MONDAY, 9 DECEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Grace Before Meat," and "Another," by Fred Chappell from The World Between the Eyes (Louisiana State University).
Grace Before Meat
As this noon our meat we carve,
Bless us better than we deserve.
Another
Bless, O Lord, our daily bread.
Bless those in hunger and in need
Of strength. Bless all who stand in want.
Bless us who pray, bless us who can't.
It's the birthday of illustrator and author Jean de Brunhoff, born in Paris (1899). He is known for his stories about Babar the Elephant, which he based on a bedtime story told to his two sons by their imaginative mother.
On this day in 1854, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," was published in England:
"Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."
It's the birthday of the author of Uncle Remus, Joel
Chandler Harris, born in Eatonton, Georgia (1848). He started out in
the newspaper business at the age of thirteen. He became a printer's helper
and began writing for the Savannah Morning News where he wrote a column
made up of jokes. After many years of that, at the age of thirty-one he developed
a character, Uncle Remus, a slave who told old folk tales, many of which centered
on the sinister deeds of Brer Rabbit. They were collected into a book in 1880,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation.
It's the birthday of poet and essayist John Milton, born in London, England (1608). Milton is considered to be one of the five greatest poets in the English language. He wrote his great works in old age. He was fifty-nine years old when he wrote Paradise Lost (1667), followed by Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). Paradise Lost is the story of Adam and Eve, God and Satan, and what happened when Satan, the most beautiful of angels, was expelled from Heaven. Paradise Lost, which begins with the words:
"Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that
Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the
World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater
Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly
Muse…"
John Milton, who also wrote:
"What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men."
Milton began his literary career at the age of eighteen
by writing elaborate and rather soppy elegies to great men who had died. In
1643, in the midst of a very unhappy marriage, Milton published a pamphlet called
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In it, he argued that adultery
should not be the only legal justification for divorce -- incompatibility should
suffice as well.
TUESDAY, 10
DECEMBER 2002
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Poem: "There's a certain Slant of light," and "It will be Summer -- eventually," by Emily Dickinson.
There's a certain Slant of light
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons --
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes --
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us --
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are --
None may teach it -- Any --
'Tis the Seal Despair --
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air --
When it comes, the Landscape listens --
Shadows -- hold their breath --
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death --
It will be Summer -- eventually
It will be Summer -- eventually.
Ladies -- with parasols --
Sauntering Gentlemen -- with Canes --
And little Girls-with Dolls --
Will tint the pallid landscape --
As 'twere a bright Bouquet --
Tho' drifted deep, in Parian --
The Village lies -- today --
The Lilacs -- bending many a year --
Will sway with purple load --
The Bees -- will not despise the tune --
Their Forefathers -- have hummed --
The Wild Rose -- redden in the Bog --
The Aster -- on the Hill
Her everlasting fashion -- set --
And Covenant Gentians -- frill --
Till Summer folds her miracle --
As Woman -- do -- their Gown --
Or Priests -- adjust the Symbols --
When Sacrament -- is done --
It's the birthday of the poet Emily
Dickinson, born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). Emily was a bright
and curious girl. She loved plants and would pass the time with her best friend
Abby Wood in a small playhouse in the garden. Her extended family was plagued
with illness-many of her relatives had already died of consumption at young
ages. Emily played the piano, preferring the sounds of upbeat music to those
of church hymns. Her father, who had been the valedictorian at Yale, discouraged
her from reading the "light" books she enjoyed so much. When her father
was elected to the State Senate, Emily's family moved back into their family's
large mansion (from a smaller home that they'd moved to during a financial struggle
a few years earlier). Her mother fell into a deep depression shortly after the
move, and Emily was forced to care for her mother full time. She began to exclude
herself from Amherst social life, and eventually became a total recluse in her
home over the next three decades until her death. From 1858 to 1866, she wrote
about 1,000 poems, and over 1,700 in her lifetime. Emily's first published poem
was at age 22 when she sent a mock valentine to someone, and it eventually landed
in the hands of Dr. Josiah Holland, who printed it. Only about 10 of her poems
were published during her lifetime, none with her consent. Shortly after her
death in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, discovered two large bundles in Emily's
closet, each tied up with string. One was full of letters, and the other of
poems. They were marked by Emily with a note to be burned and unread. Lavinia
burned the bundle of letters but could not bring herself to burn the poems.
In all, about 1,775 poems or fragments were recovered from Emily's room and
later published.
WEDNESDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Stories My Grandmother
Told," by J.L.
Conrad from A Cartography of Birds Poems (Louisiana State University
Press).
Stories My Grandmother Told
I
Lights in the barn. She was milking the cows. Alone with warm
udders
and liquid hissing earthward. Lights throwing cow-head shadows across
her face and slats of straw. Then, no lights. It must be the brothers.
Afraid, taking the back way into the house, calling Marion? Marion?
He
answered from the kitchen, had not traveled house to barn. Assured her.
II
The fruitroom with rows of peaches, pears, green beans. Viewed
through sides of glass jars, damp and saturated by earth-scent. There
were men whose stealth led them silently through basement windows,
leaving evidence: empty jars, trails of half-eaten fruit.
