MONDAY, 4 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "How To Be a Poet" by Wendell Berry from Given New Poems, © Shoemaker, Hoard, Washington, D.C. Reprinted with permission.
How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England. The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson in a little second floor room on Market Street in Philadelphia—on a little lap desk that he designed himself. The Congress had wanted Benjamin Franklin to write it, but he declined, and then John Adams declined because he said Jefferson was ten times a better writer than he was.
Benjamin Franklin made a few new changes. Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." Franklin changed that to, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
The Congress cut out an entire paragraph in which Jefferson had attacked the king for perpetuating the slave trade. They cut about 480 words out of his draft, leaving 1,337. Jefferson found the whole process rather painful.
The 4th of July became a big holiday after the war of 1812 and out on the American frontier, it was the one time of the year when everyone gathered in town from all over the countryside for parades and speeches, and the prettiest girl would be named the Goddess of Liberty, and politicians would get up and denounce the king and men would get drunk and insult each other, call each other Englishmen, and get into fights.
It's the birthday of the great American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem, Massachusetts (1804). His first novel, Fanshawe, he considered so awful that he tried to track down and destroy every copy that he could find.
He lost his job when he was 45 years old. He was in despair. He came home, told his wife the news, and she said, "Now you can write your book." She opened up a desk drawer and there was a pile of gold pieces that she had saved out of the household allowance, $150, enough to support them for several months. He sat down and he wrote The Scarlet Letter, which came out the next year and made his reputation.
It was on this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into his cabin on Walden Pond.
On this day in 1855, the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was printed. It was 12 poems and a preface. The printers were friends of his and so they didn't charge Whitman for the work.
It's the birthday of Lionel Trilling, born in New York City (1905), the man who said, "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
TUESDAY, 5 JULY, 2005
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Poem: excerpt of "Body Bags" by R. S. Gwynn, from No Words of Farewell. © Story Line Press. Reprinted with permission.
excerpt of Body Bags
Let's hear it for Dwayne Coburn, who was small
And mean without a single saving grace
Except for stealing-home from second base
Or out of teammates' lockers, it was all
The same to Dwayne. The Pep Club candy sale,
However, proved his downfall. He was held
Briefly on various charges, then expelled
And given a choice: enlist or go to jail.
He finished basic and came home from Bragg
For Christmas on his reassignment leave
With one prize in his pack he thought unique,
Which went off prematurely New Year's Eve.
The student body got the folded flag
And flew it in his memory for a week.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1880, young George Bernard Shaw quit his job at the Edison Telephone Company in London to be a writer full time. He wrote novels. He sat in the British Museum reading room, reading and writing his first five novels—all rejected. He caught smallpox while writing one of them. It took Shaw 10 years before he began to make a living as a writer. He lived with his mother all that time, and she supported him without complaint. He later said, "My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore, take off your hat to her and blush."
It's the birthday of one of the most versatile artists of the twentieth century, Jean Cocteau, born in Maison-Lafitte, just outside Paris (1889). He wrote essays, poetry, and novels. He worked on ballets, operas, and movies as well. He was involved in early stages of surrealism and cubism. He was a friend of Picasso's and a friend of Marcel Proust's.
It was on this day in 1921, several members of the Chicago White Sox went on trial for throwing the 1919 World Series. The White Sox players despised their owner Charles Comiskey. He was notoriously stingy. He would offer bonuses for performance and then take them back at the last minute. Gamblers knew that the players were frustrated and angry and offered several of them money to throw the World Series. The night before the series began, a Sox pitcher found $10,000 under the pillow in his hotel bedroom. The next day his first pitch landed between the batter's shoulder blades. The Sox lost the series to the Cincinnati Reds 5 to 3.
Many journalists knew right away that the series had been fixed. One of the accused players, one of the most tragic figures, was Shoeless Joe Jackson, who admitted to taking money, but during the series he didn't make a single error. He also hit the only home run of the series. All of the White Sox players were acquitted for lack of evidence, but the commissioner of baseball banned them from the game for the rest of their lives. None of the gamblers was ever punished.
And it was on this day in 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first rock and roll song, "That's All Right, Mama." Elvis loved to sing ballads, slow ballads, but at the Sun Studios in Memphis, Sam Phillips persuaded him to do an up-tempo song. A few weeks later, he sang it at a music show at an outdoor park. He was so nervous that he started shaking his leg in rhythm to the music as he sang, and the girls in the audience went crazy.
WEDNESDAY, 6 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Morning and Night" by Jeff Hardin, from Fall Sanctuary. © Story Line Press, Ashland, Oregon. Reprinted with permission.
Morning and Night
Beyond our town the bottomlands flood each year.
Someone's son goes walking, never comes back.
Weeks pass. Town square talk reclaims the days.
Tonight I hear the rain remember roots
and think of elders gone the long way back to dust.
What we know by heart we doubt the most.
I have a wish to be at someone's door,
unannounced but welcomed anyway, ushered in
to dine and sing and sleep the sleep of kings.
But this is a world of slaughtered saints.
Random shots are fired, while morning and night
our mothers turn their faces toward the sleeping hills.
So quickly has the century come and gone.
For a while let's ask each other simple questions
and make up answers that can keep us home tonight.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1535, Sir Thomas More was executed for treason as a result of his refusal to recognize King Henry VIII as head of the Anglican Church. He was the author of a novel called Utopia, about the perfect society. He was a passionately religious man who wore a hair shirt and flogged himself in penance almost every night of his life.
He was a diplomat—a favorite of the king. He was also one of the harshest prosecutors of heretics in the history of England. His downfall came when, in the opinion of Sir Thomas More, the king himself became a heretic. Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope declared the second marriage was unlawful, and so Henry VIII declared that he was breaking from the Catholic Church. He would now be the head of the Anglican Church.
