MONDAY, 29 DECEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "End of the Holidays," by Mark Perlberg, from The Impossible Toystore (Louisiana State University Press).

The End of the Holidays

We drop you at O'Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season's perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport's aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That's how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I'll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1849, the Christmas carol "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," written by Edmund Sears, was published in The Christian Register. Sears hoped the song would promote "peace on earth, good will toward men."

It's the birthday of inventor Charles Goodyear, born in New Haven, Connecticut (1800). While experimenting with ways to make rubber stronger, he accidentally dropped a mixture of rubber and sulphur on a hot stove. The accident led to the development of the process of vulcanization, which made the invention of the automobile possible.

It's the birthday of the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, born in Raleigh, North Carolina (1808), in a two-room log cabin to nearly illiterate parents. He didn't master the basics of reading or writing until he met his wife, Eliza, at the age of 17. Never a good speller, he once said, "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." He was strongly opposed to secession, which made him the enemy of many southerners. Once, on a train, he was attacked by a mob who wanted to hang him. But an old man in the crowd shouted, "His neighbors at Greenville have made arrangements to hang the senator on his arrival. Virginians have no right to deprive them of that privilege." And he was let go. It's the birthday of science fiction writer Charles L. Harness, born in Colorado City, Texas (1915).

It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Robert Ruark, born in Wilmington, North Carolina (1915).

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TUESDAY, 30 DECEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "My Agent Says," by R.S. Gwynn, from No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Story Line Press).

My Agent Says

My agent says Los Angeles will call.
My broker says to sell without delay.
My doctor says the spot is very small.
My lover says get tested right away.

My congressman says yes, he truly cares.
My bottle says he'll see me after five.
My mirror says to pluck a few stray hairs.
My mother says that she is still alive.

My leader says we may have seen the worst.
My mistress says her eyes are like the sun.
My bride says that it's true I'm not the first.
My landlord says he'd think about a gun.

My boss says that I'd better take a chair.
My enemy says turn the other cheek.
My rival says that all in love is fair.
My brother says he's coming for a week.

My teacher says my work is very neat.
My ex-wife says I haven't heard the last.
My usher says the big guy's in my seat.
My captain says to bind him to the mast.

My master says I must be taught my place.
My conscience says my schemes will never fly.
My father says he doesn't like my face.
My lawyer says I shouldn't testify.

My buddy says this time I've got it bad.
My first love says she can't recall my name.
My baby says my singing makes her sad.
My dog says that she loves me all the same.

My pastor says to walk the narrow path.
My coach says someone else will get the ball.
My God says I shall bend beneath his wrath.
My agent says Los Angeles may call.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of writer Sara Lidman, born in Västerbotten, Sweden (1923). She wrote The Tar Still (1953), Cloudberry Land (1955) and a number of other novels set in the small villages of rural northern Sweden, where she grew up.

It's the birthday of Paul Bowles, born in New York City (1910). He's the author of The Sheltering Sky (1949), and many other novels. He lived most of his life in exile in France and Morocco.

It's the birthday of Stephen Leacock, born in Hampshire, England (1869). He wrote Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (1914). He was working as a political economist but his family needed money, so he started to write humor pieces for Canadian magazines in his spare time. Eventually he grew to be one of the best-known humorists in the English-speaking world. Leacock wrote, "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions."

It's the birthday of Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India (1865). He's the author of Kim (1901) and The Jungle Book (1894), and he was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was educated in England, but then he returned to India to work as a newspaper reporter, writing stories about British colonial society. He supplied filler and verse to go in the dead spaces between the stories, and it was collected in Departmental Ditties (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). The books made him famous in Britain well before he returned there to live. His reputation grew, and he was nominated for many honors, including Poet Laureate. He declined this post, and many others, but he often wrote as if he were the national poet of England, exhorting his countrymen to uphold the Empire. He wrote "Take up the White Man's burden— / Send forth the best ye breed / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives' need. ..."

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WEDNESDAY, 31 DECEMBER, 2003
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Poem: "Like Smoke From Our Campfire" and "Tomorrow," by David Budbill.

