Musings from Brian J. Noggle

As I mentioned, I streamed part of the Kansas City Chiefs football game yesterday because apparently we have streaming subscriptions to CBS and to NBC along with Spotify (at $35 a month now!) and, I guess, some other things that do not include football games (not that Spotify does, but it went from $12 a month to $35 a month awful damned fast for a family subscription). “Watching” the game gave me an opportunity to page through one of my recent poetry-and-monograph purchases.

This book is a 45-year-old collection of pencil sketches by an artist born in 1902 (see this bio if you are so inclined). Some of them were made from old photographs, but they generally track to the early part of the 20th century based on the cars and whatnot. Some are just scenes from a particular corner, but others are of St. Louis landmarks, and these contain a bit of text about the landmark. Just a couple paragraphs.

Interesting to look at, and because of the early 20th century topic matters, I thought about the James R. Wilder books set in the first part of that century; although the books are not set in St. Louis, in many of them the characters come to St. Louis for one reason or another.

Also, it became a bit of a quiz at least as far as the landmarks goes. Which ones have I been to? Well, the Arch features in a couple of them. I’ve been there a couple of times and even went up it once as an adult. I’ve been to the Admiral riverboat when it was a casino and the Goldenrod Showboat when Todd had a brief, non-speaking role in a revue. I might have been on the Becky Thatcher–the book brought to mind that my mother, brother, and I took a cruise on the Mississippi in one of the Mark Twain themed boats once, and my brother and I got to handle the wheel for a bit because we were kids and that’s what they let kids do. I’ve been to Union Station a number of times, although the number of times my beautiful wife and I went to Landry’s behind it might exceed the times I was in the building myself. I’ve been to the Public Library a couple times–once to do some geneology research with a family friend and once professionally when I was writing documentation for library software to see how the company’s first client did things. I’ve been over the Grand Avenue Viaduct. I have been to either the New Cathedral or the Basillica for a funeral for the father of one of my wife’s co-workers. I’ve been to the Art Museum many times, but not in 20 or 25 years. I’ve visited both Grant’s Cabin at Grant’s Farm and the Hawken House in Old Trees; I do not think I’ve been to the Sappington House, but I’ve driven past it. And I’ve been to Lambert field a couple of times. Not as often as the Springfield-Branson National Airport, though.

Well, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t treat it like a full quiz because it’s 158 pages divided by two for a total of 79 sketches, and I’ve not been to that many of the places after all.

Still, and interesting browse during a football game. And another book towards my annual (stretch) goal of 100 read.

Ah, gentle reader. I’ve mentioned that I have read a couple of books of recent acquisition (The Art of Emily McGee and Sheer Poetry, both of which I bought last weekend) whilst reading The Life of Greece–ah, given that it’s been on my chairside table in progress for several years, you can surmise all of my reading since Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 has been breaks from reading the second volume of the Durant. So this book, which I bought within that interim (in May 2025), is no big deal except that it’s the only book where I’ve read a couple poems and then thought, “Hey, how’s Greek history going?” and picked up the Durant again to end the night.

I mean, you know I love me some Ogden Nash, gentle reader; this blog has, what, seven (now eight) book reports on his poetry, the most recent being The Old Dog Barks Backwards in January 2025 and the oldest being Versus in September 2007, when I would read the collections to my young children whilst they played (although in 2007, I only had a young child). But somehow I rate-limited this book to a couple of poems a night until last night when I powered through the last of them.

The book might be a topical compilation from other works, as the original copyright dates range from 1931 to 1970 (with some renewed because, gentle reader, in the olden days, copyrights lapsed before Disney got tired of them). The topic: Illness and growing older. Since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, not suffering a lot from colds or flu, and, because of the vaccine schedule in the 1970s, neither measles or mumps either, although I remember Cracked magazine making light of the swelling associated with mumps, so it was in living memory then–since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, I did not get a whole lot from the illness/hypochondria poems, but I did feel a twinge from the growing older posts–although he puts that turn into old man in the middle 40s when I still felt pretty young, back when I would not pull a hammy doing a head-high round kick with pop to it (which I recently did, dang it).

A couple bits worth quoting, including “A Man Can Complain, Can’t He?” where he repeats, “Another day, another dolor.” I myself have said this, so either I read this in a collection almost 20 years ago and have been inadvertantly quoting it ever since or the two of us came up with the pun independently.

