Friends tell me I’m underzealous in promoting my own books. I see this blog as something other than a relentless sales pitch—but since April is the dubious “National Poetry Month,” it’s time to tout two titles. I’ll say only this: If you enjoy the way this blog chases down medievalism in everyday life, then the “Quid Plura?” team of kobolds would be grateful for your support.

In 2009, after promoting my Charlemagne book and working on projects for other people, I was word-weary and exhausted. To make writing fun again—without worrying about marketability, editors’ impressions, or other people’s needs—I started composing poems inspired by the gargoyles and grotesques that adorn my friendly neighborhood neo-Gothic cathedral.

Light verse! Sonnets! Strange soliloquies and songs! Translations from Latin and German! Three years and more than fifty poems later, the folks at the cathedral graciously gave me permission to show their typically publication-shy beasties in print. The resulting book, Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles, is now available at the cathedral gift shop, through Amazon, or (most profitably) directly from me. I’ll donate 75 percent of the net profits to the National Cathedral to help repair damage from the 2011 earthquake. It’s my way of saying thank-you for the many quiet afternoons I’ve spent on the cathedral grounds. (Browse the first drafts of 51 of the 53 poems, and learn more about the book here.)

In 2007, I translated the 15th-century romance “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear,” a 972-line Middle Scots poem about the kerfuffle that ensues when Charlemagne, separated from his entourage by a snowstorm at Christmastime, seeks refuge in the home of a proud and irascible collier (a sort of medieval Tommy Saxondale). Combining folklore motifs with burlesque humor and elements of chansons and chivalric romances, “Rauf Coilyear” is a lively but rarely-read tale of courtesy, hospitality, and knighthood. To my knowledge, it’s also the only medieval romance in which Charlemagne totally gets slapped in the face.

The translation was an experiment: I wanted to see if I could imitate all 75 of the original poem’s tricky rhyming, alliterative, 13-line stanzas in a translation that was both readable and entertaining. (Check out “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear” in its original Middle Scots to see what I was up against.)

The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier is now available through Amazon as a $10 paperback. There’s also an e-book specially formatted for the Kindle. (To get a taste of the translation, sample this low-res PDF of the first few pages.)

No one else has translated “Rauf Coilyear” into rhyming, alliterative, modern English verse, and I doubt anyone else will be nutty enough to try—so whether you’re a longtime reader of this blog, a student of medieval literature, a fan of old-fashioned poetic formalism, or a collector of truly obscure manifestations of Charlemagniana, I hope you’ll find this translation a satisfying read. Despite what Mamillus claimed, sometimes a sad tale isn’t best for winter after all.

I’m pleased to announce that Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles is now available—just in time for Halloween.

This 138-page paperback includes 53 poems accompanied by black-and-white photos of the gargoyles and grotesques. I posted drafts of 51 of these poems on the blog from 2009 to 2012; you’ll find a clickable list of them here. Two of the poems in Looking Up are new to the book. (The cover image is the work of photographer, tour guide, and all-around good guy Chris Budny.)

For the time being, I’m donating 75 percent of the net profits from Looking Up to the National Cathedral, to help repair damage from the 2011 earthquake. It’s my way of saying thank-you for the many quiet afternoons I’ve spent on the cathedral grounds.

I had fun writing these poems, and I’m glad so many of you enjoyed reading them. I’d no idea there was an audience for such unfashionable folly: three years of light, occasionally obscure, medieval-influenced neoformalist verse.

* * *

There are several ways to buy Looking Up:

Order it through Amazon (and its international variants: .de, .es, .fr, .it, .uk), Barnes & Noble (coming soon), Powell’s, or the online retailer of your choice.

Buy a copy at the National Cathedral Store, at the new shop on the ground floor, just off the narthex near the front doors, or the original shop down in the crypt. (You’ll find the book in the gargoyle section.)

Order it from me via Google Checkout. (The cart will appear in the upper right corner of your browser. You get a 15% discount on multiple copies.)

You can also pay by PayPal. Use the above pulldown menu to calculate the cost and then send a payment to jeffsypeck -at- gmail dot com.

To pay via check or money order, email me first: jeffsypeck -at- gmail dot com.

If you buy the book from me, the cost within the United States is $14 (which includes shipping!), more if you’re elsewhere. Each additional copy is only $12, no matter where you live. Printing and shipping are exorbitant these days; I’ve kept the price as low as I can.

(I’m looking into e-book options, but I can either do the tedious line-by-line formatting required to make poetry presentable on some e-book platforms, or distribute a PDF that may misformat on many mobile devices. I don’t like either option. Stay tuned.)

* * *

Some books you plan to write; others simply happen. Looking Up definitely falls into the latter category. It’s a great surprise to me that it even exists; I hope you’ll find something pleasantly surprising in it as well.