Like Smoke From Our Campfire

All those plans for fame and fortune, honor and glory,
      where are they now?
Drifted away like smoke from our campfire, dissipated
      into the thin, night air,
the fire deserted and gone down to a few ashy coals,
      almost out.
And all of those who sat around the fire: gone away too
      into oblivion.


Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.
Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.
Drunk on music,
who needs wine?
Come on,
Sweetheart,
let's go dancing
while we've
still got feet.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is the last day of the year, New Year's Eve, the celebration of which goes back to the Romans in 153 B.C. By their calendar, however, January 1 fell where April 1 falls now, toward the beginning of spring. The Romans gathered like we do now to dance and sing and, at the stroke of midnight, wish each other a happy and prosperous new year. Today we sing "Auld Lang Sine," which means "old long since," or "the good old days," written by Robert Burns in 1788.

On this night in 1897, a solemn ceremony was held to commemorate the final day of the existence of the city of Brooklyn before its incorporation into New York City. The rest of the city was jubilant; crowds gathered, fireworks were set off everywhere, and bands played "The One New York Two-Step."

It's the birthday of artist Henri Matisse, born in Le Cateau, France (1869).

It's the birthday of Catherine Read Williams, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1790). She wrote Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1838), one of the earliest examples of public reporting in the United States. It was an account of the mysterious death of Sarah Cornell, a young mill worker whose body was found hanging in a barn one winter day in 1832. Cornell was several months pregnant, and her death was ruled a suicide until a note was found in her belongings. It said, "If I am gone missing enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol; he will know where I am." Reverend Ephriam Avery was a prominent Methodist minister, a married man with several children. A posse found him hiding in New Hampshire and brought him back for trial, but Avery was acquitted on all counts. In Fall River, Williams had a lot to say about the corruption of the New England clergy, and the book caused a great sensation when it was released.

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THURSDAY, 1 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "The Sunlight on the Garden," by Louis MacNeice, from Collected Poems (Faber & Faber).

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is New Year's Day. On this day in Georgia, black-eyed peas and turnip greens are eaten for good luck. In the mid-19th century, it was a day for calling: a gentleman was obliged to pay a visit to every lady of his acquaintance. Formal dress was worn and at each house there was a table filled with cakes, preserves, wine, oysters and hot coffee. The Vietnamese believe that the first visitor on New Year's Day brings either good or bad luck, so you should invite someone very respected to visit.

It's the birthday of cartoonist B. Kliban, born in Connecticut (1935). He once drew a cartoon in which a man is walking along the street with a walking stick and a cravat and shades, accompanied by two beautiful women, while a policeman kicks people out of the way, shouting, "Out of the way, you swine. A cartoonist is coming!"

It's the birthday of playwright Joe Orton, born in Leicester, England (1933). He wrote Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1965), and What the Butler Saw (1969). He was murdered in his prime by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then committed suicide.

It's the birthday of J. D. Salinger, born in New York City (1919). He grew up in a well-to-do family living on Park Avenue. His father was an importer of kosher cheese. He went to prep school, was drafted into the Army and took part in the invasion of Normandy. His comrades considered him to be very brave. He came back to New York and started publishing stories in Story magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and The New Yorker. His first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was an immediate success and still sells about a quarter million copies a year.

It's the birthday of E. M. Forster, born in London (1879). He's the author of A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). He wrote his five most important novels before he was forty.

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FRIDAY, 2 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Any prince to any princess," by Adrian Henri, from The Loveless Motel (Jonathan Cape).

Any prince to any princess

August is coming
and the goose, I'm afraid,
is getting fat.
There have been
no golden eggs for some months now.
Straw has fallen well below market price
despite my frantic spinning
and the sedge is,
as you rightly point out,
withered.

I can't imagine how the pea
got under your mattress. I apologize
humbly. The chambermaid has, of course,
been sacked. As has the frog footman.
I understand that, during my recent fact-finding tour of the
      Golden River,
despite your nightly unavailing efforts,
he remained obstinately
froggish.

