MONDAY, 14 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Tuition Costs" by Victor Depta, from The Helen Poems. © Ion Books. Reprinted with permission.
Tuition Costs
I'd raised a child, practically
as if the end were something I'd thought about
prepared for, worked toward
when, in fact, I was amazed how little time was left
what with the ACT, SAT, the mailbox cluttered with
college ads
loan forms, tuition costs, room and board
as if I were packaging her, fully insured
for Berkeley, Davis, somewhere deliverable to
and tampered with, probably
opened like a certified intelligence.
I'd raised a child
as if a million million hadn't done the same
yet it was fresh to me, fragrant as irises
as the climbing rose on the back porch
where I kept busy to distract myself
sawing fretwork, attaching it to the posts
and painting everything white, white as the roses
wonderfully unreal, a dream-labor
old fashioned as the moon in May, delicate
as she readied to go away.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, born in Wharton, Texas (1916). He's best known for writing the screenplays for movies such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). He also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play The Young Man from Atlanta (1995).
It's the birthday of the humorist Max Shulman, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1919). He wrote several books including, Anyone Got a Match? (1964) and Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971). He grew up during the Great Depression, and he said he became a humorist because, "I turned early to humor as my branch of writing... [because] life was bitter and I was not."
It's the birthday of Sylvia Beach, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1887). She moved to Paris when she was 30 and opened a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, which became a gathering place for writers. She met James Joyce in 1920, just as he as finishing his novel Ulysses. When all the major publishers in Europe and America decided that it was too obscene to publish, Sylvia Beach said she'd publish it, even though she'd never published a book before.
She had to contact a printer and get people to buy advanced copies to fund the cost. Because she had no editors, she edited the enormous manuscript herself, and managed to get the novel published by James Joyce's birthday, February 2, 1922.
It's the birthday of the physicist Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Germany (1879). He first became interested in science as a young boy when his father showed him a compass. He spent hours watching the needle move by itself, pointing toward north. He said, "[I realized] something deeply hidden had to be behind things."
He was home schooled for the early part of his life, and when he finally went to school with the other children, his teachers thought he was developmentally disabled. He hated sports, he almost never talked to the other children, and he refused to study any subject he didn't find interesting. The only subjects he did find interesting were math and philosophy. He spent his spare time building huge houses of cards and playing the violin. His mother said he carried his violin wherever he went, "like a dear child."
In high school, Einstein's teachers grew even more frustrated with him. One teacher tried to have him expelled because all he did in class was sit in the back of the room smiling. He finally dropped out at the age of 16.
His father persuaded him to apply to a technical college in Zurich so that he could at least get a degree in engineering. Einstein flunked the entrance exam in all subjects except for math. But one of the professors at the school was so impressed by his math scores that he accepted Einstein anyway.
Einstein began working toward a PhD in physics, but he didn't get along well with his professors. He was constantly questioning their ideas, and refusing to show the proper respect. He often missed classes and only passed his final examination because his friend let him borrow all his lecture notes. But even though he passed, he was the only member of his class not to receive an assistant professorship.
He was planning to get married, and suddenly he didn't have any way to make a living so he sent out applications for every scientific position he could find. Everyone turned him down. His mother had warned him that getting engaged too soon would ruin his career, but he refused to break off the engagement. He was in love. In desperation, he applied to a job at an insurance company, resigned to the fact that he would have to give up a career in science in order to get married. But at the last minute, he got a decent-paying job at the Swiss patent office.
Einstein's job was to evaluate patent applications and determine whether the inventions described would actually work. He rejected a lot of perpetual motion machines. Though it wasn't the university job he had always wanted, he found that it was the perfect job for him. He was inspired by all the people in the world who were thinking up new inventions, and since he didn't have to bring any work home at night he was free to work on his own theories about physics.
He began to publish a series of papers about the behavior of molecules, but they received little attention. Because he had no access to a university, he didn't have a laboratory to explore his theories. He just worked on the problems in his head and on paper, and he was removed enough from the scientific community that he didn't worry about whether his theories were fashionable or important. He just worked on the problems he found most interesting. Above all, he was interested in finding some law that could explain all the forces in the universe, from gravity to electromagnetism. He loved the idea that different forces were really different aspects of the same forces and that different substances were really different configurations of the same substance.
