Category Archive: Poetry
Time Off for Bad Behaviour
François Villon (born in Paris 1431; sentenced to be ‘hanged and strangled’ 1462 – commuted to exile, 1463; vanished 1463) was quite a villain. A killer, a thief, a common brawler, he happened to also be a poetic genius. The moral is that sometimes we need The Bad Guys. Awarded a Master of Arts at 21. He killed a priest at the age of 24 (possibly self-defence). After a year on the lam, he returned to Paris and celebrated Christmas Eve, 1456, by (sacrilegiously) robbing the College of Navarre. Four more years on the lam led to his (first) death sentence at Orleans in…
Continue Reading →Not to Yield
20 October 1833: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completes his famous poem. It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always…
Continue Reading →Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
"...and the Nobel goes to..."
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Though a defensible choice (after all, didn’t the Man in Black himself say of Dylan: “This man can rhyme the tick of time”*), we see little point in arguing the point. The Varnished Culture congratulates him and trusts that he will not take it too seriously. We have written before on the alien ceremonies, the Noh system of awards, reserved for the very few. “Competitions are set by the people who win them” says a character…
Continue Reading →Looking Up At the Stars
(image of Descent into the Maelstrom by Harry Clarke)
Today, 3rd October 1849, they found Edgar Allan Poe delirious in a gutter on the streets of Baltimore. The treating doctor remarked upon Poe’s “expansive forehead…and those full-orbed and mellow, yet soulful eyes for which he was so noticeable when himself, now lustreless…” He died 4 days later. And, as his strength Failed him at length He met a pilgrim shadow – “Shadow.” said he, “Where can it be – This land of Eldorado?”
Continue Reading →The Greatest
Ali takes out the Fab Four with one punch (photo by Autore Sconosciuto)
Muhammad Ali (January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) threw in the towel yesterday. Born Cassius Clay (he took his new names, respectively, from The Prophet and a commanding general of the third Caliphate), he was really the smartest and sweetest heavyweight. His poetry was naïve but he was pure poetry-in-motion in the ring – he looked great, he moved beautifully and his mouth was as fast as his feet and fists. Those titanic fights of the seventies (boxing’s apotheosis) linger in the mind, even for those who hate the sport: the 1971 loss to Joe Frazier, the Rumble in the Jungle over Foreman in 1974; the Thriller…
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