MONDAY, 21 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "Boarding a Bus" by Steven Huff, from Proof. © Two Rivers Review, Reprinted with permission.
Boarding a Bus
In a small-knit Iowa town I watched
a couple board the bus and take the seat
behind me. They'd waited till then to count
their cash. I could hear each of them whisper
fives and ones like vespers, and repeat, then declare
they couldn't afford to go. "But," she added,
"we haven't had a vacation in—" "That's
very true," he said. And they sighed into the rolling scene:
the sunset on a sea of corn,
a lonely red gas station, an old man changing a flat.
I don't want to scare anyone, but
this is your life too. Tell me how it's any different.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in World War I. On this day in 1918, General Erich Ludendorff launched the biggest German offensive of the year with a five-hour artillery barrage, trying to drive a wedge between the British and French, and trying to drive the British to the sea. The Germans advanced about 40 miles, creating a bulge in the British and French lines; in less than two weeks, almost 500,000 men were lost to both sides.
It was on this day in 1617 that Rebecca Rolfe died on a visit to England from the colonies. We know her as Pocahontas, the daughter of the Chieftan Powhatan. When the English settlers came to Jamestown, and there was trouble between them and the Indians, she helped to settle it. She married an Englishman, John Rolfe, in 1614. Two years later they went to England, where she was a great celebrity, but she caught either small pox or pneumonia, and died.
It's the birthday of poet Phyllis Mcginley, born in Ontario, Oregon (1905). She began writing light verse when she was in her early twenties, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her collection, Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades (1960). She also wrote novels for young adults.
It's the birthday of showman Florenz Ziegfeld, born in Chicago (1869). Starting in 1907, he staged the Ziegfeld Follies in New York—featuring scantily clad show girls, extravagant sets and costumes, and musical comedy. He launched the careers of Fanny Brice, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Eddie Cantor.
It's the birthday of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach, in Thuringia (1685). The 11th child of a couple who died by the time Bach was ten, he was raised by his brother, Johann Christian Bach, who taught him organ and clavier. Bach worked as an organist in Thuringia and composed sacred music; he was court organist and a member of the court orchestra in Weimer; then, for the last 27 years of his life, he was a cantor, a church music director and choir director in Liepzig. In his own lifetime he was such a renowned organist that his talent for composition was overlooked, and he was not fully recognized until at least half a century after his death.
TUESDAY, 22 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "Landscape" by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work. © The Atlantic Monthly Press. Reprinted with permission.
Landscape
Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though
all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Marcel Marceau, born in Strasburg, France (1923), who managed, almost single-handedly, to revive the ancient art of pantomime in the second half of the 20th century. He was active in the French Resistance during World War Two, and then, after the war, founded his own mime troupe (1948). He became the world's best-known mime, and his most famous character was the clown 'Bip,' in sailor pants and striped jacket. Marceau also devised the mime-drama Don Juan (1964) and the mime-ballet Candide (1971).
It's the birthday of novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, born in Liverpool (1910). He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, working on the Atlantic convoy runs. He wrote a novel about it during the war: H.M. Corvette (1942). But he's best known for another sea saga, The Cruel Sea (1951), about life on board a small ship in wartime.
It's the birthday of western writer Louis L'Amour, born in Jamestown, North Dakota (1908). He left school at 15 to travel the world, exploring much of the American West and working for a while as a miner. He also traveled to East Africa, and worked as an elephant handler, a lumberjack, a boxer, and a migrant farm worker. In his thirties, L'Amour began writing novels about life on the western frontier. His first big success was Hondo (1953-later made into a John Wayne movie). All through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s he wrote several books a year—one hundred of them in all—which sold over 200 million copies worldwide.
It's the birthday of French-Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, born in St-Boniface, Manitoba (1909). She lived in Montréal and wrote many French-language novels set there, including Bonheur d'occasion (translated as The Tin Flute, 1945).
It's the birthday of illustrator Randolph Caldecott, born in Chester, England (1846). He illustrated books by Washington Irving, and the poem The House that Jack Built (1878). The Caldecott Medal, awarded each year to the illustrator of the best American picture book for children, was named for him.
