POETS Day! John Skelton, Cyndi Lauper, and Phonies

Photo by Rene Sears, in the park, with a pixel

I’m sure you’ve heard that there are only nine shopping days left until Christmas. I’m acutely aware, kept up to date by radio, tv, and internet. If I somehow managed to avoid all those electronic reminders, there’s the traffic. There’s no correct lane switching strategy with an army of Amazon vans suffocating every intersection and left averse UPS trucks double parked three to a block. Fed Ex drivers like to park in the median. Maybe they train in Philadelphia.

We let the holidays get hectic. It’s commercial and too often anxiety reigns. “Do I have a present for Dad?” “What do I get my sister?” The buildup was already an ordeal and then advertisers got shifty and started using “gift” as a verb. What gets lost in all of this is what’s important: that there are only three Fridays left to lie, scheme, and dissemble in 2023.

Carpe diebus. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. This is the last one before your penultimate chance of the year. Don’t let the weekend just happen. Be an instigator. Fake a cough, arrange an “emergency call.” Whatever you have to do. Start your weekend on your terms and slip out a few hours before The Man™ deigns to give leave. Have a ball, but try to fit in a few minutes for a little verse. It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.

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“I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton.” – The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis

There is a park across the street from my house. It runs along Shades Creek, a feeder to the Cahaba River and part of the watershed that provides drinking water for the Birmingham area. That’s terrifying considering how much trash we get from upstream.

It’s almost all fast-food stuff: Styrofoam containers, plastic bags, paper bags, and napkins of all colors and sizes. Sometimes it can be pretty to see a flash of crimson against the kudzu on the far bank. That’s from a distance. The prettiness fades fast when the crimson turns out to be a Solo cup.

Ours is a walking park. At all the hours you’d suspect we have dog walkers and constitutionalists. Joggers too. Bike riders swarm to our neighborhood but they keep to the streets. What we don’t see often are picnickers. All those food containers are from upstream agitators. People that frequent our park tend to be residents and as such keep the area clean.

There are three access points with parking. One is the end of my road. It dead ends into a grassy spread with no flourish. Just road then no road. The other two are circles jutting into a large rhombus of a field. You can see one from the other. They’re about one hundred yards apart with a drainage ditch in between. This morning there was a red Camry (I think) in the ditch.

At some point during the day the car was extricated. It wasn’t towed. There’s a piece of yellow nylon strap tied around one of the trees. A neighbor said a couple were using a come along (I heard that name for a tool for the first time today and I love it) to no avail. You can see in the grass where a second car was brought in to pull the first out. The tracks were narrow, as if it were a Camry on Camry affair.

My wife and I were poking around the scene like a CSI team with another woman from the neighborhood. The other woman was speculating that maybe the driver got confused. She actually said it could have been diabetes related disorientation. She owns a bar and should know better. We live in a neighborhood with a park that’s reliably empty at night. When we bought the house I told a friend where we were going to be living. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That was my high-school make out place.” He didn’t say make out.

Some couple got drunk and wanted to find a secluded unlit spot, you can’t see the drainage ditch until you’re right on it, especially at night, and they drove onto the grass. The drop must have surprised the hell out of them. One moment they’re thinking, “Paradise by the dash…” and then “BOOM!”

I was a teenager once so I can sympathize. I’m not a teenager anymore, so I shake my head and laugh at youthful dumbassery even with the expanded capacity for forgiveness and understanding that attends parenthood. I’m a little annoyed too, because I have a proprietary notion of the park and I don’t want people messing it up. The fact that no one was hurt, as far as we can tell, makes me glad for the wreck because it’s funny, but hey… respect the park.

There’s no doubt that we see things differently from different age vantage points. Years ago, I read an NPR interview with the music critic, Greil Marcus. He talks about “Money Changes Everything.” That song is tied to Cyndi Lauper, and for good reason. She’s unfairly dismissed as a creature of her time, but there are a lot of good voices and only a few good singers. She’s both. You get personality in addition to tone. But she only covered “Money.” It was written by Tom Gray of the Atlanta based punk band, The Brains.

Marcus notes that when The Brains play it, the guy’s getting smacked around. A girl hits him with an inadequacy on her way out and he rails against it. Lauper could have played it the same way, but she gave it her own spin. Per Gray,

“Cyndi Lauper could have easily sung the song as the victim, and her man is walking out on her for the same reason. That’s not what she does with it. She is the woman of the song. She is the one who looks over her shoulder and says, “Yeah, right.” She turns it from a man’s lament into a woman’s manifesto: I’m going for what I need, I’m going for what I want and you know, good luck, loser, have a good life. And that’s a brave choice. That’s not the way most people would have approached this song.”

