Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

For Poetry Monday:

Neither out Far Nor in Deep, Robert Frost

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

Some say the land has more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?


First published in The Yale Review (Spring 1931).

---L.

Subject quote from Waterfalls, TLC.

For Poetry Monday:

Filling the Page, Kate Baer

At a dinner party
one of the husbands says
it must be easy writing poetry.

Can’t anything be a poem? he laughs.

You’re right, I say, slipping off his shoes
& pulling out his molars—
searching for any crevice to insert
a semicolon
before I drag him over what is known as

this white

& provocative

space.


From Baer’s 2022 collection And Yet.

---L.

Subject quote from Fight Light a Girl, Evanescence feat. K.Flay.

For Poetry Monday:

Before the Fall, Rachel McAlpine

After the bath with ragged towels
my Dad
would dry us very carefully:
six little wriggly girls,
each with foamy pigtails,
two rainy legs,
the invisible back we couldn’t reach,
a small wet heart,
and toes, ten each.

He dried us all
the way he gave the parish
Morning Prayer:
as if it was important,
as if God was fair,
as if it was really simple
if you would just be still
and bare.


McAlpine (b. 1940) is a New Zealand poet and author, and cites this as her favorite of her poems.

---L.

Subject quote from Of Solitude, Michel de Montaigne, tr. Cotton/Hazlitt.

For Poetry Monday:

In the Nursing Home, Jane Kenyon

She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.

She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed’s dry.

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.


---L.

Subject quote from That Voice Again, Peter Gabriel.

This fandom dates me a bit, but: a heartening discovery. Quite a few Ranma ½ video games were made in the 90s, including a couple versus fighting games on SNES and PS1. All but one were Japan-only releases, but you don’t need much Japanese to button-mash a fighting game. In all variations, several main franchise characters are available to play, including both of Ranma’s forms.

Which means it’s possible to have several iterations of Akane finally give Ranma the beatdown he royally deserves.

---L.

Subject quote from I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor.

A few bits of translation news.

A few years ago, composer Kirsten Soriano set eleven of Ono no Komachi’s Classical Japanese poems to music as a song cycle called Dream-Paths. She recently released an album that includes this cycle, and the song liner notes include modern-spelling Japanese and my English translations, previously published in These Things Called Dreams. (A physical CD is planned, but there’s still no word on when it’s coming out, so I’m finally mentioning this.)

Plus, also, I’ve been translated into Russian.

Coolness, both.

---L.

Subject quote from Touch Me in the Morning, Diana Ross.

A seven-step book meme that’s going around, which I first noticed from chestnut_pod:

1. Take five books off your bookshelf. (I used physical bookshelves, one per.)

2. Book #1 - first sentence: “It happened quickly, as if a diviner’s staff had struck the ground.”

3. Book #2 - last complete sentence on page fifty: “You might, for instance, include the total number of volumes in a multivolume publication.”

4. Book #3 - second complete sentence on page one hundred: “And he knew that it was in Kurtzburg’s Saloon on the Lower East Side in 1919 that his mother had fallen in love with Alter Klayman, newly arrived in this country and working as an iceman and freelance mover of pianos.”

5. Book #4 - next to the last complete sentence on page one hundred fifty: “One’s sense of honour is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one’s fellow men.”

6. Book #5 - final sentence of the book: “They spent the rest of the morning at work, sorting through the endless details that had to be settled before the men of the King’s Own rode north to war.”

7. Arrange the five sentences into a paragraph:

One’s sense of honour is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one’s fellow men. You might, for instance, include the total number of volumes in a multivolume publication. And he knew that it was in Kurtzburg’s Saloon on the Lower East Side in 1919 that his mother had fallen in love with Alter Klayman, newly arrived in this country and working as an iceman and freelance mover of pianos. It happened quickly, as if a diviner’s staff had struck the ground. They spent the rest of the morning at work, sorting through the endless details that had to be settled before the men of the King’s Own rode north to war.

Hrm. Maybe I should have stuck to a single bookcase, which are sorted by genre/subject.

(In case you’re wondering: #1: House of Rain, Craig Childs; #2: MLA Handbook, 8th ed.; #3: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon; #4: History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tr. Rex Warner; #5: Squire, Tamora Pierce)

---L.

Subject quote from The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde.

For Poetry Monday:

Starblossom’s Song, John Masefield

Queens long ago
Knew sorrowful days,
Seeing their husbands killed,
Their sons destroyed.
Death makes the full heart void,
The cold heart filled,
Those women knew Death’s ways,
I also knew.

Father and mother gone,
He whom I loved, and now
My sons, my lovely sons,
My three bright boys
Killed, while the sunlight shone,
And blossom filled the bough;
I was so happy once
But Death destroys.

Yet, although Death is great,
Earth’s many million tears
Move on the heart of things
Quickening a change to be;
And drop by drop the sea
Moans from its springs,
Its cry will reach God’s ears;
Man has not long to wait.
Death is but a tool of Fate.


This is from Masefield’s 1915 play The Faithful, an adaptation of the Chūshingura story aka legends that developed around the incident of the forty-seven rōnin. By all accounts (I’m certainly not reading the whole thing) it’s reasonably faithful to the plot beats but fails badly at the Japanese culture that drives the characters and story (I mean, “queens”? srsly?). Taken as a Edwardian* lyric divorced from its Japonesme origin, though, I like it.


* Okay, technically Georgian, but I often think of the arts of George V's first years, till the Great War finally started, as Still Edwardian.

---L.

Subject quote from The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot.

Eaglet is 13.

An easily frustrated 13.

---L.

Subject quote from Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

For Poetry Monday:

A Sapphic Dream, George Moore

I love the luminous poison of the moon,
The silence of illimitable seas,
Vast night, and all her myriad mysteries,
Perfumes that make the burdened senses swoon

And weaken will, large snakes who oscillate
Like lovely girls, immense exotic flowers,
And cats who purr through silk-enfestooned bowers
Where white-limbed women sleep in sumptuous state.

My soul e’er dreams, in such a dream as this is,
Visions of perfume, moonlight and the blisses
Of sexless love, and strange unreached kisses.


Moore (1852-1933) is best known for adapting French naturalism into English fiction, but before he turned novelist he was a poet under the influence of French symbolists. (He was also a childhood friend of Oscar Wilde.) This is from his first collection, Flowers of Passion (1878). After all the preceding orientalist imagery, that “sexless love” gets some heavy sideeye. Commit to the bit!

---L.

Subject quote from Hotel California, Eagles, and yes colitas are cannabis buds.