MONDAY, 30 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "Achilles' Heel" by William Kloefkorn from Dragging Sand Creek for Minnows © Spoon River Poetry Press. Reprinted with permission.
Achilles' Heel
The student who asks for an explanation
has blue eyes and an oval face
and a voice that implies—
in addition to what it requests—
I just can't understand anything
unless someone alive explains it.
Because I want to believe myself alive
I recount the ancient story—
Thetis gripping her young son's heel
to dip his body head-first into the river Styx,
goddess neglecting then to dip the heel,
so that eventually he'll die
from a wound in that only vulnerable spot,
arrow released from the bow of Paris,
that other heel.
But she doesn't smile,
probably doesn't yet quite get it,
so I tell her how human fallibility
must somehow be accounted for,
how when my brother lay groaning
after a hemorrhoidectomy,
his dark eyes asking the ceiling Why?
I told him that our mother
dipped him newborn
into a Kansas equivalent of the river Styx,
then like Thetis neglected to make immune
that portion of the anatomy she suspended
him from.
And he didn't smile,
so while I had him captive and inert
I explained the ins and the outs
of classical irony,
how a woman though a goddess
had a fallen memory,
how Achilles though clad in first-rate armor
died dead as a stone at the hand
of a third-rate warrior.
The student with the blue eyes and oval face
closes the blue eyes, nods the oval face.
Is she asleep or thinking deeply? No matter:
when she returns already I have moved
to the death of Hector, his body
dragging an oval
outside the beleaguered walls of Troy,
Achilles riding high and for the moment
invincible in the saddle of his chariot,
sword raised and silver
against a slant of blinding
but universal sun.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's Memorial Day, the day on which we honor those who died serving their country. The first Memorial Day was observed on this day in 1868 in Arlington National Cemetery, where members of both the Union and the Confederate armies were buried.
It was on this day in 2002, in New York City, that a wordless ceremony, a public occasion with no speeches, marked the end of the recovery and cleanup at Ground Zero where the World Trade towers had fallen in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.
The cleanup had started as people began to look for survivors in the wreckage, a huge pile, 150 feet high, covering 17 acres. Only 18 survivors were ever found; only one was actually dug out of the rubble, Genelle Guzman, who'd been in a stairwell on the 13th floor of the north tower when it collapsed. She just stopped to adjust her shoe when it got dark, there was a great roaring sound, and when it stopped, she was pinned to the ground.
She lay there for 27 hours before she heard rescue workers. She banged a piece of concrete against the broken stairwell, and they came and got her. She was the last person found alive.
The ceremony on this day in 2002 took place at 10:29 in the morning, the time at which the second tower collapsed. A bell was struck 20 times—the ceremony for a fallen firefighter. 343 firefighters died on September 11. 2,823 people were killed in all, and at the end of the cleanup, workers had failed to find or identify 1,721 of the victims lost in the attacks.
The steel recovered from the site was cut into three-foot sections and sold to scrap metal companies to be recycled for use in making cars and appliances.
TUESDAY, 31 MAY, 2005
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Poem: excerpts from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman.
excerpts from Crossing Brookyn Ferry
It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.
—
What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years
between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not-distance avails not, and place
avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in
the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came
upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I
knew I should be of my body.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Walt Whitman, born West Hills, Long Island (1819). When Whitman was six years old, his father took him to see the Marquis de Lafayette, the great French General, who picked the little boy out of the crowd, lifted him up and kissed him on the cheek, which Whitman felt later marked him for greatness.
In his teens he was an apprentice printer on a newspaper in Brooklyn. He wandered around the city, looking at museums and going to theaters, talking to people on the streets. He loved printing. He loved the way words looked on a page. He said of his first published writing, "How it made my heart double beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper in nice type."
There was a fire in Manhattan in December 1835 that destroyed the printing district. Whitman had to move and get a job as a teacher. He taught in a series of one-room schoolhouses and wrote to a friend, "How tired and sick I am of this wretched, wretched hole. Damnation, thy other name is school teaching."
Walt Whitman moved back to New York City and started writing for newspapers. He loved the penny papers—the cheap ones—their lively style. He said, "I like limber, lashing, fierce words... strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words." He liked to walk up and down Broadway and around in Battery Park.
He wrote a novel about the evils of alcohol called Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, (1842). It sold more than 20,000 copies. He went to New Orleans in 1846 to write for a newspaper there. He was amazed at what he saw: the mixture of Spanish and English and French. He saw slaves being auctioned on the block. He came to believe that he should write something to hold the country together, that America needed a poetry unlike poetry of Europe. The first edition of Leaves of Grass came out in 1855, unrhymed, un-metered poetry that combined language of sermons, romantic poetry and working class slang.