That’s two interpretations of the same song with no changes in the words; both youthful, or at least young adultful. More from Marcus:

“One of the things that’s so fascinating is that, after Cyndi Lauper becomes a huge star and she has all these Top 10 records, one of which is ‘Money Changes Everything,’ then she and Tom Gray continue to record and perform this song over the next 20, 25 years – until, in the end it’s turned into an old folk song. It sounds like an Appalachian ballad and that’s how they record it, that’s how they perform it, with dulcimers of all things. And it becomes even more tragic. It becomes something that’s not about ‘me,’ that’s not about ‘her,’ that’s not about ‘him.’ It becomes, ‘This is the world we have to live in, this is our tragedy, these are the limits on our lives.’ And in our resignation, in our acceptance, there’s something beautiful and almost suicidal. So the song deepens, the song grows. And I would bet in 10 years, Tom Gray and Cyndi Lauper will still be having a battle of the bands over this song.”

Again, the same words, but filtered through years it’s a different song.

I started with a quote from Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. I’d read some of his stuff here and there but I’m such a fan of his father’s writing that when Martin died recently and laudatory remembrances started popping up I decided to start with his first novel and with premeditated neglect enjoy a side project reading through his work.

The Rachel Papers is of the announcement genre where a young male writer follows his protagonist through the last few weeks of adolescence to realization of adulthood. It’s kin to A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald, and Look Homeward Angel by Wolfe. It’s not uncommon for these books to end with the sledgehammer to the head metaphor of the protagonist standing in a cemetery at the end yelling a variation of “My turn!” with the gravestones in the role of mute torch passers.

There’s a time in life where these are important books. I’m not the target demographic anymore but I recognize good writing and have opinions on whose debut is more or less impressive than others. This Side of Paradise was a revelation when I read it in high school. It probably wouldn’t do much for me now, but it did it’s job when it was meant to. On the flip side, Holden Caufield is a little shit. I couldn’t stand The Catcher in the Rye when I read it in eighth grade and a few years ago I made it maybe twenty pages in an abandoned attempt to reread it. Martin Amis’s father Kingsley’s announcement book, Lucky Jim, is either agelessly poignant, or my development isn’t on even the remedial track I think it’s on. Just writing about it makes me want to reread. I might pick it up this weekend.

The Rachel Papers is very good. Amis fils is good with images: a gloomy building has bricks that “reject sunlight” and someone describes his impression of America succinctly as “Nixon, traffic, and in broad daylight.” Those are inexact quotes as I can’t find the pages, but close. It helps that the character is meant to be immature and his transit to adulthood, though he thinks is complete, is never going to happen. Charles Highway is too self-absorbed to grow up. That’s why I thought the quote was interesting. I remember being annoyed by Skelton as a kid and bullshitting my way through a paper about him. The quote struck my curiosity.

What I remembered about John Skelton (1460-1529) was that he had idiosyncrasies of rhyme and meter referred to as Skeltonics. One such idiosyncrasy: he would beat a rhyme into the ground, pulling words from other languages when needed to keep the repetition going. Where many poems’ rhyme scheme can be described in shorthand as aabab or abab or abbacc, Skelton had runs of aaaaaaaa.

Here’s a bit of one of his funnier poems that would never make it past today’s Roald Dahl sensitivity censors, “The Tunning of Elenor Rumming.”

Tell you I chyll,
If that ye wyll
A whyle be styll,
Of a comely gyll
That dwelt on a hyll:
But she is not gryll,
For she is somwhat sage
And well worne in age;
For her visage
It would aswage
A mannes courage.

I made fun of that scheme as a kid. I thought it was ridiculous. Through the years I can look back and see that I was absolutely right, although I love the poem’s malice and humor. My Norton Anthology of English Literature tells me the shorter lines “give the voice of the narrator of the satires a breathless urgency much admired by Robert Graves and W.H. Auden, among other poets,” without a word of mockery for the overkyll, so maybe it bothers me more than it does others. I doubt that, though.

Today’s featured poem is “The Book of Phillip Sparrow.” It begins as a liturgical response and tells of the loss of a beloved pet sparrow from an encounter with a cat named Gyb. It is thought to be based on a real happening where Jane Scrope, a candidate for Holy Orders known to Skelton, lost her pet. As a kid, I thought the poem was very funny. I still do, but now I see a kindness in it.

I thought of it as similar to Pope’s mock-heroic “The Rape of the Lock,” but in this case a mock-dirge; something silly treated seriously for comic effect. It is that, but there are layers. I’m Catholic and as such a dullard when it comes to scripture in comparison with my more bookish protestant friends. I didn’t think of Luke 12:6 on my own: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.” I think he was being real comfort giving validity to her sadness and by extension, a general permission for personal grieving.

Skelton was a priest, but not chaste. He was an early tutor of Henry VIII’s but his priesthood was pre-split. Celibacy was expected though he flaunted his noncompliance. He’s known to have kept a “fair wench” who bore his children and probably wed him in secret. It’s not impossible that “Sparrow” was written to woo Scrope. She had her eyes on a nunnery, but if his consummated vows were no impediment her intended ones wouldn’t have been either – at least not to him. It could also have been a ploy for her widowed mother, Lady Eleanor Windahm. There’s no evidence that I know of that he had intentions towards either, but the thought of him trying to engineer a carriage ride with one of them to a secluded ditchless park amuses me and it’s not impossible. For what it’s worth, I got a sense that he kept company with several ladies. It’s a read between the lines sense, but I can’t shake it.

