WISHFUL THINKING: A SONNET

It's hard to explain exactly why I seem to be writing more in traditional verse forms. I think it had something to do with writing the obituary, and re-reading while I did, my college professor Richard Wilbur, though I can't claim what I do is anything like his work. It seems I sometimes try to stick to the formal structures, and play with rhymes, while trying to keep the verse within the breath and rhythms of speech, rather than strict meter, something of the continuing influence of Charles Olson and his Projective Verse theories which have influenced me since the late Sixties. Or, as Robert Creeley put it, 'form is never more than an extension of content' which I took to mean the poem takes its own form, and you just try to keep up with what it is doing. I could be very self-analytical and point out how the rhyme scheme changes after the first verse, just as the position of the two people in the poem does, but that might ruin someone else's MA thesis.

Anyway, this poem (and another, currently lurking as Wishful Thinking II, but searching for its own title) was structured from pages of notes I found in a notebook from 2001. I gathered a number of putative stanzas, unfinished quatrains, couplets, and even some single lines, and then put them together into two sonnets. This one came from notes all done at the same time and place, and seems to have more structure as a result, but it fell together when I found a couple of lines from 2013 which

fit eerily into those that were heard 12 years earlier.

The song by Ralph Towner is what I was listening to as I wrote the current poem, but I am sure I was playing it in 2001 as well....

WISHFUL THINKING

                                         (after a tune by Ralph Towner)

As you or I might try to say,

This empty night does not require

That we express even slight desire.

A breeze might blow us either way,

Together, apart, it's all the same,

Though you proceed as if they were

Distinct, thus called by different names.

And we still linked, not sliding further

Away. Confusion's just a slight delay

Til things are meant to work out well.

You pay no notice to what I say.

What you say, well, I’ve no way to tell

What a single word means; your eyes are blanks.

You insist someday I'll tell you thanks.

July 2001, St Jean de Luz/2013 Haslemere

BBC WORLD SERVICE WEEKEND: NEWS, SPORTS, ARTS AND I READ A POEM

Happy New Year! I was a guest on the estimable World Service Weekend programme Sunday (30 December), talking about the usual smorgasbord of news and feature items with the great Julian Worricker as host and the Chinese artist and commentator Aowen Jin. It was a fast-moving and very interesting two hours, as it always seems to be; one of the programmes it is really a pleasure to do.

Being the BBC, the programme is almost impossible to listen to easily on the BBC IPlayer, whose radio section has been re-branded 'BBC Sounds', and programmes broken up into nuggets for the archive. For the moment, you can hear our two hours in three slightly-bigger-than-nuggest slices.

The first may be found here although we guests appear after the 0630 bulletin, 27 minutes into the show. At which point I talk about Steve Ditko, Richard Wilbur, and my trip to the bridge from which John Berryman jumped in St. Paul. We then move on to tariffs, to the age of consent in France, my own choice of story--1968 as a bumper year for 50th anniversaries, and that day's upcoming election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The second is here, and covers the hour between 0700 and 0800. The highlight is probably the story of Syrian refugee Hassan al-Kontar, who lived for months in Kuala Lumpur airport, rather than be deported back to Syria. Strangely enough, it was the feel good story the end of the year show really needed.

I talk a bit about sport at the beginning; Colin Kaepernick and a protest different to 1968's (but I should have mentioned very much in synch with Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman in Mexico City in 1968) and much more, including the building of massive cultural centres in Taiwan.

I also get to read my poem 'January Then, February Now', which I discussed in the first segment. I have always enjoyed reading my poems publicly, but I haven't done that very often --the last time was a London Magazine benefit reading ten years ago or so--but this was my first radio broadcast. I've listened back and it sounds good; more importantly, my own evaluation of it makes sense. Many thanks to Julian and to producer Junaid Ahmed for making room for it.

The final half hour, 0800 to 0830, you can link to here.  The major story is the Bangladeshi elections, but sadly no one offered predictions (mine would have been fairly close, both in terms of result and of alleged manipulation of the vote--a topic which would have dragged me back to the American situation, where election fraud is a hugely underreported story, while virtually non-existent voter fraud remains an issue promoted by Republicans and parroted by the major media. I get to switch from sport to a quick analysis of China's growing influence in both 21st and 19th century terms. I was pleased to get that point in.