His son was born, and Einstein began studying and thinking at all hours of the day and night while taking care of the baby. He kept a notebook with him, even while sleeping, so that if he suddenly got an idea he could jot it down. He became obsessed with strange questions, like what would it be like to travel on a beam of light. Would the rest of the world look different while traveling at that speed?
In the spring of 1905, he asked his best friend to help him solve the questions on which he'd been working, but they gave up after several hours. Einstein went to bed extremely disappointed. The following morning, he woke up and suddenly everything made sense. He said, "It was as if a storm broke loose in my mind."
Einstein spent the next several weeks writing a paper on his theory, which came to be called the Special Theory of Relativity, the theory that if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same in every frame of reference, then both time and motion are relative to the observer. In other words, time and motion appear differently to someone traveling in a rocket ship than they would to someone standing on the ground as the rocket ship flies by.
That same year, 1905, Einstein published three more papers, each of which was as revolutionary as the first, including the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc2, which means that there is tremendous energy trapped inside all particles. That equation was the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. Years later, after the creation of the atom bomb, Einstein said, "If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
TUESDAY, 15 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Yogurt" by Leland Kinsey, from In the Rain Shadow. © University of New England. Reprinted with permission.
Yogurt
Each day my cousin's wife boils
the goats' milk to make the yogurt
she is locally famous for.
Many pans sit cooling in the kitchen
every morning after she has reduced
and sterilized the day's batch,
then inoculated it with previous yogurt
so her long strain is maintained.
She likes the word inoculate
since as a nurse she inoculated
thousands of children and adults
against various diseases
including helping to eradicate
the last pockets of smallpox,
but in this it's aiming toward
an end other than prevention.
She makes the day's deliveries
before shopping for the evening meal.
Her mother made deliveries of yogurt,
feta cheese, and hard ricotta,
at hotels and shops in Umbaya
near Lake Nyassa, both as a girl
carrying her mother's goods,
and as a wife to earn house money.
Now aged, in her daughter's house,
she helps pot each day's product.
She served yogurt every meal: with cereal;
with sharp spices, covering sliced cucumbers;
dressing a salad learned in India; sweetened, with mango
or other fruit as rich dessert; plain.
She gives lessons to women in shelters
and at farmers training sessions, a use
of milk for home and sale, a product
to supplement their lives.
The owners of a resort
in a national park asked her to teach
the chef to make a yogurt palatable
to guests rather than the bitter gruel
of his daily offering. She showed
him care of boiling and long cooling
and with her starter what a fine concoction
came to table. The value of the lesson
was direct, our whole stay written off,
days of viewing remote wild places
and animals, paid for by this mild domestication.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's March 15, the Ides of March. The word "ides" comes from the earliest Roman calendar, said to have been created by Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. The word "ides" is from the Latin "to divide." The Ides were meant to mark the full moon, but since the solar calendar months and lunar months are of different lengths, the ides lost its original meaning. On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was on his way to a Senate meeting in Rome. He met up with the soothsayer who had warned him days before to "Beware the Ides of March." Caesar pointed out that the Ides had come, and the soothsayer replied, "Yes, but they have not yet gone." Caesar breathed his last breath a short time later, stabbed to death by a group of conspirators after entering the Senate house.
It's the birthday of novelist, short story writer and poet Ben Okri, born on this day in Minna, Nigeria (1959). Okri writes about Nigeria, and about poverty, corruption and war. He said, "Africa is the only place I want to write about. It's a gift to the writer." His novels include The Landscapes Within (1981) and Dangerous Love (1996).
Nigeria was in the midst of a civil war when Okri was a young boy. He had a hard time concentrating in school with all the fighter planes flying overhead. Between 1967 and 1969, one million people lost their lives during that war (the Biafran War). Okri's education took place while his relatives were being killed. He had friends who got up and left class to go and fight the war.
At home, his parents, Grace and Silver, told African tales and legends. Okri spent a lot of time reading books he found in his father's library: Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Ibsen, Chekhov and Maupassant, and the dictionary.
Okri began writing fiction in his late teens when he held a day job as a clerk in Lagos. He was supposed to be writing letters to paint distributors. Instead, he wrote fiction under his desk. He published a few stories in local newspapers, and on the busrides home he saw people reading his work in the evening paper.
