As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.
Like this one:
The English Are So Nice, by D.H. Lawrence
The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.
And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know.
They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?
That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.
Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. When Writers Go Weird is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.
Today: That time Carl Sandburg appeared on a game show. And a powerful book publisher was unaware. _________________________
We've covered some truly weird situations with When Writers Go Weird, including guys accidentally killing their wife, another writer faking their own death, and yet another literary visionary trying to stage a military coup. We mean weird when we say weird. So, by those lofty standards, having a world-famous writer appear on a game show is practically amateur hour. The point is, hey, you don't see Jodi Picoult on Jeopardy! much, now do you?
By 1960, the game show What's My Line? was in its tenth year of a 17-year run on CBS and at the height of its popularity. The show's premise was fairly simple. Four B-level celebrity panelists questioned everyday people all in an attempt to guess their occupation. Considering this was the 1950s and '60s, this was about as edgy as television got.
_________________________
"Being 82-years old at the time and hard of hearing, Sandburg appears to have a grand old time...chirping yup! and nope! with a bird-like pitch."
_________________________
In addition to hum-drum everyday jamokes, each week What's My Line? invited mystery celebrities to appear, where the blindfolded panelists guessed the celebrity's identity through a series of questions, all while the guest masked their voice. And those mystery celebrities were huge by any standard. People like Muhammad Ali, Walt Disney, and Better Davis appeared...as did Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Paul Newman...Betty White, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Sir Edmund Hillary. The list went on.
This is exactly what three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg walked into when he appeared on September 11, 1960. Being 82-years old at the time and hard of hearing, Sandburg appears to have a grand old time during his roughly 5-minute segment, chirping yup! and nope! with a bird-like pitch during his failed attempt to thwart people.
(Sandburg's segment doesn't really starts until the 3:08 part of the video, but watch the first three minutes to see how elaborately the panelists introduce one another, all while dressed like MET Gala attendees.)
In the end, panelist Arlene Francis guesses Sandburg out of the blue. None of the panelist's previous questions seemingly whittled down the scope to Sandburg. Yet, somehow--somehow--it appears Francis has psychic visions a carnival swindler would admire, and Carl Sandburg pops in her head. Rii-i-ight.
But wait!
There was one big kicker! (And it's not even Arlene Francis' psychic abilities!) One of the panelists was Bennett Cerf. You're quietly asking yourself right now, "And who the hell is he?" If the name doesn't ring a bell, you might know him by a tiny little publishing company he helped co-found: Random House.
That's right. The co-founder of one of the largest publishing houses ever created was none-too-quick with guessing one of the most famous poets of the 20th century.
Oh, coronavirus. Sorry, Coronavirus-19. Or Corona-19. Or novel coronavirus. Or the mass hysteria gripping the world.
Whatever you call it, people are obsessed with hospital masks, toilet paper (why?), and washing their hands these days. While washing your hands is always a good thing, a little spritz of water doesn't do the trick.
Since health officials for decades have recommended washing your hands for 20-seconds (usually the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday to yourself twice), this led a U.K. teenager named William Gibson to create a website that generates song lyrics to accompany hand-washing posters by the U.K.'s National Health Service:
🎶 I made a little site in 24h that generates hand washing instructions accompanied by lyrics from a song of your choice instantly - check it out!
Washyourlyrics.com simply asks for an artist's name and song title, and it'll populate the hand-washing poster with lyrics timed to the poster's instructions:
— Reduced Shakespeare Company (@reduced) March 3, 2020
Sure, the Reduced Shakespeare Company could've picked a more lighthearted play than Macbeth. But if everyone is lathered up in hysteria, you might as well choose a play where nearly everyone dies.
Beloved children's author Theodor Geisel (aka: Dr. Seuss) would have turned 104 this past Monday. Not the most obvious anniversary to remember, especially since the good doctor died 29 years ago. 50th? 100th? 300th? Nah, let's remember 104th.
But Seuss is still beloved by generations regardless, which led to CNN fishing for some quick web clicks this week where they wrote the briefest bio of the man in rhyme. It was supposed to be cute, as if it was one of his books--but really it's only if Dr. Seuss hit-the-bottle-and-regretted-his-career kind of book. Little tidbits like the following:
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But do you know how it all started? Do you know where it all began? The story of the man who brought the world "Green Eggs and Ham"? No need to sit and worry No — we'll explain it all Just sit back in your chair, relax and Silent that next call
__________
Oh, boy. First of all, they think I'm taking calls? Listen, CNN, you text me if you need me.
Secondly, it's "silence," not "silent." It doesn't even change the number of syllables. Not that CNN was remotely counting syllables with this.
But I digress:
__________
Then Suess, he was approached By the director of a board They needed something new, they said The kids -- they are so bored! So he began to make a book With not too many words Less words, he figured, that might work That's what the kids preferred
__________
"Fewer," not "less." Does CNN ever hire proofreaders or editors for their website? Oh, don't be silly! Proper grammar when writing about books is overrated.
