Joseph Parisi

raymond t. caffrey, ph.d. seven nickie court iselin, new jersey 08830 732-283-2440 1-800-221-0655 x-203

11 April 2001

Joseph Parisi Poetry 60 West Walton Street Chicago, Illinois 60610

Dear Joseph Parisi:

Attached is a selection of gently satirical poems by a fictitious author with spurious, specious comment, a pastiche of poor Eighteenth Century poetry obfuscated by lame, modern criticism.

All in good fun.

I hope you will enjoy the work and perhaps be moved to publish it in Poetry.

Thank you, Excerpts of Recently Recovered Manuscript Notebooks for

Chandler's Book of Eclectic Vision and Grooming Tips for Gentlemen

by Rowland Chandler

with Critical Comment and Editorial Notes by Reginald Theodore Crakdt, Ph.D.

Raymond T. Caffrey

Above all else, and write this down, you must be creative with your cod!



Rowland Chandler's famous, "Chandler's Book of Eclectic Vision and Grooming Tips for Gentlemen" was first published in 1727 under the imprint of William Witcon's "Sign of the Stiff Neck," a notorious purveyance of books and prints at Holywell Street, number Seven, London, England. Chandler's unpublished "DIARY OF DAILY EVENTS AND IMPRESSIONS" and numerous other previously unknown manuscripts were discovered amid a heap of rubble attendant upon the demolition of a building on Holywell Street some blocks from the address ascribed to Witcon's establishment, a first hint that while in town, Chandler took up residence near Witcon's storefront and perhaps under his very roof. Chandler's diary, to afford the term its broadest latitude, served him as a notebook, a record of events, public and private, and a manuscript for his poetry, much of which, it now appears, was never published. Although Chandler's name does not appear in the manuscript and, curious for a diary, he did not date his entries the notebook is easily identified as his by the inclusion of his many poems, familiar to students and scholars of the Eighteenth Century, who hailed its discovery as most fortuitous a find which will influence interpretations not only of poetry of the Eighteenth Century, but that of the previous century and beyond, even to our own day. The pages of Chandler's diary are torn and its ink faded, but the manuscript with many companion volumes, rescued from post-demolition trash, resurrects Chandler's many familiar voices which had been entombed in the crawl space of a decaying townhouse until an enterprising estate executor persuaded a nearby bank to invest in the revitalization of Holywell Street by constructing a pub modeled on one described in Boswell's life of Doctor Samuel Johnson, who was himself an expert demolitionist. Though quite a bit older than Johnson, who in 1727 was eighteen and one year shy of Pembroke College, Oxford, Chandler, whose sensibilities offended the Doctor, experienced the thud of Johnson's wrecking ball. Chandler fumed in the late pages of his diary where he recorded that Johnson estimated his work to be "refuse, worse than the dung heap on a hot and humid afternoon."

The Tutor

Old red- faced Eric propped Robert Herrick coming from the Plough.

Dawn was just breaking; Sally was making milk squirt from her cow.

Said Herrick, "Old Eric, plump Sally Derek looks right good, just now!"

"'Tis Ale!" said Eric, and night mesmeric that glosses the brow!

You'd rather her cow!"



"The Plough," so named to commemorate the constellation Calisto, this legendary Pub endured through the Seventeenth Century as the favorite well of the goldsmith who was all: alchemist, cleric, celebrity. He enjoyed his choice of the herd, so to speak, and had his tutor as well. Chandler honored The Plough as a fond memory in the Eighteenth Century and Trollope revived its memory as the Beargarden of The Way We Live Now.

AGAINST ASSURED CERTAINTY

I find it does not pay-- not much anyway-- to speak up too sure of what I think today.

The morning's first light or a tranquil night too often alters the look of yesterday.



