The Scottish Bard's Dirty Verse

For the second year in a row I've missed Burns Night completely. The celebration of the birthday of Scotland's great Bard, Robert Burns, comes on January 25. Scots and fans of the poet will gather to recite Burns' "Address to a Haggis," and then ceremoniously stab the haggis with a dirk. They'll eat neeps and tatties and make toasts and recite more of Burns poetry. (See this description in Time Magazine from last week.)

Burns (1758-1796) is best known for Auld Lang Syne (which means, roughly, "old long ago"), the song often sung on New Year's Eve. But Burns was also a writer of bawdy verse. (Alas, his 1791 poem Johnie Lad, Cock Up Your Beaver is about tipping one's hat; it is not one of the risque poems.)

It turns out that although scholars had for centuries tried to downplay Burns' ribald side, the father of twelve (by four women) was quite unashamed of it himself.

Here, from a recent article in The Scotsman is a passage from one of Burns' letters:

"I have given her a guinea, and I have f——ed her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable… I gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones! Oh, what a peace-maker is a guid weel-willy pintle! It is the mediator, the guarantee, the umpire, the bond of union, the solemn league and covenant, the plenipotentiary, the Aaron's Rod, the Jacob's Staff, the prophet Elisha's pot of oil, the Ahasuerus' Sceptre, the sword of mercy, the philosopher's stone, the Horn of Plenty, the Tree of Life between Man and Woman!"

A pintle, a plenipotentiary, and the rest are all of course his gleeful terms for the phallus. The f-word hinted at above, is just what you think it is. Burns used it liberally.

Many of his bawdy poems contain those euphemisms, and those poems can be found in a book called Merry Muses of Caledonia. It was published a few years after Burns' death, and only two copies of the original exist today. Legend has it the book's very existence was denied by scholars and the public for a century, and, once out, was banned in the U.K. and America until 1965 and 1964, respectively. After that, people began recording these dirty pieces as music. Today it can be found online (in PDF form here or via Google Book Search here).

In honor of the Scottish Bard, I present one of his filthier poems. Here's an example, in barely understandable Scottish dialect, called "Wad ye dae That?"

Gudewife, when your gudeman’s frae hame,
Micht I but be sae bauld,
As come to your bed-chaumer,
When winter nichts are cauld;
As come to your bed-chaumer,
When nichts are cauld an wat,
An lie in your gudeman’s steed, Wad ye dae that?

Young man, an ye should be sae kind,
When oor gudeman’s frae hame,
As come to my bed-chaumer,
Where I am laid my lane;
An lie in oor gudeman’s steed,
I will tell you what,
He fucks me five times ilka nicht, Wad ye dae that?

It seems to be in two parts: first the Young Man asking the married woman if he could come over when her husband is far from home and sleep with her on cold nights. Next, the married woman, the Gudewife responds, saying her husband fucks her five times a night; he may come over if he can do that. Damn.

Look for other gems, like "Nine Inch Will Please a Lady."

The Best News I've Heard All Week

Nestled between headlines about Tara Reid checking into rehab and British scientists discovering a nearly intact 2,000-year-old brain was a gem of an item in the Associated Press's breaking news:

Fla. Woman Drinking on Roof Asks Man for More Beer

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A man called police on Wednesday night after he came home from work and spotted an intoxicated woman drinking a beer on the roof of his home. The 28-year-old woman was taken into custody after she refused to get down and leave. The police report said the woman agreed to leave only if the man agreed to give her more beer.

The woman, who faces a disorderly intoxication charge, has been in trouble before.

A police report shows that she was suspected of stealing money from her sister to buy alcohol in October. And last week an officer who went to her apartment on a disturbance report reported that Smith was intoxicated and wouldn't quiet down.

[via the AP.]

But who is Smith? The story was obviously truncated by the AP. The original headline from the TC Palm was just as good:

'Drunk Pedestrian' on Roof Won't Come Down, Seeks More Beer

At least she didn't drive up there. The woman was Amber D. Smith, and the Palm included her mugshot.

The omission of a first reference to her name aside, the AP's version of the story is delightfully straightforward, as if the second writer had edited out the reporter's incredulity.

