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  The Mower by Philip Larkin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48423/the-mower-56d229a740294

What does Nelson's project have to do with Coleridge's poem?

Somebody shot Kennedy, so he certainly qualifies.

Kennedy was shot by a left-wing nut. Somebody who had renounced his citizenship and gone to live in the Soviet Union, and who didn't like it there and came back to the US.

A nut to almost the degree of a Spartacist or Trotskyite.

There were plenty of people at the time that were not fond of Kennedy. One quote I remember hearing about Johnson was He may be a crook, but at least he's an American crook. A not so subtle jab at Kennedy. There was pretty wide spread belief that Kennedy only became president through ballot stuffing efforts in Chicago. Rather than challenge the results like later losers, Nixon conceded. The best thing to happen to Kennedy's long term mystique was to die young.

If Kennedy hadn't died young, the bay-of-pigs, Cuban missile crises, and Viet Nam would have all dragged his legacy down.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron

And I was sure they were talking about The Mathemagician's Rule of Three:

• "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
• That alone should encourage the crew.
• Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
• What I tell you three times is true."

--The hunting of the snark, Lewis Carrol. Fit the First, second stanza.

there are hundreds of studies that show that most fucked up children get fucked up by the home environment they are brought up in,

There's even a poem about it: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055

I've got to consider Oxford's own Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) as a plausible candidate for "Nightingale". His "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems" (1849), and "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems" (1852) were published under the pseudonym "A.", but they certainly seem characteristic. Odd that he hasn't been made mention of. http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/strayed-reveller http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172862 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnold

I've got to consider Oxford's own Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) as a plausible candidate for "Nightingale". His "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems" (1849), and "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems" (1852) were published under the pseudonym "A.", but they certainly seem characteristic. Odd that he hasn't been made mention of. http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/strayed-reveller http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172862 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnold

My entire last post was essentially a satire on Constantly Risking Absurdity, one of perhaps three nuggets I've retained from my private school education. Knew it would come in handy, some day.

When I first read that poem during my years at Pretentious High I regarded it as a send-up of narcissism. I reluctantly completed many written assignments by starting out complaining that I had nothing to write about (which is effectively writing about oneself) and then seguing into something more interesting from which the useless first page could later be shorn. Always found more to say after clearing my throat of the hairball of hostility.

Not long ago I set myself up with a blog. Never write there, even though I write compulsively every day. I just don't like performing under an integrated identity. I like my circus costumes. I'm sure there have been movies about that, about actors who can't function without the costume. Not quite Wings of Desire. Seriously, that movie could have been about anything. Reminds me of so many poems that left me speechless.

I'm writing far more than usual lately trying to get the costume out of my system. Doubt I'm succeeding. There are sober things I would like to say under the auspice of a perpetual self.

Entrechats, my ass. Way too fucking feminine. Damn I wish I had said that in my essay long ago. I get it, there's a second reading: beauty's a bitch. In my case, it's more like playing hopscotch with Elvish chalk and a magic decoder ring. Not the glam elves, the ones grabbing your ankles from the Dead Marshes, canted in trapezoids. Facebook prime.

I probably write as much for what I erase as what I say. The brush sweeps transverse to the chalk. I'm constantly barfing up memes of disengagement. I write to assimilate, and I write to purge. How many opinions written here are white flags of the soul? Petite mots of surrender? Glib self-loathings of reconciliation?

For a trapeze artist, there's something unseemly about stringing your own wires. A blog feels more like bricks than ballet shoes. Little bricks you keep politely hidden on the third page of Google's search results.

It almost seems like identity has jumped the shark for a generation indoctrinated on commoditizing eyeballs. I have no idea really who I am. With a lot of scratching for words, a few clues emerge. It's not a yard sale of self-documentation.

For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step

A funny poem. On Slashdot, usually that's the guy I'm barrel rolling, quarrelling coons in the canopy.