He sent copies to many important writers. John Greenleaf Whittier threw his in the fire. Ralph Waldo Emerson responded. He wrote to Whitman, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," which Whitman later printed on the cover. It was one of the first blurbs in American publishing. It got mostly terrible reviews, but Whitman kept issuing new editions.
He died in 1892, more popular in Europe than in this country, but now he is considered the first great American poet.
WEDNESDAY, 1 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "The Enigma We Answer by Living" by Alison Hawthorne Deming from Genius Loci. © Penguin Poets. Reprinted with permission.
The Enigma We Answer by Living
Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.
I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?
This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,
who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,
tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down
he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.
And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,
though he knows it will all disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,
that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging
from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet
that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1942, a newspaper in Warsaw published the first account of Jews being gassed to death in a concentration camp. This was the first time the news of the Nazis' "Final Solution" became public.
Hitler had been in power for nine years, had never made a secret of his anti-Semitism. He had passed laws firing Jews from government jobs, dismissing them from public schools, and burning their books.
The first concentration camps were set up not for Jews but for political dissidents, unionists, social democrats; then homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and Gypsies. The first people the Nazis exterminated were the mentally and physically disabled.
It wasn't until after the invasion of Poland, with its enormous Jewish population, that Hitler began to consider what he called the "Jewish question." There was a plan for a while to ship all the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, but that was scrapped.
By 1941, many thousands of Jews had already been rounded up and shot in Eastern Europe, as the Nazis marched north into Russia. Historians aren't sure precisely when the decision was made to systematically exterminate the Jews in death camps, but it was Himmler's idea to use gas chambers, after he'd witnessed a mass execution by gunfire, which he found shocking.
The newspaper that broke the story of the death camps was an underground Polish Socialist paper called the Liberty Brigade. A young man named Emanuel Ringelblum had escaped from the death camp, and his story was published on this day. The story was picked up by the London Daily Telegraph a week later. Around the same time, secret Polish agents began to send messages to the allies about Auschwitz. They met with Churchill and Roosevelt, but when the story reached the public, it was met with disbelief, even by many Jews.
British and American intelligence experts knew it was happening because they had cracked the Nazi codes, but they were reluctant to make their knowledge public because they didn't want to signal the fact that they'd broken the codes. And Roosevelt and Churchill were reluctant to turn the war into a "Jewish war."
It was not until American soldiers liberated the camps in the spring of 1945 that the full truth came out. The word genocide was not even coined until after the war. It wasn't until 1957 that people began to use the term "the Holocaust."
THURSDAY, 2 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Anniversary" by Davi Walders from A More Perfect Union. © St. Martin's Press. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Anniversary
That you and I, I and you,
this twenty-fifth year after
you stamped your foot, shattered
the glass, and friends, so many dead
or forgotten, applauded in a ballroom
long abandoned, twenty-five years
of Monday good-byes, monthly wars
with stacks of bills, bags of garbage,
frozen gutters, nights filled
with pink medicines, fevered cheeks
on shoulders, the other hand reaching
for the pediatrician's call, termites
chewing, and hours waiting
for the door to open, holding
our own daughter's head vomiting
beer into our own leaking toilet,
that now, as mirrors mark the descent
of breasts, the tub catches silvered
pubic hair and our eyes wear pouches
and hoods, as though expecting rain,
that you and I could smell the salt
of each other, coming together after
long absence, silent, still, staring up
at the darkening ceiling, naked in a house
with empty, orderly bedrooms, the last
of dead roses and discarded boyfriends
tossed out, your hand touching mine,
our breathing slowing,
the wonder of it all.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Carol Shields, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1935). She got married after college, moved to Winnipeg, and had five kids. She said, "All I expected was a baby, a TV, a fridge, freezer, and a car. But having children inspired her to write." She said, "Having children woke me up. I knew I had to pay attention. All my senses seemed sharpened. I seemed capable of more."
Shields started writing poetry, then her first novel, Small Ceremonies. It came out when she was 41 years old. Her big success was Stone Diaries (1993). She said, "I don't very often see decent people in novels, and why not? Some people don't believe in them, but I do."
And it was on this day in 1977 that the writer Raymond Carver quit drinking. He'd gotten married young. His girlfriend was pregnant. He had to support his family with jobs as a janitor and delivery boy and gas station attendant. He tried to write whenever he could. He got a college degree and got a job editing textbooks.
