MONDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "The Palms," by W.S. Merwin, from Travels (Alfred A. Knopf).
The Palms
Each is alone in the world
and on some the flowers
are of one sex only
they stand as though they had no secrets
and one by one the flowers emerge from the sheaths
into the air
where the other flowers are
it happens in silence except for the wind
often it happens in the dark
with the earth carrying the sound of water
most of the flowers themselves are small and green by day
and only a few are fragrant
but in time the fruits are beautiful
and later still their children
whether they are seen or not
many of the fruits are no larger than peas
but some are like brains of black marble
and some have more than one seed inside them
some are full of milk of one taste or another
and on a number of them there is a writing
from long before speech
and the children resemble each other
with the same family preference
for shade when young
in which colors deepen
and the same family liking for water
and warmth
and each family deals with the wind in its own way
and with the sun and the water
some of the leaves are crystals others are stars
some are bows some are bridges and some
are hands
in a world without hands
they know of each other first from themselves
some are fond of limestone and a few cling to high cliffs
they learn from the splashing water
and the falling water and the wind
much later the elephant
will learn from them
the muscles will learn from their shadows
ears will begin to hear in them
the sound of water
and heads will float like black nutshells
on an unmeasured ocean neither rising nor falling
to be held up at last and named for the sea
Literary Notes:
Today is Labor Day. The first Labor Day was celebrated one hundred and twenty years ago, on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. It was the idea of the Central Labor Union in New York City, which organized a parade and a picnic featuring speeches by union leaders. The holiday was intended to celebrate labor unions and to recognize the achievements of the American worker. For most Americans, Labor Day marks the end of summer—and the last day before the start of the school year.
It's the birthday of Rosa Guy, born in Trinidad (1925). She's the co-founder of the Harlem Writer's Guild, and she's written a number of novels for young adults. The Broadway musical Once on this Island is based on her novella My Love, My Love: or, The Peasant Girl (1985)—which is, in turn, a version of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid."
It's the birthday of Eleanor Burford Hibbert, born in London (1906). She wrote 200 novels under many pseudonyms, including Victoria Holt, Jean Plaidy, and Phillipa Carr. The Victoria Holt titles far outsold the others; together, sales totaled in the millions.
On this day in 1904, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe. She was the first blind-and-deaf student ever to graduate from any college anywhere. When Keller met Woodrow Wilson several years later, he asked her why she had chosen Radcliffe when she could have been admitted to a less challenging school. "Because they didn't want me," she replied promptly.
It's the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs, born in Chicago (1875). After he was married, he went through 10 different office and sales jobs in 10 years. When money ran short and his wife started pawning her jewelry, he decided he could probably write stories just as bad as the stuff in pulp magazines. His first series, Under the Moons of Mars, starred John Carter, who was teleported to Mars after a battle with the Apaches in Arizona. Tarzan of the Apes was published in the October issue of All-Story magazine, and Burroughs got $700 for it. He decided to quit and write full time. He wrote dozens of books, bought a huge ranch in California, and saw a town called Tarzana grow up around it.
TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "Hair," by David Citino from The Invention of Secrecy (Ohio State University Press).
Hair
One by one the children,
large cartoon eyes shining,
push away from the table,
rise and walk away from us
into their rooms. Doors slam
hard. Loud music, the bass
throbbing deep in our teeth,
dark rooms of the heart.
Oooo Baby...Oooo Baby...
Years pass, time enough
for something grand,
something terrible to happen.
When they come out, our sons
have wild, unearthly voices.
Our daughter has budded, mastered
the art of embarrassment.
She won't look us in the eye.
Oh, Daddy, she says, corners
of her mouth turning down,
Oh, Daddy. And everywhere
there is hair. Such hair.
Literary Notes:
Early in the morning of this day in 1666, a small fire broke out in a baker's shop on Puddling Lane in London. The flames soon spread, and within hours all of London was ablaze. When it was all over The Great Fire of London destroyed more than 80 percent of the city, including over 13,000 houses. The diarist Samuel Pepys watched the fire from across the Thames River, after burying his wine and parmesan cheese to keep them safe from the fire. The Great Fire did provide at least one golden opportunity—the architect Christopher Wren was hired to rebuild the more than 80 churches destroyed by the blaze, including St. Paul's Cathedral.
It's the birthday of novelist Allen Drury, born in Houston, Texas (1918). He worked as an editor for papers in Tulare and Bakersfield, California, before heading out to Washington, D.C., to cover the United States Senate for United Press International. Two decades of experience as a journalist in Washington went into his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, Advise and Consent (1959), about political intrigue in the nation's capital. The book was a huge critical and popular success. His later novels include A Shade of Difference (1962), Preserve and Protect (1968), Pentagon (1986) and A Thing of State (1995). He said: "People defend nothing more violently than the pretenses they live by."
