POETS Day! Alan Seeger

Cover of Above the Trenches by Nathan Hale, illustrated by Nathan Hale

I try to provide whatever help I can in escaping work. Not always a plan, but at the very least a little encouragement. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday! Don’t translate desire into action and then it’s poets day; just another Friday. I don’t know how useful today’s opening will be towards that end for most.

Have you considered calling in drunk?

In ‘98 I worked with a bartender named Chris. He was as direct in conversation as you can get without coming across as rude. He went right up to that line with rapid-fire questions and clipped phrases strung together into long answers. He was a bartender, and a good one, so he had a separate personality for the public, but when not in character he was a conversational Gatling gun.

He was not exactly a manager because he was rumored, and at a later point confirmed, to have a pretty healthy drug habit, but he had some scheduling responsibilities and was the phone guy when higher ups were otherwise occupied.

One day he looked at me after hanging up the phone. “[REDACTED]” he told me. “That whole call was [REDACTED] interspersed with fake [REDACTED] coughs.”

The long and the short of it was that a waitress called in sick at the last minute and we would be shorthanded for lunch. There was no doubt he was right about her cough being [REDACTED]. She took the previous night off to see some band she was psyched to see and a bunch of us, including Chris, grabbed a beer after dinner and saw her walking smashed into the bar as we were walking out.

“I’d have more respect if she’d just told me she was hung over or even drunk,” and he meant it. He went on about restaurant reprobates and late nights. “You’d only get one. And you have to be the first one to do it that shift. Second one: ‘Sorry, we already got a drunk call today. You have to come in.’ Thunderdome. Hesitate and lose.” We all laughed. “Call in drunk twice and you’re fired. Just don’t [REDACTED] lie to me when I know.”

Weeks later, someone actually did it. “No problem. Thanks. See you tomorrow.” Then he went and told management so-and-so called in sick, “sounded pretty bad, there’s something going around. We got it though.”

It’s unlikely that this helps, but I’m here to testify that there is at least one receptive person out there should you try this gambit. Maybe claim things got out of hand at lunch. “Crept right up on me, can’t possibly make it back. Never happen again.” If you work for a guy named Chris, give it a shot.

Whatever the plan, grab the weekend by stepping out prematurely. Seize the half-day. Start off with a little verse on the way out.

***

Back in March I read one of Douglas Murray’s “Things Worth Remembering Series” for The Free Press. This one was “RFK’s Tribute to a Slain Hero,” a recounting of a speech the candidate gave in Indianapolis. When Kennedy got on the plane that day, Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive. When he got off, he wasn’t. It was up to the candidate to tell an unaware audience, predominantly black, that the civil rights leader had been assassinated.

It’s a remarkable article about a remarkable moment. Kennedy ended on a quote from Aeschylus. The audio is at the link to Murray’s column and I recommend it – in fact the whole weekly series on remarkable speeches and passages – highly.

Since, I’ve been on the cusp of spurred-to-memorizing poems. As it stands, I have some Shakespeare, Chaucer, and a second-grade assignment about “One bright day in the middle of the night.” I have a collection of lines and couplets, but I’ve not imprinted a full poem since high school. Last week my mother in-law sent a link to a Washington Post article, “How memorizing poetry can expand your life” by Jacob Brogan. The author found solace in Clive James’s “Sentenced to Life” on a flight to pay a last visit to a dying friend. He memorized it on the plane, by accident as result of rereading and rereading. He’s since spent time learning others. It’s another article I recommend.

I’ve taken up the challenge in earnest, starting with something amusing. I suppose solemn or stirring is more usefully deployed, but I like light, so it’s Kingsley Amis’s short poem “Gulls” to start. While committing, I considered how many poems I’d already have under my belt had I taken literature more seriously in my youth. There were rehearsal dinners un-Marlowed, coy resolves unchallenged by Marvell, bits of Endeavour paused needlessly in search of referents. I don’t know if everybody likes a guy who quotes Ovid but I’d nonetheless like to be a guy who quotes Ovid.

My younger son, 12, was unlucky enough to walk into the room while his father was pondering how youth could have been better spent. I asked him what his favorite poem was as an entrée, expecting either “I don’t know,” or a NSFS limerick. Then I could pounce on his indolent ignorance and teach him about real poetry.

“’I Have a Rendezvous with Death,’ by Alan Seeger,” he responded without breaking pace towards the refrigerator. That threw me a little. He’s a smart kid and I thought I’d find a chink in his armor. I asked, and he told me he found it in Above the Trenches, one of Nathan Hale’s (a descendant) historical comic books from the Hazardous Tales series. Above the Trenches is about pilots in WWI and Seeger, though not a pilot, figures in as a compatriot of several American fliers who started as infantry. This particular book is a favorite of my son’s. His bookshelves/floor are a mish mash of military history and catalogues too young and too old for him. I don’t know which the Nathan Hale series is. In Above he makes “clever Fokker” jokes but introduces pilot Clyde Horace Balsley without a snicker.

I read up on Alan Seeger. He was uncle to folk Legend Pete Seeger, though Alan died three years before the singer was born. He’s honored with street names and on monuments in France as an American who came to that country’s aid, joining the Foreign Legion and stirring through magazine articles sentiment towards his county’s involvement. His poetry was lesser known, and “Rendezvous” was published posthumously, probably written in the winter of 1916, months before his death, cut down in no man’s land at the Battle of the Somme on July 4^th.

Per Wikipedia, his Harvard classmate T.S. Eliot wrote of his poetry in The Egoist magazine,

“Seeger was serious about his work and spent pains over it. The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality. It is high-flown, heavily decorated and solemn, but its solemnity is thorough going, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping.”

Others have commented that he’s too much in thrall of the Romantics. The criticism is couched as a stage that an early demise made final. Poetry Foundation has this from H.F. Armstrong, writing in Dial, about Rupert Brooke, to whom Seeger is often compared, but touching on the American:

“We like to think that if Rupert Brooke had lived he would have eliminated from his final volume some of the unnecessary gaucheries of expression, as well as some of the unworthy compositions which were rushed into print under the impulse of the sudden fame brought about by his death. The same thought occurs in the case of Alan Seeger.”

I haven’t seen enough of Seeger’s poetry to comment as to the aptness of comparisons to Brooke. It’s tempting to throw them together without having read a word; two dashing young poets cut down in WWI, both eager to prove themselves in battle, both enamored of the cause, and both memorialized among the lost best and brightest. Both beautiful, though overwrought, but then they lived dramatically.

Here’s my younger son’s favorite poem. Enjoy, and have a great weekend.

I Have a Rendezvous with Death
Alan Seeger (1888-1916)

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.