MONDAY, 12 MAY 2003
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Poem: "The Dancing," by Gerald Stern from Paradise Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press).

The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never see a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop--in 1945--
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing--in Poland and Germany--
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of English detective writer Leslie Charteris, born in Singapore in 1907. He's famous for creating the Saint, a sharply-dressed hero who hunted down bad guys and used the names of different saints as pseudonyms. The Saint was introduced in the novel Enter the Saint (1930), and his adventures were portrayed in several movies and a television series starring Roger Moore in the 1960s. Charteris introduced his character, "I am the Saint -- you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cock-eyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across."

It's the birthday of American novelist and poet Rosellen Brown, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1939. Her novels include Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and her latest, Half a Heart (2000), which tells the story of a white, Jewish woman who is reunited with the biracial daughter she abandoned during the sixties. She said, "I still write for the same reason I wrote when I was nine years old: to speak more perfectly than I really can, to a listener more perfect than any I know."

It's the birthday of Canadian writer of animal stories Farley Mowat, born in Belleville, Ontario in 1921. He was obsessed with animals as a child, and became an avid bird-watcher by the time he was fifteen years old. One evening, his parents were hosting a formal dinner party at their house when young Farley rushed into the room with a dead, dissected woodpecker on a plate, excited about an anatomical discovery he had made. One of the guests happened to work at the local newspaper and asked Farley if he would write a weekly column about birds in the paper's supplement for young readers. It was the beginning of his career as a writer.

It's the birthday of English nonsense poet Edward Lear, born in London in 1812. His first book of poems was called A Book of Nonsense (1846), and was filled with limericks and other snappy, silly poems. He was better known in his day for his landscape paintings and nature drawings than his poetry, and worked for the London Zoological Society illustrating birds. He wrote:

There was an Old Man who supposed,
That the street door was partially closed;
But some very large rats, ate his coats and his hats,
While that futile old gentleman dozed.

It's the birthday of poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born in London in 1828 to Italian exiles. He and his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, grew up drawing, painting, and writing poetry in both English and Italian. In 1851, he became engaged to Lizzie Siddal, but they weren't married until 1860. Lizzie died just two years after she and Rossetti were married, probably by suicide. Rossetti placed all of his unpublished poems in her coffin, only to dig them up a few years later so he could publish them.

It's the birthday of philosophical writer and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti, born in Mandanapalle, South India in 1895. He said, "Your judgment, your mind, your affection, your life are being perverted by things which have no value, and herein lies sorrow."

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TUESDAY, 13 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Museum Guard," by David Hernandez from A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press).

Museum Guard

My condolences to the man dressed
for a funeral, sitting bored
on a gray folding chair, the zero

of his mouth widening in a yawn.
No doubt he's pictured himself inside
a painting or two around his station,

stealing a plump green grape
from the cluster hanging above
the corkscrew locks of Dionysus,

or shooting arrows at rosy-cheeked cherubs
hiding behind a woolly cloud.
With time limping along

like a Bruegel beggar, no doubt
he's even seen himself taking the place
of the one crucified: the black spike

of the minute hand piercing his left palm,
the hour hand penetrating the right,
nailed forever to one spot.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of painter Georges Braque, born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France in 1882. He painted scenes of villages where the buildings were reduced to their basic geometrical shape, the cube, and along with Pablo Picasso became a leader of Cubism. Georges Braque said: "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."

It's the birthday of one half of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera writing team, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, born in London in 1842. He began collaborating with William Gilbert in 1871, and the pair would go on to write fourteen enormously popular comic operas, including Trial by Jury (1875), The Mikado (1885), and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). After a string of successes, they had their own theatre built for them, the Savoy, where they premiered Patience (1881).

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, born in Euclid, Ohio in 1937. He was part of science fiction's "New Wave" in the 1960s, a group of writers that focused on character development and psychology and thought that science fiction should be taken seriously as literature. He wrote over 150 short stories and 50 books, including Lords of Light (1967) and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969).