It's the birthday of Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, born in Brody, Ukraine (1894). His most famous novel is Radetsky March (1932), about the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg monarchy. He worked for many years as a journalist in Berlin, and wrote a book of essays The Wandering Jews (1927), about the plight of the embattled European Jews on the verge of extinction. He writes with particular fondness about the Jews of the shtetl, the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe. He wrote: "The shtetl Jews are not rare visitors of God, they live with him. In their prayers they inveigh against him, they complain at his severity, they go to God to accuse God. There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their god. They are an old people and they have known him a long time!"
It's the birthday of baseball pioneer Albert Goodwill Spalding, born in Byron, Illinois (1850). He was a pitcher for the National League Boston Red Stockings from 1871 to 1875, then became a pitcher and manager of the Chicago White Stockings in 1876. In that same year, he and his brother founded the sporting goods company A.G. Spalding and Brothers.
WEDNESDAY,
3 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "Idaho Potatoes," by Kathryn Kysar from Dark Lake (Loonfeather Press)
Idaho Potatoes
I don't know if the story is true: during the Depression, Grandpa
was a tenant farmer in Idaho. Each winter morning, Grandma
gave Virden and Ardis a hot baked potato. They walked to school
down the flat Idaho roads, powdery snow blowing against their
cold pink cheeks and frosted eyelashes, their mittened hands
holding the prayers of steamy potatoes. To keep warm, the children
spoke of pleasant things: singing in church, eating summer apricots
in the neighbor's orchard, whispering to the chickens in the damp,
dark henhouse. Virden imagined proudly riding atop the vibrating
tractor, its hum loud enough to make men shout. Ardis worried:
she had to stay clean, she couldn't play in the trees. Only alone in
the hen house as she collected the eggs was she happy, each stolen
brown orb damp and warm and pulsing against her skin like the
morning's baked potatoes.
At the school's playground, children ran and screamed. Ardis stood
on the side of the trampled snowy field while gangly Virden ran,
toes pointed in, ran with the pack of skinny boys, joking, laughing,
and shoving. In her perfect Shirley Temple curls, in her starched
cotton dress and wool stockings, in her worn coat buttoned up to
the neck, she waited for the older girls to ask her to play. She
waited for Mrs. Youngquist to call them in to class. She waited
for lunchtime when she could join her brother on the rough
wooden bench in the corner to eat boiled eggs and cold potatoes,
the white middles flaking into their mouths, the browned skin
crispy, cool, and comforting on a cold winter's day.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of playwright Caryl Churchill, born in London, England (1938). She began writing plays while a student at Oxford, and after graduation landed a job writing radio plays for the BBC. In 1974, she joined the Royal Court Theater in London as a resident playwright. Her two most successful plays received their first staging at the Royal Court; they were Cloud Nine (1979) and the Obie Award-winning Top Girls (1982). She's also known for her inventive use of language—she often uses overlapping dialogue, rhyme, music, and nonsense dialogue. In the one-act play Blue Kettle, (1997), for instance, the words "blue" and "kettle" are randomly inserted into the dialogue with increasing frequency, until at the end of the play they're the only words being spoken.
It's the birthday of anthropologist and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska (1907). He spent most of his long academic career as a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1947 to 1977. He was interested in the dating of fossils and in extinctions during the Ice Age. But he's remembered today as a writer of popular books about anthropology and evolution—books such as The Immense Journey, (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country, (1971) and The Star Thrower (1979). Writing about the evolution of the brain and the development of consciousness in humans, he wrote: "For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of wind in the night reeds."
It's the birthday of American architect Louis Sullivan, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1856). He studied architecture at MIT and in Europe before making his way to Chicago in 1875. He found a city that needed rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire four years earlier. In 1881, he became a partner with Dankmar Adler in the firm of Adler and Sullivan. In 1886, he was commissioned to design the Auditorium Building in Chicago, considered one of his masterpieces. His motto: "Form ever follows function."
It's the birthday of American writer Sarah Orne Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine (1849). Her father was a country doctor, and she thought about becoming a doctor herself. Instead, she turned to writing, and had her first story published in The Atlantic when she was just 20 years old. She wrote about the people of Maine and about the old country ways that were quickly dying out around her, and earned a reputation as one of the finest writers in the "local color" tradition. Her first collection of stories, Deephaven, came out in 1877. Her most famous work was the collection The Country of the Pointed Firs, which was published in 1896.
THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "Cat Dying in Autumn," by Irving Layton, from Collected Poems (McClellan and Stewart)
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of memoirist and essayist Lisa Knopp, born in Burlington, Iowa (1956). In the late 1980s, she turned from writing fiction and poetry to writing memoirs and essays about natural history and the human place in the natural world. Her home ground is the Midwest—Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska. Her newest book, The Nature of Home, is being published this month. Her earlier books are Field of Vision (1996) and Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (1998). She said: "When I discovered how malleable the essay was, through the work of such writers as Loren Eiseley and Annie Dillard, I realized that I had found my home and my life work."
