Houghton Hall had been derelict
Since the Roundheads came and went,
They said that it couldn’t be restored
No matter how much you spent,
But I loved that place and its spacious grounds
So I went against advice,
I paid a pittance and thought I’d get
A part of it looking nice.

It still had the stately central stair,
It still had the marble floors,
It needed a bit of the lead replaced
But still had the cedar doors.
The windows needed a scrub and clean
Were original pebble glass,
It soon was done though my Bank was lean
And I moved right in, at last.

There wasn’t much furniture at first
To muffle its ancient walls,
My footsteps echoed around the floors
Of its entry, rooms and halls,
It was only then that I saw her walk
In the gloom of a winter’s night,
And found I’d bought, along with the Hall
A ghostly woman in white!

She glided along the balustrade
Came steadily down the stair,
I stood well back in the entryway
Pretended I wasn’t there.
Then she stopped and grabbed at the bannister
And let out a dreadful wail,
It seemed to swell from the hounds of hell
And I felt myself grow pale.

She seemed to fade on the stairway there
And her wailing went as well,
The hair stood up on the back of my neck
For I felt she’d come from hell.
So I asked around with the village folk
If they knew, they said they might,
And for a bribe of a drink or two
Described the woman in white.

It seems she had been Lord Houghton’s bride
When the Roundheads came to call,
And Ireton’s men had shot the Lord,
He told them to **** them all.
She died on the central stairway there
She died from a single shot,
While the Roundheads plundered the ancient hall
With her corpse left there to rot.

I felt for her, yes, I really did
It was such a gory tale,
But it got too much when at night I hid
For she came each night to wail.
My eyes were haggard, I couldn’t sleep
I was feeling so uptight,
And then I came across the cupboard
That clothed the woman in white.

The cupboard stood in an upstairs room
That I hadn’t quite restored,
I hadn’t bothered for in the gloom
The damp had swollen the door,
And in a drawer was a pile of clothes
So old, that she kept for best,
And there preserved with a bullet hole
Was the very same woman’s dress.

I took the dress and I hid it well,
Then waited for her that night,
Till she came stumbling down the stair,
She did, the woman in white.
But there was no sign of the dress on her
Just camiknickers in silk,
And pain and sadness were in her wail
Though her skin was white as milk.

A week went by and she still came down
That stairway to keen and wail,
So I went back with my sleepless frown
And I hid it, without fail,
The camiknickers, the stockings, shoes
And I left that cupboard bare,
Invited a crowd from the local hunt
To come, to stand and stare.

And she came just once on that fateful night
She was naked and serene,
Then she saw us all in the entryway
And the woman stood and screamed.
If you need to get rid of a troublesome ghost
You must cause some slight mishap,
She never came back down the stairs again
Once we all just stood, and clapped.

David Lewis Paget

i love women, don't get me wrong, i finally succumbed
to watching the female world cup,
since the lionesses reached the semi-finals
against u.s.a., but the man in me just kept thinking:
yeah yeah, great footie, but those beauties...
where's martin keown, i need to look at
a mugshot of a brute, i can't concentrate
on the skill without a girl that looks like
martin keown... oh god... alex morgan...
              julie ertz... steph houghton...
   don't get me started on the swedish team...
    wimbledon has also started...
                    i do enjoy female tennis more than
the male variation of serve-**** tactic...
or the terminator that's serena williams...
     cori "coco" gauff... wow...
                i wish she would win the championship
and replicate martina hingis wimblendon 1996...
problem... she's under 16...
so she's only allowed to play 5 matches
in the tournament... and what if she wins
the 5th? that's the quarter-finals...
7 to win the tournament... the rules should be bent,
she should be able to continue...
end of an era... the dinosaurs are being chased
by the younglings...
prof. green (roger federer) still has it in him...
but... well he is a professor of tennis...
his style? his backhand? immaculate "conception"...
who played as well as he does?
roger sampras... the list is very short...
but i don't have a problem watching woman's
tennis, it's so much better than the brute strength
of the serve akin to the game played
by: ivanišević, rusedski, roddick, čilić (chy-lea-'c -
piquant, that acute c)...
   n'ah... in terms of tennis?
i think the males are over-rated,
                except for the prof. of grass court...
i do love women... apart from the nostalgia
for primary school playground banter with
the girls: when we still had an asexual
sense of it... before all the **** jokes,
before the greatest schism in ether of existence:
beyond the religious and in the biological realm...
o.k.: i tease... which is something a prepubescent
girl would understand:
   if i was also a prepubescent boy...
times, have, changed...
i'm with ms. amber and ginger ale,
cigarettes and a decent soundtrack...
               i still don't want to understand incels...
i listen to them, but then i reach a limit...
thank god i didn't lose my virginity to a *******...
but... if you have to?
         isabella of grenoble...
               a fine fine catch...
          mind you... have you ever been
to an 18 year old's birthday party,
   and it was not what you were used to,
i.e.: bal samców / cockfest?
   this 18 year old's birthday party?
  my friend ian tagged along for about an hour
or two... then he suddenly bailed on me...
i was the only male... among... um....
20 or so girls...
              why, the, ****, are, muslims,
blowing themselves, up,
for a reward of 72, virgins?! eh?! can anyone
please please tell me?!