And finally, there is a piece of humour in church, which allowed me to do my Jesus as standup shtick:
'I'm Jesus, I'm here all the milennium, don't forget to tip your waitress'.

It's a fine show; give it a listen.

IN THE WAKE: A STUDENT POEM

Writing and speaking about Richard Wilbur over the past two weeks, I was drawn to search through my files looking for work I might have done for him. I found this poem, which I wrote in the fall of 1970, which must have been for his verse writing class. I was 19. I seem to have revised it, only slightly each time, in 1976 and 1977, in Montreal, then in Connecticut, and finally after I moved to Britain, and sent it to at least one magazine each time (I can tell by the return addresses; and I used onion-skin paper in those days, remember that?).

I've done a little more revision now, but it's still basically the same poem. I wish I had the copy I submitted to Wilbur, with his comments; it may be in a box somewhere in my brother's attic. I share it because I think one can sense the influence of Wilbur, and I can feel the awkwardness with which I approach rhyme and particularly meter. In The Wake has never appeared in public before...

IN THE WAKE
 

The funeral procession plodded by

in single-file cars,

headlights struggling to be seen

against the morning sun.

In front the hearse, the limousines,

behind them black gave way

to cars in motley disarray

until the line was done.

And down the road a flower-painted

old Volkswagen van,

just-married signs and tied-on shoes,

tin cans and blaring horn,

Chugged past like dawn's cacophony.

I stopped and looked both ways to view

Their circling my boundaries

That sunny summer morn.

Sept-Oct 1970, Middletown

RICHARD WILBUR: MY BBC RADIO 4 LAST WORD ESSAY

Yesterday I mentioned, in the words I spoke at Kevin Cadle's funeral, the Richard Wilbur essay I'd recorded for BBC Radio 4 Last Word; today the piece was broadcast. You can find it here on IPlayer; it runs from 13 mins to 18 minutes into the programme. It was a very clever edit by the programme editor Neil George, who got an extra poem in, the wonderful 'Tywater', as well as created a new link into the lyrics from Candide. It sounds seamless and I'm very pleased with it. I hope it's a worthy tribute. One bit that was lost was my own reading of Wilbur's 'Museum Piece'...maybe I'll post my original script and record that one for it. Until then, Wilbur's readings are beautiful; listen and enjoy. The programme will be broadcast again Sunday evening at 8:30 on Radio 4.

KEVIN CADLE: SAYING GOODBYE

Today was Kevin Cadle's funeral. It was a big service, full of music and video and reminiscence from family and friends that had us combining laughter and sadness the way you hope such events will do. I was honoured to be asked to speak at the service, and I wrote something to fit a 4-5 minute slot. But when I arrived at the church, I saw in the programme that I was scheduled to do a reading of Psalm 23. So I took my script and did a quick edit: removing the stories I was going to tell, so the emphasis would be more serious, and lead to the Psalm.

As the service went on, and people shared their stories, I felt better because mine were not really needed, and there were so many of these touching personal moments we might have gone on all day. I found out all about all sorts of sides of Kevin I hadn't known, Although when Bobby Kinzer, in his Eulogy, mentioned Kev watching Calvin Murphy play basketball at Niagara, he reminded me of something and I inserted it into the speech adlib. Anyway here's what I wrote and said: the bit in bold face is what I wrote in the pew as I cut the story-telling part, which is what's between the brackets at the end:

KEVIN CADLE

Since Kevin died, I've been thinking a lot about synchronicity. The other day I started reading a novel, Inez, by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. The first line went “We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death” and I had to put it down right there, and haven't picked it up since. Kev went so suddenly he didn't have anything to say, but it's been a comfort to my soul to hear so much that everyone else has said. Kevin was so full of life, such fun. You all know that--and it was one of the things you heard from almost everyone who remembered him, from friends and colleagues and fans: the Kevin audiences watched on TV was the same Kevin we knew.