III
The doctor had sent her father home to die. Blood poisoning
in the
leg. He sat in the room refusing to go. Waking one night, saw a leg
through the window, a hand reaching in. The chair-side bell rang fever-
ishly, whispering danger. The leg withdrew; the brothers came. Saw a
running figure, knife in hand. The stranger was sent by the doctor,
they decided. To make sure his time had really come.
On this day in 1882, a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's
"Iolanthe" at Boston's Bijou Theatre became the first performance
in a theater to be lit by incandescent electric lights.
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Jim Harrison, born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). He is well known for his best-selling novel, Legends of the Fall (1977), but he's also published nine collections of poetry. He said, "I'm a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less."
It's the birthday of Grace
Paley, poet and short-story writer, born in the Bronx, New York City
(1922). Her collections include The Little Disturbances of Man (1959),
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day
(1985).
It's the birthday of Russian novelist Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). He won the 1970 Nobel
Peace Prize and is best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962) and The Gulag Archipelago, both of which caused him great trouble
with the Russian government. He was eventually exiled, and did not return to
Russia until the age of 76.
It's the birthday of Egyptian novelist, playwright, and short-story writer Naguib Mahfouz, born in Cairo (1911). He was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988). He has written over thirty novels, most of them set in the Jamaliyaa quarter of Cairo, where he grew up. He is still a columnist at the Al-Ahram newspaper based in Cairo.
It's the birthday of novelist Thomas
McGuane, born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). His most famous novels
include The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971),
and Nobody's Angel (1982).
THURSDAY,
12 DECEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Great
Things Have Happened," by Alden
Nowlan from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Nineties
Press).
Great Things Have Happened
We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
It's the birthday of playwright John Osborne, born in London, England (1929) who became the most famous of the generation of young writers known as the "Angry Young Men" for his play of 1956, Look Back in Anger. He was an actor, worked as a stage manager, started writing his own plays and took the script Look Back in Anger to the Royal Court Theater in London while he was living on a houseboat in Chelsea. The play had a very successful run in London and established Osborne in the theater. His next play, The Entertainer (1957), became a showcase for Sir Lawrence Olivier.
It's the birthday of novelist Patrick O'Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ in London, England (1914). He was introduced to the sea when he was young and a family friend taught him to hand, reef and steer, as they did with the great sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries. As an adult, Patrick O'Brian moved to a small fishing village in the south of France, where he began writing novels about the British naval officer Jack Aubrey and his friend the Irish-Catalan physician and spy, Stephen Maturin. The first Aubrey-Maturin novel, Master and Commander, was published in 1969. But it wasn't until 1990 that an editor in the United States read the novels and decided to take a chance on publishing them in America.
It's the birthday of the man who said "Be regular
and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original
in your work," Gustave
Flaubert, born in Rouen, France (1821). He came from a family of doctors
and veterinarians, but he chose instead to study the law and become a writer.
He was famous for his novel, Madame Bovary (1857), about a country doctor's
wife who is driven to suicide by debt and infidelity. The novel took him nearly
five years to write. The publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 landed
Flaubert in court on charges of immorality. He was eventually acquitted of the
charges, and the publicity of the trial made the book a bestseller.
FRIDAY,
13 DECEMBER 2002
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Poem:
"A Song for the Middle of the Night," by James Wright from Above
the River: The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
A Song for the Middle of the Night
By way of explaining to my son the following curse by
Eustace Deschamps: "Happy is he who has no children;
for babies bring nothing but crying and stench."
Now first of all he means the night
You beat the crib and cried
And brought me spinning out of bed
To powder your backside.
I rolled your buttocks over
And I could not complain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.
Now second of all he means the day
You dabbled out of doors
And dragged a dead cat Billy-be-damned
Across the kitchen floors.
I rolled your buttocks over
And made you sing for pain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la
Back to sleep again.
But third of all my father once
Laid me across his knee
And solved the trouble when he beat
The yowling out of me.
He rocked me on his shoulder
When razor straps were vain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.
So roll upon your belly, boy,
And bother being cursed.
You turn the household upside down,
But you are not the first.
Deschamps the poet blubbered too,
For all his fool disdain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.
Today is Santa Lucia Day. Santa Lucia, or Saint Lucy, lived in Sicily in the fourth century. Her name means light, and she became the patron saint of sight, and of the blind. By the year 1000, the veneration of Saint Lucy had reached as far as Sweden, where her feast day became the start of the Christmas season. In Sweden, it's a tradition on Santa Lucia Day for the eldest daughter of the house to usher in the Christmas season by putting on a white dress and wearing an evergreen wreath with seven lighted candles as a crown. In the old Julian calendar, December 13 was the winter solstice.
