MONDAY, 3 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "Escape from Paradise, Iowa," by Kathryn Kysar from Dark Lake (Loonfeather Press).

Escape from Paradise, Iowa

We are afraid of nothing.
At the diner,
you order a burger,
a grilled cheese for me.
We tell bad jokes,
pour salt on the table.
The waitress glares at us,
our clothes too tight,
my lipstick too red
for this small town.

This is the summer
of anger and beer.
We know everything:
how each blade of grass turns in the wind,
why the sunlight glints off the pool,
the shining of streetlights on black pavement,
the darkness of the lake at night.

At the bar
you say I am as Nordic
as blonde hair, these big bones
under the sheet of my skin
a frame for your thoughts.
I am the only one smoking.
My breath peels into the air like waves.

We have nothing in this town:
a beat-up Mustang,
a few songs on the jukebox,
the torn cover of a book you never read.
When we get in the car,
you pass me another beer.

We are scared of these random roads,
the small towns passing,
the gas tank nearly empty.
My head on your shoulder,
the eight track stuck again,
we're gonna drive this dirt road
all the way to Kansas City.

It's the birthday of Larry McMurtry, born in Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). His novel Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, and he began to hear stories about men in bars trying to pick women up by telling them that they were Larry McMurtry. Not long afterward he had bypass surgery, and with the surgery experienced a sudden, full-scale breakdown. He was so depressed that he could neither read nor write for several years. He runs a huge bookstore in Archer, Texas, which is housed in four buildings, and has the largest stock of used books between Manhattan and Berkeley. He grew up in Archer, and said that when he was a boy, there were no books there at all, and he wanted to fix that. He wrote about Archer in an early novel, The Last Picture Show, portraying it as "a town full of stupid people who were interested in unspeakable things." His mother said she read a hundred pages of the book and then hid it in the closet.

It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark (1926). His mother sank into mental illness when Ginsberg was still a child and she died in an asylum. His monumental poem "Kaddish," which he wrote in one forty-hour session, was an elegy to her. He met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs while he was a student at Columbia, and threw himself into a prolonged period of literary, sexual and hallucinogenic experimentation. After he was kicked out of school and in 1954 he moved to San Francisco, where he gave an electrifying public reading of his poem "Howl!" which he had composed in what he called his "Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath," and which became the manifesto of the Beat movement. He died of cancer in 1997, and he was so prolific that in the twenty-four hours before he slipped into a coma, he wrote twelve poems.

On this day in 1924, Franz Kafka died. He wrote to his friend Max Brod, "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me...in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.... Yours, Franz Kafka." But Brod had already told him that he would never destroy any of Kafka's manuscripts-not even if Kafka himself told him to-and critics are skeptical about the sincerity of Kafka's request. The three novels Kafka left behind-The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle-were all published by Brod, who made substantial changes to the manuscripts.

It's the birthday of Josephine Baker, born Frieda Josephine Carson in St. Louis, Missouri (1906). She was told that she was "too skinny and too dark" to be a chorus girl at the Plantation Club, but she worked backstage and learned all the routines and went on as an understudy. Instead of acting cool and sophisticated on stage, she rolled her eyes and pretended to fall over things. Audiences loved her. When she got a job in Paris with Le Revue Negre, she was an instant sensation. She wore skimpy costumes made of feathers and bananas, and sang and danced in a way no one had ever seen before. French audiences were mad for her. She once said that she had received 1500 marriage proposals, and she made more money than any other entertainer in Europe. When she died, the French government buried her with full military honors.

TUESDAY, 4 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "Carp Gallbladders," by Matt Cook from In The Small of My Backyard (Manic D Press).

Carp Gallbladders

I was reading an academic medical journal once,
Just to see what that would feel like.

There was something in there
About this weird disease that was identified.
It kept showing up in Chinatowns across the country-
Nobody could figure out what the deal was with it.

Finally the disease was linked to carp gallbladders-
Residents in these sections were eating
Ridiculously authentic food that featured carp gallbladders.

Then some fraternity brothers at a major state university
Came down with the same sickness-
And nobody could think of any lifestyle parallel
Between middle-class frat boys and poor, urban Asians.

But then through a lot of trial and error and stuff
It was determined that the frat boys
Got the disease from drinking games
Like swallowing goldfish,
Which are a type of carp,
The End.