WEDNESDAY, 23 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "The Blue Blanket" by Sue Ellen Thompson. Reprinted with permission.
The Blue Blanket
Toward the end, my father argued
with my mother over everything: He wanted
her to eat again. He wanted her to take
her medicine. He wanted her
to live. He argued with her in their bed
at naptime. He was cold, he said,
tugging at the blanket tangled
in my mother's wasted limbs. From the hall
outside their room I listened
as love, caught and fettered, howled
at its captors, gnawing at its own flesh
in its frenzy to escape. Then I entered
without knocking, freed the blanket
trapped between my mother's knees and shook
it out once, high above
their bodies' cursive. It floated
for a moment, blue as the Italian sky
into which my father flew his bombs
in 1943, blue as the hat I'd bought her
for the winter she would never live
to see. My father's agitation eased,
my mother smiled up at me, her face
lucent with gratitude, as the blanket
sifted down on them like earth.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist David R. Slavitt, born in White Plains, New York (1935). Author or editor of more than 60 books, starting with The Exhibitionist (1967), which he wrote under the pen name Henry Sutton.
It's the birthday of amateur track star Roger Bannister, born in Harrow on the Hill, England (1929), the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes. On May 6, 1954, despite a cold cross wind and poor track conditions, he ran the mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, collapsing at the tape.
It's the birthday of children's author Eleanor Cameron, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba (1912). Her adult fiction was published to good reviews but poor sales. When she was 42, her son David asked her to write "a story about himself and his best friend and how they would build a spaceship and go off and find a planet." She wrote The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) and it was a big success. In 1974, Cameron won the National Book Award for The Court of the Stone Children (1973).
It's the birthday of Fannie Farmer, born in Boston (1857). She was the headmistress of the Boston Cooking School, when, in 1896, she published the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which revolutionized the field of cookbooks by giving standard measurements—right down to an eighth of a teaspoon—instead just saying of "a pinch of this" or "a dash of that." The publisher was skeptical that it would sell very well—he assumed that everybody knew how to cook—and made her pay all the costs of the printing. But the book went on to sell 4 million copies and made her a household name.
On this day in 1743, Handel's Messiah oratorio was given its first performance, at the Covent Garden Theatre, in London. When the Hallelujah Chorus began, King George the Second leaped to his feet, and everyone else in the theater followed suit—a tradition that is still observed today.
THURSDAY, 24 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "Ice Storm" by Jane Kenyon, from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems.
© Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…
I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…
It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in Memphis, in 1958, at about 6:30 in the morning, Elvis Presley arrived at the draft board on South Main Street in to be inducted into the army. He arrived wearing dark blue trousers, a gray and white checked sports jacket, a striped shirt, and pink and black socks. He said, "Millions of other guys have been drafted, and I don't want to be different from anyone else."
It was on this day in 1955 Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theater in New York. It starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret, Ben Gazzara as Brick, and Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
It's the birthday of playwright and actor Dario Fo, born in San Giano, Lombardy, Italy (1926). He's the author of irreverent, anarchic, satiric plays—more than 70 of them—including Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! (1974), and One Was Nude and One Wore Tails (1985). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.
It's the birthday of poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti born in Yonkers, New York (1919). In World War Two he was the commanding officer of a submarine chaser at the D-Day invasion. He moved to San Francisco in 1951, and, along with Peter Martin, founded the City Lights Pocket Book Shop, the first paperback bookstore in the country. The store became a center for the Beat movement, and published Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl," for which Ferlinghetti was sued for indecency. His book A Coney Island of the Mind is the largest-selling book by a living American poet.
It's the birthday of the English playwright Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, born in London (1855). He's best known for his comic look at Victorian theater, Trelawney of the Wells (1898).
It's the birthday of poet and craftsman William Morris, born in Walthamstow, north of London (1834). Along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other artists, he helped to form the Pre-Raphaelite movement, based on a love of all things gothic. His poems were often written in a medieval style. His turned his interest to crafts, and co-founded a design firm that produced wallpaper and stained glass and furniture—particularly the Morris chair, with its removable cushions and adjustable back.
