I’m going to go out on a limb and make a possibly startling admission: I’m not one for poetry at all. Never have been and probably never will be. Byron. Browning and Barrett Browning. Tennyson. Dickinson. Blake. Burns. Eliot, and the numerous others I’ve had to study in my time. No, I’m not a poetry person. In fact, I’ll say quite plainly and without a twinge of being untrue to my closet English major self: I do not get poetry, nor do I particularly like, or enjoy it.

With every absolute a person declares comes an almost obligatory ability to throw in an exception or two and I’m no different. My exceptions are T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and a few from good ol’ Robbie Burns. I remember a season when the sister and I exchanged “How should I presume” as a greeting, both of us having just been introduced to the poem, she in high school and I in college.

Time continued to move in its normal wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey way and we eventually tired of the salutation. Fast forward a year or two; my friend Woj returned from a trip to Germany (I think it was Germany) and mailed me a dubbed audio cassette of Rage, T’Pau’s follow-up to Bridge of Spies

The more I listened to it, the more I heard strains of Prufrock in one of the songs, but for the life of me, I can’t recall which one it was; I may well spend the rest of my Sunday listening and relistening to Rage in the hopes something in my dodgy memory will be shaken or stirred free. It’s very frustrating, especially at this moment because of this odd and unscheduled tangent I find myself entertaining. Quite a few years later, I ran into a much more direct reference to Prufrock in “Dover Beach,” a song from All Over The Place, the Bangles first full album:

If we could steal away
Like jugglers and thieves
But we could come and go
Oh, and talk of Michaelangelo.

And so ends what I’d like to believe is a rare pseudo-academic post, a post that once upon a time could have masqueraded as a very, very rough draft of a writing assignment.