Froog: Well, thank you very much for introducing me to Vasco Popa (I think I know which of your blogs might have featured that one in particular). It sent me off into a Google-threshing frenzy I still haven’t recovered from but found very rewarding!

“Jelling” is probably an Americanized form of “gelling,” meaning something like congealing or turning to jelly form from liquid. On the other hand, a quick toggle into the vast maw of the Web yields the information that capital-J Jelling is (per Wikipedia) “a village situated in Vejle municipality, Denmark on the Jutland peninsula.”

Whatever else this village might be noteworthy for, it’s the site of the so-called Jelling Runes, or Jelling Stones. They appear to have no major mythological or historical significance — more or less monuments to individuals, such as a king’s wife. But it did make wish that my own little hometown had thought to erect such monuments: maybe in eleven centuries maybe it would have the equivalent of Jelling’s Wikipedia entry.

Jules: Yeah — I loved the Bilgere thing, too, although there didn’t seem to be a ton of information about him on the Web. I saw somewhere that Billy Collins had endorsed his work; this makes complete sense to me, based on this one sample!

In college, for a fantasy/SF course I read and really liked Updike’s The Centaur. One of the things which fascinated me most about it (going on memory here; please forgive if I’m misrepresenting it) was the way in which the 20th-century protagonist, by book’s end, had merged almost to the point of identity with the mythological creature of the title.

(My reCaptcha word pair of the moment: the almost unforgivably hilarious Mr Doritos.)

I came here too early on Friday morning and saw no Poetry Friday post. I should have known you’d show up later, lucky for all of us.

I keep re-reading that Lawrence quote, too. This fits in nicely (for me anyway) with the Greek-gods theme we’ve currently got going on in our Danielson “Sunday school,” you know.

The Beautiful God-Hater

A regular customer in a local bar
Waves his empty sleeve,
Fulminates from his undisciplined beard:
We’ve buried the gods
And now it’s the turn of the dummies
Who are playing at gods.
The regular is hidden in tobacco clouds
Illuminated by his own words
Hewn from an oak trunk;
He is as beautiful as a god
Dug up recently nearby.

Vasco Popa (tr. from the Serbo-Croat by Anthony Weir)

And the D.H. Lawrence put me in mind of this line from the Portugese writer Fernando Pessoa: “In every corner of myself I erect an altar to a different god.”

(Oh, and my first attempt to send this somehow went astray. But at least that brought me the inspired second ReCaptcha delegates jelling. Is ‘jellling’ really a word??)