From “This Is Going To Hurt A Little Bit”:

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

Ah, gentle reader. I was afraid of dentistry for a while until I got my teeth cleaned up twenty-five years ago, and now I go thrice a year for cleanings. But once you’ve lived with a filling rubbing on a dental nerve for weeks thanks to a sedation dentist who went a little deeper than he thought and only after picking a new dentist got emergency surgery where the numbing shot brought the first real peace in a month, after that, there’s little pain a simple dental visit can bring. Although my latest trusted dentist just retired. Perhaps I’ll go back to fearing it or avoiding it if the new guy seems eager to bill.

From “Let’s Not Climb The Washington Monument Tonight”, we get this then-contemporary allusion:

It is when you wouldn’t visit Gina Lollobrigida or the Aga Khan if it meant sleeping on a sofa or a cot

Ah, gentle reader. I understand the allusion not because I have a degree in English and Philosophy and continue to read them as I age but because I read Kim du Toit (link maybe NSFW depending upon your work).

At any rate, I have to wonder if Ogden Nash set out to lightly parody the vernacular poets popular in his youth, such as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then he got stuck in the wordplay because he, too, discovered that’s what audiences wanted. I suppose a real Nash scholar who has read all his papers and letters would know, but I am not that guy.

I might have a collection or two of his still floating about, but I probably won’t jump right into it even if I discover it. After all, I re-seeded my stacks last weekend with small collections of poetry that I will likely get to first. But: Maybe not before I finish The Life of Greece–I have determined that the volume contains almost 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, so I am doner than I thought–so I might power through it in the near term.

I got this book at the Friends of the Library book sale last weekend, and it wasn’t the first book I picked up (The Artwork of Emily McGee was), it was the second I began on Sunday night whilst watching the football game. And, to be honest, it’s not the collection of poetry that I picked up recently as a break from The Life of Greece. But because it is poetry interleavened with photos, so it was a faster browse and….

You know, the poetry is pretty good in it.

I might want to build out a rubric for how I score poems. The poems in this volume have pretty good rhythm; have line lengths that vary between the shorter, couple of words lines and the longer, near-sentence complete thought lines I tend to favor; have a little of the small-i thing going on, but not so much “i did this” or “i went there” as opposed to just a way to start a poem–which is how I’d like to think I do it (but probably don’t); don’t have end rhymes or formal structure; and evoke rather than tell. This book would score pretty highly.

Or I guess what I’m saying is that I enjoyed it. Probably my second favorite collection of poetry so far this year after the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. But I guess “second favorite for the year” is not a high bar given that I really only read one or two collections of poetry that I actually enjoy in a given year.

The photography is okay, too; black and white landscapes, still lifes, and closeups.

I’ll have to try to remember the name Toler and look for their work in the future. Although, sadly, when looking for information about them just now, I learned that she passed away last week. Kind of a downer to end a book report on, but I can do worse; I also discovered a scam site that mimics the official funeral home Web site and collects money in the name of the deceased, and if you’re a family member, you can “make a request” that they give some of the money to you.

What a fooking world. I actually looked at filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, but this has not affected me personally, so they will not take it seriously. And when it does affect me personally, I’ll be too preoccupied to be incensed then.

I picked this book up over the weekend. You know, I used to load up at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale on art monographs, brief humor/joke books, and poetry for browsing during football games. Since the NFL has optimized its revenue by requiring almost all possible streaming subscriptions to watch a bunch of football at the casual viewer’s, well, expense–which means the casual user such as me is not watching two or three football games on Sundays and maybe another one or two during the week–well, since the financial wizards made that optimization and since a cynical viewer might think that the games are now optimized for billions in sports betting (The Bears scored how many in week one? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the over. They scored how in week two? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the under. Is it me, or are more games going to overtime or won at the last second now? And if not, does reality make a difference?), my football watching has fallen off the cliff. Still, you would not know by what I bought on Saturday, and since the Sunday night game is streaming on Peacock, one of the handful of such subscriptions scattered amongst Nogglestead that cost what cable or DirecTV did before we cut the cord–well, since it was on, I put on a bit of the Chiefs game if only to hear Friar saying, “Shut up, Colinsworth!” in my head, and I picked up this book.

As I mentioned, this is not really a monograph; although it does include a number of Ms. McGee’s works, more importantly or interestingly, most of them show stages of their development, from tracing to working region to region. And she does not put in hard outlines and then work from them; instead, she does maybe part of the head and then works out from there.