I've told a lot of stories about Kev lately, and I realised that the point of all of them was the same: Kevin touching my serious self, teaching me that 'people gonna do what people gonna do', 'stuff happens' 'it is what it is' and of course exhorting me to 'have a GREAT day!' And making me laugh. Bobby just reminded us of Calvin Murphy; every time Kev and I would discuss or argue or broadcast basketball together, at some point he'd look at me and say, 'remind me how many Murph laid on you in high school?' and I'd stammer and finally say '67 points, but they weren't all on me!'. The last time I saw him we were doing his Sportsheads show, and when we were done I was feeling sentimental and I told Kev how great it felt to be working together again. Kev looked at me and said 'You know what's better? We're still working!' 

I've been thinking a lot about synchronicity. The day Kev died I woke up and discovered that a professor of mine, Richard Wilbur, the second poet laureate of the United States, had died the day before. He was 96, and last week I recorded an essay about him for BBC Radio 4's Last Words. In his late 80s he wrote a poem called This Pleasing Anxious Being, whose title comes from Gray's 'Elegy in A Country Churchyard'—which, given a little poetic license about 'country' is just what we're doing today. In the poem he remembers a holiday dinner when he was a boy, and the action stops while everyone around the table waits

for you to recollect that, while it lived, the past

was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.

In an interview he explained he had only recently discovered there was a past: he thought his life would always be there for him to revisit, only to find now he had to do it in his mind. It was like Thomas Wolfe's saying 'you can't go home again', something both Kev and I, as expats, were aware of.

The poem ends with a drive, in 1928, through a snowstorm, to a Christmas visit. In the back seat, the boy's half-closed sleepy eyes

make out at times the dark hood of the car

plowing the eddied flakes, and might forsee

in good time, the bedstead at whose foot

the world will swim and flicker and be gone.

Synchronicity. Seeing through a child's eyes. Cooking pancakes for my son on New Year's morning two years ago, right after giving me 'pinch, punch first of the month', he asked me 'when we die, the world won't remember us, will they?' I told him that we all have worlds we make around ourselves, where we will be remembered, even when things, like books and poems and articles and show tapes and blogs, have disappeared. And that someday he would tell his children about their grandad they may have never met, and maybe tell them how he learned to make pancakes from me. And he said 'never mind, dad'....

But I do mind. We can't go home again? Kev didn't get to choose his own words? For Kevin Cadle, home is going to be present in all those memories all of us and so many other people share of him, home will be in all those he reached, and touched, made smile, and entertained. I don't have that many close friends. I've just lost one. But wherever my friend is now, I like to think that he is home.

Which leads us to the reading, from the 23rd psalm, and please join in: 

 

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: 

for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies: you anoint my head with oil; 

my cup runs over. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: 

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

-end-

If you're still interested, here are the stories I left out.  They pick up from

'I've told a lot of stories about Kev lately, 

{ but I'll repeat this one cause it's at the root of why we stayed friends for more than 20 years.

Kev and I had been covering World League of American football in the spring. That summer, Sky decided to replace me with Kev as host of the NFL in the fall, and being Sky they didn't bother to tell me. Kev and I had lunch one day and talked mostly about his future. Later, after I'd luckily gone to Channel 5's late night, I bumped into Kev and told him I had no hard feelings; Sky offered him the job and that's fair enough, I just was surprised he hadn't mentioned it to me. 'But I thought they'd told you and you were just being polite and not mentioning it', he said. And then he shook his head and said 'Sky be Sky' and the truth of it (and the pun on BSkyB) made me laugh. It became a catch phrase and I still use it.

We still did NFL Europe together, where I got Cadled (see this post), when Kev would tell you he was going to ask you a certain question, then ask you something completely different, and sit chuckling off camera while you spun your wheels. The best times were when he'd drive me home afterwards, and we'd talk. Sometimes we were even serious. I do tend to stew on things. One time I ended a worry about something by asking rhetorically, why can't they just do the right thing? Kevin burst out laughing. People gonna do what they do, he said. Nothing you can do about it.

My favourite gig with Kev was one he got for me. We did Euroleague basketball for Showtime Sport, each doing solo commentary on one game a week, then doing the Final Four together, my doing play by play and Kev colour. I rarely Cadled him, but I got to set him up to analyse the sport he loved so much and was so knowledgeable about. Kev was a good coach because he was a people person, but he was a great coach because he could also take apart the game} 

I sometimes tell people I'm happy I don't have to work for a living. When I was working with Kev, it certainly never seemed like working. RIP my man. My condolences to his family and friends, and my grateful thanks to Lorraine, his widow, for being asked to be a part of his goodbye.