It's the birthday of novelist Armistead Maupin, born Armistead Jones in Washington, D.C. in 1944. He's famous for his Tales of the City series, which evolved from a regular column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning May 24, 1976. The novels focus on a group of gay and straight characters who share a boarding house in San Francisco.

It's the birthday of the novelist who wrote Rebecca (1938), Daphne du Maurier, born in London in 1907. She spent most of her adult life in the coastal town of Cornwall, known for its stormy, unpredictable weather. Her three most famous novels, Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and Rebecca (1938), are all set in Cornwall. Rebecca is narrated by a young, nameless woman who marries a rich widower and lives in a mysterious house ruled by an odd housekeeper who remains devoted to the man's dead wife, Rebecca. Orson Welles dramatized Rebecca on a radio program in 1938, and two years later Alfred Hitchcock made it into a movie.

It's the birthday of travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, in 1940. One day he woke up half blind, and a doctor suggested that he stop looking at pictures and go to Africa with its wide horizons. He took the doctor's advice and soon left for the Sudan, where he journeyed on camel and foot through the hills of the Red Sea. He began writing a column for the London Times. For one of his articles, he went to see the ninety-three year-old architect Eileen Gray in Paris. When Chatwin saw that she had a map of Patagonia on her apartment wall, he said he had always wanted to go there. She said, "So have I. Go there for me." Chatwin left the next day, leaving a cable for the London Times that said, "Have Gone to Patagonia." He took a few provisions and during his time in Patagonia, a small area on the southern tip of South America, he collected the material for what would become his first book, In Patagonia (1977). His travel writings include Anatomy of Restlessness (1997) and What Am I Doing Here (1989), and his novels include Utz (1984) and The Songlines (1987).

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WEDNESDAY, 14 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Mirru," by Kenneth Patchen from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen (New Directions Publishing Corporation).

Mirru

I tiptoed into her sleep
And she was a little girl
Listening to her father clearing the snow
From the sidewalk in front of their house
And it was sweetly mixed-up
With funnypapers on Sunday morning
And black, surly-friendly tomcats
Smelling of New England and
Finnish bread but Finns talk too long
And little girls get tired and father calls
I'll be asleep before you will
And after a moment calls again
Aren't you asleep yet? and when you say no
He adds triumphantly
I told you I'd win, I'm asleep
Leaving you to puzzle over it
And later when she has nearly "grown-up"
Sitting with her mother in the warm kitchen
Reading Mystery Stories and father asking
Are you two going to stay up all night?
And her mother assuring him that
Just as soon as this chapter is finished
We'll stop but somehow they never did
And holding squirmy little flower-eyed rabbits

And watching for Santa Claus at the front door
While the snow swirled so prettily on the lawn
Like a white queen in a beautiful dress.

Literary Notes:

On this day in 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed at Tel Aviv. Jews had been campaigning for a Jewish territory in Palestine since the late 19th century. During the 1930s and 40s, the campaign grew, and many Arabs became more vocal in their opposition to a Jewish state. The United Nations helped to establish the boundaries between Israel and Palestine and set up a small buffer zone that included Jerusalem. In 1950, Israel enacted the Law of the Return, which would provide free and automatic citizenship for all immigrant Jews.

It was on this day in 1804 that Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis for the Pacific Coast. William Clark wrote in his journal, "Rained the fore part of the day. . . . I Set out at 4 oClock P.M, in the presence of many of the neighboring in habitants, and proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie. . . a heavy rain this after-noon." The group traveled up through the Dakotas, through Montana and across the Continental Divide, and finally down to the mouth of the Columbia River. When they spotted the Pacific, Clark wrote in his journal, "Ocian in view! O! the joy." Thomas Jefferson was president at the time, and wanted to find out about the land he had just gotten through the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson was also interested in Native American culture, as well as western plants and animals. Lewis and Clark's party was well-stocked for their journey: they brought clothes; guns; medical supplies; a traveling library that included science and reference books; mathematical instruments; and loads of camping supplies, including twelve pounds of soap and 193 pounds of portable soup -- a thick paste made by boiling down beef, eggs and vegetables. They also brought gifts for Native Americans, including silk ribbons, ivory combs, 130 rolls of tobacco, vermilion face paint, 144 small pairs of scissors, and twelve dozen pocket mirrors. Lewis and Clark identified 178 plants and 122 animals that had never before been recorded for science, including the grizzly bear, which often chased the group across the plains and mountains. Lewis wrote, "the curiosity of our party is pretty well satisfied with respect to this animal."