One of Okri's stories kept growing longer and became his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980). At the age of 19, Okri packed the book in a suitcase and went to London. He said, "I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. No, let's say Shakespeare and Dickens, to get them in the right order."
Okri studied at the University of Essex and returned to London to write. He said, "I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable." He also worked as a BBC broadcaster and as poetry editor of West Africa magazine. "I had very high standards and I was finally fired because I wasn't publishing enough poetry."
In 1984 one of Okri's stories, "Disparities", won the PEN New Fiction contest. He published his first book in the United States, Stars of the New Curfew, four years later and won the Booker Prize in Britain for his novel The Famished Road (1991). Okri's most recent novel is In Arcadia (2002).
Ben Okri said, "Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens' characters are Nigerians. Do you see what I mean? Literature may come from a specific place but it always lives in its own unique kingdom."
It's the birthday of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, born in the Waxhaws area near the border between North and South Carolina on this day in 1767.
Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828. His election was a victory for the common people. He was the first populist president who did not come from the aristocracy. Jackson said, "As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.
WEDNESDAY, 16 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: To N, in absentia" by Robyn Sarah, from A Day's Grace. © The Porcupine's Quill. Reprinted with permission.
To N, in absentia
I do not know how you went out of my life
or when exactly. The leaves of the Norway maple
are beginning to turn yellow, fall has come.
I last saw you on an evening at the end of July
but I think you were already gone then,
I think by then you had been gone for a long time.
And so it seems meaningless to count the days
yet still I count them, August, September,
October now half over, terrible days,
And I do not know where you are
or when I may have news of you again.
But I remember as if yesterday the day
you came out of my body into this world,
a fine splash in full midsummer, a small cry
like the meow of a Siamese cat,
your eyes wide open and looking all around;
remember how in the early hours of that morning,
before you arrived, I heard pass down our street
(as I had heard each morning that summer
of my thirtieth year) the clopping sound
of a lone horse pulling a calèche,
his sleepy driver bound for the road
that climbs Mount Royal's slope.
No one can take away that morning
or the exactness of its place in time.
I go there often.
I visit it like a temple.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet César Vallejo, born in a small town in northern Peru (1892). He was mistakenly thrown in jail as a young man after a riot in his hometown, and he wrote his first collection of poetry while behind bars.
Once he was free, he moved to Paris and tried to find a job, but he wound up on the street, sleeping on park benches and in subways. He wrote to his brother, "My will veers between the point at which one is reduced to the sole desire for death and the intention of conquering the world by sword and fire."
He kept writing poetry for the rest of his life, but none of it was published until after his death. He died relatively unknown, but today he is regarded as one of the great poets of the Spanish language.
It's the birthday of novelist Alice Hoffman, born in New York City (1952). She's the author of many novels, including Practical Magic (1995) and Local Girls (1999). Her most next book, Ice Queen, will come out next month.
It's the birthday of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, born in Port Conway, Virginia (1751). He did more than almost any of the founding fathers to help write the United States Constitution, establishing our nation's federal government, with all its checks and balances. He believed the government needed to be checked and balanced because, he said, "The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted."
It was on this day in 1850 that Nathaniel Hawthorne published his novel The Scarlet Letter. He was forty-six years old, and had been writing for more than 20 years, with little success.
He was living at a time when there was almost no such thing as American literature, in part because the American publishing industry was so behind the times. In order to publish a book, a single printer would edit the manuscript, set the type, operate the printing press, bind the pages into books, and then sell them. It was remarkably inefficient, and so it was almost impossible to produce a best-seller, since so few copies were available to be sold.
But by 1850, books were being printed by machines. Long, continuous sheets of paper were fed into steam-powered printing presses, and factories of workers folded, pressed, and stitched the pages into books. The Scarlet Letter became the first great American novel in part because could reach a large audience.
When he started writing the novel, Hawthorne was working as a political appointee at the Salem Custom House. He'd long been fascinated by America's Puritan history, especially since one of his own ancestors had been a judge in the Salem witch trials. 10 years before starting The Scarlet Letter, he had read a historical account of a woman who had to wear the letter "A" on her chest as a punishment for adultery. He used that woman as the main character of the novel, and he named her Hester Prynne.