I've got a friend from Iceland;
He said this to me the other day:

"Americans are always telling you about some article they've read."

On this day in 2000, a chartered train called the Literature Express started off on a month-long journey from Lisbon to Berlin. One hundred and seven writers from forty-three countries took the trip. The journey was supposed to allow the writers time to get to know each other in an informal setting so they could start to talk about cross-border tensions in Europe. Leo Tuor, a writer from a small Swiss village, said that he agreed to go because he wanted to meet some new people. "I write in Romansh," he said. "It's a language spoken by only forty thousand people, and I know them all already."

On this day in 1962, William Faulkner's The Reivers was published. It was the last novel he published before his death. The provisional title was "The Stealers," but Faulkner changed it to "The Reavers," using an old word for thieves. Then he wrote his publisher to say that he wanted to spell Reavers the old, Scottish way, E-I, instead of E-A.

On this day in 1940, Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter first appeared. She was twenty-three, and the only thing she had published before was a short story. The novel, about a group of outcasts all drawn to the same deaf man, was a magnificent success. She wrote later, "For a whole year I worked on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn't know. I'd almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. Suddenly it occurred me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer. The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."

On this day in 1920, Congress passed the 19th amendment to the Constitution. It took over forty years of political activism to get it passed, and most of the women who had worked for passage early on did not live long enough to vote themselves.

It's the birthday of the playwright Robert Anderson, born in New York City (1917). He's the author of Tea and Sympathy, the first Broadway play to consider in a thoughtful way the possibility of a young man's being homosexual. The young man wasn't, as it turned out, but the idea wasn't condemned. It was Deborah Kerr's first starring role as an actress.

It's the birthday of Harry Grew Crosby, born 1898 in the Back Bay of Boston. He was J.P. Morgan's nephew and was expected to become a banker, but instead he stole a socialite from her husband and took her to Paris. He started writing poetry. While he waited for fame and recognition, he and Caresse founded the Black Sun Press, which published handsome editions of titles by Hart Crane, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and T.S. Elliot. Crosby drank and smoked and gambled and conquered women and finally killed himself two years after he started Black Sun.

WEDNESDAY, 5 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "I am a hunchback," by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I am a hunchback

I am a hunchback, yellow faced,
A hateful sight to see,
'Tis all that other men can do
To pass and let me be.

I am a woman, my hair is white,
I was a darkhaired lass;
The gin dances in my head,
I stumble as I pass.

I am a man that God made at first,
And teachers tried to harm,
Here! hunchback take my friendly hand,
Good woman, take my arm.

It's the day Adam Smith was baptized in Kirkeldy, Scotland (1723). The exact date of his birth is not known. When he was a small child he was stolen by gypsies, but he was soon found and returned to his parents. He published only two books in his lifetime: The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which said that market forces were better at creating social good than any government program.

It's the birthday of Ivy Compton-Burnett, born in Pinner, England (1884). Her father had seven children by his first wife, and when she died, seven children by his second; Compton-Burnett was the oldest child of the second wife. Her father deposited this enormous family in an isolated house on the coast, and returned to his practice in London. The tyranny and caprice of her mother, and the unexpected deaths, one after the other, of her beloved father and four of her siblings, provided Compton-Burnett with the material for many of her early novels. She wrote about the tyranny and repression that lay behind the prim decorum of Victorian families. She didn't publish her first book, Pastors and Masters, until after she was forty, in 1925. Readers raved about the effect created by her steely, ironic writing. "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world," said one reviewer. During the Second World War she began to be more widely read as public sentiment caught up with her moral disenchantment.

It's the birthday of Federico Garcia Lorca, born in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain (1898). He wrote poems, but resisted publishing them; he thought poetry should be spoken. He did publish, though; his collection Gypsy Ballads (1928) combined twentieth-century surrealism with the old, dark legends of Andalusia, and he became famous all over Spain. He single-handedly revived Spanish theatre, and is remembered now for three tragedies, Blood Wedding (1935), Yerma, (1937) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1940). In the first month of the Spanish Civil War he was dragged into an open field and shot by a firing squad.