It's the birthday of American novelist and travel writer Mary Morris, born in Chicago in 1947. While she was in graduate school, she read a short story by Rosellen Brown on the bus on the way back from a literary conference. She was so inspired by the story that she went home and wrote two stories herself, and sold them to a magazine for 800 dollars each, using the money to pay her rent. She didn't sell another story for ten years, but continued to write and has since published the travel memoirs Wall to Wall, From Beijing to Berlin by Rail (1992), and Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (1998), as well as the novel The Waiting Room (1989).

It's the birthday of nature writer Hal (Harold Glen) Borland, born in Sterling, Nebraska in 1900. He wrote what he called "outdoor editorials" for the Sunday New York Times for 35 years, and he wrote four novels, including When Legends Die (1963). He said, "April is a promise that May is bound to keep."

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THURSDAY, 15 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Public School 168," by Stewart Brisby from A Death In America (Wolverine Press).

Public School 168

is
abandoned
like some remnant
of time-soaked simplicity

a childless carriage
on the east side of harlem.

a smile dances
when i envision
small hands
pledging allegiance
to manifest destinies
in which they were not included.

from a rooftop you hover
like a gothic ghost
above st. lucy's church
where black robed nuns
carried rulers & bars of soap
like guns strapped to their waists
speaking in tones
of catechism & guilt.

do you remember the eyes of the children?
lunch room smells?
the song of forgotten games?

"red light     green light     one     two     three "

i stand now
before your shattered broken face
kindergarten laughs
echo the schoolyard
& i remember palms of hands
& eyes of children.

before we embraced the city
before we met the man who ate glass
& asked about our dreams.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of painter Jasper Johns, born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, famous for his paintings of flags and maps in the '50s and '60s.

It's the birthday of writer Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas in 1890. She wrote many essays and short stories, but she spent twenty years working on her only novel, The Ship of Fools, which made her famous when it was published in 1962. She said, "I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul." And, "I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction."

It's the birthday of the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum, born in Chittenango, New York in 1856. His father was a rich oil tycoon, and the family lived at an idyllic country home in upstate New York. He was a shy and studious child. Frank had a heart condition his entire life and was never able to exert himself physically. He had a heart attack at school and returned home, where he turned his creativity toward writing and publishing. When he was fifteen years old his father bought him a small printing press for his birthday, and he and his brother Harry started a newspaper called The Rose Lawn Home Journal. His first book was published in 1886 and was called The Book of Hamburgs, A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of Different Varieties of Hamburgs. He wrote a couple of plays and toured around the country before settling down in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He ran a general store that he called "Baum's Bazaar," where, with a cigar constantly dangling from his mouth, he liked to entertain children by telling them fairy tales and giving them candy as they gathered around on the dusty, wooden sidewalk. In 1897, he published his collection of Mother Goose stories, Mother Goose in Prose. Two years later he met the illustrator William Denslow, and the pair published Father Goose, His Book (1899), a huge success. In 1900, Baum wrote the book that made him famous, The Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Denslow. The book began as a story he told to some neighborhood children; Frank thought it was so good that he stopped in the middle of the story to go start writing it down. The story of Dorothy, her dog Toto, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man, and their journey down the yellow brick road, was an instant classic. Baum was a socialist, and The Emerald City of Oz was his socialist utopia. He wrote, "There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do."

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FRIDAY, 16 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Blue Tango," by Frazier Russell from Lush (Four Way Books).

Blue Tango

Say it's the year of their courtship,
your mother and father,
in the ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel,
summer 1952.

In this plush setting,
the orchestra swells
time and again to a tune
always their favorite.