Sadakichi Hartmann

The mosaic hat above represents Sadakichi Hartmann, one of dozens representing New York artists and entertainers in the 23rd Street R station in Manhattan. It's part of artist Keith Godard's "Memories of 23rd Street".

Hartmann (1867-1944) was a New York poet and critic of German and Japanese descent. He was a friend of Walt Whitman and the anarchist Emma Goldman. He was an excellent pickpocket. He wrote a play called "Christ" that was banned in Boston for obscenity when he was 23. And he may have been the first poet to pen a haiku in English.

He once wrote, "I have devoted my long literary career largely to a promotion of a National U.S. Art and a lifelong plea for tolerance in religious matters. I wrote six dramas to prove that every religion has profound merits and deplorable defect."

But he wasn't a total success. He tried writing screenplays in Hollywood but became a fixture in bars, drinking with John Barrymore's entourage. George Knox writes in a 1970 bio:

His tales of Whitman and Mallarmé, of Isadora Duncan and Greenwich Village characters -- tales related with a half-mocking quality and often fantastic embellishments -- were regarded as sheer invention by the Hollywood crowd that kept the old man in drinks in order to be entertained by his talk, recitations, and bizarre dancing. They liked this shabby self-proclaimed genius with termagantish tongue, and they brought him to parties as a put-on guest to shock the easily outraged. But they were convinced, nonetheless, that he was essentially a hoax and a poseur. How else explain the sly mockery of a man who would outrage all credibility by beginning an anecdote: "On a day like this, there were Rodin, Whitman, myself and three beers in a cafe in Vienna . . ."

But at that same time, writes Knox, Hartmann was also championing and encouraging young painters.

Although Hartmann was a citizen since 1894 and wrote a lengthy history of American art, he was tormented by the FBI for his German and Japanese heritage during WWII.

Hartmann died in St. Petersburg, Florida at a daughter's house at the age of 77 in 1944.

Dylan Thomas, Re-Animated

I don't know which distracts me more from the words of the poem -- the creepy photo animation or Dylan Thomas's melodramatic recitation. The poem is "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

The Platypus

The first platypus to make it to England from Australia in 1799 was received by naturalists as a hoax. The species has characteristics of birds, reptiles, and mammals. And did you know that males have poisonous spurs on their hind legs? A sting can kill a dog or cat. And then there's the radar-like bill that senses both pheromones and electrical fields.

Scientists have finally decoded the genome for the 150 million year-old platypus, revealing an even stranger beast. But first, a poem by Ogden Nash:

I like the duck-billed platypus
Because it is anomalous.
I like the way it raises its family
Partly birdly, partly mammaly.
I like its independent attitude.
Let no one call it a duck-billed platitude.

While the platypus has only two-thirds of the molecular letters of DNA that human beings have, we both have about the same number -- 18,500 -- of genes. The genome was like nothing scientists had seen before, according to a Washington Post article earlier this month.

With mammals, there are two chromosomes, X and Y, which are paired differently to make males and females. The platypus has 10 sex chromosomes. Platypus milk, which is secreted from abdominal patches instead of nipples, changes in nutritional complexity according to five or more genes that turn on in sequence (similar to kangaroos). This is of apparent interest to the dairy industry.

The genome tells us that the venom males use evolved differently than snake venom, but started from molecule and ended up very similar.

Scientists are still baffled by the platypus's ability to detect electrical fields -- they could not locate any genetic clues to this strange ability.

The short video below from National Geographic shows the odd beast in action, including some platypus battle scenes.

Quote of the Day: James J. Hill

"Give me snuff, whiskey and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell."

So said Minnesota railroad baron James J. Hill, the man who took a bankrupt railroad in 1878 and turned it into the Great Northern Railroad, amassing a $63 million fortune by his death in 1916.

His quote, which is so good it must be apocryphal, sounds a bit like the title and opening line of a Keats poem:

Give me women, wine, and snuff
Until I cry out "hold, enough!"
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection:
For, bless my beard, they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.

