Like a turd just dropt on snow

What I like about Wyatt is his fascination with turning away. Most of the time he's obsessing over a woman who has turned away from him - "But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, / Into a strange fashion of forsaking" - but sometimes we can catch glimpses of that moment when he too wants to let something go: "I leave off therefore, / Since in a net I seek to hold the wind."

Still, he never really leaves off. He has too much Petrarch in him; his pain is too potent. His dismissals are always incomplete, as he holds on to the injury done to him in order to write about it (and here he has an excuse built in, which, even if we would call it misogynist, makes "her" somehow less culpable):

I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad,
Nor call her false that falsely did me feed,
But let it pass, and think it is of kind
That often change doth please a woman's mind.

We see the same thing in those poets who lash out rather than turn away. Jonson purges his characters of their humours and sends them offstage, never to be seen again, but they're never really gone: he has had to hang on to them for most of the play in order to excoriate them at the end, and so they return, again and again, every time the play is performed. Swift's poetry might sting, but he still needs to hold on to Richard Tighe in order to say that Tighe's face is "Like a turd just dropt on snow."

A complete turn (or a total dismissal) would have to be a poem about something else entirely, a poem that contains no trace of the subject that is not being discussed. And what's more - here's the tricky part - is that every subsequent poem would need to be free from that trace. These would be the poems that do not acknowledge the possibility of recovering what has been forgotten; these would be the poems that come after forgetting.

This isn't 'Nam. This is [karaoke]. There are rules.

1) No fucking Billy Joel.

2) "Atrocious," when said with the right tone of voice, should be interpreted as a compliment.

3) Arrive sweet, but not already hammered. Hammered should come later.

4) Do not make eyes at Undergraduate Wisconsin Grandma Headband Guy.

5) Talk through all instrumental breaks.

Rather Cocksure of Facile Conjectures

I found the title of this post in the margins of a mid-twentieth-century tome entitled Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature, in cramped-but-confident old-man script. The commentator was right: the author's suppositions about John Marston - an author he hated so much that he needed to devote over a hundred pages to an explanation of Marston's poetic, dramatic, satirical, and personal shortcomings - were ridiculous enough in several places to make me laugh out loud.

I hope someone will write that in the margins of my book someday.