And "the kids"?
__________
The book he made, it had a name "The Cat in the Hat" A blend of rhythms and cartoons A different format That same year, he dropped another "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" A story of an odd green man who's rude and too ambitious
__________
Yeeeah, sorry CNN, but the "The" in "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" is capitalized, as Random House's own book--and the following photo CNN attached to the story--shows:
You literally had the photo on your site, CNN, and still spelled the word incorrectly.
You know what Dr. Seuss would think?
You need to read more children's books.
PS: Lest you wonder why I don't begrudge CNN for their spelling of "The Cat in the Hat," it's because damn near all versions of Random House's editions capitalize every letter of every word in the title. No media outlet, CNN or anyone else, is going to capitalize every letter of every word like they're screaming.
As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.
Like this one:
Words, by Kamala Das
All round me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within... But I tell my self, words
Are a nuisance, beware of them, they
Can be so many things, a
Chasm where running feet must pause, to
Look, a sea with paralyzing waves,
A blast of burning air or,
A knife most willing to cut your best
Friend's throat... Words are a nuisance, but.
They grow on me like leaves on a tree,
They never seem to stop their coming,
From a silence, somewhere deep within...
Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet dogs.
This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their canine companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.
Today: Langston Hughes
This looks like an ad for some off-brand cologne for men, the type that's sold at a suburban mall kiosk, where the bottles say "Tuscany," but the smells say "Tampa."
The old saying is dogs look like their owners. But in this case, what if the dog looks like Langston Hughes' poetry? Lean, stately, and more beautiful than your own?
Reddit user u/est-1913 used The Poetry Foundation's information to create a visual representation of the most common words used in World War One poetry.
Knowing what we know of The Great War, its brutality, its outcome, etc., what's striking is the emotional progression of how the war finds itself represented in language, which u/est-1913 displays in the following graph.
"Love" leads the way in the hopeful beginning stages of the war in 1915. Two years of trench warfare later, and "mud" dominates poems by 1917.
In the decade following the war, "dead," "died," and "time" become most commonly used.
The creators at Satellite Studio created OpenStreetMap Haiku, a site that whips up a brand new haiku for every single address, neighborhood, town, etc. you place your cursor over.*
As the creative team explains in a blog post:
"Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes fun, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrifying for haiku purists (sorry)."
Inspired by artist Naho Matsuda's EVERY THING EVERY TIME project, which used data points of one city to create short poems, the Satellite Studio team followed suit--albeit on a massive global scale.
The myriad of nearby data points from a selected spot include grocery stores, schools, bus stop locations, etc., to generate the haiku. They even include current weather and time of day, which leads to a potentially new haiku again and again for a selected spot.
Some randomly selected locations checked just now:
Boston, MA @ 28 State Street: A bird in the tree, Meet at Court Street, 1 The blurs of lifetimes
Paris, France @ 3 Avenue de l'Opera: White paint on concrete Quite chilly Dear You
Tokyo, Japan @ JP Tower: Commuting back home A vacant lot Warm air from the subway entrance
Checking local places I personally know, OpenStreetMap Haiku generated a variety of poems suggesting again and again that it was "a sad day."
Either the haiku generator is feeling down in the dumps or I need to reevaluate where I live.
*It works well in populated nations. But some random sparse locations, like Micronesia, weren't worth a haiku according to the map. Let's have a moment of silence for Micronesia then.
As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.
Like this one:
If God Is A Dog, by Erica Jong
If God is a dog drowsing,
contemplating
the quintessential dogginess
of the universe, of the whole
canine race, why are we
uneasy?
No dog I know
would hurl thunderbolts,
or plant plague germs,
or shower us with darts
of pox or gonococci.
No. He lies on his back
awaiting
the cosmic belly rub.
He wags his tail signifying
universal love.
He frolics and cavorts
because he has just
taken a galactic shit
& found it good.
All dogs are blessed;
they live in the now.
But God is all too human.
Somehow we have spelled his name
wrong, got it backward,
aroused his growl.
God drowses
like a lazy old man
bored
with our false
alarms.
As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.
Like this one: Tea Talk, by Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis
'Excuse me if I sit on you,' the cup said to the saucer.
'I fear I've been here all the afternoon.'
'Spare excuses,' said the saucer; 'you have sat on me before, sir.'
'Oh, I'll stir him up directly,' said the spoon.
'Stop your clatter! Stop your clatter!' cried the bread-and-butter platter
'Tittle-tattle!' sneered the tea-pot, with a shrug;
'Now, the most important question is my chronic indigestion.'
'Ah, you've taken too much tannin,' jeered the jug.
'Hey, hey, hey!' sang the silver-plated tray,
'It's time you had your faces washed. I've come to clear away!'
Poetry is meant to be read aloud, but rarely is. As Oscar Wilde once said, "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
So, cutting out the middle man, here is where we'll post famous poets reading their own poetry--the words off the page and in your ears, as they intended. And hopefully nothing is lost in the process.