In 2009, after promoting my Charlemagne book and working on projects for other people, I was word-weary and exhausted. To make writing fun again—without worrying about marketability, editors’ impressions, or other people’s needs—I started composing poems inspired by the gargoyles and grotesques that adorn my friendly neighborhood neo-Gothic cathedral.

Three years and more than fifty poems later, this series is complete—and, to my amazement, the gracious folks at the cathedral have granted permission for their typically publication-shy beasties to show their faces in print. Later this summer, Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles will be available as a 138-page trade paperback. I’ll donate the bulk of the profits (whatever they may be) to the cathedral to help fund post-earthquake repairs.

Many of the poems will be freshly polished; here are links to the first drafts. (The final two poems won’t be posted here; they’ll appear solely in the paperback.)

A wild boar who wants to rule the world.
An octopus reappraising her lobster.
A bitter but alliterative Anglo-Saxon mother.
A Gollum-like monster on All Hallows’ Eve.
A creepy dragon with an Arthurian autumn elegy.
A tiger mother singing a Midsummer goblin song.
A bird and dragon, doomed to dance.
Medusa, with angels.
A robot camera, conjuring a sprite.
An alligator, delaying salvation.
A rooftop-ruling monster.
A bellyaching, medlar-eating monster.
An insect with an identity crisis.
A skeletal beast decaying on Good Friday.
A unicorn with Easter dreams.
A caveman, soft on the inside.
A scholarly owl with stories to tell.
A dog on the trail of a thief.
Rilke, through raccoonish eyes.
A medievalist goat going all Carolingian.
A skeletal horse, mindful of Mother Goose.
A bird who celebrates Sukkot.
A snake with a taste for antiquarianism, and rabbit.
A smiling dragon.
A tradition-minded frog.
An indefatigable fish.
A monster, begging for silence.
A mouse with his eyes on circling skies.
A devil, exiled from the Garden State.
Two autumn rabbits, one thankful, one not.
A confused Boethian hamster.
Cerberus, barking mad.
A bat-creature, in Nordic disrepair.
A restless, bookish elephant.
An insecure, artsy deer.
The anecdotal basenji.
A lovelorn, molar-clutching monster.
A medieval-minded birdwatcher.
Pan, not even mostly dead.
Baby Pan, undaunted by snow.
A rooster, resigned to vicissitude.
Some vegetation, sinning through the weeds.
An administrator on form and façade.
A fish who spouts one slippery riddle.
An angel on an Easter Vigil.
A monster, with a winter warning.
The bishop, recalling Chaucer.
A fallen angel, who knows his Chaucer, too.
A ghazal by a cicada…
…and a cockroach’s reply.

Thank you to everyone who linked, commented, or otherwise supported this project! I hope you’ll enjoy the resulting book.

RIDDLE

I saw on the strand     the strangest of sights:
A gleaming pageant     that passed from the sea,
Their foremost borne,     that fine-bearded king,
Through sculpted chambers      skeined with sea-weed,
Mute twirling trumpets      trailing his wake.
Sailing beside him,      his silent white lords
Were marred by the maulings     of millions of wars.
Light on the shoreline,    their lonely race
Watched and waited     wordless ages
For imminent signs.     Silence drained heaven,
Then a dry rustle     like rain in ascent:
The whitecaps boiled        bone-dry, leaving
deserts unplundered,     plains without end.
Long they beheld here     horrors of old:
Ravenous monsters,      maws ringed with arms,
Pried their bulk blindly   from beds of muck
As nobles sternly     stiffened their spines,
For all was lost.     The lords yielded,
Shedding their swords     and shields of gold,
Hurling their helms      hard on the dune,
Laying their war-gear     now lightly aside,
Once-bright armor         bristling with rust.
With no last cry      they cracked their spears;
No howling braced     their broken ranks;
Insensibly stone-eyed     as statues at dawn,
Their remnant sank      in the sand where they stood.
Then forth from the snare     of a fisherman’s nets
In their relics reborn      I rose to my shrine
To wait for water.     Their world is dust,
And so is this matter.     Now say what I am.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

This pair of grotesques has always struck me as eerie. Is their fecundity enough, or are we meant to wonder what they smother under stony vegetation?

EMAIL FROM THE COMMUNITY GARDEN RULES COMMITTEE

No worm discerns the robin; we dispense
With blazing wing to herald your offense.
The slug secretes his shadow under chard
Where you malinger, lest your way be barred
By negligence that chokes your bolting plants.
We yet may cast you out, beyond the ants
That vainly pray for peonies to burst.
The mess you fell today you raised up first
In indolence. For fear of flaming brand
You hide with mites; we pluck you out. Now stand
As wordless witness wild around you breeds.
The wages of our mortal sin is weeds.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

Since the August 2011 earthquake, this previously camera-shy angel at the National Cathedral has become a minor celebrity, as well as a herald of the restoration work to come.

