Stealth poetry

Remember Jeff Foxworthy's old comedy routine, "You might be a redneck"?

He'd sift through circumstantial evidence for which that sentence was the always the punchline ("If you've ever taken a six-pack of beer to a funeral, you might be a redneck...If your daughter's Barbie Dream House has a clothesline in the front of it, you might be a redneck.")

Foxworthy says his definition of "redneck" is "someone with a glorious lack of sophistication," and I like that.

His follow-the-anecdote-to-its-wry-conclusion formula can be applied to other kinds of identification, also. There are probably more poets out there than most of us realize, even if comparatively few people think of themselves as poets, and even fewer people make a living that way.

I think you can tell "stealth poets" by their markings. I don't know of any comprehensive field guide to identifying that species, but here are a few utterly subjective and improvised clues:

If you've ever woken up to a day when a thin scrim of cloud filters sunlight that is partially diffused but wholly beautiful, you might be a poet.

If you've ever made a U-turn just to take a photo of crepe myrtle flowering in red and purple near the road, you might be a poet.

If you deliberately wear your heart on your sleeve around people whom you trust, because the emotionally reserved alternative seems like a recipe for missed opportunity, you might be a poet.

If the song "You Don't Know Me" still seems especially poignant, then you know why Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and Michael Buble all covered it, and you might be a poet.

If while singing hymns, you sometimes substitute words to improve scansion, you might be a poet.

If you talk to wild rabbits even when you're sober, you might be a third-order Franciscan -- or a poet.

If you've ever actually watched clouds for more than a few seconds, you might be a poet.

Lesson learned

I am not a big soccer fan, but like a lot of other people, I watched the World Cup final this past weekend between the women's teams from the United States and Japan. That was a fun game. I marveled at the audacity of the longest goal in Carli Lloyd's hat trick, and cheered when Tobin Heath capped the scoring with a lightning strike that the opposing goalkeeper did not have a prayer of stopping.

The American women are champions, and rightfully so, but in the pre-game potpourri of "human interest" stories aired by Fox Sports, one thing stood out for me: Head coach Jill Ellis mentioned that a Navy SEAL had spoken with her team earlier this year. She added that his motivational advice was simple but effective: "Hold fast and stay true," he said.

Good for him for passing that along. I don't know whether he got into the oft-ignored difference between suffering and pain, as Neo-Neocon does thoughtfully at her eponymous blog, but you can't live out a statement like that without at least intuiting that there might be a difference between those things, even if you don't go so far as to wonder whether one of them can sometimes be redemptive.

Good for Jill Ellis for remembering the SEAL's line. She and her team took at least that much to heart, and the rest of us can learn from what such commitment looks like, even when we're not competing for a trophy.

(Photo by Anne-Marie Sorvin of USA Today/Reuters shows U.S. forward Alex Morgan)

For Independence Day

It's not a bald eagle; it's a broad-winged hawk. But it'll do! And as friend Jeff notes, forget the "July 4" stuff. What makes July 4 special is that it's Independence Day.

I do not think it means what you think it means

I saw a news clip today of the First Lady telling Girl Scouts that they were "making history" by being "the first to camp out on the South Lawn of the White House."

Newscasters also said that a severe thunderstorm soon forced those Girl Scouts to seek shelter in the Executive Office Building, but I'm more interested in what Michelle Obama calls "historic," because the action she praised seems trivial.

Doesn't something have to be significant before it can be called historic?

Etymology is not something I have any particular expertise in, but I've always thought of "historic" and "heroic" as sibling words.

Was spotlighting the White House in multi-colored light to celebrate a Supreme Court ruling also "historic"? I hope not, because it's easier to make a case for calling that stunt "ill-advised" or "juvenile."

Let me put the question a little differently: The  boys in my senior class were, as far as I know, the first to wear turquoise tuxedos and ruffled shirts for our high school yearbook photos, but that does not make our wardrobe choice "historic." What it means is that someone in school administration at the time got a superlative discount from a local formal wear shop whose proprietor was nostalgic for the Seventies.

