A cold snap has hit the American east coast, including Maryland, and we are experiencing what Christina Rossetti calls “bleak midwinter,” with temperatures moving down into the teens. To cheer myself up, I turn to one of my father’s Christmas poems. My father has been writing these poems annually for years. He sends them out […]
Tag Archives: Scott Bates
Midwinter Transformation: A Poem
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Bird Watcher's Christmas Dinner", Christmas, Nature Comments closed
An ABC of Children’s Books
As we enter the holiday season, you can expect a number of posts on children’s books. I have mentioned several times how one of my father’s great joys when we were growing up was reading us the books he had loved as a child. We got extra reading around the Christmas season. Here’s a poem […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "ABC of Books for Christmas", Children, children's books, Christmas Comments closed
The Divine Comedy, Doggerel Version
For a change of pace as we enter the Christmas season, I share here a light, witty, and very smart poem by my father on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poem grew out of research that he was doing on Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet who has been his scholarly subject. Don’t worry if you don’t […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dante Dance", Add new tag, Christmas, Dante, Divine Comedy Comments closed
Fixing the House that Jefferson Built
I offer my apologies to my regular readers for having written a series of very long posts this week. To give you some relief, I offer up a political poem by my father, who is a master of light verse. As he did in a poem that I ran in a previous post (you can […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "House that Jefferson Built", Environmentalism, Nature, politics Comments closed
A Poem for Those Who Love to Read
My father is a master of light comic verse, a genre often not taken seriously by literature departments. The ability to lift the spirits, however, is a precious gift that should not be underestimated. The following poem, about a lover of reading, is a reference to Jesus’s instructions (in Mark 4:21-22) that we not […]
A Whale Poem to Lift the Spirits
A Scott Bates whale poem to lift your spirits.
Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows
Film Friday I owe my love of film to my father, who for years ran the “Cinema Guild” at the University of the South/Sewanee. When I wrote two weeks ago about Meet Me in St. Louis, my father talked about seeing the film as a G. I. in Europe. “We saw the film as directed […]
Bread (Pretzels) and (Super Bowl) Circuses
Bread and circuses. That was the accusation of the Roman satirist Juvenal, directed against those politicians who used free bread and gladiatorial contests to divert the populace’s mind from their political responsibilities. Today our diversions continue to occur in coliseums and arenas. I plead guilty to having been so diverted. These past […]
