Home » Poetry: sunsprung bright Julys

Comments

Poetry: sunsprung bright Julys — 15 Comments

  1. Humm….. now that you mention it I am also seeing bright sundresses in many different places. They are so shocking after the endless schlubs in shorts that yesterday I actually complimented one such by saying, “Excuse me, but that is a very nice outfit.”

  2. I am going to shamelessly hijack the thread to tell the only Massachusetts joke I know.

    Governor Peabody (sounding like Peebiddy to my ears) was governor.

    Do you know they named three towns after the governor?

    Peabody, Marblehead and Athol.

  3. I like it! Had never heard of Philip Booth, but get the immediate impression that he had heard of (amongst others) G M Hopkins and Belloc 🙂

  4. Tonanwanda:
    I think that’s a compressed story.
    Gov. Endicott Peabody had four towns named after him; your three and Endicott, MA.

  5. Matthew Zapruder was my favorite young poet for a year or two, but I don’t much like his latest book. So now I prefer Matthew Rohrer.

  6. From time to time you see a–usually accidental–collection of the sunsprung folk. The impact seems to be exponential, as the numbers go up.
    It’s like Brigadoon. How do I get there and how can I stay?
    It’s not just the girls. It’s the carefree–which is to say no problem with money–attitude. No problem with health, obligations, annoying and unkempt friends…..
    What’s not to desire?

  7. Beautiful imagery of another place. I remember NE area from my youth and wish I could return.

    Meanwhile, in Texas, successive 100 degree + days for many weeks, with many days exceeding 107.
    Imagine Hell if you can, radiating heat from pavement and earth alike, intense pressure from the sunlight itself. The overall brightness gives you a headache if you don’t wear sunglasses, and many days the excessive sunlight generates natural ozone to irritate your eyes and sinues.
    For the northern folks, its like when you get into a hot black car where the windows have been rolled up in the bright sun That’s outside, all day and most of the evening. Getting into a car here is an order of magnitude above that. But hey, we got jobs.

    Thank God for AC and swimming pools, cold beer, and the occasional thunderstorm.

    Can’t wait for winter.

  8. “What Narcissism Means to Me” by Tony Hoagland is also right there, but so far that’s the only book by him I’ve seen.

    I don’t appreciate poetry readings much, as performing one’s work easily bleeds into entertaining the crowd, which for instance in poetry slams swiftly devolved into either stand-up comedy or identity-politics chants you had to agree with or risk being killed by the mob. In the world of fiction, some authors have turned book tours into show-biz cult of personality events, Chuck Palahniuk and T.C. Boyle being two of the most wildly popular.

  9. I imagine you still have the dancer’s spring to your step that enables shameless wearing of sundresses.

  10. My daughter was married in Massachusetts (near Cape Cod) in July. This is a lovely post. Just lovely

  11. Less classy, but it reminds me of Gary Snyder, “A spring night in Shokoku-ji”:

    I remember your cool body
    Naked under a summer cotton dress.

  12. Richard Aubrey:

    That is a better telling of the joke, and maybe as a foreigner I did not catch it all.

    Irrelevant, but I worked (really devoted, a lot of time) when Bill Barnstead (a wonderful, wonderful man, who made stills and sterilizers) opposed Tip O’Neill three times in a row.

    Bill did better and better each time.

    Here are three things I learned so well from the experience.

    1) The white working class folks I talked to had a total disconnect between their lives and beliefs, and Tip O’Neil. I had the same conversation hundreds of times with hundreds of lovely, smart, delightful people. Tip was their home guy, period.

    2) Like many black people, many union people have an override which can be addressed if understood, meaning addressing the categorical aspect.

    3) In a great, wonderful, amazing, fascinating story about real life only I know (maybe some others, possibly) Tip O’Neil was not truthfully and legally qualified to run in one of those years.

    Out of utter laziness and lese majeste, he submitted qualifying petitions basically filled out by a small number of people doing the kitchen thing.

    No expert was needed to see it. A child could see the same hands were used mechanically to get over the needed number.

    Bill Barnstead challenged the petitions and hired a smart lawyer named Arthur Levine, who did an excellent job.

    I will omit many details which are fascinating, but the reviewing electoral board denied the challenge.

    The graphologist who testified to the obvious had been qualified as an expert 90 times before, before the same board.

    This time, they found him unqualified. End of challenge.

    There are so many NPR stories out there, great stuff anybody would love to hear, who do not fit the narrative.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>