I hope that the Three Wishes granted by the General
      Assembly
will go some way towards redressing
this unfortunate recent sequence of events.
The fall in output from the shoe-factory, for example:
no one could have foreseen the work-to-rule
by the National Union of Elves. Not to mention the fact
that the court has been fast asleep
for the last six and a half years.

The matter of the poisoned apple has been taken up
by the Board of Trade: I think I can assure you
the incident will not be
repeated.

I can quite understand, in the circumstances,
your reluctance to let down
your golden tresses. However
I feel I must point out
that the weather isn't getting any better
and I already have a nasty chill
from waiting at the base
of the White Tower. You must see
the absurdity of the
      situation.
Some of the courtiers are beginning to talk,
not to mention the humble villagers.
It's been three weeks now, and not even
a word.

Princess,
a cold, black wind
howls through our empty palace.
Dead leaves litter the bedchamber;
the mirror on the wall hasn't said a thing
since you left. I can only ask,
bearing all this in mind,
that you think again,

let down your hair,

reconsider.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1975, Kenneth Brugger discovered where monarch butterflies from North America spend the winter. Scientists had been looking for the place for generations. They knew monarchs flew south to Mexico, but they had never been able to find out where they went. Brugger, a textile chemist who was living in Mexico City, saw an ad asking for help tracing the monarchs' migratory path, and remembered driving through a storm of monarchs once on a vacation, in the mountains west of Mexico City. He had no luck there at first, but when he brought his wife Catalina, who was Mexican, the local farmers were less reluctant to tell them where they thought the butterflies might be. Finally, a farmer led them up the side of a remote mountain, through dense forests of fir, until they came to a meadow filled with millions of butterflies. The monarchs clung to the foliage in such profusion that the trees looked orange instead of green.

It's the birthday of Isaac Asimov, born in Petrovichi, Russia (1920). His family moved to Brooklyn in 1923, where they ran a candy shop for 40 years. Asimov wrote, edited or compiled several hundred books on subjects ranging from Don Juan and the Bible to humor and mathematics. He also wrote dozens of works of science fiction. He typed ninety words a minute, and he worked ten hours a day, seven days a week. He tried to turn out four thousand words before he got up from his typewriter every day.

Even though many of his works dealt with space travel and flight, Asimov was afraid of flying. His phobia began while trying to impress a date by going on a roller coaster at the 1940 New York World's Fair. He traveled little in his lifetime because of his fear of flying, staying close to his home in New York.

It's the birthday of Antarctic explorer and author Apsley Cherry-Garrard, born in Bedford, England (1886). He's the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."

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SATURDAY, 3 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "In My Family," by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, from Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica).

In My Family

In my family we're all tenacious, decide what we want and go after it.
We work hard, moving forward, when we're exhausted, and
think we can't move one inch more. I wonder if it's in the
genes, this need to finish everything we start, this belief that
hard work and perseverance will get us through. My sister
kept going to work for months after she had seizures and
couldn't walk. Her live-in aide took her to work in a wheel-
chair, pushing her down the road, because the sidewalks in
Hawthorne aren't handicapped accessible.
My father had a degenerative disease of the spine. He dragged
one paralyzed leg behind him wherever he went, and went he
did, driving until he was eighty-seven years old, cloth around
the pedals of the car so he could reach the brake, one shoe
built up to compensate for the unevenness of his legs, driving
to his friends' houses to play cards and visit, driving to the
courthouse in Paterson to file a petition for his friends or reg-
ister the legal papers he drew up, his body failing him, but his
mind sharp and willing him on.
My son John wants to think he is not like us. I hear how even
at thirty-two he takes responsibility for his life, how he gets up
at 5 a.m., so he can be at his office by 5:30, how he handles the
complex legal problems of a large corporation, working
straight through till he returns at 6 p.m. to help with the chil-
dren and to deal with the house, the yard, repairs. He takes
everything seriously. I love the way John carries his son in his
arms, the child running to him for comfort and the way they
speak to each other without words. I know that even my son,
who wants to think he is not like our family, is driven as we
are to keep on going, no matter what.
These are the things my mother taught us by example, my
mother who tripped over our skates when we were children
and got up and walked the twelve blocks to Farraro Coat
Factory on River Street. She worked until noon, walked back
home to make our lunches, and then walked back to work.
Only after she came home at 3:30, so she could be there when
we got home from school, did she collapse into a chair unable
to move. When she came back from the hospital clinic with a
cast on her leg, fourteen bones in her foot broken, she had to
rest her leg on a stool. That was one of the few times in her
life that I saw her cry, not because of the pain, but because she
couldn't do the work she told herself she had to do.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien, born in South Africa (1892). He wrote The Hobbit (1937) and the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His family moved to England after his father died, and his mother taught him Latin and converted him to Catholicism. She died when he was twelve, and friends said he stayed a Catholic and continued to study languages in her memory. He taught himself Old Norse, and read the ancient sagas and stories of Northern Europe in their original languages. "Literature stops in the year 1100," he once said. "After that it's only books." He arrived at Oxford as a scholar of philology, and he met C.S. Lewis there. With a number of other men, he formed The Inklings, a group of Christian writers who met to read aloud what they'd written every week. They talked late into the night about whether or not books could be "morally serious fantasy."