VIGIL

No furling earth, no incandescent wing—
You know your ruin by what your ruin is not:
No bounding vault, no lapidary gate,
No corbels raised to frame the blazing glass,
No graven arch to turn the pilgrim purse,
No choristers to round the close with verse,
No patrons’ patient faces grazed with sun,
No pedestals for patronage to come,
No babbling pandemonium of spring,
No spindling girls to bind their loves with blooms,
No censer-swirling deacon, nor his drudge
To agonize the vetch that winds the thyme,
No mourning dove to peck on wispy rhyme,
No scaffold-clambered bishop overhead,
No winch-raw backs, no oaken arms to roll
The stones to where they fit, before they fall,
No nobler you to pace the slouching wall
And squat by stumps, gnaw spalls of scaly bread,
And mutter to yourself, and to the night,
To columns crowded round you how you wait
For herald, harp, and scroll,
For pinnacles set perfectly alight,
For furling earth, for incandescent wing—


Undaunted, in the purple light we meet
As spider mites anticipate the shade
And halos haunt the vestibule. We kneel,
Unwrap our roundest rasps, and raze away
The hundred thousand afternoons you woke
And strained to brace the battlements you broke.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

Outdated technology has a grotesqueness all its own. It reminds us of old ideas, and what we once hoped to do with them.

CONJURING THE SPRITE

Through moonlight, in my infancy, I traced
No sphere, no stars, but grids of perfect lines
Whose magnitude redoubled as I paced
And poked the air. A fading charm defines
My life: It came, unheralded by signs,
In blue oblique, a blur, a block of smoke
Divine; and being bound by my designs
It swayed, a silent, hexachromal cloak
Of nothing. I rejoiced in what I woke,
Unnumbered form, a notion turned to light,
And bowed, and laughed, and see now that it spoke
In evanescent noiselessness: Rewrite,
Return, recast, you never will excel
The devilry of this, your only spell.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

The Bishop’s Garden at the National Cathedral is home to a medlar (Mespilius germanica, or die Mispel in German), a tree that was far more common in medieval gardens than it is now in North America. Its homely fruit are inedible until they “blett,” when they become little mush-balls that taste a bit like spiced apples and wine—but only after time and frost render them wrinkled and weird. This bellyacher knows that with medlars, timing is everything, even with noises that disregard sense but feel right on the tongue.

MEDLAR SONG

Til we be rotten, kan we nat be rype.
—Chaucer, “The Reeve’s Prologue”

In sawdust ruts, the roots encroach
On walls where wintered widows poach.
Hear sepals peep what reeves forgot:
     Fast we ripen; first we rot.

A ritter rests. His jonquil dream
Shall reck in every rustling beam
What shrivling scops by lines allot:
     Fast we ripen; first we rot.

A shovel drudge, his leafs mislaid,
Fears bishops, like their mispels, fade,
But sets aside the lightest plot:
     Fast we ripen; first we rot.

A goblin sunders thist and thorn
By mispel moonlit shade, to mourn
One perfect pearl she misbegot:
     Fast we ripen; first we rot.

Now pray we bless the bletted mess,
That fine and blither minds profess
To round the rinds that rime did not.
     Let them ripen; let me rot.

The medlar in the Bishop’s Garden, autumn 2010:

Medlar fruit (harvested with permission of the cathedral), unbletted and bletted, December 2010:

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

This week, we had three beautiful days of unseasonable sunshine and warmth, prompting overeager bulbs to break the soil at the edges of my garden. Meanwhile, at the cathedral, a nightmare of feathers, wings, and horns perched above the Bishop’s Garden watches, waits, and warns.

FEBRUARY
(PSEUDOTHALAMION)

The golden groom dismounts; the war is done.
     The persephonic matrons, long withdrawn,
Betray the bride, let fly their veils as one,
     and race like reckless robins round the lawn.
The bulbs trod under boot cry out: oh run
     oh praise him raise him high hymenaeon—
So spring steals in, the beaming, spendthrift son
     who flatters us, and slinks away by dawn.

Heinz Warneke, “The Prodigal Son,” dedicated in the Bishop’s Garden in 1961.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)

Facing away from the cavewoman pietà, this bone-wielding caveman tears open his own abdomen, but he’s less brutal than he seems. Candor sometimes demands that you de-form yourself a bit.

THREE SEASONS

     Panting at twilight
the fox halts, and bends his neck:
     “one white bone is yours.”
You shook me half awake look!
with cold, open, empty hands

            * * *

     Beneath your mirror,
light, scarf, gloves, clock, sonnet book,
     a deer tibia—
you beam, and gaze into it

Lose her to God for a while

            * * *

     Four trees fell.
                             She swings
through fresh-mown sunshine, smiling
     over fitful seeds
slight as a hummingbird skull
light as a hummingbird dream

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab, or read the gargoyle FAQ.)