RIDDLE: A POEM FROM RICHARD WILBUR'S CLASS

I mentioned that I could recall one exercise I did for Richard Wilbur's poetry writing class. This was in the fall of 1970; I was 19, beginning my third year of college, and as I wrote in the previous post, the student strike had convinced me that if I was going to stay in college, I was going to study what I wanted to study. Though I'm not sure this sort of thing was my ultimate goal. If I can find any others from that time which are a bit more, well, you know, I may post them here.

The assignment was to write a riddle in verse.  I was quite pleased when I came up with this one, and if I remember correctly he of course guessed it right away (it ain't hard) but said something nice about the originality of the metaphor, or some such.

I couldn't find a copy of it, but I did find its index card in my files, because it was actually published, in Frank Denton's magazine Ash Wing, in 1977. I hadn't remembered that at all. But I've written it below, from memory. I think I'd get rid of jaundiced in this context and maybe reverse 'around the world' and 'over the top', which I'd originally done writing in logical progression, though the phrases sound better ordered as they are.


RIDDLE

Blood blue yellow yo-yo
What tricks can you do?
Around the world, over the top
And a wicked all-day sleeper too.

RICHARD WILBUR: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

Richard Wilbur, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and America's second Poet Laureate, died last Saturday. My obit of him went up at the Guardian online Tuesday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. I had actually written it quite a while ago, probably about ten years ago, long enough that it was saved in my computer in Microsoft Works! However it didn't require much updating, and I was very happy with what I'd written then.

When I was at Wesleyan, Wilbur was one of the two glamorous figures in the English department. The other was F.D. Reeve (father of the actor Christopher), whose obituary I also wrote, four years ago for the Independent. You can link to that one here. What links the two, apart from their patrician elegance, is Robert Frost and Russia. Reeve was Frost's translator when the older poet went to Russia, Wilbur translated Russians, especially Yevtushenko. But more importantly, Wilbur really was the heir to Frost's position as an American poet. His work has the same precision of language, the same sensitivity to the natural world, the same sense of some sort of moral agency behind it, though crucially I find Wilbur's world-view far less dark and far more approachable in our time than Frost's. I almost see it more in Wilbur's blank verse, and occasional free verse, than in the rhymed poems, but it's certainly there. That he was never able to assume Frost's centrality in America's public arts world speaks more to the changes both in American poetry and American society than it does to Wilbur.

I saw him compared to both Auden and Larkin in some obituaries, and it's easy enough to see why. But he's not as showy with his language as Auden, and he's nowhere near as misanthropic, as presumptively world-weary as Larkin. Somehow it's hard to imagine either of those poets translating Moliere with the playful verve Wilbur managed--I do recommend those to anyone still reading this far!

I was lucky enough to take two courses with Wilbur. One was his basic poetry course, where as I say in the obit, his breakdown of a wide range of poets was stunning: his command of the deeper meaning of words, their roots, their sounds, their usages was comprehensive, and he liked poets who could use words deftly and unusually: Hopkins and Cummings, I recall. I then came back and got into his verse writing course the following year, by which time, after the student strike of 1970, I had decided I should be studying those subjects I wanted to study. Wilbur had been one of the professors most supportive of the strike; I remember cycling round campus with the strike paper the morning his poem 'For The Student Strikers' appeared, hawking it like a newsie with a headline: 'Strike paper! Wilbur Poem! Getcher Wilbur poem here'.  The photo above left shows the documentary film-maker Stephen Talbot leading an anti-war march in Middletown in 1969: if you closely behind him you'll see Wilbur, a few rows back, unprepossessingly marching with the students.

I had published a poem when I was 16, in the New Haven Register, but I should have realised just how big a step a class with him would be. Wilbur was not a touchy-feely kind of teacher, but each assignment came back with thoughtful (and gentle) criticism of my work. I can recall one short exercise I wrote for him, a riddle, and he took great pleasure in guessing it, correctly of course.

At some point after that class, I discovered Charles Olson, a Wesleyan alumnus, and my view of poetry changed completely. I wish I'd been able to start making that leap while I was submitting poems to Wilbur, because his input probably would have spurred me on. But though the style I began to absorb from Olson was very different to Wilbur's I never lost my desire to be able to express myself with a mere fraction of Wilbur's acuity, grace, and precision.