FRIDAY, 25 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "Upon My Offering Her an Easter Chocolate, My Wife Screams that She Won't Let Me Make Her Fat" by Gaylord Brewer, from Exit Pursued by a Bear. © Cherry Grove Collections. Reprinted with permission.
Upon My Offering Her an Easter Chocolate, My Wife Screams that She Won't Let Me Make Her Fat
Later, it may occur to me
that inside a door frame is, they say, safest
place structurally during a tornado,
other than any available underground.
And later, after the night perhaps,
when earth's sun shines on a cold spring morning
and the house is quiet,
I will reflect inconclusively on what I've done
and what I may deserve, and whether I am a villain.
But for now, a punishing moment
when a woman turns in a chair
to a man extending a candy egg held on the axis
of thumb and forefinger and subtext
explodes, for that moment I weave
a bit foolishly on the threshold of an open passage,
blinking carefully, drunk,
absolutely and silently indefensible
as the existing universe that I can perceive
narrows to a radiating point,
then, widening, takes the shape of a glove
crafted for life's work, one that may slap, caress,
or close quickly to a fist, as the hand desires.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1960, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the unabridged version of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, was not obscene, and could be sent through the U.S. mail. The ruling was unanimous. One judge asked, "Should a mature and sophisticated reading public be kept in blinders because a government official thinks reading certain works of power and literary value are not good for him?" A British court issued a similar verdict shortly afterwards. During the wave of publicity that accompanied the litigation in 1959-1960, over 6 million copies of the book were sold. Unfortunately, D.H. Lawrence did not benefit from it: he'd been dead 30 years.
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, born in Brooklyn (1941), author of Buffalo Afternoon (1988), The Golden Rope (1996), and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat (1997) and other books.
It's the birthday of Gloria Steinem, born in Toledo, Ohio (1934). Her childhood was spent traveling with her parents in trailers—she didn't attend school regularly until she was 12. In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus, and edited the first issue of Ms. magazine.
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). She once said that the climax of her life occurred when she was six: newsreel cameramen came to her farm and shot footage of her with a chicken that walked backwards. Her first novel, Wise Blood was published in 1952. Shortly afterward, she was stricken with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was 12. She moved back to live with her mother on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. There she wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).
SATURDAY, 26 MARCH, 2005
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Poem: "The Goose" by Muriel Spark, from All the Poems of Muriel Spark. © New Directions. Reprinted with permission.
The Goose
Do you want to know why I am alive today?
I will tell you.
Early on, during the food-shortage,
Some of us were miraculously presented
Each with a goose that laid a golden egg.
Myself, I killed the cackling thing and I ate it.
Alas, many and many of the other recipients
Died of gold-dust poisoning.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of journalist Bob Woodward, born in Geneva, Illinois (1943). Along with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, Woodward covered the burglary at the Watergate apartment complex (1972), and the cover-up that led to the resignation of President Nixon in August, 1974. He and Bernstein won a Pulitzer Prize for their book All the President's Men (1974).
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Erica Jong, born in New York City (1942). She caused a sensation with her novel Fear of Flying (1973). She wrote,
"Friends love misery. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends."
It's the birthday of Beat poet Gregory Corso, born in New York City (1930).
It's the birthday of comic Bob Elliott, born in Boston (1923), who, with his comedy partner Ray Goulding, got his start on radio station WHDH in Boston, improvising sketches on their program Matinee with Bob and Ray (1946-51). Then they moved to New York's WNBC where they had a live two-and-a-half hour show each morning, doing bumbling interviewer Wally Ballou, cooking hostess Mary McGoon, and soap opera star Linda Lovely.
It's the birthday of playwright Tennessee Williams, born in Columbus, Mississippi (1911). His first great hit was in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie (1945).
