The Yak -- Hilaire Belloc

(Poem #688) The Yak As a friend to the children commend me the Yak. You will find it exactly the thing: It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back, Or lead it about with a string. The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet (A desolate region of snow) Has for centuries made it a nursery pet, And surely the Tartar should know! Then tell you papa where the Yak can be got, And if he is awfully rich He will buy you the creature -- or else he will not. (I cannot be positive which.) -- Hilaire Belloc

Another delightful little poem from Belloc's "The Bad Child's Book of
Beasts". While the poem as a whole is certainly worth a read, those of you
familiar with my taste in poetry will be unsurprised to learn that I'm
running it mainly for the ending <g>.

Links:

poem #124 , the previous poem we've run from "The Bad Child's Book of
Beasts", has a biography of Belloc.

We've run several of his other poems too, though no other children's poem -
see [broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html

Afterthought:

A nice companion piece to today's poem would be Frank Jacobs' poem about the
Yak, which ran in Mad. I'll run it sometime if I can dig up a copy.

-martin

Success is counted sweetest -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Ashwin Mahalingam:

(Poem #687) Success is counted sweetest Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of Victory, As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear. -- Emily Dickinson

(1864)

When I first read this poem (in 6th grade) I was cynical enough to scoff at
it. However, like most of us I have 'been there' often enough to know that
the feeling of being 'so near and yet so far', agonizingly brings home the
point that it is in defeat that we truly learn to appreciate victory - so
much so, that the more the defeats, the sweeter the success.
  In a competition of the sort that Dickinson writes about, where there are
winners and losers, to accept a win is to accept the concept of a loss. For
by the very nature of the contest, there can be no definition of a win that
does not imply the definition of the loss. The knowledge of what you have is
a function of the knowledge of what you don't or could have had.
  About the poem itself, I love its simplicity and its brevity. Dickinson
makes her point very quickly and leaves it at that, allowing the reader to
further carry on the train of thought. I also like the way she exaggerates
the ostensible difference between the winner and the loser... the winner is
'the purple host who takes the flag' while the loser is injured, in pain,
dying... partly due to being bested and partly due to the knowledge that
he/she has been bested.

Ashwin.

Nicholas Cricket -- Joyce Maxner

Guest poem submitted by Sally Canzoneri:

(Poem #686) Nicholas Cricket Nicholas Cricket plays every night in the Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band. Moonlight glows and summer wind blows, rabbits come dancing on tip-tippy toes. The music is just so grand! Nicholas Cricket plays with all his might in the Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band. Little Lake shines and Little Stream winds, peep-peep-peepers come dancing through the vines. The music is just so grand! Nicholas Cricket is a banjo picker in the Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band. Crickets play fiddles and guitars with middles curvy and round as a rantum riddle and ducks come dancing ducky-hey-ducky-diddle. The music is just so grand! In the blue blue night when the moon is bright underneath the leaves of summer if we're quiet and quick we can find Cricket Nick and the washboard strummers and the slap-a-spoon drummers and the crick-crick-crickety kazoo hummers. We can dance all night 'til the rosy dawn comes. The music is just so grand! Ladybugs strut and toads sashay, moths and mantises wing their way, snap-turtles swing and grasshoppers sway while Nick and the crickets just play and play. The music is just so grand! All the Bug-a-Wugs grow sleepy and still and go back with the moonlight under the hill. Back to the trees the peepers pop, back to the hollow the rabbits hop, back to the willows the weary ducks waddle and back to our beds our tired legs toddle to dream as Little Stream winds its way into tomorrow. The music was just so grand! The music was just so grand! The music was just so grand! -- Joyce Maxner

"Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey" put me in mind of "Nicholas Cricket", a poem that
also celebrates the joys of an all night jazz session. The poem is the text
of a children's book with wonderful illustrations by William Joyce, but the
poem can stand on its own. Joyce's illustrations have the look of one of
those elegant thirties movies, with the band playing in the kind of night
club Nick and Nora Charles would frequent.