She is a local artist who does (or did–the Web site in the book is not longer active, and a quick Internet searches led to a Facebook page that was active until 2022) commissions, and she’d work from photographs, which is where the light tracing comes in. I’ve seen artists like this with booths in Relics–some samples for sale and information about how to have your own photo turned into art. The book itself might be promotional material as well, as it does include information on how to commission work.

I hope that has not fallen off of a cliff as much as it probably has with the new AI-generating tools because being able to create works like these from scratch is amazing (said the oft-attempting poetaster).

At any rate, I only made it to the half, so it will be a day or so until I complete the other book I started on Sunday night. But even without football, I’ll probably work in a lot of the books I bought this weekend. If I can find them in the stacks. Because The Life of Greece is long, and the next volume in The Story of Civilization ain’t short, either.

I am not sure where I picked this book up–it does not show in any Good Book Hunting post, but it’s a Hallmark hardback, so I suppose it could have been in a book sale bundle. Hallmark issued this little gift book edition following the release of the film in 1965, when I guess Zhivagomania was at its peak? I bought a videocassette copy of the film last year, and I would not be surprised to discover a copy of the book from this era in the stacks since I know I picked up a copy of it in my Ebay peddling days. How soon I will get to them, I have no idea; I’ve seen mention of the film on a Substack somewhere in the recent past, but I’m not sure how eager I am to tackle a Russian novel these days.

The poems in this collection, 61 pages long, fall into three categories, broadly (with some overlap, of course). Poems about the seasons, mostly autumn and winter (being set in Russia, lots of winter amongst the poems). Love poems–given that the poems come from a novel which was a love story and that the poems were attributed in the novel to the title character, not the author, one wonders how much more meaningful they would be in the context of the story. And Christian poems dealing with the life birth and life of Jesus.

The poems are translated into quatrains with rhymes on lines two and four. No idea how much the translator had to alter the work to make it fit, but certainly some. Which is always the risk with translations, especially poetry, which I pretty much point out every time I read poetry in translation.

At any rate, better than the grandmother poetry I like to read. More approachable than the Pope I’ve saturated myself with over the last half of a year. Maybe on par with the Larsen I read before it. Which could be good news for Larsen: After all, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize, which I believe is a bigger deal than the Pushcart prize or even a Rattle prize. Neither of which I have won, to be clear.

I got this chapbook, the winner of the Rattle magazine Chapbook of the Year prize, because I entered a poetry contest with a reading fee that came with a subscription to Rattle. Not sure when I will get to reading my new subscription–I have a great number of literary magazines to which I subscribed over the years or older copies that I’ve picked up at book sales in the past, and I have a desk drawer in the parlor full of old history magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, and beer magazines that I subscribed to around the turn of the century and years of First Things I will get to when the topical articles are history. But I had just finished Treasures of Truth as my night-ending poetry (The Rape of the Lock being a reading chairside table book, not the collections and magazines containing shorter poems that I prefer to read right before bed), so I read this book over the course of a couple of nights before lights out.

And…. Well, I guess Lance Larsen is one of my favorite poets from the second quarter of the 21st century, maybe even of the 21st century, but that’s not a high bar to clear. The work is better than Rupi Kaur and most of the self-published work that I read and pretty much all of the grandmother poetry I read. Unfortunately, though, I read the work after encountering the phrase “small i poetry” somewhere, and although the research I’ve done (a Google search) indicates this definitely (as far as an LLM knows) refers to ee cummings and his lack of capitalization to indicate wonder, contextually (if I remember), it meant how poets insert themselves into their poems. And I saw this meme again:

I know, I know, it’s been this way at least since the romantic poets, and my favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) does this consistently, and I know, I know, I do this all the time (see also). The latest poem I sent to the very contest which brought this chapbook to my door is almost two pages of me me me. So perhaps I was too harsh in my reading of this fellow’s work. Perhaps I was jealous; he’s certainly made more of a go of it than I have; poems in this volume previously appeared even in the hometown(ish) Missouri Review.

That being said: The poet-narrator of these particular poems often makes note of physical places where he is, cities and states and whatnot, and they acted as an abstraction layer–I was reading a poem, I was not in the poem. I hope I’m not doing too much of that, but, probably I am. A couple of the poems feel like filler–a list of thoughts from a hammock, for example–perhaps a good blog post, but a poem? Nah.

So: Better than average, but not on the pantheon of the best ever. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for, too.