It's the birthday of writer Jane Brox, born in Dracut, Massachusetts (1956). She was born on the farm that her Lebanese immigrant grandfather bought when he came to this country in 1901. She writes about life and work on the family farm in her books Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family (1995) and Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (1999).
It's the birthday of English writer Joan Aiken, born in Rye, Sussex, England (1924). She published short stories, and then a novel, The Kingdom and the Cave (1960)—a revision of a novel she wrote when she was 17. She gained a loyal following with her series of Gothic children's novels set in the imaginary England of King James the Third, filled with roaming wolves and political rebels. The first book in the series was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), followed by Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), Cold Shoulder Road (1996), and others. She's also written several "sequels" of Jane Austen novels, following up on the originals, or telling the stories from different perspectives. These include Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen's Emma Through Another's Eyes (1990) and Lady Catherine's Necklace (2000). Joan Aiken said: "Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. Therefore, if you write about something, hopefully you write about something that's better or more interesting than circumstances as they now are, and that way you hope to make a step towards it."
It's the birthday of African-American novelist Richard Wright, born near Natchez, Mississippi (1908). His grandparents were slaves, and he grew up in poverty in the South before heading north to Chicago, and then to New York City, where he worked as the editor of the Community Daily Worker in Harlem. His most famous novel, Native Son (1940), is set in Chicago. It's the story of Bigger Thomas, a poor black man who is forced into flight when he accidentally kills a white girl. He's also known for his autobiography Black Boy (1945), tracing his rise from poverty to become a successful writer. After World War Two, he settled in Paris, where he wrote the novel The Outsider (1953).
It's the birthday of novelist Mary Renault, born Mary Challans, in London, England (1905). She worked as a nurse during World War Two, then settled in South Africa, where she began to write her highly successful series of historical novels set in ancient Greece. The novels were The Last of the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962). In The Last of the Wine, she wrote: "Madness is sacred to the gods. They give it us at the proper season to purge our souls, as they give us strong herbs to clean out our bodies."
FRIDAY,
5 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "The White Knight's Ballad," by Lewis Carroll.
The White Knight's Ballad
I'll tell thee everything I can;
There's little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
'Who are you, aged man?' I said.
'And how is it you live?'
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.
He said 'I look for butterflies
That sleep among the wheat:
I make them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,' he said,
'Who sail on stormy seas;
And that's the way I get my bread —
A trifle, if you please.'
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
So, having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried 'Come, tell me how you live!'
And I thumped him on the head.
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said 'I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze;
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowland's Macassar Oil —
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.'
But I was thinking of a way
To feed oneself on batter,
And so go on from day to day
Getting a little fatter.
I shook him well from side to side,
Until his face was blue:
'Come, tell me how you live,' I cried
'And what it is you do!'
He said 'I hunt for haddocks' eyes
Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold
Or coin of silvery shine,
But for a copper halfpenny
And that will purchase nine.
'I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs;
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of hansom-cabs.
And that's the way' (he gave a wink)
'By which I get my wealth —
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour's noble health.'
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth.
But chiefly for his wish that he
Might drink my noble health.
And now, if e'er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe
Or if I drop upon my toe
A very heavy weight,
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know —
Whose look was mild, whose speech was
slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo —
That summer evening long ago
A-sitting on a gate.
Literary Notes:
On this day in 1957, Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was published by Viking Press. The Beat Generation classic was based on road trips Kerouac made with his friend Neal Cassady in the late 1940s. Kerouac started writing the novel on April 12, 1951, and finished on April 22. He taped together sheets of tracing paper to create a one hundred and twenty foot-long scroll.
It's the birthday of American avant-garde composer John Cage, born in Los Angeles, California (1912). He was a student of Arnold Shoenberg, and started out writing pieces in his teacher's 12-tone style before beginning to experiment with the "prepared piano"—a piano with objects placed between its strings to change their sound. He also began experimenting with tape recorders, randomly tuned radios, and silence.
It's the birthday of Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest (1905). His most famous novel came in 1941. It was Darkness at Noon, about Stalin's purges of the Communist Party during the 1930s.
It's the birthday of French playwright Victorien Sardou, born in Paris (1831). He was the popular author of a number of well-crafted bourgeois dramas, several of which he wrote as a showcase for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Sardou's La Tosca was written as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, and it was in the climactic scene of the play, during a 1915 performance, that the actress seriously injured her leg—an injury that resulted in amputation. Bernhardt also starred in the premiere of Sardou's Fedorain 1881; she made her entrance wearing a new style of felt hat with a crushed crown that was known forever after as a "fedora."