The page of Chandler's notebook on which this brief, curiously regular poem appears is in tact, undamaged, and unblemished, but the following page and one beyond are missing. Rarely did Chandler write a poem in a single flash. Most of his work endured an excess of tampering: lines appear changed, eliminated, revised, restored to their original form, revised a second and third time, but this poem stands as it is without a spot of errant ink--unusual. The very condition of the poem in the notebook raises more questions than it answers: is the poem complete or are further stanzas to be found on the succeeding, missing pages? Did Chandler compose the poem or simply copy something he heard with an idea to develop the theme in a poem of his own? In the entire Chandler canon, there is not another poem so clearly written, so simply put, so direct and perhaps one might say so wanting in the imaginative values of image, shape and color that mark his more interesting work. The poem, however, reflects a typical Eighteenth Century inclination toward "wit": to approximate Pope's only memorable line, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Here Chandler has his thought, but fails his expression. The diary gives no clue to the significance of this didactic verse. Many of Chandler's poems, particularly those whose inspiration derived from his association with one or another of the ladies whose forms appeared on the walls of Witcon's establishment, have about them the spirited wit of the Pub, but this drab saying is unrelated to the complaint that precedes it and runs on for three and one half irregular and torn pages of the diary. "This Spring was Joyous, and the Ladies sang / like Sparrows at dawn they troubled my sleep" abruptly ends to be followed by, "The Fine Balance Twixt Sunshine and Rain dispersed the Damnable Fog," which gives way to, "Last Summer was so Fucking Dry that when the Cherries fell, the Rain Stopped and I could Not Breathe in my Room nor Sleep at Night and Phyllis Sweat So that she Slipped Through My Grasp like a Bottle of Cold Beer in August." Since the Diary is undated, it is impossible to learn when Chandler wrote these brief notes, or what import they may have had beyond his observation of the weather through one or more years: references to Spring and Summer past suggest that he wrote in Fall or Winter but he may have written in early Summer since he first refers to a Spring just past, and no reference to an embarrassing occasion when he suffered the indignity of eating a dish of Crow appears to give a clue to the inspiration for this poem's unusually sound advice.

Phyllis Stands Her Ground

"What looks a green pasture Rolling over the hills Is a cold and lonely steep.

The slope of those hills Makes a treacherous footing For journeys with no precise end,

And you are no judge of women-- You fall for our wiles, Then we are drudgery for you When the passion is gone."



It remains unclear throughout whether Rowland Chandler knew a woman named Phyllis or simply used the generic pastoral name to disguise an actual acquaintance or a succession of lovers. There is latitude for conjecture that Chandler wrote in imitation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and created his own Dark Lady under the guise of Phyllis; for he, at least once, wrote a Shakespearean-like Sonnet and on another occasion he wrote with enthusiastic admiration for what appears to be Shakespeare's work: "There is nobody like old Will, when it comes to that!" The context for Chandler's remark is missing from the torn pages of his diary, but in another, unrelated section of the notebook, he paraphrases Shakespeare's sonnet in celebration of his mistress' bad breath. The question, however, is colored slightly by the fact that Chandler, who liked to boast of many things, but of his horsemanship in particular, relied upon an Irish blacksmith named Will, whose family name appears but once in the diary and is foreshortened on its page by a torn deckle edge: the name begins "O'Guines . . ." before it is broken off, and the next line on the page finishes the sentence: "in her riding boots." Chandler's very next entry appears in darker ink, a sign of a certain break in the writing, and complains of Witcon's well known proclivity for miscalculating and withholding payments due him for unspecified services.

I made up verses blank and long That skipped in steps of three and four But to my critics, old, my song Seemed quite a dreary, deadly bore.

'No rhyme' said they, 'no poise, no shape; Try prose,' they coughed,' essays or plays. A poem, you see, must have its stays-- Verse barely rustles the drape.'

'Well shit!' I thought, in shades of red; The simple words don't always rhyme: Take love or sex, and run on lines Surprise the eye. Why dress the bed In folds of fancy stuff whose time Went by! Blank verse hides its designs.