In 1967, he published his short story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" which was selected for the Best American Short Stories Anthology that year—the same year he started drinking heavily. He said, "My wife and I had one bankruptcy behind us, years of hard work, nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, new creditors on our back. I felt spiritually obliterated, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit."
Even as his drinking got worse, his career took off. He published a series of stories about characters in dead-end jobs, dead-end marriages. He won awards, got invited to teach, but he still had money problems. His checks bounced, his cars were repossessed, and he got into fights at parties. He was hospitalized four times due to alcohol, and then his doctor told him he had to quit drinking or he'd live no more than six months.
He tried several times to get sober, but kept falling off the wagon. He finally got an advance for a novel, and used the money to rent a house in California. He never did write the novel, but he quit drinking. He later said, "Raymond Carver, if you want the truth, I'm prouder of that, that I quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life."
He died of lung cancer 11 years later, but he once described those last 11 years of his life as "gravy, pure gravy."
FRIDAY, 3 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "For the Thief" by Alison Hawthorne Deming from Genius Loci. © Penguin Poets Press. Reprinted with permission.
For the Thief
Thank you for leaving the desk and the chair,
the books, snapshots and piano.
I've heard of moving van robberies—
coming home from work to percussion
of empty rooms. Thank you for
leaving the trapped air
that softens the blunt edge of my day.
What's mine - the hum of identity—
still surrounds me,
though the electronics
are gone and the jewelry
that was too precious to wear.
Thank you for not spraying
the walls with coke or with piss.
Thank you being a professional,
tidy and quick, entering with a clean
silent cut, not wasting your time
or mine with vandalism or assault.
When my mother was robbed
the closets and drawers were dumped
on the floor. All that was stolen were
towels that had hung in her bathroom.
Her neighbors, the police said, had
lost their cookware. Better our houses
become someone's mall than shooting range.
With my cousins, one in New York took
a knife-blade against her throat.
Another in Madrid was dragged
three blocks by her hair. Thank you
for knowing what you were here for,
for tending to your business without rage.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Larry McMurtry, born Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). He grew up in a little town called Archer City. He came from a long line of Texas ranchers, but Larry McMurtry figured out he didn't like working on a ranch when he was a kid. He said, "I saw right away that my father and all the cowboys were slaves to these stupid animals. Who wants to be a slave to a cow?"
He never thought cowboys were romantic figures. He thought they led mostly drab, repetitive, unexciting lives, and weren't necessarily strong or free. Many of them were twisted, fascistic, and dumb.
He studied literature at Rice University. He started writing dark novels about his home town, in which he portrayed most of the people there as none too bright, none too good. His third novel, The Last Picture Show came out in 1966. It begins, "Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were on Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn't that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town."
People in Archer, Texas didn't much care for the way they were portrayed by Larry McMurtry. He moved away to Washington, D.C., became a severe critic of the whole Western genre. But even though he hated the idea of the romanticized Old West, there was a story in his head that he couldn't get rid of. It was a story about the Old West, which started as a movie treatment for John Wayne, but Wayne had backed out of the project. Once in a while McMurtry would think about the characters again, and then one day he drove past a sign for a church called "Lonesome Dove," and that inspired him to rewrite the screenplay as a novel.
It was the story of a former Texas Ranger, Augustus McCrae, who persuades two friends to ride with him to Montana to find his one true love Clara Allen, the only woman who could ever beat him in an argument. Lonesome Dove became a huge best-seller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was made into a TV mini-series.
After it came out, McMurtry's home town embraced him. The local hotel changed its name to the Lonesome Dove Hotel, and Larry McMurtry moved back there and opened one of the largest antiquarian bookstores in the country, and he announced that keeping a bookstore was a form of ranching, and instead of herding cattle, he herded books.
SATURDAY, 4 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Pulling Up Beside My Husband at the Stoplight" by Marjorie Saiser from Bones of a Very Fine Hand. © The Backwaters Press, Omaha. Reprinted with permission.
Pulling Up Beside My Husband at the Stoplight
We are going to the same place
but we take two cars. Sunday morning
and there's not much traffic
so I pull up beside him at the light.
The sun is shining on the road.
Here he is in his car
beside my car,
the curve of his shoulder
through the glass, his face
fresh from a shave, his hair
against the brown of his neck.
He turns and blows me a kiss.
I watch it float on by. I ask
for another. I think of him
coming into the dark bedroom
in the mornings,
the sound of his workboots
across the carpet,
the scent of his face
when he finds me in the covers,
pulls the blanket away and
kisses my eyebrow,
the corner of my mouth,
tells me the weather report
and the precise time of day.
