It’s the day for The Session again, the last Friday of the month. Our host this month is Phil Cook, a New Zealander in the beer trade who lives in Australia. He posed his question for this month’s consideration over at his blog and it’s all about art:
Feel free to interpret “art” and “fiction” as broadly as you like. Film, TV, music, games, poetry, prose, painting, a particularly pointed piece of graffiti; whatever. Don’t feel obliged to pick a single favourite. A random grab-bag of examples would be wonderful — though a carefully-selected set that illustrates a trend or theme is of course welcome, too. I’d even be curious to hear about a beer or pub that came to you in a dream, if it felt like it captured something about its subliminal force in culture or on your own specific consciousness.
Phil was good enough in his announcement of the topic to remind me that he was struck by Gord Downie’s rendition of the poem “At the Quinte Hotel” by Al Purdy, something I shared years ago. Here’s Al Purdy’s own rendition. Around that time, I also received what was unquestionably the highest award a Canadian beer blog writer can receive for their sensitivity as my original post about Purdy’s poem received this comment from none other than the host of CBC TV’s Man Alive Roy Bonisteel back in 2007, offering a bit of background on the poet and the poet:
I like the beer blog….it’s very good. In interesting fact that a lot of people don’t know is that although Bellevillians are very proud of Al Purdy’s poem about the Quinte Hotel…it is not the Belleville Quinte. It is the Trenton Quinte…now called something else…where Purdy drank. At this same time I had a room at the Quinte when I was driving cab and working at the Courier. At that time we didn’t know each other…but year’s later over many a beer, talked about the fact that we had both been there at the same time. Tell your friend I’ll keep up with his blog.
We now understand that the Quinte of Trenton became known as The Sherwood Forest Inn, a peeler bar, before it burned in 2012. Such is the way of the world. There are somethings even poetry can’t save us from.
And as further proof (if it was needed… or even possible) of my status as a sensitive man, I posted a number of passages from poems about beer back in 2007. It included this passage from a poem I have admired since I was in undergrad, William Shenstone‘s “Written At An Inn” from 1758:
Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lackeys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me Freedom, at an inn.
Freedom. Wonderful thought right there. Click on that image to see the whole thing as it appeared on page of Volume 27 of The London Magazine, Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer at page 255. And you know it wasn’t just poems being read about drinking in inns back then. There were poems written that were meant to be sung in the taverns and inns of the eighteenth century. I’ve posted a few over the years but I think my favourite, set to a very familiar tune, was “Nottingham Ale” because, as explained in the 2017 post under that link, I was familiar with the tune. But that was not the only one. In the very next year, I wrote about “Dorchester Beer” which includes this rueful geo-political verse offering an alt-history of the lead up to the American Revolution:
E’en our brethren across the Atlantick, could they
But drink of this liquor, would soon be content:
And quicker by half, I will venture to say,
Our parliament might have fulfilled their intent.
If, instead of commissioners, tedious and dear.
They had sent out a cargo of Dorchester-beer.
I wonder if they’d be open to that trade these days. Hmm. And I would be failing in my sensitivity on this point if I didn’t finish with an acknowledgement to Beer Daily Haiku which ran from 2005 to 2013 during the Golden Age of Beer Writing. That was a great thing to read over the first coffee each morning. The Wordle of its day.
What happened to it all? Why has beer ceased to inspire the pen? Is it because we have traded haze where once was clarity? I don’t know. Have we lost our capacity for sensitivity? I wonder. One last bit of verse before you go about your weekend, this from Keats’s Ode to Autumn which I wrote about in 2003 again thinking back to undergrad days when I was struck by this poet’s thoughts on the plenty of harvest and, in the end, harvest’s rewards:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Good work, Johnny K. Now I am off. Gotta go plant something. And then maybe have a drink.