered something idiotic. But my gosh. Honestly! I just can't stand to see somebody get away with absolute murder. It makes my blood boil." She suspended animation just long enough to be bolstered by a look of simulated empathy from Mrs. Silsburn. Mrs. Silsburn and I were now turned completely, supersociably, around in our jump seats. "I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "You can't just barge through life hurting people's feelings whenever you feel like it."
"I'm afraid I know very little about the young man," Mrs. Silsburn said, softly. "As a matter of fact, I haven't even met him. The first I'd heard that Muriel was even engaged -"
"Nobody's met him," the Matron of Honor said, rather explosively. "I haven't even met him. We had two rehearsals, and both times Muriel's poor father had to take his place, just because his crazy plane couldn't take off. he was supposed to get a hop here last Tuesday night in some crazy Army plane, but it was snowing or something crazy in Colorado, or Arizona, or one of those crazy places, and he didn't get in till one o'clock in the morning, last night. Then - at that insane hour - he calls Muriel on the phone from way out in Long Island or someplace and asks her to meet him in the lobby of some horrible hotel so they can talk." The Matron of Honor shuddered eloquently. "And you know Muriel. She's just darling enought o let anybody and his brother push her around. That's what gripes me. It's always those kind of people that get hurt in the end ... Anyway, so she gets dressed and gets in a cab and sits in some horrible lobby talking with him till quarter to five in the morning." The Matron of Honor released her grip on her gardenia bouquet long enough to raise two clenched fists above her lap. "Ooo, it makes me so mad!" she said.
"What hotel?" I asked the Matron of Honor. "Do you know?" I tried to make my voice sound casual, as though, possibly, my father might be in the hotel business and I took a certain understandable filial interest in where people stopped in New York. In reality, my question meant almost nothing. I was just thinking aloud, more or less. I'd been interested in the fact that my brother had asked his fiancee to meet him in a hotel lobby, rather than at his empty, available apartment. The morality of the invitation was by no means out of character, but it interested me, mildly, nonetheless.
"I don't know which hotel," the Matron of Honor said irritably. "Just some hotel." She stared at me. "Why?" she demanded. "Are you a friend of his?"
There was something distinctly intimidating about her stare. It seemed to come from a one-woman mob, separated only by time and chance from her knitting bag and a splendid view of the guillotine. I've been terrified of mobs, of any kind, all my life. "We were boys together," I answered, all but unintelligibly.
"Well, lucky you!"
"Now, now," said her husband.
"Well, I'm sorry," the Matron of Honor said to him, but addressing all of us. "But you haven't been in a room watching that poor kid cry her eyes out for a solid hour. It's not funny - and don't you forget it. I've heard about grooms getting cold feet, and all that. But you don't do it at the last minute. I mean you don't do it so that you'll embarrass a lot of perfectly nice people half to death and almost break a kid's spirit and everything! If he'd changed his mind, why didn't he write to her and at least break it off like a gentleman, for goodness' sake? Before all the damage was done."
"All right, take it easy, just take it easy," her husband said. His chuckle was still there, but it was sounding a trifle strained.
"Well, I mean it! Why couldn't he write to her and just tell her, like a man, and prevent all this tragedy and everything?" She looked at me, abruptly. "Do you have any idea where he is, by any chance?" she demanded, with metal in her voice. "If you have boyhood friends, you should have some -"
"I just got into New York about two hours ago," I said nervously. Not only the Matron of Honor but her husband and Mrs. Silsburn as well were now staring at me. "So far, I haven't even had a chance to get to a phone." At that point, as I remember, I had a coughing spell. It was genuine enough, but I must say I did very little to suppress it or shorten its duration.
"You had that cough looked at, soldier?" the Lieutenant asked me when I'd come out of it.
At that instant, I had another coughing spell - a perfectly genuine one, oddly enough. I was still turned a sort of half or quarter right in my jump seat, with my body averted just enough toward the front of the car to be able to cough with all due hygienic propriety.
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯
Of all the poets that were so famous in their day, and yet entirely unknown now, surely Edward Fumer is the prime candidate.
Born in Wales in 1862, Fumer's parents were of low birth. His father was a bus conductress, his mother a fisherman. In those days, this kind of gender fluidity was something to hide.
In his biography Edward spoke of the mental difficulties he experienced as each morning his father would don a little black skirt, and his mother both a false beard and a sou'wester, before walking the uncaring streets to their jobs.
Starting work at the age of eleven, as a butcher's boy, the evenings found Fumer scribbling, mostly on walls. It was only later as he discovered the works of Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, that he decided to become a poet.
Words soon began to torrent from his pen, and his mighty epic "Mandylion" was finished as early as 1885. Notice was soon taken of this new young poet, and literary society took him into their collective bosom.
Many a thesis, dissertation and lecture were given on Fumer's work. The enigmatic lines "Hap the may, nine bob buys you a sardine, says our naughty Mary" made little sense at the time, although everyone agreed it was probably deep, and so they could make themselves look clever by discussing it.
The Royal Poets Society brought Fumer to London, where he was suitable fêted.
But it was all a fraud.
Fumer didn't really have a poetic talent at all, he had just been in the right place at the right time. Aware of his own lack of true talent, the strain became too much.
At the young age of fifty two, Fumer ended his own life with the aid of a stereoscope.
He left a note of apology and one final poem:
The poet spins a pretty table
Delicious words, the best he's able
He serves a seeming complex dish,
But really it's the price of fish.
Edward Fumer is buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, where on a quiet night, he can still be heard, turning slowly.
PROYECTO 26 OBRAS DE ARTE
2/26
THE POOR POET. (EL POETA POBRE).
CARL SPITZWEG. 1839.
OLEO SOBRE TELA
MODELO: OMAR DIAZ GUTT
Obra Original: www.wga.hu/art/s/spitzweg/poorpoex.jpg