It's the birthday of poet James (Arlington) Wright, born in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1927). He was enrolled in a vocational program in school until a friend started to teach him Latin. That began for him a lifelong devotion to Latin poetry, which left its mark on his own poetry. He studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. He taught at the University of Minnesota and it was while he was at the university that he published the important book, The Branch Will Not Break (1963). The collection contains his most widely anthologized poem, "A Blessing," which ends with the lines: "Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom." James Wright said: "My own poems are merely attempts to cure myself of glibness. Glibness is the worst thing that can happen -- and not only in the writing of verse."
It's the birthday of the German poet Heinrich
Heine, born in Düsseldorf, Germany (1797). The son of a Jewish
tradesman, he became a literary celebrity with the publication of his first
book of poems, called Poems by H. Heine (1821). The collection
Book of Songs (1827) spread his fame beyond Germany. Several of the poems
were set to music by composers like Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. When
the Nazis occupied Paris in 1941, they attempted to obliterate all traces of
Heine's grave in the Montmartre cemetery and his books were burned. He said:
"The burning is but a prologue: where books are burned, people in the end
are burned too."
SATURDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Honesty,"
by Connie Wanek from Hartly Field (Holy Cow Press).
Honesty
I could easily be honest
if I were certain of the truth.
You remember the day as sunny and hot,
the car an oven, the air
rippling over the green chile fields.
I remember clouds building in the western sky
as quickly as if there'd been an explosion
out where the military tested
something big and vastly expensive
over and over.
Everyone seems so confident.
Those letters to the editor: "Get real" and
"Wake up, people!" The man from Pengilly
who keeps "loaded guns in readily accessible locations."
I honestly don't know why I had children
or why I sew, or garden,
except that if it's true we're made in God's image
we are born to create, or to try-
though when you smile at my earnestness
I see that you're right, I am naive.
I remember when our daughter realized
it was possible not to tell the truth.
She was three years old.
I saw something pass over her eyes, a petit mal,
leaving a kind of bright residue,
the shimmer of a most attractive lie, a fairy tale
no one had told her; yet she suddenly knew,
about a girl who never pinched a friend
however much she deserved it.
A hour passes and I'm no longer angry,
though it's true I was.
Sunlight streams through the screen door-
a late clearing, just as you predicted.
We're together in the kitchen,
a friendly bumping as we wash and slice
the green and red, yellow and white
ingredients, and stir them all in the kettle
until nothing is exclusively itself.
It's the birthday of short story writer Amy
Hempel, born in Chicago, Illinois (1951). After her mother's suicide,
and her own near-death experience in a motorcycle accident, she enrolled in
an anatomy course that gave her a chance to be present at autopsies. The experience
allowed her to become more comfortable with death. She went on to become a writer
known for her dark, quirky short stories, like "In the Cemetery Where Al
Jolson is Buried."
It's the birthday of historical fiction writer Rosemary Sutcliff, born in East Clanden, Surrey, England (1920). She became known as England's best writer of historical novels for young people, with books such as The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), the first in a trilogy of novels set during the Roman occupation of Britain. She also published a popular trilogy of novels about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, including The Light Beyond the Forest (1979), The Sword and the Circle (1981), and The Road to Camlann (1981).
It's the birthday of novelist Shirley
(Hardie) Jackson, born in San Francisco, California (1916). She's most
famous for her story, "The Lottery," which appeared in the New
Yorker in 1948. It's about a town's annual tradition of sacrificing a human
in order to insure a good harvest. She also wrote books of nonfiction about
raising a big family of children, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising
Demons (1957).
On this day in 1799, George
Washington died at his Mount Vernon estate. He had caught a chill while
riding his horse in the damp winter weather two days earlier. At a memorial
service organized by Congress two weeks later, Washington's old friend, Major
General Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, delivered a famous eulogy that
began, "First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen."
SUNDAY, 15 DECEMBER
2002
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Poem: "A Clear Day and No Memories," and "The Planet on the Table," by Wallace Stevens from Collected Poems (Knopf).
A Clear Day and No Memories
No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.
Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.
The Planet on the Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
It's the birthday of Irish novelist Edna
O'Brien, born in Twamgraney, County Clare, Ireland (1936). She grew
up on a farm near a small village in the west of Ireland. There were about two
hundred people in the village, and everybody knew everyone else's business.
She said: "I had sort of a limitless access to everyone's life story. For
a writer, it's a marvelous chance." She was brought up in a convent and
her family was opposed to anything having to do with literature. When she was
a student in Dublin her mother found a Sean O'Casey book in her suitcase and
threatened to burn it. But she was still inspired to write, especially after
reading James Joyce. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was banned
in Ireland because of its graphic sexual scenes. She said, "It's important
when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are
answerable, you're throttled. You can't do it." She also wrote House
of Splendid Isolation and moved from Ireland to England, though her homeland
always remained vivid in her memory and in her fiction.
It's the birthday of playwright Maxwell
Anderson, born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania (1888). His dream was to write
plays that would bring tragic poetry to the American stage. He tried, with White
Desert, but he failed. Then Laurence Stallings approached him about collaborating
on a comic play about World War One. The play, What Price Glory? (1924),
launched Anderson's career on the stage. This allowed him to again try writing
verse plays including Elizabeth the Queen (1930) and Winterset (1935).
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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