It's the birthday of Richard Scarry, born in Boston (1919). He's the author of more than three hundred books for children. He said that what made him happiest as an author was receiving letters from people telling him that their copies of his books were all worn out, or were held together with Scotch tape.

It's the birthday of Margaret Drabble, born in Sheffield, Yorkshire (1939). She won great admiration when she was younger for novels about women flouting social convention, like The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965). Her books have also been described as the best books to read for people who wonder what's it's like to be English. Drabble's half-sister is the British novelist A.S. Byatt. Last year Drabble edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and inserted, among its thousands of biographical entries, a single, entirely mythical one.

It's the birthday of David Hare, born in Sussex (1947). Since his debut in 1969, he's written twenty-two plays. In 1998, he had four plays running simultaneously in four different New York City theatres. When Frank Rich panned one of his plays in 1998 and the production closed immediately afterward, Hare wrote an essay for the New York Times that said Rich had too much power. Rich backpeddled somewhat in a reply, and Hare was judged to have landed a blow to the critic's formidable reputation.

THURSDAY, 6 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "After the Heat Wave," by Maxine Kumin from Connecting the Dots (W.W. Norton and Company).

After the Heat Wave

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep.
Deerflies lie doggo, black flies are absent.
Not one emerges from the great storehouse.
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season's
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

On this day in 1949, George Orwell's novel 1984 was published. It has since sold 10 million copies, and has been translated into 62 languages. Orwell became a celebrity in 1946 with the publication of Animal Farm. With the money he earned from his first success, Orwell bought a house on Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland, a place so far away from civilization that it took several days just to get there. There he started work on 1984. He developed symptoms of tuberculosis, got better for a while, and then fell seriously ill. He pleaded with his publisher to send him a typist, but they couldn't find anyone who was willing to travel to Orwell's island. So, he sat up in bed and typed the whole manuscript by himself, smoking cigarette after cigarette. The day he finished, he was taken to a sanitarium, and he died there six months later.

On this day in 1944, during the Second World War, the long-awaited invasion of France began. Thousands of ships took one hundred and thirty thousand Allied troops across the English Channel, where they streamed onto five separate beaches in Normandy. The Allied forces had prepared for the invasion with a masterful campaign of misinformation. The most natural place for an invasion would have been across the narrow straits of Calais, and decoy messages convinced the Germans that the real invasion was going to take place there. Dummy landing craft were launched. Faked radar signals made it look as if planes were headed for Calais, while radar blackouts concealed planes headed for Normandy. The campaign was so successful that the Germans failed to move any of their divisions south in time to block the Allies. Other messages sent earlier had diverted more German divisions north to Norway and south to the Balkans.

On this day in 1933, Richard Hollingshead opened the first drive-in movie theatre in Camden, New Jersey. Drive-in theatres still exist in the U.S.; the professional association of drive-in movie theatre owners has about one hundred members.

It's the birthday of Maxine Kumin, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1925). She has published fourteen books of poetry, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country (1972). She lives on a farm in New Hampshire, where she and her husband raise sheep and horses. Three years ago, she was thrown from a carriage she was driving when her horse bolted. The emergency room doctor told her that ninety-five percent of people with similar injuries wouldn't have made it to the emergency room. She wrote a book called Inside the Halo and Beyond (2000) about the year it took her to recover from the accident. In it, she credits her grown children for the constant help they gave her.

It's the birthday of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, born in Moscow (1799). His father was from a noble Russian family, and his mother was descended from an Ethiopian servant in the court of Peter the Great. The children of Russian aristocrats were educated entirely in French, and Pushkin heard Russian only from the family's servants. He was the first writer to try writing in colloquial Russian, and he is still considered one of its most accomplished stylists. He's remembered now for his long works in verse, Boris Godunov (1831) and Eugene Onegin (1833).

FRIDAY, 7 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "The Way I Tie My Shoes," by Matt Cook from In The Small of My Backyard (Manic D Press).

The Way I Tie My Shoes

When the Vietnam War ended
I didn't know how to tie my shoes.

But then the men started coming home from that war,
And they began to date my mother,
And then they were moving into our apartment,
And then they taught me how to tie my shoes.

This isn't some metaphor: as a boy I associated Vietnam War veterans
With people who knew how to tie their shoes.

This guy Murphy lived with us for a while.
He also taught me how to treat a snakebite
But that doesn't come up as often.