Any Friday night you could find them
on the dance floor.
He in tux and cummerbund.
She in a black strapless,
hem brushing the waxed wood
as though it were a lilypad.

Surrounded on all sides by Jesuits
and their debutante dates
in crushed velvet,
pearls around their necks
like a load of light.

How you love to imagine
that somehow everyone in that room
although a little tipsy
will get home safely
and fumble in love for their beds.

That the smoke from cigarettes
ringing the room in red
like hot coals is still rising.

Say somewhere birds lift off the lake
and it never gets light.

Literary Notes:

Today is the feast day of St. Brendan, patron saint of sailors and travelers. St. Brendan was born near Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland. He traveled all around Ireland as a young man, and founded many monasteries. He also went to Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, to spread Christianity in those areas. In the middle ages a story called The Voyage of St. Brendan became popular; it told the tale of St. Brendan going on a long journey across the Atlantic in search of paradise. In the 1970s, a man named Tim Severin became obsessed with St. Brendan's story and built a boat similar to what Brendan must have sailed with. It was made of hides tanned with oak bark, sealed together with animal fat and grease. He sailed with a group of volunteers from the western coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, proving that Brendan's journey would have been possible. He published the story of his journey in the book The Brendan Voyage (2000).

It's the birthday of American poet Adrienne Rich, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1929. She's written over twenty collections, including The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955) and Diving into the Wreck (1973), and is known for her feminism and her politically charged poetry. She said, "Art is our human birthright, our most powerful means of access to our own and another's experience and imaginative life. In continually rediscovering and recovering the humanity of human beings, art is crucial to the democratic vision." And, "For more than 50 years I have been writing, tearing up, revising poems, studying poets from every culture and century available to me. I have been a poet of the oppositional imagination, meaning that I don't think my only argument is with myself. My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night, rather than rehearse the landlocked details of personal quandaries…."

It was on this day in 1763 that English writer Samuel Johnson met his future biographer James Boswell in a bookstore. Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is considered one of the greatest biographies in the English language. Boswell wrote the book from notes he made on the spot while talking with Johnson and his friends, and the biography is full of Johnson's witty conversation. It includes lines from Johnson like, "Read over your compositions and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out," and, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

It's the birthday of writer and Chicago radio personality Louis Studs Terkel, born in New York City in 1912. He went to law school in Chicago but decided to go into television, where he hosted a variety show. Later, he became a radio disc jockey for a fine arts station, and began to interview blues and jazz musicians and actors. In 1967 he published a book of interviews with immigrants in Chicago called Division Street: America, and has since published many more books of interviews. In 1985, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of oral histories about World War II, The Good War. His latest is Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (2001), published two years ago.

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SATURDAY, 17 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Mother Doesn't Want a Dog," by Judith Viorst from If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries…(Macmillian).

Mother Doesn't Want a Dog

Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they smell,
And never sit when you say sit,
Or even when you yell.
And when you come home late at night
And there is ice and snow,
You have to go back out because
The dumb dog has to go.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they shed,
And always let the strangers in
And bark at friends instead,
And do disgraceful things on rugs,
And track mud on the floor,
And flop upon your bed at night
And snore their doggy snore.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
She's making a mistake.
Because, more than a dog, I think
She will not want this snake.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of English novelist Dorothy Miller Richardson, born in Abingdon, Berkshire, England in 1873, one of the first writers to use stream of consciousness. She wrote the thirteen volume autobiographical novel Pilgrimage (1938), which tells the life-story of a woman in early twentieth century Britain.

It's the birthday of English novelist Robert Smith Surtees, born in 1803 in County Durham. He wrote humorous novels about the sporting life of British aristocrats in the nineteenth century. He was an avid foxhunter and edited The New Sporting Magazine for twenty-five years. In Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities (1838), he created the character of John Jorrocks the sporting grocer. Charles Dickens' publishers loved the character and the book and suggested to Dickens that he try writing something similar; the result was The Pickwick Papers (1837). Surtees said, "More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice."

It's the birthday of American screenwriter and playwright John Patrick, born John Patrick Goggan in Louisville, Kentucky in 1905. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Teahouse of the August Moon (1954), about an American soldier who builds a teahouse in a small Okinawa village.