It's the birthday of poet Robert Frost, born in San Francisco (1874). His journalist father died of tuberculosis when young Robert was 11. His mother, who had $8 in the bank, had to take her young children back East and rely on the good will of the father's family. Frost went off to Harvard, but dropped out when he learned that he might have TB. He became a poultry farmer, but had a run of bad luck: his son Elliot, not quite 4 years old, died of typhoid fever. Frost blamed himself for it; he said the death was like "murdering his own child." Then, when the woman who owned the farm stopped by to see if she could collect some rent from him, she found chickens wandering everywhere, the house filthy, with dishes unwashed, and unswept floors. The next day she sent Frost an eviction letter. But then his mother-in-law stepped in and found his family a farm in southeastern New Hampshire, where they spent the next 11 years, during which he wrote many of his best poems. He wrote a friend later: "To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. There was something about the experience which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after."
It's the birthday of poet A. E. Housman, born in Worcestershire, England, 1859. He went off to Oxford, where he fell deeply in love with a man named Moses Jackson. A few years later, when Moses Jackson married and moved to India, Housman was so anguished that he fell to writing poems — and he continued writing until Jackson died 36 years later. His collection A Shropshire Lad came out in 1896.
SUNDAY, 27 MARCH, 2005
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Poems: "This Morning" by Jane Kenyon, from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
This Morning
The barn bears the weight
of the first heavy snow
without complaint.
White breath of cows
rises in the tie-up, a man
wearing a frayed winter jacket
reaches for his milking stool
in the dark.
The cows have gone into the ground,
and the man,
his wife beside him now.
A nuthatch drops
to the ground, feeding
on sunflower seed and bits of bread
I scattered on the snow.
The cats doze near the stove.
They lift their heads
as the plow goes down the road,
making the house
tremble as it passes.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the Anchorage, Alaska earthquake of 1964 — the most powerful earthquake in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century.
It's the birthday of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963). He grew up in Los Angeles, where he went to a movie-house that showed kung-fu movies. As a teenager he worked as an usher in a porno theater, then spent 5 years as a clerk in a video store. "We'd get off work, close up the store, then sit around and watch movies all night." In 1990, with producer John Langley, a customer of his video store, he scraped together $1.5 million to make his first feature film, Reservoir Dogs (1992).
It's the birthday of author T. R. Pearson, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1956). He's the author of the Neely Trilogy of novels: A Short History of a Small Place (1985), Off for the Sweet Hereafter (1986), and The Last of How It Was (1987) — all set in the fictitious town of Neely, North Carolina.
It's the birthday of New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, born in New York City (1927). He's best known for Gideon's Trumpet (1964), a history of the landmark Supreme Court case in which prisoner James Gideon fought for the right to legal counsel.
It's the birthday of jazz singer and pianist Sarah Vaughan, born in Newark, New Jersey (1924). She made her debut at the Apollo Theater in Harlem — she sang "Body and Soul" for an amateur contest, and won. She sang with Earl ("Fatha") Hines, the singer Billy Eckstine, and picked up the nickname 'The Divine One.'
It's the birthday of American poet Louis Simpson, born in Jamaica, the British West Indies (1923). His father was a second-generation Jamaican of Scottish descent; his mother was a Russian Jew. He said later, "I most of all wanted to be an American." He went to Columbia University, joined the U.S. Army in 1943, served in the 101st Airborne Division, and took part in the Battle of the Bulge. His longest poem, "The Runner," dealt with that battle.
It's the birthday of novelist Thorne Smith, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1892). He only lived to be 40 years old, but he wrote several comic novels that were highly regarded in the 1930s: Topper (1926), about a bank executive who is rescued from his drab life by a couple of fun-loving ghosts, became a Cary Grant movie. Others include The Stray Lamb (1929), and Rain in the Doorway (1933).
It's the birthday of the man who discovered X-rays — which ushered in a new age of physics and revolutionized diagnostic medicine — Wilhelm Röntgen, born in Lennep, Prussia (1845). He discovered X-rays by accident, in 1895, when he left some uranium salts on top of a photographic plate. In developing it, he found that it had been fogged in the area where the uranium had rested on it.