My uncle was over there-
He told me once that the jungle did strange things to his mind.
Then, while he was telling me this, he added, seemingly out of nowhere,
That he never liked deviled eggs as a child.
I couldn't see where he was going with that,
But then he laid this on me-
The jungle, for some reason, he said, caused him to crave deviled eggs.

That was it. That was his Vietnam story:
He developed a craving for deviled eggs.

My father, who was lucky at everything all the time,
Was stationed in Germany during the war.
All he did was play ping-pong and smoke marijuana and read paperbacks.
When he would go out on sentry duty,
He would carry just one bullet with him.
When his shift was over, he would hand the bullet
To the next man coming on.

Sometimes I'll sit transfixed in a chair, with one shoe on-
I'm working up the courage to put the next shoe on.
It's early in the morning, and the shoes look like big question marks.

On this day in 1967, Dorothy Parker died alone in a hotel in New York City. She had tried to commit suicide several times before-Robert Benchley visited her in the hospital after one attempt and said, "Dorothy, you're going to make yourself sick!"-but examination revealed that she had had a heart attack.

It's the birthday of Louise Erdrich, born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). Her mother was French-Chippewa and her father was German-American. Her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), was accepted when her husband posed as her literary agent and resubmitted it to the publishers who had rejected it the first time around. Her latest book, Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, takes place on the same reservation and involves many of the same characters as the four novels that precede it. "I've finally figured out that I'm just working on one long novel," she has said.

It's the birthday of Gwendolyn Brooks, born in Topeka, Kansas (1917). She started submitting work to poetry magazines when she was eleven. She often talked about her poetry as spanning three periods: a period of self-expression, an "integrationist" period, and then a period in which she tried consciously to write poems for a black audience, poems that would be accessible to ordinary people, like songs. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her second collection, Annie Allen (1949).

It's the birthday of Elizabeth Bowen, born Elizabeth Dorothea Cole in Dublin (1899). Her family were Anglo-Irish, English aristocrats who lived on isolated Irish estates surrounded by the poor fields of tenant farmers. Her father went mad, and the family doctor advised Bowen's mother to take her daughter to England and settle there. Bowen's mother died when she was thirteen, and she spent the rest of her childhood shuttling between boarding school and the houses of various aunts. Later, she often wrote about women who had been orphaned or who found themselves alone in the world, but she said of herself that her traumatic childhood had left her with "nothing more disastrous than a stammer." She took her pen name from Bowen's Court, the enormous house where she was born, which she was forced at last to sell to wreckers because she could no longer pay the taxes. She published fifteen novels. Her first, The Hotel was published in 1927, and her last, Eva Trout, was published in 1968.

SATURDAY, 8 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "Wanting to Dance with the Bride," by Kathryn Kysar from Dark Lake (Loonfeather Press).

Wanting to Dance with the Bride

White: the silhouette of hair, shoulders, the flow
of the gown against the cathedral windows
steaming in the August Superior sun,
White haze on the big lake, white clouds,
White cake with almond filling,
White gardenias for the mothers,
White carnations for the teenage nieces
with nose rings, purple hair, and clunky shoes,
White for the flash of the friend's camera bulb,
White for the teeth of the smiling groom,
White for the napkins, the thick paper of the guest book,
the ostrich feather-plumed pen,
White for the baby's breath in the bride's hair,
White for the porcelain cups filled with coffee,
White for the cream, not the bluish tinge of the skim milk,
White for the aprons of the matrons who serve the buffet,
White for the scuffed shoes of the three-year-old flower girl
as she strews petals on the lawn,
White for my blank face,
White for the sheets of my empty hotel room bed,
White for ignoring how he ignores here,
White for her hope for children,
White for his absence in her bed at night,
White to make me blank, uncaring,
White for transcendence,
White for wanting to dance with the bride.

On this day in 1997, the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola died. He was born in 1920; his birth date is unknown. In 1952 he wrote the Palm Wine Drinkard, a novel about a man who travels to the spirit world to rescue his bartender.

It's the birthday of Sara Paretsky, born in Ames, Iowa (1947). She's written ten novels about V. I. Warshawski, a female detective from Chicago who carries a gun and doesn't take any back-talk. The books sell well overseas, particularly in Japan. The translator of the series has figured out how to make Warshawski's speech strong and direct without violating any of the conventions of feminine speech in Japanese.