A distant bell of memory sent me to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about Andrew Jackson's first inauguration. While accounts of the debauchery around that event seem inconclusive, there is evidence to suggest that Mrs. Obama may have been wrong not only for confusing the mundane with the historic (her husband does that, too), but also for ignoring what happened 1829. Ten thousand people came to Washington, D.C. that March to see Andrew Jackson sworn in as president, and a good number of them seem to have partied all over the place, very possibly camping on the White House lawn. In a few well-documented cases, they passed out on that lawn.

Super Troupers

Summer around here is chockablock with opportunities to hear live music outdoors, but because afternoon thunderstorms have equal claim to the calendar, local bands don't always get to play when or where they think they're going to. Such was the case last Thursday evening, when a fine quintet called the Gravy Boys was unceremoniously booted from an all-too-exposed stage under the "Lucky Strike" tower in Durham by a driving rain. I saw the sound crew and event managers scurrying to tie tarps over speakers, and assumed that the show would have to be rescheduled. Happily, I hadn't reckoned on the band's willingness to "improvise, adapt, and overcome."

What the Gravy Boys did was move about a hundred yards from the unusable stage to set up shop under the covered arcade that links two long brick buildings in the American Tobacco complex. They pushed chairs aside and played "unplugged" for appreciative fans in a show that ended up being more intimate,and possibly more enthusiastic, than the amplified gig would have been.

The band couldn't compete with the sound of rainwater or thunder, but fans skooched close to hear the boys give it their best shot. The Durham Bulls were on a rain delay nearby. Although Mother Nature managed to halt baseball, she was a little more forgiving with "Gravy Nation." Everybody  enjoyed the makeshift show so much that the band actually played two encores.

It's great when professionalism and grit also turns out to be fun.

Make art, not reparations

There is nothing wrong with reparations as such, but grievance-mongering in our society seems now to be so commonplace that when we're not careful, the entitlement attitude that goes hand-in-hand with demands for reparations can hold other activities hostage.

An almost-comically conflicted poet got me thinking about things like that. Somebody convinced the poor guy that art was a zero-sum game, probably over the course of several years. Cowed by "social justice warriors," he fears now that by using his own talents, he might be robbing other people of the chance to use their talents.

Baloney, I say. Logic like that would only apply if you decided that your "talent" was something like beating other people up for money. That's not the case for most of us, including the poet whose confused confession in an open letter got my attention.

People don't read George Orwell as much as they used to, which is a shame. If the price of diversity is selective silence, then "some animals are more equal than others," and it's time to re-frame the argument, so as to aspire instead or again to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Theology and strategy

I'd be lying if I said I felt "scandalously close to God" on this Feast of Corpus Christi in the Catholic liturgical calendar, but John Bergsma uses that phrase effectively in his wonderful meditation on the scripture readings for Mass today, and I was privileged to be able to proclaim the text from the Letter to the Hebrews before I'd read what Bergsma had to say about it.

I like his meditation because it draws a line between Moses and Jesus in a tone of barely-suppressed excitement, and that sort of thing can only be done by people who understand both Jewish and Christian traditions.

In other church news that got my attention, the choir at my parish announced its annual atomization. What that means is that for the next ten or so Sundays, congregational singing will be led by a cantor alone, rather than by a cantor-with-chorus, as is typical for us.

Some of the people who cantor open windows onto beauty whenever they sing. Others never seem to manage that, bless their hearts, but still deserve credit for singing in public.

Lacking any kind of insider information as to who will be cantoring when, I already know that one of the ways I'll be looking to nourish my own faith on the days when it does not receive an Official Musical Assist is to sit near acquaintances whom I know are in the choir when that's possible. Another coping strategy (and I'm not ashamed to admit that it is precisely that) involves looking and listening more attentively for providential fingerprints in unexpected settings.

Friend Lynne recently introduced me to a great example of that, in a song called "Hold On Tight" as compellingly performed by Greg Holden. This might be as profound a lyric as you'll hear in pop music:

I'll try not to complain
about the things I have lost;
'Cause when you have something great
that just means there's a greater loss--
So when you look at yourself,
Tell me, who do you see?
Is it the person you've been,
or the person that you're gonna be?