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SUNDAY, 4 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "White Autumn," by Robert Morgan, from At the Edge of the Orchard Country (Wesleyan University Press).

White Autumn

She had always loved to read, even
in childhood during the Confederate War,
and built the habit later of staying up
by the oil lamp near the fireplace after
husband and children slept, the scrub-work done.
She fed the addiction in the hard years
of Reconstruction and even after
her husband died and she was forced
to provide and be sole foreman of the place
. While her only son fought in France
it was this second life, by the open window
in warm months when the pines on the hill
seemed to talk to the creek, or katydids
lined-out their hymns in the trees beyond the barn,
or by the familiar of fire in winter,
that sustained her. She and her daughters
later forgot the time, the exact date,
if there was such a day, she made her decision.
But after the children could cook
and garden and milk and bring in a little
by housecleaning for the rich in Flat Rock,
and the son returned from overseas
wounded but still able and married a war widow,
and when she had found just the right chair,
a rocker joined by a man over on Willow
from rubbed hickory, with cane seat and back,
and arms wide enough to rest her everlasting cup
of coffee on, or a heavy book,
she knew she had come to her place and would stay.
And from that day, if it was one time and not
a gradual recognition, she never crossed a threshold
or ventured from that special seat of rightness,
of presence and pleasure, except to be helped to bed
in the hours before dawn for a little nap.
That chair-every Christmas someone gave her a bright
cushion to break in-was the site on which she bathed
in a warm river of books and black coffee,
varieties of candy and cakes kept in a low cupboard
at hand. The cats passed through her lap and legs
and through the rungs of her seat. The tons
of firewood came in cold and left as light, smoke, ash.
She rode that upright cradle to sleep
and through many long visits with tiers of family,
kissing the babies like different kinds of fruit.
Always hiding the clay pipe in her cabinet
when company appeared. She chaired decisions
to keep the land and refused welfare.
On that creaking throne she ruled a tiny kingdom
through war, death of kin. Even on the night she did
stop breathing, near a hundred, no one knew
exactly when, but found the lamp still on,
the romance open to a new chapter,
and the sun just appearing at her elbow.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Jakob Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1785). He and his brother Wilhelm assembled the collection of folktales we all know today, including "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella" and "Rumplestiltskin." Scholars have been studying and categorizing fairy tales ever since. According to folktale typology, Cinderella is a version of type 510A, "heroines persecuted," and Little Red Riding Hood is type 333, "careless girls eaten by witches."

It's the birthday of Charles Stratton, "General Tom Thumb," born in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1838). He stopped growing at the age of seven months, and never weighed more than fifteen pounds, even as a full-grown adult. Under the care of Phineas Barnum, he made appearances all over the United States and Europe, and he always agreed to go back on tour when Barnum ran short of funds.

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