POETS Day! Richard Wilbur

Photograph of the American poets Richard Wilbur and Anselm Hollo at Lahti International Writers’ Reunion, June 1964. Photo from Wikimedia Commons

It’s POETS Day! Once again we have the brilliance of a weekend sans work on the horizon. In the POETS Day spirit of Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday there is a duty to emerge from your shackled insert-Marxist-argument-against-the-owners-of-capital-here position among the exploited and overworked.

God worked for six days and then rested on the seventh. Who do people think you are? You can’t keep up that kind of divine pace. The weekend is made for your human failings and imperfections and if you are willing to embrace the idea that you’re fallen you may be able to cull a few extra hours from an unsuspecting Friday. On reflection I think you’ll see that trying to work God hours is blasphemous. Give Him his due. Take a couple of days off.

Maybe cozy up with a deceiving tempter?

Two pinpricks in the ankle will cost you nothing but a second of minor pain assuming you have some rubbing alcohol and some boiled needles. Maybe an inch apart or even shorter.

You were stepping out of your car at a favorite lunch place and it felt like a hammer hit you in your ankle. The hammer part is important. More often than not when you read an account of someone getting bitten by a poisonous snake the phrase “It felt like I was hit by a hammer,” is in there somewhere.

Now you have a story to tell. Back at work, recount how a snake that was hiding under your car bit you as you got out of the driver’s seat. Be vague. If you live in the South, it was tiny and had various shades of brown but it all happened so quickly that you couldn’t make out a pattern. If you live in the West, it was various shades of grey. If you live in the anti-Ireland of Australia where everything is venomous, you can describe it as any shade that amuses you as ultraviolet to infrared is going to kill you. Just let it be a might have been. Do not identify the beast.

I’ve read about copperhead anti-venom because I live near a creek in Alabama. It’s likely that you will survive a bite without treatment but those rare deaths are from people that look at the $76,000 to $115,000 cycle of antivenom recommended even when it may not be needed. Depending on your insurance, that may be an out of pocket cost. We’re a nation of gamblers. “I’ll probably be okay,” thinks the average American vs. “Sell the house.”

Since there are signs of venomous bites – some of which may not appear immediately for those wrongly taking my writings as medical advice – a lot of people will wait until symptoms arise before heading to the doctor. In the wake of your fake snake bite that’s you. You say you don’t need to go to a doctor. You aren’t even sure the snake was venomous. Everyone is going to tell you to get checked out.

Eventually play it as a compromise. You’ll go home, take it easy, and keep an eye on things. Nobody wants to be the one who said that you needed stay and finish the week’s work only to get an email that for lack of rest and attention your funeral will be on the following Friday. You have slithered out of your commitments. Enjoy the nachos at the bar.

Today’s poet is Richard Wilbur. He replaced Robert Penn Warren as the Poet Laureate of the United States. He won the Pulitzer for poetry twice. He’s likely one of the few people that can, when presented with Wellesley and Wesleyan, tell you which is in Connecticut and which is in Massachusetts, because he taught at both. He also taught at Smith and his alma mater, Amhurst. He attended Harvard graduate school and earned a master’s degree in English. Then he taught at Harvard. Yale gave him an honorary Doctor of letters. The Lyrics he contributed to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide after years of translated works of theater earned New York’s Drama Critic’s Award for Best Musical. He was also inducted to the American Theater Hall of Fame and given the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. That scratches the surface of his accomplishments. I suspect he slept, but I don’t see how.

He’s capable of running on at length, but I’ve been reading a collection of Roger Scruton’s columns and essays and something Mark Dooley, his literary executor, said in the introduction has been stuck in my mind recently. Per Dooley, the “purpose of a newspaper column is neither to argue from first principles not to engage in debate, but to present, as briefly as possible, a distinct point of view.”

Obviously, Scruton was not referring to poetry but the idea “as briefly as possible, a distinct point of view,” engages me as it’s not a talent I possess but should aspire to. Wilbur was capable of that direct succinctness.

Here are two of Wilbur’s works from his Pulitzer winning New and Collected Poems. The style of the first is fairly free and the second formal but in both cases the tone is conversational. I chose them because they both deal with choice and consequence.

The Rule

Richard Wilbur (1921 – 2017)

The oil for extreme unction must be blessed
On Maundy Thursday, so the rule has ruled,
And by the bishop of the diocese.
Does that revolt you? If so, you are free
To squat beneath the deadly manchineel,
That tree of caustic drops and fierce aspersion,
And fancy that you have escaped from mercy.
Things must be done in one way or another.

 

Parable

Ibid

I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and less he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Wither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory lay wherever he might turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse’s shoes

Were Heavy, and he headed for the barn.