I roll down the window,
whistle in my throat,
pull my glasses crooked on my face,
do my best baboon snorting,
pound the horn
as if it were bread dough.
There's only the lady in the white Taurus
but he is embarrassed, glad to see the green.
I'm stepping on the gas,
catching up, wondering
what I can do at 56th and Calvert.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1919, the 19th amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress giving women the right to vote.
It's the anniversary of two crucial battles in World War II. In 1940, the British forces completed their evacuation from Dunkirk, and on this day in 1942, the Battle of Midway took place.
Winston Churchill, who'd become prime minister that spring, had sent British forces to Belgium to try to stop the advance of the Nazi invasion, but the British soldiers were unprepared for the superior German army. They were completely overwhelmed. They were bottled up in the little coastal town of Dunkirk. They had abandoned equipment on the way, leaving the road to Dunkirk littered with empty vehicles and piles of gear.
The Nazi tanks had been in close pursuit, but when the British troops reached the coast, Hitler gave a personal order to stop the invasion. The Nazi commander was infuriated. He knew that he could probably wipe out the British in a single battle, and that the war for western Europe could be finished in a few days. One of Hitler's associates at the time wrote in his diary, "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous. Frightened by his own success, he's afraid to take any chance and would rather pull the reins on us."
The British estimated they had about two days to evacuate, but when the British ships showed up to carry the troops across the channel, they found the harbor too shallow for most of the ships to reach the shore. Almost 500,000 men were stranded on the beach, and Nazi bombers began to attack from the air. The British government sent out a request for all persons with seaworthy vessels to help in the evacuation, and a great flotilla of fishing boats, lifeboats, paddle steamers and yachts came across the English Channel and saved the British army.
What really turned the tide, however, was Winston Churchill's decision to turn the whole event into a symbol of bravery and perseverance. When the soldiers arrived in Britain, they were given a hero's welcome, with parades and cheering crowds. One solider said, "We might have been the heroes of some great victory instead of a beaten army returning home, having lost most of its equipment."
The Battle of Midway took place in the Central Pacific Ocean—Midway Island—the last American outpost in the Pacific. The Japanese navy hoped to take control of it and use it to stage an invasion of Hawaii, but a squadron of American bombers who had wandered off course accidentally stumbled upon the Japanese fleet while most of planes were refueling. Fuel lines on the Japanese carriers caught fire, munitions exploded, and hundreds of Japanese sailors died in an instant. The battle went on for three more days, but the Japanese never fully recovered from that first attack, and never won another decisive naval battle for the rest of the war.
SUNDAY, 5 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "The Star" by Jane Taylor.
The Star
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the trav'ller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the traveler in the dark—
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the British playwright David Hare, born in Sussex, England (1947). He is the author of many plays, including Plenty, Racing Demon, and others. His writing career began when he had to write a play in four days because a playwright had failed to deliver a script to the Portable Theater, which Hare had co-founded.
David Hare was a prolific writer, author of two dozen plays, twelve feature films, three books and a one-man play called Via Dolorosa, in which he starred in New York. In the play, he said, "[In England,] people lead shallow lives because they don't believe in anything anymore. [In Israel,] in a single day I experience events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year."
It's the birthday of Richard Scarry, born in Boston (1919). He's the author of more than 300 books for children, who said that what made him happiest as an author was getting letters from people telling him that their copies of his books were all worn out and held together with Scotch tape.
It's the birthday of one of the great men of letters of the twentieth century, Alfred Kazin, born in Brooklyn (1915). He grew up in the Brownsville section, the poor Jewish immigrant sector of Brooklyn. He said, "We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city's back door... a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it."
He loved books, and spent most of his time sitting on the fire escape of the tenement reading whatever he could get his hands on.
He was a senior in college in 1934 when he read a book review in the New York Times that made him so angry, he got off the subway, went to the Times office, and complained to the editor in person, who was impressed, and got Kazin a job writing freelance book reviews.
He studied literature at Columbia, and started writing a historical survey of American literature from 1880 up to the 1930s. The result was his book On Native Grounds, which covered American literature from Dreiser and Stephen Crane to Edith Wharton and William Faulkner. It became one of the most celebrated works of literary criticism of the decade.
Kazin is also remembered for his great memoir, A Walker in the City, a kind of sensory tour of his childhood in Brownsville. It begins, "Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness... As I walk those familiarly choked streets at dusk and see the old women sitting in front of the tenements, past and present become each other's faces; I am back where I began."