When he finished the last chapter, he read it aloud to his wife. He said the tragic ending broke her heart and sent her to bed with a terrible headache, which he considered a great success. But he worried that it might be too bleak a book, and he thought he might try to publish it along with some lighter short stories.
His publisher thought it was good enough to stand alone, and he was right. The first printing sold out in 10 days and went on to become a big best-seller. Henry James would later call it, "The finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in this country."
THURSDAY, 17 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Ireland" by John Hewitt, from Collected Poems. © The Blackstaff Press. Reprinted with permission.
Ireland
We Irish pride ourselves as patriots
and tell the beadroll of the valiant ones
since Clontarf's sunset saw the Norsemen broken...
Aye, and before that too we had our heroes:
but they were mighty fighters and victorious.
The later men got nothing save defeat,
hard transatlantic sidewalks or the scaffold...
We Irish, vainer than tense Lucifer,
are yet content with half-a-dozen turf,
and cry our adoration for a bog,
rejoicing in the rain that never ceases,
and happy to stride over the sterile acres,
or stony hills that scarcely feed a sheep.
But we are fools, I say, are ignorant fools
to waste the spirit's warmth in this cold air,
to spend our wit and love and poetry
on half-a-dozen peat and a black bog.
We are not native here or anywhere.
We were the keltic wave that broke over Europe,
and ran up this bleak beach among these stones:
but when the tide ebbed, were left stranded here
in crevices, and ledge-protected pools
that have grown saltier with the drying up
of the great common flow that kept us sweet
with fresh cold draughts from deep down in the ocean.
So we are bitter, and are dying out
in terrible harshness in this lonely place,
and what we think is love for usual rock,
or old affection for our customary ledge,
is but forgotten longing for the sea
that cries far out and calls us to partake
in his great tidal movements round the earth.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1776 that British forces evacuated Boston during the Revolutionary War. The defeat ended the eight-year British occupation of the city, and it was during those eight years that events such as the Boston Massacre occurred.
George Washington ordered the fortification of the city and the harbor on March 4th, and American General John Thomas had secretly led about 800 soldiers and 1,200 workers to Dorchester Heights, just south of the city. Most of the artillery used to surround Boston had been captured by Henry Knox at Fort Ticonderoga in New York during that winter. Knox used his men, their horses, and oxen to drag over 120,000 pounds of artillery through ice and snow for 300 miles back to Boston for the fortification.
British General Sir William Howe had planned to use British ships already in Boston Harbor to defeat the growing Patriot defense, but a storm hit and that gave the Patriots all the time they needed to complete their preparations. General Howe considered his options, and when he was told he was completely surrounded, he gave up Boston without a fight. 11,000 British troops and more than 1,000 remaining British loyalists boarded ships, and later they left Boston, retreating to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
It was on this day in 1901 that Vincent Van Gogh's paintings were shown at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. The exhibit made Van Gogh's work famous. Van Gogh committed suicide 11 years earlier, never knowing how influential his paintings would become.
The painter Maurice de Vlaminck saw the exhibit, and it influenced his own painting so much that he said Van Gogh was more important to him than his own father. Van Gogh said, "One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way."
It was on this day in 1910 that the Camp Fire Girls organization was formed, founded by Dr. Luther Gulick and his wife, Charlotte. It was the first organization for girls in the United States open to members of all religions.
It was on this day in 1941 that the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington D.C. The museum was dedicated in a ceremony given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and 8,822 guests were there. Andrew W. Mellon donated the funds for the construction of the museum's main building, and he also gave his own entire art collection, which included 369 paintings by European artists such as Botticelli, Corot, Perugino, Raphael, Rembrandt, Turner, Van Dyck, and many, many others. In the collection there were also 175 American portraits and about 25 statues. The gift had an estimated value of around $65 million.
Andrew Mellon had been working towards the creation of the Gallery for several years prior to the opening, getting President Hoover to set aside the land years before construction began. Mellon chose the architect, John Russell Pope, and he supervised the construction himself. The original structure is now called the West Building.
Pope was also the designer of the Jefferson Memorial, and he modeled both structures after the Pantheon in Rome. That's why the National Gallery has a massive dome and a huge columned portico. The whole Gallery spans four city blocks. Some of the most famous paintings that it houses today are Ginevra de'Benci (1474) by Leonardo da Vinci, Daniel in the Lion's Den (1613) by Peter Paul Rubens and Salvador Dali's The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955).