 Rowland Chandler, it seems, wrote this idiosyncratic sonnet in response to a caustic review that did not welcome the publication of his work. Chandler's poetry did not precisely experiment in blank verse, but rambled, to an extent, and often omitted the familiar, expected, and should we say, sacrosanct devices of rhyme and meter. Blank verse, of course, was Shakespeare's province and it appears to be less troublesome writing than Chandler found it to be: what Chandler here calls blank verse, is prose disguised as poetry that fooled no one. His attempts at blank verse, like this abandoned sketch for a sonnet, wanted fundamental values. In Shakespeare's hands, the sonnet gives wing to his thought and music to his sentiment. Although Chandler never published this attempt at a sonnet, he apparently struggled with the form over a period of time. The octave appears in his diary as distinct, much revised quatrains some pages apart, and the sestet, often revised as well, appears some twelve pages later. The placement of the elements of the sonnet in the diary and the voluminous revisions that nearly make the sonnet illegible suggest that Chandler worked it over a good number of times before he finally rejected the poem either because he could not succeed with the form or because he decided not to give his critics the satisfaction of a response, or because he thought a vitriolic poem might curtail the unexpectedly crisp sale of his book. Chandler's sonnet foreshortens the meter from pentameters to quatrameters and merges the Shakespearean octave, modified in the rhyme scheme of the second quatrain, with the Petrarchan sestet. Had the poem some viable thought or musical sentiment, it might have served as an instance of the sonnet's power to fascinate age after age of poets who strive to meet its technical challenge without

© Raymond T. Caffrey 2000 sacrificing its capacity for powerful expressions of love, sincere or satirical. Chandler's sonnet fails to sing because he chooses to shout! From "[Rowland] Chandler's Book of Eclectic Vision and Grooming Tips for Gentlemen"

Life is a fuck-- if you let it.



Although Rowland Chandler left not a single date in his Diary, it is possible, with reference to his notice of Alexander Pope's single collaboration with John Gay in 1717 (a comedic drama entitled, Three Hours After a Marriage) to speculate that it was in late 1718, some twenty years before Samuel Richardson published Pamela, that Chandler labored through a long manuscript written by a friend, Charles Spikes, a little known poet of whose work Chandler noted in his diary, "That raggy Stuff sits on Witcon's shelf and gathers soot from the fire." The unusual nature of Spikes' new manuscript, however, interested Chandler who found, "the novel, if laboriously detailed, prose description of an affair of the heart, carried on by an aristocratic gentleman with a young servant girl, written in the form of a collection of letters, is curiously compelling if time consuming for writer and reader alike." Spikes asked Chandler to read his work and prepare an Introduction on the outside chance that a daring publisher might agree that, as Chandler wrote with evident surprise, "this bloody thing is an instructive entertainment, innovative and worthy of the risk attendant upon publication of so lengthy a manuscript." Chandler's remarks appear in his diary under the heading, "Notes for Introduction to Spikes' Colleen Tweaks the Colonel." Shortly after Chandler completed his Introduction and returned Spikes' manuscript, Spikes, his manuscript, and Chandler's Introduction, which bore, according to his notebook, the lame, nondescript title, "An Introduction To These Characters and Their Actions," disappeared. Chandler could ill-afford an investigation into Spikes' whereabouts and he could less afford to forego the small stipend Spikes promised to pay in return for Chandler's work, but luck, on that particular day, had abandoned Chandler. He remained unsympathetic toward Spikes whose disappearance was rumored to be involuntary and not unrelated to his novel bit of writing which may not have sprung entirely from his creative inspiration, but was said to be a true account of the doings of a particular gentleman of some influence. A few days after Chandler wrote this brief, angry complaint against his lot, his mood had improved enough for him to write with pleasure, "Phyllis proved most imaginative and, I may add, eager in her role of servant."

The Bridegroom Soothes His Bride

Don't give me that sacrificial lamb shit!

You can cease that perpetual last bleat!

Sacrificed lambs get slit and bled; they die.

Their insides get searched for omens of no

consequence to dead sheep!



Rowland Chandler's diary yields no clue to the source or inspiration of this carefully constructed pastoral complaint which introduces an unusually astute reference to the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice. The Registry of Marriage records no Chandler alliance, and tradition holds that he lived a prolonged life of bachelorhood with occasional flirtations, as his inspired pastoral love poems might suggest. References to "Phyllis" throughout Chandler's work raise the questions of her identity and the sort of relationship he might have had with her or with the number of women whose identities he disguised under the generic pastoral name. No where in his work, except in this poem, did Chandler write about marriage. He regularly took his dinner at the Ox and Cat, an eatery renowned for mutton chops, ale and buxom barmaids where he lingered into the night and was often heard extolling the virtues of the hours past mid-night which, as he wrote, "transform the maid of afternoon to the exquisite queen of starlight." In his diary, Chandler often thanked his Muse and praised the efficacy of this compliment, which apparently fetched him solace on more than one memorable night.