Not to be confused with wine, women and song (or sex, drugs and rock and roll). John Keats died in his apartment near the Spanish steps in Rome in 1821, almost a decade before Hill was born.

I stumbled upon the Hill quote in the latest issue of a year-old quarterly called Art Review & Preview published by a couple of artists in the Twin Cities. The quote was invoked by my friend Andy Sturdevant in a review of an exhibit of Minnesota art at James J. Hill's mansion called "Looking Back / Moving Forward" (October 4-April 20). Andy's review can be read online in a PDF version of the Spring 2008 issue.

Rejection Letter

now do shave off yr whiskuhs; stop irritating the cops; remain sober; stop trying to figure it all out for yrself--other minds have been here--avail yrself of them; they are called 'classics' which AINT ACADEMIC; brush yr teeth; find a way to pay th' rent & join the free public library & obey the chinese command: "walk in the courtyard as if alone... not seeing the rest of them..." & repeat the magic formula:

"now it is my time to walk on thin ice & face tigers" & recall the poem the greek sailor left for us :

"I bid you take ship & set sail, for many a ship, when ours was lost, weathered the gale..."

or words to effect/

however did you see the A&P Review?

most cordially

SM

That was the end of a rejection letter Sheri Martinelli sent to the poet Charles Bukowski in June of 1960 after Bukowski sent some unsolicited poems. He hadn't ever seen a copy of her poetry journal Anagogic & Paideumic Review, which was later one of the first to publish his poetry. They corresponded for almost a decade. Their letters are collected in Black Sparrow Press's 2001 book Beeerspit And Cursing.

Martinelli was a literary character of some renown in her day. She hosted Charlie Parker and other jazz musicians in her Greenwich Village apartment, she modeled for Vogue, she was a mistress of Ezra Pound's, Rod Steiger and E.E. Cummings collected her art, and she was a good friend of Allen Ginsberg. She died in 1996.

The Poetry of Chairman Mao

That's a page from Chairman Mao's Red Book. And so it is that Mao's own poetry, even when he tried to make it about nature, had a political tone. Mao, like many well-educated Chinese, wrote poetry. He was also an accomplished calligrapher. The picture below, though not Mao's own calligraphy, is of his poem "Snow" from about 1936.
Here is the poem in translation:

North country scene:
A hundred leagues locked in ice,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow.
Both sides of the Great Wall
One single white immensity.
The Yellow River's swift current
Is stilled from end to end.
The mountains dance like silver snakes
And the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants,
Vying with heaven in stature.
On a fine day, the land,
Clad in white, adorned in red,
Grows more enchanting.

This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage.
But alas! Chin Shih-huang and Han Wu-ti
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan,
Proud Son of Heaven for a day,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.

The Chrysanthemum

Frost! You may fall!
After chrysanthemums there are
no flowers at all!

That's a haiku called "The End of Autumn" by the 18th century poet Otomo Oemaru. It appeared in the New York Times this week as a part of an article on the New York Botanical Garden's exhibit "Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum," which opens soon.

There's something odd about such a short poem with so many exclamation points -- are we to read it as more urgent? Or as if it's being yelled at us? Something is certainly lost in the translation.

The name of the flower comes from the Greek: "krus anthemon" which means gold flower, but the flowers originate in China. And they come in many more colors than gold. It was brought to Japan from China (like much of Japan's culture).

In other, more brutal Japanese news, the Times has a fascinating article about the troubled sumo wrestling world, in which Mongolian champs fake injuries and fix fights, teen novices die in hazing rituals, and women, all considered "spiritually unclean," try to taint the sacred sumo ring.It makes one long for the days of Akebono Taro (pictured above), the 500 pound, 6-foot 8-inch Hawaiian who was the first foreigner to reach the level of Yokozuna, sumo wrestling's highest. Akebono, born Chad Haaheo Rowan, won the Emperor's Cup 11 times in 13 years. He retired in 2001.

Fénéon's Three Line Novels

The July issue of Harper's excerpted from the upcoming book Novels in Three Lines, a series of short news items written by Félix Fénéon for the Paris daily Le Matin in 1906. Fénéon wrote 1,200 such three-line crime shorts that year. They have been translated and collected by Luc Sante for the book due out in August.

