POETS Day!: Remaindered, the Clive James Fury Edition

This week’s Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday is a meta inverted bit of nonsense whereby I cower in a couch pillow fort hoping to repel the fact that Georgia just outright won that game. It’s Friday and the College Football National Championship Game was on Monday. I’m still not over it. That’s my POETS Day excuse to flee the job and you were lucky to have me at work Tuesday through a fragile Thursday.

POETS Day is meant to be about fun. This is a drowning of sorrows.

So it’s Friday and I’m at my ends, and me and my friends are going to try and twitter ourselves with all manner of reasons and regrets from the cliffs of nihilism, and at least where I live that’s a legitimate excuse for leaving work early. Just go. I get it.

This is about getting out of that deep pit you toil into for a paycheck to commiserate with your fellow college football fans even though you know that your team was in a rebuilding year and had no expectation of even being in the national championship game. They played beyond themselves and everybody should fear the hell out of them because the team is almost entirely made up of freshmen and sophomores and there will be hell to pay for the next few years. You get out of work early for rage this week and hug that pillow of hope. Maybe turn the lights off for me for a bit.

That is unless you root for Georgia or any team that doesn’t rhyme with Balbabama. If you are of that confused and foolish tribe, drink and be merry.

This week’s poem comes from an acclaimed writer and notable Australian, Clive James.

It’s a remarkable work in that it is swimming in contagious hatred. His enemy has been cast to the side as a loser, much like a casual fan might say my precious Crimson Tide has been, but they would be wrong if they took a longer view of things. Dammit. Take the longer view for F… Just have some perspective.

There are a lot of false rhymes and though there is rhythm it’s not standardized or meant to be. If you are looking for such you miss the thrust. This is a joyful expression of hatefulness realized and presented full gloat. This is a glorious middle finger.

I have no idea who the target is, but like Warren Beatty in a Carly Simon refrain, I’m betting that the subject of the poem thinks it’s about them. Good. I’ve an admiration for the mean spirited but more so for the recalcitrant and I hate to think that people would do what I think they should.

This is pencil sharp hatred. It’s the wish of a tweed jacketed much acclaimed gentleman on another tweed jacketed Ivy League malevolence let loose at a seated dinner by putting the latter at a table with a few state school grads and a hopeful spokeswoman/actress/local news anchor or two niece types. It’s the cardigan cruelty that hopes to outlive the victim’s opportunity to give a eulogy in rebuttal. It is in of itself a good. Viciousness is clear. Viciousness is clean.

It’s a perfect hate poem – petty and gleeful. For hate’s sake he’s spitting.

The Book of My Enemy has Been Remaindered

Clive James (1939 – 2019)

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised efforts sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upone one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

​The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yes, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots –
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.’

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error –
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an even should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.