A farm laborer, a bricklayer, a hotel servant, a coal heaver, a milkman--all positions once held by Carl Sandburg before his writing career began. It's the sort of life nearly impossible to achieve--to simply live--in the 21st century and still become a lauded writer. Whereas today's writers often huddle in academia, a hundred years ago there were some like Sandburg who ventured outside the hallowed halls of ivy and rote memorization and experienced all versions of humanity up close.
After some time hopscotching around careers, Sandburg became a journalist for the Chicago Daily News, which brought him across stories and people unique to each day he worked. Journalism influenced his creative writing in later years, where Sandburg's poetry often took small moments and encounters from the newspaper life and found beauty in the minutia.
At the time of Sandburg's peak popularity, Robert Frost was considered the grand marshal of America's poetry parade. Indeed, despite being nearly the same age as Frost (with both men having nearly identical shocks of white hair atop their heads), Sandburg won the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal in 1952. And while Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes in his lifetime (including one at the age of 73), only Robert Frost won more (four) as a poet. Always the bridesmaid, Sandburg seemingly was content to never be the bride.
While Sandburg was on television routinely in the 1950s, there are few recordings of him actually reading his own work. The video above is audio of him reading the lilting, brief poem of his titled Grass (ignore the visual part of the video, and simply listen). Sandburg added the location of Stalingrad to the poem in this recording, which doesn't appear in the original poem printed below--but it's his poem, so he can see fit to edit it on the fly if he so chooses.
That's right. A farm laborer, a bricklayer, a hotel servant, a coal heaver, a milkman...and folk musician, too.
Grass, by Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.
Like this one:
AAA Vacation Guide, by Ernest Hilbert
“Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.”
—Billboard on Interstate 95
Paris in the Spring, Autumn in New York,
Singers pair a city with a season
As though it belonged to it all year long.
They should try to put a few more to work:
Trenton in winter needs a good reason;
Scranton in summer seems so very wrong.
How about Cincinnati in the spring?
Autumn in Passaic, or in Oakland?
Some cities just lack glamour and appeal,
And there is no point arguing the thing.
No one reads through stacks of brochures to spend
A honeymoon in Allentown. Let’s get real.
Most places on the map, you must believe,
No one wants to visit, only to leave.
PBS as a whole isn't really known as a live wire of humor or excitement. A pledge drive featuring James Taylor or Downton Abbey marathons is about as wild as they get.
Specifically, the nightly PBS NewsHour is as zany as a retirement community in Del Boca Vista after 7pm, which is why it's odd that the newscast decided to hold a haiku contest recently. Lest you think rules were left open-ended, viewers were invited to submit seventeen syllables of creativity regarding healthcare in America.
Indeed...you just reflexively yawned just now at learning that.
Regardless, haiku were submitted, and the NewsHour selected two winners: __________
Can’t pay the M.D.,
no money for surgery,
but I can die free!
–Ronnie Dugger __________
The Health Care Debate
A final insanity
Which no one can win.
–Dorothy Workman __________
Dugger and Workman won nothing for their effort it seems. Not even a PBS tote bag, and those things are handed out like there was an Amazon Prime sale on them.
Instead of having a shuttered eyesore squat in the middle of Brooklyn, two locals decided to place a haiku on an old cinema's marquee to gussy up the joint.
The Pavillion Theater in the Park Slope neighborhood closed last year and has remained dormant while new owners refurbish the property inside. Locals Molly Gross and Drew Pisarra asked the proprietors if, in the meantime, they could add a little artistic flair to the property and place cinematic-themed haiku that relate to Brooklyn on the marquee.
Gross wrote the first haiku, a nod to Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It:
Nola Darling dreams A story in black and white Loving herself first
They've also posted a nod to Saturday Night Fever, with a work by poet Diane Mehta:
Right down to my blood Fast-footed strut this disco Love these teenage feet
"We like the idea of creativity in public spaces," Gross told the New York Post. “This is definitely our biggest project to date. We hope that this inspires people."
Well, it's at least inspired me to start humming the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," so it's got that going for itself.
Nobel Prize Laureate J.M Coetzee was once a computer programmer back in the 1960s who worked on designing the United Kingdom's Atlas 2 supercomputer. (It was the '60s. Picture the cut-and-paste set of the original Star Trek with glowing buttons. That was how snazzy the Atlas 2 was. Just swap out Spock for Coetzee.)
According to University of Texas research, while developing the computer Coetzee spent his evenings placing algorithms into it to select words and create repetitive lines to construct "computer poetry." What we end up with explains the 1960s in a nutshell.
"OUTSPREAD LEAF PLANT THE GRAVEDIGGER"
"GLACIAL TAILOR MIRROR THE LEMNISCATE"
"SAD SPADE JOIN THE ENTROPY"
"FRENETIC TETANUS DEADEN THE DOCUMENT"
No offense, but this computer sounds like it needs a good scotch and a couple of anti-depressants to lighten up. Sylvia Plath comes across as rainbows and sunshine compared to this.