I grew up in rural Vermont where the summer nights are full of the sounds of
insects and animals.  Part of what was so delightful about the nights in a
place like that is the sense that a wonderful show is going on out there in
the night, and that you can sneak in on the performance if you sit still and
listen.  Maxner captures that, as well as the delight of being swept up in a
great jam session.

I don't know more about Maxner, other than this book.  Like all really good
"picture books" this one is as enjoyable for adults as it is for children
and is one that you can read aloud over and over without growing tired of
it.

Sally Canzoneri.

The Old Ships -- James Elroy Flecker

Guest poem submitted by Aparna:

(Poem #685) The Old Ships I have seen old ships like swans asleep Beyond the village which men call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those ships were certainly so old Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green, Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold. But I have seen, Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn And image tumbed on a rose-swept bay, A drowsy ship of some yet older day; And, wonder's breath indrawn, Thought I - who knows - who knows - but in that same (Fished up beyond Ææa, patched up new - Stern painted brighter blue -) That talkative, bald-headed seaman came (Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar) From Troy's doom-crimson shore, And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course. It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows? - And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain To see the mast burst open with a rose, And the whole deck put on its leaves again. -- James Elroy Flecker

The first time I read any Flecker was in the preface to M.M. Kaye's "The Far
Pavilions"... those lovely lines from the The Golden Journey to Samarkand
beginning, "We are the pilgrims Master..."  After I dug up and read the
whole poem, the enchantment was complete and Flecker became and remains one
of my favourite poets.

What I love about this particular poem is the _colours_ I associate with it
...it's replete, drenched with all the richness and colour and patterns I
would expect from a place that sounds as beautiful as Cyprus itself -- "
dipping deep for Famagusta and the hidden sun..."  -- just saying
"Famagusta" out aloud would be enough! Or that amazing juxtaposition of
images ..."questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges..." - absolutely lovely.

Despite everything I still think that "Golden Journey" is the best Flecker
I've read. Besides I might be biased but Samarkand (like caravanserai, as
Martin pointed out some time ago) is one of those words that has loveliness
and dust and distance and magic in every syllable so... :-)

Aparna.

[Biography]

James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) was born in London on November 5, 1884. His
death in 1915 at the age of thirty was "unquestionably the greatest
premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of
Keats" (Macdonald, 1924). The eldest son of the Rev. W. H. Flecker,
Headmaster of Dean Close School, Flecker attended Trinity College, Oxford,
and also Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied oriental languages in
preparation for a consular career. From 1910 to 1913 he held a series of
minor consular posts in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Beirut, and these
appointments reinforced his life-long love for the Mediterranean and the
Middle East. Flecker's health was not robust (he had been diagnosed with
tuberculosis in 1910 shortly after he entered the consular service) and he
was forced to take frequent leaves of absence from his posts, sometimes to
return to England and sometimes to visit sanatoria in Switzerland. He died
in Davos, Switzerland, on January 3, 1915, and is buried in Cheltenham,
England, at the foot of the Cotswold Hills. His grave is marked with a
granite cross inscribed with the poet's own words: "O Lord, restore his
realm to the dreamer." "Flecker had a splendor and breadth of vision
unmatched among young English poets of his time" (Philadelphia North
American). His writings include poetry, short stories, non-fiction prose,
and two plays that were published posthumously. Though sometimes grouped
chronologically with the Georgian poets, Flecker's real literary affinity is
with the French Parnassian school. [Georgian poets are early
twentieth-century poets like Rupert Brooke or W.H. Davies/Flecker but I have
no idea what the French Parnassian school is. Could anyone elucidate? -
Aparna]

     -- http://www1.arcs.ac.at/users/wk/fairway/flecker.html

The Poets' Corner has some stuff from Flecker at
[broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/gp2_5.html

and there's a photograph at the University of Toronto site
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/flecker.html

[thomas adds]

Aparna suggested revisiting the Silk Road theme which I had mentioned in
yesterday's post; you can read all the poems of the original theme at the
Minstrels website, http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/.

