The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 7 of 18)

As composer and lyricist, crafting poems as well --"Honored This Day," "Flourish of a Rose," "Stars and Stripes Forever" (to Sousa's drum-roll Chorus), "Tom o'Bedlam" et al.-- we perform and write to approbation and testimonial plaudits ("High Midsummer"), but reserve a healthy disrespect for any preferring the Singer to the Song. Cliches apply: I've been a merchant seaman, military officer, New York cabdriver, financial analyst and designer of quant-model hedge funds. Standard rant is that numbers equate, words rhyme, but they both sing.

Poets are out there. We still starve in garrets, with the difference that old-line litterateurs abominate Derrida and his arrogant, solipsistic ilk. Eliot was a bank manager, Wallace Stevens an insurance executive... Yeats was of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, where food and shelter just came naturally. Fuhgedabudit! We are Merry Ones, who go our ways. You will not find poets, digging down... we are not deep, but we are far-removed. We love the English Language, and we turn a phrase.

William Faulkner for decades lived but a few short miles from Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. Even after his Nobel Prize, not once did that institution's English Department so much as invite him to a seminar, never mind award an Honorary Degree. True, Southerners' vile old post-Reconstruction prejudices still obtained. But those were nothing to what we see today. Anyone seeking recognition as a poet since (say) 1965 would be better off (as Patton put it) "shoveling [effluent] in Louisiana". But ars longa, vita brevis. The old straight track yet traces ley lines over hill and dale, where Cadmus sows his dragons' teeth and Gwydion celebrates Grammayre.

p>No finer sound than Silence. br> -- JPB br> P.S. Owen's Alligator, a fable concerning Wise Learning and Right Choice , is due out this fall. /p> p> GENERAL DISAGREEMENT br> Re: Reader Mail's Civil Warring and H.W. Crocker III's

topics:
Trade, Islam, Hollywood, Constitution, Law, Supreme Court, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, NATO, North Korea, Fascism, Immigration