POETS Day! Robert Service

A woeful POETS Day casts a shadow on my corner of Birmingham. My local library sunk.

It flooded, actually. A pipe burst and they’ve closed to replace drywall and carpeting, and according to a “Letter from the Director,” they won’t re-open for the next few months. The Director advised patrons to hold on to borrowed books until the Mississippi State game (she didn’t phrase it that way exactly, but this being Alabama she could have) rather than return them to other branches; something about storage. I’m stuck with a Longfellow collection I’m not fond of and Lowell’s The Dolphin that I’ve read and enjoyed but am not likely to pick up again anytime soon.

For the librarians – the bearded guy who seems in charge and looks like he’s wearing a turtleneck even when he isn’t, the nice lady whose tattoos suggest a pre-librarian wilding, the young guy who paints his nails black, the persnickety guy who’s mad at me because I returned a book without the bar code it didn’t have when I checked it out but who still suspects I have a drawer full of ill-gotten bar codes in my lair, and the guy who says, without fail, “I’ve been meaning to pick up [fill in poet’s/author’s name] again,” no matter what book I check out – it was looking like an involuntary Piss Off Early, ‘Til September. The most recent missive from the Director states that they’ve found a temporary location so they’ll be back to shushing soon, but the selection of books on hand will be limited. I suspect there will be little poetry to browse.

Other locations in the Jefferson Co. system have poetry sections, but O’Neal, the nearby flooded one, was the repository. It’s where the system stores the bulk of the genre, thankfully on the second floor, and where requests are filled for patrons of other branches. It sounds like the collection will be available, but I’ll have to order what I want which means I’ll have to know what I want. I like wandering around on a Monday looking for a tempting spine. As it is, for the next few months I’ll lean mostly on my collection and internet-available poems. Be ready for revisited poets. If you thought I spent too much time talking about Pound before…

Anyway, do your duty and reap your rewards. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Quietly raise a glass to the involuntary POETS Day librarians while you’re at it.

***

“Verse, not poetry, is what I was after … something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please.”
– Robert Service

“Robert Service wrote the most commercially successful poetry of the century,” wrote someone earnestly on Wikipedia. I’ve seen comparisons between Wikipedia and other references showing that the open and free encyclopedia is wrong, but slightly less often than “respectable sources.” I never know which “respectable sources” are involved or who is conferring respectability, so I think of Wikipedia as a good starting point. If I see something interesting, I’ll look elsewhere to verify it. I’m not going to bother with the above assertion. It may or may not be true, but it’s followed by a bracketed superscript asking “according to whom?” Take it with a granary of salt. He was amazingly successful though.

His first book was Songs of a Sourdough, renamed The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses for U.S. release; “sourdough” being Yukon slang for a grizzled old miner. He earned the equivalent of just over three million in today’s dollars from its sales. Verse paid well. He went on to write successful collection of poetry after successful collection of poetry with a few successful novels thrown in here and there, and got to play a bit part in The Spoilers, a movie starring John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, and Randolph Scott. He did pretty well for himself.

Wikipedia avoided the need for an [according to whom?] by using the word “reputedly” when someone wrote that while living in Paris, Service was “reputedly the wealthiest author living in the city.” He enlisted to fight in World War I but was turned away for medical reasons so he volunteered for the American Red Cross. Since he went straight to being “reputedly the wealthiest author” in Paris after the war ended I think it’s safe to say, and I have no qualms starting the unsourced reputing myself, that he was the wealthiest volunteer stretcher bearer and ambulance driver in the European theater… theatre.

He’s known as a Canadian – The Bard of the Yukon – but he was born in England and raised in Scotland. It wasn’t until he was twenty when he reached his Kipling and Stevenson, both of whom he greatly admired, saturation point that Service took off for the hinterland and then, when he had the means, he flitted around France for the rest of his life. Canadia is where he made his name though, and when the Nazis took Lancieux, Brittany and went “looking specifically for the poet who had mocked Hitler in newspaper verse,” [according to whom?] he had already escaped to safety in Canada. I think you go home when in danger. He’s Canadian.

Critics weren’t kind too him, but he was beloved. Below I’ve printed “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” It’s meant to be told to a crowd, like “Casey at Bat,” a poem Service did recite to applause at taverns and such before he took up writing himself. He came up with the first line, “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;” while walking home one night. He lived in an apartment above the bank he was working for at the time in Whitehorse, Yukon, and when he arrived at his place he was mistaken for a burglar, I suppose of the bank, and shot at. He wasn’t hit and everything was cleared up so, apparently unshaken [according to whom?], he sat up that night and wrote the entirety of his most famous poem.

“The Cremation of Sam McGee” is probably his second-best known work. He composed it in his head on a walk (he took lucrative walks) one night. When he woke up he wrote it down with few changes. As a guy who needs a written list when going to get more than five items at the grocery store, that impresses me.

A lot of his poetry is “Casey at Bat” length. It’s long enough to tell a tale and wander off on a wistful tangent here and there but not so long as to let an audience start to ask where the story’s going and when the presenter plans on wrapping things up. You’ll see what I mean below.

He’s got some good short stuff and some bad. Reading “I Believe” I was about to smack him for being a sonorous bastard composing a Dudley Do-Right anthem to the modern paladin tailored to be snipped into throw pillow sized bites when I got to the end and he made me laugh. That guy’s alright.

Read this one out loud. If you like it, head to Dawson City, Yukon. They used to do recitations in front of Service’s cabin every summer. Now the show’s moved to the Westmont Hotel in Dawson City ([according to whom?] says [citation needed] so I’d call first.) Tell ‘em Babs sent you.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew
Robert Service (1874 – 1958)

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he’d do,
And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that’s known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman’s love —
A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that’s known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
‘Twas the crowning cry of a heart’s despair, and it thrilled you through and through —
“I guess I’ll make it a spread misere”, said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away … then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, “Repay, repay,” and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill … then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;

In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And “Boys,” says he, “you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew.”

Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with “hooch,” and I’m not denying it’s so.
I’m not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —
The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that’s known as Lou.