Tag Archives: E.A. Robinson

Peggy Landsman, ‘Minimum Achiever’

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Minimum Achiever, for years forlorn,
Grew grey and fat and out of fashion;
She wore the jeans she’d always worn,
And swore with passion.

Minimum loved the days gone by
When wars were wrong and songs were moving;
With files from the FBI,
What was she proving?

Minimum sighed for what had been,
And bitched and moaned how nothing lasted;
She longed for one more great love-in,
And dropping acid.

Minimum mourned the hippie years,
The counterculture’s zest and freedom;
She mourned ideals—her sell-out peers
Didn’t seem to need ’em.

Minimum loved her artsy friends,
And swore that she would start achieving;
Her starts were great, but had no ends
And left her grieving.

Minimum cursed the worthless game
And gave it up instead of trying;
She missed her fifteen minutes’ fame,
But wasn’t crying.

Minimum scorned the job she sought,
But how could she survive without it?
Minimum thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Minimum Achiever, starting late,
Started out by hesitating;
Minimum knew she shouldn’t wait,
And kept on waiting.

*****

‘Minimum Achiever’ was first published with apologies to Edwin Arlington Robinson in Clockwise Cat.

Peggy Landsman writes: “I started writing ‘Minimum Achiever’ in 1978. Back then, Minimum watched TV: “…She turned and turned and turned the dial,/ but every station showed World War Three,/ modern, nuclear style.” She was also very political: “Minimum loved the anarchists,/ did actions in the name of Emma….”  In the almost thirty years it took me to complete the present version, she went through many changes. The one constant, though, has always been that she is the great-granddaughter of Miniver Cheevy.”

Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2023), and two poetry chapbooks, Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021) and To-wit To-woo (Foothills Publishing, 2008). She lives in South Florida where she swims in the warm Atlantic Ocean every chance she gets. A selection of her poems and prose pieces can be read on her website: https://peggylandsman.wordpress.com/

Photo: “For all those low achievers” by Claire_Sambrook is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Marcus Bales, ‘Miniver Cheever III’

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Miniver Cheevy Junior’s kid
Despised his own contemporaries,
Like his poetic forebears did,
As functionaries.

Miniver missed old apartheids,
South Africa and Mississippi,
And longed to go on freedom rides
And lay a hippie.

Miniver yearned for days gone by,
For free love’s newly bra-less boobies,
For Woodstock, rock and roll, tie-dye,
And smoking doobies.

Miniver mourned for Owsley Blue,
The name, he understood, for acid.
At Kool-Aid Tests and love-ins, too,
He’d be less flaccid.

Miniver loved the Beatles, Stones,
Frank Zappa, Zep, and, yes, the Monkees;
He didn’t care, he had a jones
For tuneful junkies.

He cursed the mosh-pit debutantes,
And viewed hip-hop with open loathing;
He missed the sight of Mary Quant’s
Bell-bottomed clothing.

He metaphored and analogued
And similed to try to flout it;
Miniver blogged, and blogged, and blogged,
And blogged about it.

And so there’s Miniver number three,
Who’s no more dour but no less bitter.
He shakes his head and sighs. Then he
Logs in to Twitter.

Marcus Bales writes: “Here’s one that has its own built-in reason for writing it: DF Parry had done such a good job, who could resist? But Miniver Cheevy III was written so long ago, now, that possibly it’s time to explore IV.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his “51 Poems” is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (“form in formless times”), and would like you to be familiar with the forerunners to his ‘Miniver Cheevy III’:

‘Miniver Cheevy, Jr.’ by D.F. Parry

Miniver Cheevy, Jr., child
Of Robinson’s renowned creation
Also lamented and reviled
His generation.

Miniver similarly spurned
The present that so irked his pater,
But that langsyne for which he yearned
Came somewhat later.

Miniver wished he were alive
When dividends came due each quarter,
When Goldman Sachs was 205
And skirts were shorter.

Miniver gave no hoot in hell
For Camelot or proud Troy’s pillage;
He would have much preferred to dwell
In Greenwich Village.

Miniver cherished fond regrets
For days when benefits were boundless;
When radios were crystal sets
And movies soundless.

Miniver missed the iron grills,
The whispered word, the swift admission,
The bath-tub gin, and other thrills
Of Prohibition.

Miniver longed, as all men long,
To turn back time (his eyes would moisten),
To dance the Charleston, play mah jong
And smuggle Joyce in.

Miniver Cheevy, Jr., swore
And drank until the drink imperiled
Health, then sighed, and read some more
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The original, of course, is ‘Miniver Cheevy‘ by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.