Although Mellon created the museum, he didn't want it named after him. He worried it might limit future contributions of art and money to the gallery. In his speech at the opening ceremony, President Roosevelt said, "It is with a very real sense of satisfaction that I accept for the people of the United States, and on their behalf, this National Gallery and the collections it contains. The giver of this building has matched the richness of its gift with the modesty of his spirit, stipulating that the Gallery should be known not by his name, but by the Nation's [...] not a memorial to themselves, but a monument to the art that they love and the country to which they belong." Because it's a national building, entrance to the gallery is free.
FRIDAY, 18 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: (Eve speaks to Adam) from Paradise Lost by John Milton. Reprinted with permission.
(Eve speaks to Adam)
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heav'n, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
Literary and Historical Notes:
The Tornado of 1925 began in southern Missouri and hurdled the Mississippi River, tearing through Indiana and Illinois in three hours. The tornado followed the path of a slight ridge, home to several small mining towns. Many of these towns were completely destroyed, and others, like Murphysboro, suffered heavy damages.
A group of men were working in the mines 500 feet below the town of West Frankfort, Illinois. They were aware of anything unusual on the surface, until the electricity went out. Then they climbed out of the mines through a shaft, and when they reached the surface, the men found their homes heavily damaged or totally destroyed, many of their family members missing.
Nearly 700 people were killed in the tornado, and another 2,000 were injured. Claude Wisely, owner of Murphysboro's greenhouse, lost everything. Florists from across the region sent flowers to Murphysboro by the trainload for all the funerals the small town was to hold.
It's the birthday of John Updike, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). He is known as the author of the Rabbit series, following the story of one man's life over the course of several novels. But Updike has published nearly 30 novels and short story collections, and he has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Updike was encouraged by his mother to begin writing because he was shy. After college, Updike joined the staff of the New Yorker as a regular contributor. He still publishes stories with them today.
John Updike said, "Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
It's the birthday of the poet Wilfred Owen, born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England (1893). He is well-known as a poet of World War I, but Owen's poetry was not published in his own lifetime. Owen was raised in an evangelical home, and though he rejected many of these beliefs, they are themes in his poetry.
Owen's life changed during World War I when he took leave from his teaching job in France to visit a war hospital. He was so moved by the experience that he resolved to become an officer in the British military. Owen said, "I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." Owen did not actually spend that much time on the war front, only a total of five weeks, but these weeks shaped his poetry.
Owen suffered shellshock and was sent to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had been severely injured. Sassoon encouraged Owen to publish his poetry after the war, but it was Sassoon who published a collection of Owen's poems in 1924.
On November 11, 1918, the bells were ringing in Owen's hometown, signifying the end of the war, the signing of the Armistice. The day also brought a telegram to the parents of Wilfred Owen, informing them that their son had been killed one week before in a German machine gun attack during one of the final battles of World War I.
It's the birthday of George Plimpton, born in New York City (1927). He is known as the founder of the Paris Review, and for being a "participatory journalist." Plimpton believed that journalists and nonfiction writers should do more than simply observe; he believed they should immerse themselves in whatever they covered, and know it from the inside out. He was known as a famous practical joker, and this sometimes overlapped with his journalism helped turn him into a New York icon.
Plimpton was inspired as a boy by the exploits of Paul Gallico, a sports journalist who believed so much in participatory journalism that he fought the legendary boxer Jack Dempsey. In 1959, Plimpton imitated his hero when he fought Archie Moore. Plimpton cried when Moore bloodied his nose, and he said it was a "sympathetic response."
Plimpton tried his hand at many sports. He liked to compete against the very best, and then write books about it. He pitched against a team of Major League All-Stars, inducing Willie Mays, and lost a tennis match to Pancho Gonzalez. Plimpton spent one evening as a goaltender for the Boston Bruins, and played one game as a third-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions. He lost a golf match to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, despite an 18 handicap.
In 1997, Plimpton appeared at amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, famous for its outspoken and opinionated audiences. When Plimpton was asked what he was going to play, he replied, "The piano." Plimpton charmed the crowd with an original, improvised composition he called "Opus No. 1." He won second prize.