SATURDAY,
6 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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To A Frustrated Poet
This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the benefits and allowances offered to
employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever intelligent and decent and patient in a
way
Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of Irish poet Christopher Nolan, born in Mullingar, Ireland (1965). He suffered a serious brain injury at birth which left him paralyzed and speechless until the age of eleven, when a powerful new drug allowed him to type using a stick strapped to his forehead. He began to write stories and poems that were published as Dam-Burst of Dreams in 1981. His next book was an autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock: The Life Story of Christopher Nolan (1987), which won the prestigious Whitbread Prize in England. He wrote: "Wearing a pointer attached to a band around my head I had to fight a rebellious, spasm-ridden body for expression through the typing of every single letter. My mind was alive with creativity, but sadly the vessel had no outlet. Imagine then the absolute joy of discovering a leak through which I could slowly squeeze out a sample of my poetic musings."
It's the birthday of writer Robert M. Pirsig, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1928). He became famous with the publication of his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), an exploration of metaphysics wrapped up in an account of a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to the West Coast. He said: "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself."
It's the birthday of American sculptor Horatio Greenough, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1805). He studied art in Italy before returning to the United States, where he attracted the attention of a wealthy patron whose support helped him become the first American artist to devote himself entirely to sculpture. In 1832, he was commissioned by Congress to create a sculpture of George Washington to stand in the Capitol Rotunda. The sculpture he created was based on the statue of Zeus at Olympia, by the ancient Greek sculptor Pheidias. Greenough's Washington wore sandals, held a sword, and was bare-chested. This semi-nudity was so scandalous that Congress opted to put the statue in the Smithsonian Institution instead of displaying it more publicly in the Capitol Rotunda.
SUNDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER, 2003
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My Mother's Pansies
And all that time, in back of the house,
there were pansies growing, some silt blue,
some silt yellow, most of them sable
red or purplish sable, heavy
as velvet curtains, so soft they seemed wet but they were
dry as powder on a luna's wing,
dust on an alluvial path, in a drought
summer. And they were open like lips,
and pouted like lips, and they had a tiny fur-gold
v, which made bees not be able
to not want. And so, although women, in our
lobes and sepals, our corollas and spurs, seemed
despised spathe, style-arm, standard,
crest, and fall,
still there were those plush entries,
night mouth, pillow mouth,
anyone might want to push
their pinky, or anything, into such velveteen
chambers, such throats, each midnight-velvet
petal saying touch-touch-touch, please-touch, please-touch,
each sex like a spirit-shy, flushed, praying.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Egan, born in Chicago, Illinois (1962). She had stories published in The New Yorker, and won a short-story award from Cosmopolitan magazine, before her first novel appeared in 1995. The novel was The Invisible Circus. She followed it up a year later with a collection of short stories, Emerald City and Other Stories (1996). Her novel Look at Me (2001) was nominated for a National Book Award.
It's the birthday of novelist and journalist Joseph (Joe) Klein, born in New York City (1946). He started out as a reporter in Boston, moved on to an editor's desk at Rolling Stone and Newsweek, a columnist's berth at The New Yorker, and an on-air political consultant spot for CBS News. In 1996, the novel Primary Colors was published anonymously, setting off a flurry of speculation about its author. The author was obviously a Washington insider, since the novel was so closely based on the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. Finally, a computerized stylistic analysis, combined with a handwriting analysis of the novel's corrected proofs, revealed Klein as the author. His latest book is The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (2002).
It's the birthday of novelist and teacher Sir Malcolm Bradbury, born in Sheffield, England (1932). In 1970, he and Angus Wilson established the first creative writing program in Great Britain at the University of East Anglia. For the first year, they only had one pupil, Ian McEwan, who went on to win the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam. Malcolm Bradbury, who said: "I take the novel extremely seriously. It is the best of all forms: open and personal, intelligent and inquiring. I value it for its skepticism, its irony, and its play."
It's the birthday of American poet Isabella Gardner, born in Newton, Massachusetts (1915). She started her career as an actress, then went on to become the associate editor of the prestigious magazine Poetry. He books of poetry include Birthdays From the Ocean (1954), West of Childhood: Poems, 1950-1965 (1965) and Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems (1990).
It's the birthday of English poet Dame Edith Sitwell, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England (1887). She was also a well-known eccentric, who like to appear in elaborate Elizabethan costumes and who once gave a performance of her poetry by reading it through a megaphone. Late in her life, she became a popular guest on English television. She said: "I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish."
It's the birthday of Queen Elizabeth the First of England, born in Greenwich, England (1533). She was the daughter of King Henry the Eighth and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. She became queen in 1558, and during her reign, England established its dominance as a sea power with the defeat, in 1588, of the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth also presided over a remarkable flourishing of literature in England. It was during her reign that Shakespeare rose to prominence and established himself as the greatest poet and playwright in the English language. Her reign ended in 1603.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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