“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” poem by W. H. Auden, poets.org
This poem has several “movements,” like a symphony. I marvel at its discursive tone — “You were silly like us” — until the last stanza, where it becomes highly stressed and rhymed. That transition, for me, is a punch in the gut, like the organ cutting loose in a cathedral.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Fay Dawne Burmeister was valedictorian the year Boog Jeeters got his lacerated kidney in the game against Horne. When Boog was born, Lonnie wanted to call him Booger. Can you feature that? Booger Jeeters. Reba wouldn’t have it, said no fruit of her womb was gonna be called Booger. She wanted to name the baby Peter after her daddy, but Lonnie said Peter Jeeters sounded like the funny papers. So Boog’s real name is Johnny Mack, but Lonnie called him Boog from day one and that name stuck.
Fay Dawne, I was saying, is too pretty for her own good, but smart. I hope she learns to cook like her momma. Hollie Jean makes the best chicken-fried frankfurters in the world. Says her secret is condensed milk and pancake mix for the batter. She also makes a mean Jello pudding with whipped cream, and puts minimarshmallows in it. Those tricks are hard to teach, you just have to have a feel for the kitchen. I hope Fay Dawne gets it. I don’t care what you say, the way to a man’s heart is not through his fly. That wears off soon enough, and what’s left is his stomach.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Sir Alistair Chichester is in the habit of quaffing two pints of bitter at The Thane of Thoth every afternoon from 3 to 4 p.m., excepting Sundays. Each pint costs a quid tuppence. (Sir Alistair, of course, is indifferent to the pecuniary setback of his libations. He lives, after all, in Chichester Towers on the splendid interest of his ancestral bequeathment.)
Question: Suppose Sir Alistair stoops to charitable giving? He contributes what he otherwise would fritter away in defrayal of his quotidian refreshment to, let us say, Saint Mordred’s Institution for the Afflicted. How much would Sir Alistair’s contribution, accrued in the lapse of thrice a fortnight, permit Miss Primley, the headmistress of Saint Mordred’s, to squander on ready-to-wear apparel?
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
mistery … (Eliot)
“In the figure of the monster from outer space, the freakish, the ugly and the predatory all converge — and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself, and for the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster.” (Sontag)
Naïveté is not under-exposure; it is the desire to be caught underexposed; willful, perverted innocence.
“Evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete.” Sartre
“The aim of formalism is to break up content, to *question* content.” Sontag.
I have lacked a single purpose.
Lawrence said life’s aim is not inert safety.
Singleness of purpose entails sacrifice, ordering.
Gary has ulcers. “I was looking for a solution. I gave up beer. No, I can’t
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Written in the 70s, 70s-9a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
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In trying to render emotion in faces, I find it interesting how similar smiling is to weeping. The difference seems to lie in the eyes more than in the mouth.
“For me, poetry proliferates and flourishes in the intellect’s blind spot. But you have to have the intellect first; you can’t skip that step. I find intelligence to be most interesting when it’s tested — not when it’s challenged, but when we restrain it from being the default mode by which we apprehend the phenomena around us.” (Christina Pugh, “On Ghosts and the Overplus,” Poetry, March 2016)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Dover Beach,” poem by Matthew Arnold, https://www.poetryfoundation.org
Penned by a Victorian on his honeymoon! This is hardly a celebratory poem, but I get from it what the French call a “morne plaisir,” a gloomy satisfaction. Its somber music moves me, and lends assurance that human folly is eternal, as regular and repeating as a Hollywood superhero franchise. Wars have kept coming, do keep coming, and will keep coming as long as waves fling pebbles up the high strand.
I learned touch typing in high school and have used it intensively all my life. My dream is to enable my fingers to find the notes they need on the fretboard as automatically and unconsciously as they find the letters they need on the keyboard. I feel certain that sublimely accomplished guitarists such as Sharon Isbin and Pepe Romero have this facility, cultivated from early youth and refined over a lifetime of practice.
For this Johnny-come-lately to serious musicianship it’s a pipe dream. Nevertheless, something can be achieved. The effort to improve my grasp and practice of music on the guitar provides good thoughts when I go to sleep and a motive for getting up in the morning.