These sick little summaries are reminiscent of both Hemingway's famous six-word story (more of a poem, really: For sale, baby shoes, never used.) and the so-called "Bus Plunge" genre of newspaper space filler shorts, in which accounts of buses plunging over cliffs around the world (it happens all the time -- see here or here. Or Google it.) were summarized to fill bare column space in print newspapers.

Here are a few of my favorite Fénéon items from Harper's:

"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,"
M. Bellavione, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inférieure,
had declared. He killed himself.

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his
wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to
aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

In the vicinity of Noisy-sur-Ecole, M. Louis
Delillieau, seventy, dropped dead of sunstroke.
Quickly his dog Fido ate his head.

What? Children perched on his wall? With eight
rounds, M. Olive, property owner in Toulon,
forced them to scramble down all bloodied.

Le Verbeau hit Marie Champion right on her
breasts, but he burned his eye, because acid is
not a precise weapon.

At the Trianon Palace, a visitor disrobed and
climbed into the imperial bed. It is disputed
whether he is, as he claims, Napoleon IV.

There is no longer a God even for drunkards.
Kersilie, of Saint-Germain, who had mistaken
the window for the door, is dead.

Quote of the Day: Emily Dickinson

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Emily Dickinson wrote that description of poetry to her close friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man some scholars think she was in love with.

Yeats' Second Coming

Lots of our pearls of wisdom of sayings come from Shakespeare and the Bible, and few of us ever realize it. But there are other sources, too. Take William Butler Yeats' 1919 poem "Second Coming." Adam Cohen parsed the poem in the New York Times recently, in the context of Iraq. It's been quoted amply of late, from "the center cannot hold" to "things fall apart" to the more gruesome and specific "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed."

Here's part of what Cohen wrote, noting that blogs were chock full of Yeats these days:

These phrases all come from William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming.” Yeats’s bleakly apocalyptic poem has long been irresistible to pundits. What historical era, after all, is not neatly summed up by his lament that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”? But with its somber vision of looming anarchy, and its Middle Eastern backdrop (the terrifying beast Yeats warns of “slouches towards Bethlehem”), “The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.

The pundits who quote it, though, are picking up on Yeats’s words, but not his world view. As Helen Vendler, the great Harvard poetry scholar, and others have pointed out, “The Second Coming” is really two poems. The first eight lines are filled with the pointed aphorisms that pundits like so much, while the rest of the poem suggests the unpredictability of how history will unfold. This second, less quoted part is the one that speaks most directly to the grim situation in Iraq.

Here's the entire poem:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(found at poets.org)

Cohen notes that Yeats was more of new age mystic type, and not a Christian. The Bethlehem reference and the title didn't mean to Yeats that Jesus was on his way; what's more, Yeats apparently liked fascism more than quaint democracy.

Critic Harold Bloom says the poem is meant to describe the end of Christianity and the beginning of something else, a new god. None of that is what the pundits had in mind when they quoted the poem.

National Poetry Month

In honor of National Poetry Month, I've written a poem. I call it:

National Poetry Month

April is
National Poetry Month
But did you know
That it is also
Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month?

New York Finds Poetry in the Times

From New York Magazine's blog, the Daily Intelligencer, a poem created by arranging New York Times headlines "to bring you secret messages from the paper of record":

Hooking a Big One?
Revolution Begins at the Beauty Salon.

Sallie Mae Said to Talk to Suitors —
No Matter the Message, It's Delivered With Dazzle.

Mixing Poise and Panache
Parise Wastes Little Time in Firing Up the Devils.

Sharon's "Condition" Is Said to Improve:
Statistics Show Ups, Downs and Betweens.

When the Haunted One Turns Into the Hunter
Paris Believes in Tears (and Love and Real Estate).

From Call Girl to Kant Girl in a Flash of White Panties
Giving All for Her Country but Also Feeling the Pain.

The "poet" is Lizzie Skurnick. Go to the Daily Intelligencer to view the poem complete with original links to the articles from which the headlines are taken.