The Irish Are God’s Chosen Poets, How a Raven is Like a Writing Desk & Eric R’s Suggestion

 

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(please right click on the link below to cue up the suggested background music to this evening’s treatise.  The final piece of poetry week here in The Attic set to the lyricaly stylings of post Sex Pistols J. Rotten)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–2AHDFUSco

 

 

 

 

Truly great storytellers and hair stylists are hard to find:  we should embrace them in Pompeii-like stone death grips when we find them.  The greatest poets and authors are Irish poets and authors because The Irish are God’s chosen people.  Chosen, that is, to farm potatoes, drink whiskey and tell tales.  Had the opportunity to play Gaelic football for a league in Cleveland back in “the day”.  One of older greenhorns, Collin, would endlessly repeat the following phrase after seventeen or eighteen bottles of Jameson’s.  “Danny, there are always more tales tell….there are always more tales.”

As you may have noticed, this has been poetry week in The Attic.  Am envious of poets because I am the world’s seventh worse poetry writer.  Most of my poems are about boats because “boat” is really, really, really, really, really easy to rhyme.  Play to your strengths.  When my pen rolls over paper with the best of intentions and heart outlines circling my head, things like this come out:

 

 

 

 Man, I wish I had a boat;

Because that would be cooler than a goat.

Or around my house, a spiffy moat.

But if I had a boat I’d have a big, red Evinrude motor on it.

 

 

 

 

Have never been able to get that last line to quite rhyme correctly.  When our nonsensical Mind of Mully poet laureates Teddy Geisel and Lewis Carroll wrote fake words in poems they sounded 1,287 (cubed) times better than my poetry on its best day.  As we saw last weekend, “Jabberwocky”, even when read backwards, is still a darn good read.  Not a boat poem, but a wonderful poem nonetheless.

 

Great storytellers would make the finest of sales people because sales and marketing is all about questions and stories.  The best sales people ask the best questions and they tell the most remarkable, emoting stories.  Great storyteller’s books are like scratch and sniff cards for your heart and brain.

Rick Bragg is a great story teller.  Herman Melville sucked.  John Carlin is a great story teller.  Half of Hemmingway’s stuff sucked.  Richard Bach is a great storyteller.  I would hire Bragg, Carlin, and Bach.  Would pass on Melville and Hemmingway.  

We are replacing Harriet the Spy with John  Carlin’s Playing the Enemy  for the next Mind of Mully ESP book club.  Playing the Enemy is a wonderful book on Nelson Mandela, leadership, and the transformation of South Africa from a David Dukesque country into a harmonious society.  Would imagine that’s why they made it into the Morgan Freeman/Matt Damon movie Invictus that came out a few months back.  For the sales and marketing professionals of the world.

Mr. Mandela stated“Don’t address their brains, address their hearts”.   All business lessons are life lessons and all life lessons are business lessons.  There are fantastic sales and leadership lessons in Playing the Enemy.  

 

Eric R’s Suggestion

Until the gun blasts, the piano bar was all fun and games, much like Germany was a fine place to visit for veal and noodle dumplings before they began executing the gypsies, clowns, and lion tamers.  It was that sort of night.  The sort of night that smelled of raspberries but tasted of muenster cheese.  And I was in.   I am always in.

With the abundance of barber shops and beauty parlors in the world, it is a wonder that so many people walk around with utterly tragic hair styles.  Plastic surgery is relatively expensive, so walking around with really, really big ears or a protruding forehead is understandable.  Having a bad haircut is inexcusable.   The piano player had a tragic hairstyle, right up until the gun blasts took off her noggin.

 

How a Raven is Like a Writing Desk:

Neither is made of citrus fruit

Both are organic

Neither exist naturally in gas or liquid form

Poe wrote on both of them

Neither have started an armed conflict in Southeast Asia

 

Had a wonderful English literature teacher at Miami University who encouraged us to dig deep on any poet that tickled our heart with their literary feather.  See where he or she came from.  Find out where their joy or pain originated.  Sure Dylan Thomas wrote darkly and drank himself to an early death, but why?  Why did Thomas write “That Sanity be Kept”?  When you fall in love with a poem, figure out where it came from. 

All life lessons are business lessons and all business lessons are life lessons.  If your customer has an objection, it means someone burned them in the past.  Dig deep and find out where that pain originated.   There’s meaning in pain. 

We will finish poetry week and plunge headfirst into the holiest of all holy days with the finest poem in the universe on owning ones actions and perseverance.  A poem title meaning unconquerable and a poetic message about owning your own destiny.  If you choose to dig deep on Mr. Bentley, you will find he lost his leg at an early age.   He wrote this while recuperating, chosing to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.

 

 

Inviticus:  (William Ernest Bentley)

 

 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are not Irish, we chosen people welcome you with open arms and parched throats.  Buy us a beer and perhaps we will recite a boat poem for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mind of Mully

May the road rise with you

May the road rise with you

May the road rise with you

May the road rise with you