It's the birthday of young adult novelist Gary Paulsen, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1939. He's the author of dozens of books, including Canyons (1990), Woodsong (1990), and Hatchet (1988), about a fourteen-year-old boy who survives over fifty days in the northern wilderness. Paulson ran away from home when he was fourteen years old, and later worked on a farm, as an engineer, a ranch hand, a truck driver, and a sailor. He decided to be a writer while he was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm in California. He drove off to northern Minnesota, rented a cabin on a lake, and wrote his first novel while living off his own vegetable gardens. He said, "In my case, writing is putting bloody skins on your back and dancing around the fire to tell what the hunt was like, and that's all it is."

It's the birthday of British writer Dennis Potter, born in Berry Hill, Gloucestershire, England in 1935. He wrote plays, movies, and novels, but started out writing challenging and innovative dramas for television, like Pennies from Heaven (1978), a musical about a depressed sheet music salesman during the Depression. He said, "I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart pound. Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights, that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance."

It's the birthday of composer Erik Satie, born in Honfleur, Calvados, France in 1866. He's known for his simple, catchy piano pieces with titles like Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a Dog) (1912) and Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Boob Made of Wood (1913). Known as "the velvet gentleman," he owned twelve identical velvet costumes, 84 identical handkerchiefs, and nearly 100 umbrellas. He walked several miles to a cabaret in Paris every evening, where he played all night before walking back with a hammer in his pocket for protection.

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SUNDAY, 18 MAY 2003
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Poem: "Transplanting," by Theodore Roethke from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday).

Transplanting

Watching hands transplanting,
Turning and tamping,
Lifting the young plants with two fingers,
Sifting in a palm-full of fresh loam,--
One swift movement,--
Then plumping in the bunched roots,
A single twist of the thumbs, a tamping and turning,
All in one,
Quick on the wooden bench,
A shaking down, while the stem stays straight,
Once, twice, and a faint third thump,--
Into the flat-box it goes,
Ready for the long days under the sloped glass:

The sun warming the fine loam,
The young horns winding and unwinding,
Creaking their thin spines,
The underleaves, the smallest buds
Breaking into nakedness,
The blossoms extending
Out into the sweet air,
The whole flower extending outward,
Stretching and reaching.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyam, born in Nishapur, Khurasan, Iran in 1048. When he was alive, he was famous for his scientific and mathematical achievements, which included a study of Euclid's definitions and extensive work on music and algebra. It wasn't until English poet Edward Fitzgerald translated his fragments of poetry into one great coherent work called the Rubaiyat that Khayyam became known as a poet. The poem encourages us to live life to the fullest and includes lines like "The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on," and the verse:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

It's the birthday of Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson, born in Fljótsdalur, Iceland in 1889. He wrote novels about Iceland in the Danish language so he could reach a wider audience, and was one of the first internationally known writers of his country. From 1924 to 1928, he wrote a series of five long autobiographical novels celebrating Iceland, including Ships in the Sky and The Night and the Dream, translated into English in 1938.

It's the birthday of Patrick Dennis, born Edward Everett Tanner III in Evanston, Illinois in 1921. He's best known for his novel Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade in Biography (1955), the story of a flighty, eccentric, middle-aged woman based on Dennis' actual aunt. It became a Broadway musical and a successful movie.

It's the birthday of science fiction author Diane Elizabeth Duane, born in Manhattan in 1952. She was a psychiatrist before she published her first novel, The Door Into Fire (1979), the first of over thirty novels that include several collaborations with her husband, Peter Morwood. She said, "Those who don't know the mistakes of the past won't be able to enjoy it when they make them again in the future."

It's the birthday of British philosopher Bertrand Russell, born in Trelleck, Monmouthshire, England in 1872. He wrote about mathematics, logic, ethics, and social issues, and was one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. He emerged as an important philosopher with The Principles of Mathematics (1903), which argued that the foundations of mathematics can be deduced from a few logical ideas. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He said, "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." And, "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."