It was a privilege to be able to write Wilbur's obit and note his passing for a British audience. I hope I did him justice. I just wish the paper would occasionally use a younger photo of poets who lived nearly 100 years! The first photo at top right is of the young poet; the one just above to the right is from about the time I was a student at Wesleyan, and how I remember him. RIP

JOHN HOLLANDER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the American poet John Hollander is up at the Guardian online; you can link to it here. Sadly, it appears to have gone up just before Seamus Heaney's death, and being in New Zealand half a day ahead of London, I have no idea of whether it appeared in the paper paper, though I'd imagine Heaney would have preceded it if it wasn't in the Thursday edition. It's a nice synchronicity to see them side by side online; Heaney lacked nothing in working with form, but presented far more emotional dynamism driving his poetry.

It's an interesting photo the Guardian found, one that plays far more to the early part of Hollander's career, a very much New York city, Columbia College kind of shot. Later pictures, such as the one above, were much more the professor of poetry, New England tweedy kind of shots which are more standard these days.

I read a bit of Hollander when I was younger; he was on the advisory board of Wesleyan University Press, as I remember, and at least one of his books was published there, which is how I first encountered his work. His work was far more cerebral than, say, Richard Wilbur's, and Wilbur was the formalist I most admired (not least because I had two classes with him). Sometimes I had the sense of his working out poetry as a puzzle. I should have mentioned that his prose was exceptionally lucid; he was a fine critic.

I was trying to think of a British equivalent of Hollander when I wrote the obit; Geoffrey Hill was the closest I could come, for the formal rigor, the intellectual difficulty, and sometimes the religious overtones, but in the end I didn't think it close enough to mention, except here.

F.D. REEVE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the poet and translator F.D. Reeve, father of the actor Christopher, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. Because I had been at Wesleyan when Reeve was teaching there, I wrote a bit more than I'd been asked. In my researching I found the lists of poetry readings at the Honors College, and saw that I had read with other student poets not long after Reeve had performed as 'the Blue Cat'. Because my friend Seth Davis was in the College of Letters, he knew him well. Seth was kind enough to share his memories with me, thus the piece may give the impression I knew Reeve, which isn't so. Because I over-wrote, little bits were trimmed here and there in the paper. Rather than explain what's gone, I'll just post my copy here. Seth is the student who received an evaluation written in rhyming couplets--among the other differences are my description of the Frost-Krushchev confrontation as 'ill-tempered', my analysis of Richard Wilbur's translations from Russian, and the reference to Reeve's 2005 novel My Sister Life.

F.D. REEVE: POET AND TRANSLATOR

In the early stages of his career, the poet F.D. Reeve, who has died aged 84, found himself best-known as the translator who accompanied Robert Frost on his famous 1962 visit to the Soviet Union, the man in the middle of Frost's ill-tempered showdown with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Years later, having established himself as a poet, novelist, and translator, Reeve would find himself overshadowed again, by his eldest son Christopher, who achieved worldwide fame as the actor playing Superman in the smash 1978 movie hit.

Ironically, Reeve himself had given up acting to pursue poetry. If anything, he was better-looking than his son; I was a student at Wesleyan University when Reeve was a leading light in the inter-disciplinary College of Letters and his poetry was receiving its highest acclaim. Richard Wilbur was the University's poet in residence, and the two shared an almost impossibly handsome patrician elegance. I found that most striking when they performed on campus with the Russian poet Andrei Vozhnesensky, reading translations of his work. Reeve was fluent in Russian; Wilbur didn't speak the language but worked from Reeve's literal translation and his own sense of the intonation, meter and rhyme . The dueling verses were equally thrilling.

Franklin D’Olier Reeve was born in Philadelphia 18 September 1928. His father ran Prudential Financial, and although F.D. often told students his middle name was Delano, after President Roosevelt, D'Olier was his mother's family name. He was educated at the elite Philips Exeter Academy, and then at Princeton, where he studied under the poet and critic R.P. Blackmur, and became entranced with Russian literature after reading Anna Karenina. After graduation he travelled in Europe and worked in the Dakotas harvesting wheat, which would provide the material for his first novel, Red Machines (1968). In 1951, he married Barbara Lamb; Christopher was born in 1952 and a second son, Benjamin in 1953.