On this day in 1867, Mark Twain boarded the side-wheel steamer "The Quaker City," bound for a five-month journey to Europe and the Mediterranean. The San Francisco paper Alta California had promised to finance the trip if Twain would agree to send bulletins of his progress, and they said they'd pay him twenty dollars for every letter he wrote for publication. When he got home, the American Publishing Company released the letters as The Innocents Abroad. It sold seventy thousand copies in its first year, and was Twain's bestselling work during his lifetime.

On this day in 1892 Emily Dickinson wrote to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson to ask his opinion of her work. She had probably seen articles of his in the Atlantic Monthly, and she sent him several of her poems. This time she wrote: "Would you have time to be the 'friend' you should think I need? I have a little shape: it would not crowd your desk, nor make much racket as the mouse that dents your galleries. If I might bring you what I do--not so frequent to trouble you--and ask you if I told it clear, 'twould be control to me." He told her the gait of her poetry was "spasmodic," and never offered to help her publish any of her work, but she continued to write to him until her death twenty years later. When her first collection of poetry was published after her death, he admitted in an essay that the six editions it had gone through in six months was "a suddenness of success almost without a parallel in American literature."


SUNDAY, 9 JUNE 2002
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Poem: "Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats," by Walt Whitman.

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats

Ah poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
(For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes,
the old, the incessant war?)
You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds the
sharpest of all!)
You toil of painful and choked articulations, you meannesses,
You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of
any;)
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd
ennuis!
Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come
forth,
It shall yet march forth o'ermastering, till all lies beneath me,
It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.

It's the birthday of Patricia Cornwell, born in Miami, Florida (1956). She's the author of thirteen mysteries about a medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta. When she started writing mysteries and submitting them to publishers, they were returned. She wrote one sympathetic editor to ask what she could do to improve them, and the editor told her to dump the male detective she had written about and say more about a minor character called Kay Scarpetta. The next novel Cornwell wrote, Postmortem (1990), won five major mystery prizes, the first time any book had landed all five the same year. Her books have a reputation for grisly realism, which she supports with exhaustive research.

It's the birthday of S. N. Behrman, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1893). He went to Harvard and studied playwriting in George Baker Pierce's workshop. Behrman wrote twenty-one plays, all comedies, wrote essays and criticism for the New Yorker, and later went to Hollywood, where he wrote the screenplays for Anna Karenina, The Tale of Two Cities, and Ninotchka.

It's the birthday of Cole Porter, born in Peru, Indiana (1891). A music teacher at boarding school taught him to write songs in which the words and the music were ingeniously wedded, and by the time Porter graduated from Yale he had produced six full-scale musical revues and hundreds of songs. Porter's lyrics were dry, witty, and contained a fair amount of sexual innuendo. He liked to write songs backwards, starting from the punch-line in the final verse and working back toward the beginning. In 1935 he set out on a round- the-world cruise equipped with a piano, twenty-four pencils, a stack of music paper, and three cases of champagne, and returned with "Begin the Beguine." Some of his shows were flops, but at least one tune from every show became a standard.

On this day in 1870, Charles Dickens dropped from his chair at the dinner table and died of apoplexy, as strokes were called then. He was fifty-eight. Queen Victoria sent a telegram the next day, and news of his demise spread all over the British Empire. He had hoped to be buried at home, but the Dean of Westminster Abbey told the family that a place had been prepared for him in the Poet's Corner, and he was buried there. In the last year before his death he had undertaken a punishing series of public readings at theatres in the United States, and his letters from that time complain of fatigue and insomnia. Yet he enjoyed doing the readings, and they brought in a lot of money.

On this day in 1628, William Bradstreet exiled Thomas Morton from New England. The settlement elders charged Morton with "licentiousness," and accused Morton of selling weapons to the Indians. The people of Morton's settlement had offended Bradstreet's Separatist Puritans by erecting a Maypole, dancing around it, and "tippling with quick dexterity." Morton saved most of his praise for the Indians: "[T]hese people lead the more happy and freer life, being voyde of care, which torments the mindes of so many Christians: they are not delighted in baubles, but in usefull things."

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