Maurice Manning's "A Brief Refutation..."

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

The full title of today’s poem from Maurice Manning says it all: “A Brief Refutation of the Rumor That I Allowed Willie and Tad to Relieve Themselves in my Up-Turned Hat on a Sunday Morning at the Office While Their Mother was Attending Religious Services”

Maurice Manning (born 1966) is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry (with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Copper Canyon Press). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Today’s poem comes from his 2020 collection, Railsplitter.

-bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, February 20th, 2004.
0:10.4	Today's poem is by Maurice Manning, and it comes from his 2019 collection, Rail Splitter, composed in the posthumous voice of Abraham Lincoln.
0:22.2	That collection does a great job of capturing the seriousness and introspection
0:29.7	that Lincoln must have experienced, as well as the lightheartedness and the joys at the common things of life,
0:43.8	which also characterized the man in rarer moments.
0:49.4	And today's poem is a great example of that levity that is juxtaposed with the serious and weighty spirit, usually characterizing President Lincoln.
1:11.6	After I read the title, I think no more commentary will be needed.
1:18.8	So, enjoy.
1:21.2	This is Maurice Manning's, a brief refutation of the rumor that I allowed Willie and Tad to relieve themselves in my upturned
1:29.1	hat on a Sunday morning at the office while their mother was attending religious services.
1:38.9	I will allow a tall hat can be put to purposes other than the polite covering of the head.
1:45.8	And the record shows I carried papers in mine, important papers too, and for dramatic effect
1:51.4	I'd pull them out in court, bewildering my opponents. But that was practical. The documents
1:57.0	intended to prove my claim were sheltered from the weather and less likely to be lost.
2:02.3	And having words I'd taken care to write, proximate to the head from which they sprang,
2:07.6	permitted me to ponder them, to keep them, so to speak, in the nest a little longer,
2:13.4	before they flew into the room to batter against the smudged windows of a prairie courthouse amid the clangs of the punctuating spatoon.
2:21.6	It was a commonplace to fill my hat with oats and feed my horse when I was riding on the circuit,
2:27.2	and the rooming houses where I lodged had few accommodations so the hat was handy as a basin if a morning ablution were required.
2:35.4	On this occasion, however, the hat was mere amusement for the boys who set it on the office
2:40.9	floor and pitched pennies into it, stepping farther back each round, as I was reading on the couch.
2:48.2	Their mother was indeed at church. The weather was profoundly bad, and the privy,
	...

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