Reeve began graduate work at Columbia University, while working as a longshoreman and a jobbing actor. But he quit acting because he said he would have to 'give up too much of my inner self' to continue writing poetry. In 1956, he and Lamb divorced; she took the children to Princeton, and married a stockbroker, while he married a fellow Columbia student, Helen Schmidinger. That marriage also ended in divorce, as did his third, to Ellen Swift. His relationship with Christopher would always be difficult, and didn't improve with the son's fame. In interviews Christopher spoke of resentment toward his father over the bitterness of the marital break-up, and the awkwardness of his shared upbringing.

When F.D. Reeve gave his first public poetry reading, in New York, he was introduced by Blackmur, and shared the stage with Denise Levertov and the priest and future anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan. He received his PhD in 1958, and taught Russian at Columbia, where his first book, a study of Aleksandr Blok, was published in 1962. By then, he'd been selected for one of the first academic exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which led to his selection as Frost's translator. Later he wrote a fine memoir of the trip, Robert Frost in Russia (1964), noting how he used the trip to introduce Frost, and himself, to the younger, more open, generation of Soviet writers.

After returning from Russia in 1962, he moved to Wesleyan, where he taught for 40 years. Originally head of the Russian department, he gave up tenure for an adjunct position in the College of Letters, which allowed him freedom to live and work elsewhere, eventually in Vermont, for parts of the year; particularly at Yale from 1974-86. He was a popular teacher, renowned in my time for his evaluation of one star student's colloquium, written entirely in rhymed couplets. That was his most successful period of writing; between 1968 and 1973 his first two collections of poetry, In The Silent Stones and The Blue Cat were published by major publishers, as were his next three novels, Just Over The Border, The Brother, and White Colours (1973). He would not publish another novel until My Sister Life in 2005.

Reeve translated Turgenev's short novels, and produced two anthologies of Russian drama. His renaissance as a writer was triggered by his move to Vermont, where he settled eventually in Wilmington with his fourth wife, creative writing professor Laura Stevenson. His third book of poetry, Nightway, finally appeared in 1987, followed by an exceptional critical work, White Monk (1989) tying together Dostoevsky and Melville. Between 1992 and 2010 seven more books of poetry appeared from independent presses, as well as a selected poems, A World You Haven't Seen (2001). He wrote two books of short stories based around his working on the Hudson River docks, and translated poetry by Bella Akhmadulina and Leonid Andreyev's 1908 novel Seven Who Were Hanged, which took on added resonance in the age of terrorism. His last published work was the novel Nathaniel Purple (2012) set in rural Vermont.

Reeve died 28 June 2013 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, of complications from diabetes. He is survived by Stevenson, his son from his first marriage, and a son and two daughters from his second. In a 2002 poem, 'Home In Wartime' Reeve wrote:

If I die first, gather the lost years
with the late September apples. At sunset ghost me
beside you on the steps to watch
the tangerine-lavender clouds turn gray.
Go on, go on.

SPEAKING POETIC TRUTH TO POWER: KLEINZAHLER TAKES TIMES

The New York Times said, some months ago, that August Kleinzahler was pugnacious, had charm, and could write poetry. The LA Times called him the bad boy of American poetry. All of this is true, although the pugnacity is probably more evident to critics, professors of creative writing, and poetasters than it has been to me since I first met him some thirty years when our paths finally crossed (after much build-up by mutual friends) in Montreal.

So imagine my surprise when the NYT invited the pride of San Francisco, via Ft Lee New Jersey, to comment on the election, alongside John Ashberry and three others, and guess what, August's isn't the poem set among rolling wheat fields...in fact you can check it out right here.

It sure is an improvement over Tom 'The World Is Fat' Friedman, or Maureen 'Edwards Spends Almost As Much On Haircuts As I Do' Dowd! Check out his poetry, and his essays; in fact the NYT must dig his act, because he's in this weekend's book review with a fine appreciation of James Merrill, find it here (though I might contend Richard Wilbur, among those writing in rhyme and metre, is at least Merrill's elegant equal)

But Augie's the real deal, if not quite as pugnacious as Mike Singletary. But we are talking poets here...