no brainer question(s)
   (as dictated by h'american girls in venise):
the beatles or the rolling stones -
to be honest? neither.

   top three songs with the bass guitar
setting the rhytm:
   1. tool - forty six & two
  2. the offspring - bad habit
3. róże europy - kości czerwone, kości czarne...

roy orbison or elvis? m'hahaha... royo...

  a lot has happened since i attended that
18 year old's birthday party...
why are muslim men so eager to entertain
eternity with 72 virgins?
      will they be keeping them virgins
or what? that would be the best way
to not move past kissing and oral ***...
once 3rd base is entered: the third eye
of transgender shiva opens up...
    
              why did solomon give up his harem
for the monotheistic monogamy associated
with the queen of Sheba?
   beyond one, what good is a harem?
if you've never been around 25 or so virgins...
you really don't know what you're talking...
or getting yourself into...
                    herrdildomaschinekopf...
look, i just changed the background to show
you i'm not lying:
  that evening i came home: ex-haus-ted...
did i spend the past few hours in
the company of teenage girls or was i being
ripped apart by a pack of wolves / hyennas...
and you know how drunk teenage girls
behave... you're shreds... they're competing
like it's both the 100m sprint and the marathon
cooked up into one!

i really could have chosen a different path:
***** ***** all year round...
   well, why didn't i, why did i become
voluntarily "celibate"?
            as much as might want the company
of the opposite ***: picking up a thai surprise
bisexual in the park one day...
******* her in the garden...
   walking her home while she drowned
in my jacket... she telling me i should stop
drinking... now... drinking...
i was taught to listen to rules under the arch
of pedagogy... now? i'll be as stubborn as
i am expected to be...
i don't like being told what to do,
thank you for telling me to do for the first
21 years of my life...
  now? welcome to the plateau!
even the best advice is the worst advice
after a certain period of time...
do i look like a ******* puppett that will
listen to such things: oh, but if you don't
do x, you'll become homeless...
   i've met some happy homeless people...
one even told me why he became homeless:
'my mother told me to never lie'...

i don't even think these jihadis know what
they're getting into,
wishing up 72 celestial virgins...
i'll take to the count of "72" valkyrie serving
me drinks than expecting me to **** them,
and the eternal library of text and music...
don't get me wrong...
receiving attention from women:
esp. those younger than you,
while they're intoxicated: it is fun...
but when it comes to the sort of
intimacy of a relationship with a women,
when she starts to read you the cosmopolitan
magazine's questionnaire as to whether
she's the perfect girlfriend /
you're the perfect boyfriend /
   you're a perfect couple?
i love women outside the realm of a molten
heart... i don't like finding myself
vulnerable...

              am i missing out on something?
oh i know i am...
but it's like owning a car:
great! you own a car!
             "mobility"...
  but you also own car insurance...
the m.o.t. payments and spare parts...
and washing the car on the weekend...
oh i'm so jealous!

  what's that famous saying?
women... can't live with them,
  can't live without them...
       well... more like: can live without them,
but much harder to live without them
and stop wanting them...
whatever glimpses i've had of past
relationships: i sober up even if i'm drunk...
she didn't want to split the restaurant bill...
this "modern thing": feminism,
my "toxic masculinity"...
  whatever, whatever...
                   i guess i'll have to end
on a note superstitious of a teenage girl's whim...
i'm bored, the end.