SATURDAY, 19 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Letter in Autumn" by Donald Hall, from Without. © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
Letter in Autumn
This first October of your death
I sit in my blue chair
looking out at late afternoon's
western light suffusing
its goldenrod yellow over
the barn's unpainted boards—
here where I sat each fall
watching you pull your summer's
garden up.
Yesterday
I cleaned out your Saab
to sell it. The dozen tapes
I mailed to Caroline.
I collected hairpins and hair ties.
In the Hill's Balsam tin
Where you kept silver for tolls
I found your collection
of slips from fortune cookies:
YOU ARE A FANTASTIC PERSON!
YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE
WHO GOES PLACES IN THEIR LIFE!
As I slept last night:
You leap from our compartment
in an underground railroad yard
and I follow; behind us the train
clatters and sways; I turn
and turn again to see you tugging
at a gold bugle welded
to a freight car; then you vanish
into the pitchy clanking dark.
Here I sit in my blue chair
not exactly watching Seattle
beat Denver in the Kingdome.
Last autumn above Pill Hill
we looked from the eleventh floor
down at Puget Sound,
at Seattle's skyline,
and at the Kingdome scaffolded
for repair. From your armature
of tubes, you asked, "Perkins,
am I going to live?"
When you died
in April, baseball took up
its cadences again
under the indoor ballpark's
patched and recovered ceiling.
You would have admired
the Mariners, still hanging on
in October, like blue asters
surviving frost.
Sometimes
when I start to cry,
I wave it off: "I just
did that." When Andrew
wearing a dark suit and necktie
telephones from his desk,
he cannot keep from crying.
When Philippa weeps,
Allison at seven announces,
"The river is flowing."
Gus no longer searches for you,
but when Alice or Joyce comes calling
he dances and sings. He brings us
one of your white slippers
from the bedroom.
I cannot discard
your jeans or lotions or T-shirts.
I cannot disturb your tumbles
of scarves and floppy hats.
Lost unfinished things remain
on your desk, in your purse
or Shaker basket. Under a cushion
I discover your silver thimble.
Today when the telephone rang
I thought it was you.
At night when I go to bed
Gus drowses on the floor beside me.
I sleep where we lived and died
in the painted Victorian bed
under the tiny lights
you strung on the headboard
when you brought me home
from the hospital four years ago.
The lights still burned last April
early on a Saturday morning
while you died.
At your grave
I find tribute: chrysanthemums,
cosmos, a pumpkin, and a poem
by a woman who "never knew you"
who asks, "Can you hear me Jane?"
there is an apple and a heart—
shaped pebble.
Looking south
from your stone, I gaze at the file
of eight enormous sugar maples
that rage and flare in dark noon,
the air grainy with mist
like the rain of Seattle's winter.
The trees go on burning
Without ravage of loss or disorder.
I wish you were that birch
rising from the clump behind you,
and I the gray oak alongside.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of comedienne Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken in Brevard, North Carolina (1894). She was known for coming on stage in baggy clothes, over-sized shoes, and a crushed hat. She had a gravely voice and a toothless grin. She got the nickname "Moms" from one of her old boyfriends, who gave it to her because it described the mothering attitude she had towards other performers and her audiences.
Mabley was one of twelve children in a family of mixed African, Cherokee and Irish descent. She eventually toured in every state, except for Mississippi. She said, "I won't go there. They ain't ready." She was widely known after recording her album, Moms Mabley, the Funniest Woman in the World (1960). It sold over a million copies and became a Gold Record.
She refused the chance to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show once because he had only offered her five minutes of time. She said, "Honey, it takes Moms four minutes just to get on the stage."
It's the birthday of explorer, translator, and scholar Sir Richard Burton, born in Devonshire, England (1821). He's known for his translations of The Arabian Nights (1885-88), The Kama Sutra (1883), and The Perfumed Garden (1886).
SUNDAY, 20 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "6" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems. © Copper Canyon. Reprinted with permission.
6
Dearest, I never knew such loving. There
in that glass tower in the alien city, alone,
we found what somewhere I had always known
exists and must exist, this fervent care,
this lust of tenderness. Two were aware
how in hot seizure, bone pressed to bone
and liquid flesh to flesh, each separate moan
was pleasure, yes, but most in the other's share.