My chief goal in learning the fretboard notes is to become fluently conversant with chord anatomy. When I’m fingering a chord I want to know at a glance which finger is playing what interval of the chord: the first, the third, the fifth, the seventh, a suspended fourth, whatever.
(By the way, in music talk a “suspended” note is one that’s played, not one that’s left out. I can never get used to this. One writer says a suspended note creates melodic “suspense” calling for resolution. I buy that, but I would call it a “suspending” note if I were inventing musicology.)
If I’m building a chord I want to know where my alternatives are. You can’t finger a chord just anywhere. I can perform this analysis now, but more laboriously than I would like. I often drift off into idle song as a result of the mental fatigue incurred, and have to wrench my brain back to the task at hand.
Carlis McElroy was captain of our Lady Stags softball team her senior year. She had to stop pitching when she injured her rotator cuff. Bobbi Gail thinks that’s when she got pregnant with Mardel Spelvin. Mardel’s taking classes in Kinesiology over at Blane. He has a crush on that girl with the dark tan, but Bobby Gail thinks he’ll do right by Carlis when she has the baby. That’s a momma’s prerogative to be optimistic. Plus she’ll make Sturgis get Mardel a Tom’s Toasted Snack route to help pay the bills. Sturgis is fleet manager over there, commutes to the headquarters in Fleck three nights a week. I think it does Bobbi Gail good to get him out from under foot. Shawnetta Murd says Mardel and Carlis are too
young to get married, and I couldn’t agree more. Young parents should not rush into marriage. They need to be ready for that commitment. Shawnetta should know. She tied the knot with D’Havilland when she was eight months with D’EveLynn. Her kids turned out good. D’EveLynn’s at Blane now on a softball scholarship, and D’Antwan is junior varsity this year.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
To a Friend
8-12-2012
“I need to return to it at a quieter time.” Lets have this understanding, though. Never give anything I send or link you to more than a moment of your time unless you really want to. And if you don’t even give it a moment I’ll never know, and it won’t matter! Just delete it and move on! You’re still my hero. (You don’t mind if I steer clear of “heroine,” do you?) I provide links as a courtesy, “just in case,” but I don’t expect you to read all the stuff, or any of it. With all the demands on your time? Good heavens. (Glad to hear about your IT work. Didn’t know you were still consulting.)
I know you don’t need to hear any of this, but I need to say it. I’m trying to be more enunciative and transparent in revealing my expectations (to students, notably) because I think I’ve often fallen short in that respect, instead expecting people to simply know what I think or want. How could they? Conversely, I spend too much time trying to guess why people are acting as they do. Why don’t I just ask? I think real communication becomes difficult (for me) when I think I might have feelings about how they respond. I’m aware at these workshops, when I’m thrown into crowds, how fiercely I keep people at arm’s length, including those I know. I’m polite to a fault, but…Keep your distance! I know I’m considered a snob, or worse. It’s an unconstructive reflex that gravitates against success in the material world.
Back to winteranthology.com. Just so you know: I probably have spent all of four minutes on the site. Sized it up, liked the look, skimmed a few things, and got back to my task, which was to find out a little more about “Flarf poetry.” Four minutes, mind you. Like you, I thought, I need to come back here, but not now. I’m finding it hard to consume much content (online at least) because I’m so preoccupied with creating it. And my consumption is still oriented toward books and magazines, which do absorb a lot of my time. It makes me remember a sardonic comment by a well-respected poet: “It’s easier to write poetry than to read it.” There’s so much truth there. You’re not alone in needing multiple exposures to poems. All serious readers do, including poets. I look for hints and advice all the time about how to read poems. I find it useful to resist the need to paraphrase a poem, and the subsequent tendency to beat myself (or the poem) up if I can’t. The poem already “means” what it says. (Supposedly. Let’s not forget there’s plenty of shall we say unrealized poetry out there! But which is realized and which isn’t? That’s the fascinating aspect of confronting the contemporary. It’s up to you and me to figure out where there’s value and to hone our faculties for that high calling.) I have to try to perceive it on its own level, which implies not vigilance but receptivity, a heightened attentiveness. I end with that outrageously pompous and obscure comment.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)