_______

.now i have a fox, without a leash, that i tend to feed everyday... keep feeding him, or her, lamb fat, cat food synthetics, and once in a while a frankfurter... and the Polacks you minded so much? only attacked ****** night0club owners... made plums and figs out of their faces... bulging and caress worthy... same ****, different cover, with the easy girls of Liverpool and Newcastle... back down in London? the story goes: she's an exchange student from New Hampshire... riddled by the madonna-***** complex... and i'm not really adamant adamant on stealing the cherry... if you've ever ****** aa ******? one, is enough...  i'd sooner become ****** up by a ******* tornado... and giggle... dying with a half breath... before plummeting face down onto the hearth; watching daisies, growing, roots up!

i've had one irish migrant educate me:
you know...
there are plenty of neo-nazis
in Poland...  
       and? am i one of them?
   liked him, a high school friend...
i'm sorry the friendship ended...
so i am?
   **** me... better i brush up on
reading some Heidegger!
         oh look 'ere i go...
        can't stop me now...
unless befriending Pakistanis
who have kept a null of Urdu...
              because you know...
   if there's a culture that's integrating,
and doesn't,
   have the honor, capacity,
to keep in line its origins?
no problem...  not worth it...
           people who do not retain their
skeleton -
their basics -
  their language -
   they, "magically" lose it...
half-castes... half-people...
   no pride in an origin,
   not upkeep with a language?
might as well call your mother a,
*******, *****!
      ****** by an antiques dealer!
******.
      no pride in origin,
  no subsequent pride in a "return"
on foreign soil...
   plethora of antagonizing Islam...
good look...
    i have mine,
but i hide it...
      ex-girlfriend -
almost took a ride on one of those
buses in the 7/7 bombings...
     what?!
               guess what...
i'm an ex-pat...
  i know that you wouldn't call
your similar genetics of
a "family" an ex-pat
and neither a migrant or an immigrant...
   (economics comes later,
doesn't it?) -
  but i'm sure the english
are loved up with Hindu grannies
and their grandchildren
taking them to the doctors to
translate symptoms...
   fine by me... you do the math...
   apparently i'm not speaking
English, but? ******* Urdu!
         no problem...
thank god i never allowed myself
a pledge of allegiance to the people,
rather, the language they spoke...
the language is all i pledge my
allegiance to... and for...
the queen... and her people?
        **** it... shooting albatrosses
off the shoreline of Cornwall...
attempting to spot
  porky Siamese twins...
        one does the eating,
the other does the oral ***...
             what?!
             i have not pledged any allegiance
to the english people...
  they love their **** curry
and their Afghan foot-soldiers...
   i'm doing the Pontius Pilate
washing of hands...
   which is a secondary theater of
a baptism...
                      no...
no allegiance to the people....
but the language?
   i'd give my life for it...
           the people are not exactly
the main ingredient in terms
of existential coordinates -
but the language is...
    on a per se basis mingling with
the appropriate focus.

The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

Those days recall less colors
and even less sense
With longer hair like Jackson Browne,
Pensively reeling in half rhymed ballads
walkin’ like Dylan and shredding our voices
like Springsteen.
“walkin’ real loud…”

When poets sang and singers
Listened, from a freight car door
Waiting on an old white fence
Anything that made an album cover.

My crew was meticulously unkempt,
one day shy of a much needed shampoo
but okay -
we were just 'okay' then.
...Surely for another day.

Our moms were old with
thick rimmed glasses and smoked
and our fathers,
they were smoking men too
wearing two shades of gray
tucked in all the way… around
And around, my dad and I went.

We spoke with twisted lips
Groomed our eyes and looked out
From behind narrow poles
and ***** brick walls
That gave, what we knew of our souls,
This, sorta clandestine refuge.

And our pockets
Were empty, our wallets -
were empty .
Except a beer cap and a phone number,
Scribbled and torn from the corner of
a Houghton Mifflin textbook.
“I’ll call her when I get home.”
Let’s go home.

Sitting on the hood of my Torino
I scanned the streets, smelled the tar
Of our last summers burning.

These girls hugged their diaries to their chest
and we’d gaze
we’d gaze through
Sunlit dust and dandelion fairies
eager to unbutton their secret stories about us,
always about us,
and our eyes made such nimble fingers.

We were outward bound on inward glory...
always thinking about love
hoping on plans that’ll get us "laid" by
a girl who wears daisies in her hair.

Big sweet flowers for the butterflies
Stirring in our stomachs
Fluttering to land softly at the entrance
of her big – sweet - flower.
My generation loved love.