Specifically,

Poem #504 - Li Po, "About Tu Fu"
Poem #506 - Christopher Marlowe, "Lament for Zenocrate"
Poem #509 - James Elroy Flecker, "The Golden Road to Samarkand"
Poem #513 - Jalaluddin Rumi, "The Tavern"
Poem #515 - Robert Graves, "The Persian Version"
Poem #518 - James Elroy Flecker, "The Gates of Damascus"
Poem #522 - Constantine Cavafy, "In Harbor"
Poem #526 - Robert Browning, "A Toccata of Galuppi's"

And in response to Aparna's query:

"Parnassian - French PARNASSIEN, member of a group of 19th-century French
poets headed by Leconte de Lisle, who stressed restraint, objectivity,
technical perfection, and precise description as a reaction against the
emotionalism and verbal imprecision of the Romantics. The poetic movement
led by the Parnassians that resulted in experimentation with metres and
verse forms and the revival of the sonnet paralleled the trend toward
Realism in drama and the novel that became evident in the late 19th century.
Initially taking their themes from contemporary society, the Parnassians
later turned to the mythology, epics, and sagas of exotic lands and past
civilizations, notably India and ancient Greece, for inspiration. The
Parnassians derived their name from the anthology to which they contributed:
Le Parnasse Contemporain (3 vol., 1866, 1871, 1876), edited by Louis-Xavier
de Ricard and Catulle Mendès and published by Alphonse Lemerre. Their
principles, though, had been formulated earlier in Théophile Gautier's
preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), which expounded the theory of art
for art's sake, in Leconte de Lisle's preface to his Poèmes antiques (1852),
and in La Revue Fantaisiste (1860), founded by Mendès. Gautier's Émaux et
camées (1852), a collection of carefully worked, formally perfect poems,
pointed to a new conception of poetry and influenced the works of major
Parnassians such as Albert Glatigny, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée,
Léon Dierx, and José Maria de Heredia. Heredia, the most representative of
the group, looked for precise details, double rhymes, sonorous words, and
exotic names, and concentrated on making the 14th line of his sonnets the
most striking.

The influence of the Parnassians was felt throughout Europe and was
particularly evident in the Modernist movement of Spain and Portugal and in
the Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium) movement. In the late 19th century a new
generation of poets, the Symbolists, followers of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul
Verlaine, themselves Parnassians in their youth, broke away from precise
description in search of an art of nuance and musical suggestion."

     -- EB

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey -- Hayden Carruth

My thanks to Rajat Sharma for introducing me to this poem...

(Poem #684) Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren't we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don't say a word, don't tell a soul, they wouldn't understand, they couldn't, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight. -- Hayden Carruth

There's nothing, absolutely _nothing_, like the excitement of a good jazz
performance... Carruth does a wonderful job of capturing both the magic of
the show, and the harshness of the setting [1]. And in a strange, almost
mystical way, the former redeems the latter, leaving the speaker, his fellow
musicians, and the audience in a state of exaltation, as it were...

thomas.

[Biography]

Hayden Carruth was born on August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and
was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the
University of Chicago. For many years, Carruth lived in northern Vermont. He
now lives in upstate New York, where until recently he taught in the
Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. Noted for the
breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the
blues, Carruth has published twenty-nine books, chiefly of poetry but also a
novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies. His most recent books
are Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays (Copper Canyon press, 1998);
Selected Essays & Reviews; Collected Longer Poems; Collected Shorter Poems,
1946-1991 (awarded the National Book Critics' Circle Award); and Scrambled
Eggs and Whiskey (1996), which won the National Book Award for Poetry.

Informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility,
many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of
northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship. He has been editor
of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and, for 20 years, an advisory editor
of The Hudson Review. Carruth has received fellowships from the Bollingen
Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the
Arts, and a 1995 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has been presented with the
Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's
Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize,
among many others.

        -- The Academy of American Poets,
[broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=236
(The above website also has links to several other Carruth poems).

[Links]

Here's an essay on Carruth's life and his poetry:
[broken link] http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/olv3n2.html#carruth

Adrian Mitchell's wonderfully laidback "Jimmy Giuffre Plays 'The Easy Way'"
is both very different from today's poem, and startlingly alike; read it at
poem #337