Companions and discoverers, equal and free,
so deep in love we adventured and so far
that we became perhaps more than we are,
and now being home is hardship. Therefore are we
diminished? No. We are of the world again
but still augmented, more than we've ever been.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1852 that Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. It's considered one of the most important novels in American history. The book's author was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a famous Congregationalist preacher. Her brothers and husband were ministers, too, and Stowe herself had a strong Christian faith and wrote essays and articles about the value of temperance.
Stowe lived with her husband in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city on the Ohio River that separated North from South. Stowe met many fugitive slaves who had escaped bondage in the South, and so Stowe learned a lot about the life of slaves. In 1849 her son Samuel Charles, just eighteen months old, died of cholera. For the first time, Stowe thought she could imagine the grief of a slave mother, separated from her children, with almost no chance of seeing them again. She became a fierce abolitionist, and she began to write Uncle Tom's Cabin after her family had moved far north, into Maine.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was actually published serially at first, in the abolitionist paper National Era. Stowe had trouble keeping up with the demanding monthly deadlines because she was learning about the culture of the South even as she wrote about it. Stowe failed to meet her deadline only once in two years, pouring the words onto the page with an intensity she considered divinely inspired. Stowe said, "The Lord Himself wrote it. I was but an instrument in His hand."
Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year in print. In the North and in Europe, Harriet Beecher Stowe was hailed as a hero of anti-slavery movements. In the South, she became a hated figure. But the book's influence cannot be denied; some even credit it for helping bring about the Civil War. The book was translated into 20 languages, and it was imitated on stage and in song. Many of the characters, including the title character, are still well known to this day.
It was on this day in 1854 that the Republican Party was founded. The name "Republican" was first used many years before, by Thomas Jefferson's political party, the Democratic Republican Party. That name was shortened to the Democratic Party, which is what we call it today. The present-day Republican Party was formed by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and by members of other parties, like the Democratic and Whig parties, who disagreed with their parties' positions on slavery. By 1855, the Republican Party was thriving in the North, while it had almost no following in the South. The Republican Party's second candidate for President of the United States was Abraham Lincoln, who was elected in 1860.
It's the birthday of the playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in Skien, Norway (1828). He is widely regarded as the father of modern drama. Ibsen helped bring an end to the style of Romantic drama by bringing the day's problems and ideas into the lives of his characters. Oscar Wilde once said, after seeing an Ibsen play, "I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek."
Ibsen's father was a prosperous merchant, but a series of poor financial decisions caused the family to sink in social and economic class, and young Ibsen was miserable. He developed a strong mistrust for society and class, and this would be the primary influence behind much of his writing. Also, when Ibsen was twenty, a revolution swept Norway, and Ibsen was attracted by the ideals of personal freedom and liberty.
Henrik Ibsen hoped to become a physician, but he failed the entrance examinations, so he began to write plays. He became the stage poet of a small theatre in Bergen, and they sent him on study tours to Denmark and Germany. When he returned to Norway, Ibsen became the artistic director of the new Norwegian Theatre, but it eventually went bankrupt and Ibsen was assigned to another theatre. During this time, he wrote several plays, such as The Pretenders (1864) and Love's Comedy (1862). But none of these plays were successful, and Ibsen was humiliated by their failures.
Then, in 1864, Ibsen received a government grant to travel abroad, and he did so for the next 27 years. He returned to Norway briefly and infrequently during this time. Ibsen lived in Rome, Munich and Dresden. He wrote some of his most famous plays, including Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867) and A Doll's House (1879).
It's the birthday of Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), the poet who gave us the Metamorphoses, born in Sulmo, present-day Sulmona (43 B.C.). Ovid holds a special place in Western literary history, being a bridge from Golden Age poets like Virgil and Horace, to Silver Age poets like Lucan and Statius. Ovid was the first major Roman poet to live his entire life at the beginning of the Roman Empire.
After his brother died, Ovid became the focus of his family's ambitions for success. He was trained for a career in government, studying in Rome with famous rhetoricians like Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro. Ovid became the administrator of the mint and of prisons and executions before becoming the first Roman senator from Sulmona. But Ovid preferred the life of a poet, and he liked his literary friends, and so he gave up his career in government to pursue poetry full-time.