I read Skelton as a kid and paid as little attention as possible to his “beefy” poetry. I saw the signifiers of his importance. He’s considered the most important poet of his age and was the first and only poet named laureate by Cambridge. I knew of him without an attempt to understand him. When I was younger, he was dated. Now that I’m older, I get that we’re all dated, even if it won’t be apparent for a few years. Verses go in and out of style, change with the times. Unique voices are rare, but they make themselves heard despite constraints of form and break out of whatever period they found themselves in. He deserves a revisit.

It’s easy to skip by Skelton, reduce him to a relic of a time he immortalized and color him not relatable. Too many people have dismissed Cyndi Lauper for the same reasons. Cut that out. Listen to her acoustic stuff or her standards if you need new, but the old albums are great. She’s still relevant.

The Book of Phillip Sparrow
John Skelton (1460-1529)

Pla ce bo,
Who is there, who?
Di le xi,
Dame Margery;
Fa, re, my, my,
Wherfore and why, why?
For the sowle of Philip Sparowe,
That was late slayn at Carowe,
Among the Nones Blake,
For that swete soules sake,
And for all sparowes soules,
Set in our bederolles,
Pater noster qui,
With an Ave Mari,
And with the corner of a Crede,
The more shalbe your mede.

Whan I remembre again
How mi Philyp was slayn,
Never halfe the payne
Was betwene you twayne,
Pyramus and Thesbe,
As than befell to me:
I wept and I wayled,
The tearys downe hayled;
But nothinge it availed
To call Phylyp agayne,
Whom Gyb our cat hath slayne.

Gib, I saye, our cat,
Worrowyd her on that
Which I loved best:
It can not be exprest
My sorowfull hevynesse,
But all without redresse;
For within that stounde,
Halfe slumbrynge, in a swounde
I fell downe to the grounde.

Unneth I kest myne eyes
Towarde the cloudy skyes:
But whan I dyd beholde
My sparow dead and colde,
No creatuer but that wolde
Have rewed upon me,
To behold and se
What hevynesse dyd me pange;
Wherewith my handes I wrange,
That my senaws cracked,
As though I had ben racked,
So payned and so strayned,
That no lyfe wellnye remayned.

I syghed and I sobbed,
For that I was robbed
Of my sparowes lyfe.
O mayden, wydow, and wyfe,
Of what estate ye be,
Of hye or lowe degre,
Great sorowe than ye myght se,
And lerne to wepe at me!
Such paynes dyd me frete,
That myne hert dyd bete,
My vysage pale and dead,
Wanne, and blewe as lead;
The panges of hatefull death
Wellnye had stopped my breath.
Heu, heu, me,
That I am wo for the!
Ad Dominum, cum tribularer, clamavi:
Of God nothynge els crave I
But Phyllypes soule to keep
From the marees deepe
Of Acherontes well,
That is a flode of hell;
And from the great Pluto,
The prynce of endles wo;
And from foule Alecto,
With vysage blacke and blo;
And from Medusa, that mare,
That lyke a fende doth stare;
And from Megeras edders,
For rufflynge of Phillips fethers,
And from her fyry sparklynges,
For burnynge of his wynges;
And from the smokes sowre
Of Proserpinas bowre;
And from the dennes darke,
Wher Cerberus doth barke,
Whom Theseus dyd afraye,
Whom Hercules dyd outraye,
As famous poetes say;
From that hell-hounde,
That lyeth in cheynes bounde,
With gastly hedes thre,
To Jupyter pray we
That Phyllyp preserved may be!
Amen, say ye with me!

Do mi nus,
Helpe nowe, swete Jesus!
Levavi oculos meos in montes:
Wolde God I had Zenophontes,
Or Socrates the wyse
To shew me their devyse,
Moderatly to take
This sorrow that I make
For Phylyp Sparowes sake!
So fervently I shake,
I fele my body quake;
So urgently I am brought
Into carefull thought.
Like Andromach, Hectors wyfe,
Was wery of her lyfe,
Whan she had lost her joye,
Noble Hector of Troye;
In lyke maner also
Encreaseth my dedly wo,
For my sparowe is go.

It was so prety a fole,
It wold syt on a stole,
And lerned after my scole
For to kepe his cut,
With, “Phyllyp, kepe your cut!”

It had a velvet cap,
And wold syt upon my lap,
And seke after small wormes,
And somtyme white bred crommes;
And many tymes and ofte
Betwene my brestes softe
It wolde lye and rest;
It was propre and prest.

Somtyme he wolde gaspe
Whan he sawe a waspe;
A fly or a gnat,
He wolde flye at that;
And prytely he wold pant
Whan he saw an ant;
Lord, how he wolde pry
After the butterfly!
Lorde, how he wolde hop
After the gressop!
And whan I sayd, “Phyp! Phyp!”
Than he wold lepe and skyp,
And take me by the lyp.
Alas, it wyll me slo,
That Phillyp is gone me fro!