More refused to sign an oath in support of the king's decision, so he was thrown in the Tower of London, and on this day he was led to the scaffold on Tower Hill. His executioners asked him if he had any final words. He said he forgave them for their actions and looked forward to the day when they would all meet in heaven.
It was on this day in 1862, Samuel Clemens first started publishing his stories in the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. It was his first writing job. It was where he first used the name Mark Twain.
He had been a riverboat pilot apprentice on the Mississippi. He got a job working for his brother, who worked for the governor of Nevada, and that's what got him to Virginia City. He tried mining for a while, but it was hard work and he didn't like it. He was running out of money, so he started writing for the Territorial Enterprise, and his first story appeared on this day in 1862.
It's the birthday of philosopher Peter Singer, born in Melbourne, Australia (1946). His book, Animal Liberation, argued that animals have the same right to be treated humanely as we do, because they are capable of suffering. That book is generally credited with starting the animal rights movement.
It's the birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama, born in Tibet (1936), who's written several dozen collections of Buddhist teachings.
It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Eleanor Clark, born in Los Angeles (1913). One of her best-known books is a book about oysters, The Oysters of Locmariaquer, in which she said, "If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes."
THURSDAY, 7 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "The Exchange" by Ron Rash from Among the Believers. © Iris Press, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Reprinted with permission.
The Exchange
Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a dougle-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, insidev
the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Robert Heinlein, born in Butler, Missouri (1907). He wrote over 50 novels, and many collections of short stories. Heinlein is best known for his novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a boy born during the first manned mission to Mars.
He called his books "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction." He was trying to write about events that could actually happen, taking into consideration the natural laws of the universe.
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Jill McCorkle, born in Lumberton, North Carolina (1958). Her novels include July 7th, about the events on a single day in a little town in North Carolina; and her short story collection, Creatures of Habit, which came out a couple of years ago, and begins: "We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana seat bikes and mini-bikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. 'We will never be that way,' we said, 'we will never say those things.'"
It's the birthday of the popular historian David McCullough, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1933). His first big book was Truman (1992), one of the best selling biographies ever published. The sales were even greater for his biography, John Adams, in 2001. Both John Adams and Truman won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
FRIDAY, 8 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Selecting a Reader" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs. © University of Pittsburg Press. Reprinted with permission.
Selecting a Reader
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Jean de la Fontaine, born in Chateau-Thierry, France (1621). He was the man who said, "It is a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver." And, "It is impossible to please all the world and one's father."
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer J.F. (James Farl) Powers, born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917). He was a writer who didn't have too many readers in his lifetime. He wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests. But after his death in 1999, many critics ranked him among the greatest—and funniest—fiction writers of the late twentieth century.
He grew up in a town with very few Catholics other than his own family, and he later said, "The town was Protestant. The best people were Protestants and you felt that. That, to some extent, made a philosopher out of me. It made me mad." He went to study at Quincy College Academy, run by Franciscan friars, where most of the students went into the priesthood. But at the last minute, J.F. Powers decided against becoming a priest. He said, "I just didn't care for the look of the life. The praying would have attracted me. I wouldn't have minded the celibacy, but I couldn't see myself standing outside church Sunday morning talking to a bunch of old women."
It was the Depression, and Powers took any job he could get. He worked at a Marshall Fields department store. He sold shirts and books and linoleum. He sold insurance door to door, saved up his money, and bought a typewriter. He got a job as a chauffeur and carried the typewriter along in the trunk so he could write when he was parked.
He got involved in various Catholic charity groups in Chicago. He got to know a lot of priests through his work, and he was fascinated by how human they were, how imperfect, even as they tried to live up to their ideals. And he came to believe that these imperfect men were the real saints. He became fascinated by the non-spiritual aspects of their lives, their fundraising and ordering furniture for the church and so forth.
For his first novel, Morte D'Urban, he created a priest, Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish and plays golf in his spare time and thinks of himself as a kind of businessman. It won the National Book Award, but it only sold 25,000 copies and Powers was disappointed.
It took him 25 years to write his next novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, (1988). His publishers only ordered 8,500 copies to be printed. Powers begged them to print more. And when the book came out, it got great reviews. The first printing sold out in a few weeks. It took so long to print more copies that, by the time the book was back in print, the word of mouth had already died down. Powers said, "It was as if I were on first base but somebody had come and collected second and third base and carried them away. There was a sharp line drive to left, and I had nowhere to go."
He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. By the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his short stories have been collected in The Stories of J. F. Powers, which came out in 2000.
J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for the American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, "No, I'm afraid I don't, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk."
SATURDAY, 9 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "A Primer of the Daily Round" by Howard Nemerov, from New and Selected Poems. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission.
A Primer of the Daily Round
A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives into town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Larry Brown, born in Oxford, Mississippi (1951). He liked school when he was a kid, but read mostly hunting stories and fishing stories and cowboy stories—nothing that qualified as literature. He failed English his senior year in high school.
He enlisted in the Marines, was stationed at a barracks in Philadelphia. He spent a lot of time listening to the stories of veterans who'd come back from Vietnam. He went back to Mississippi and joined the Oxford Fire Department in 1973 and loved the job. It didn't pay well, though. He had been reading best-selling novels by Stephen King and Louis L'Amour and thought maybe he could do that too.
He wrote a novel about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone Park. It got turned down by everybody. So he went to the library and checked out every how-to book about writing that he could find. He started writing short stories and started reading Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Raymond Carver.
His first book of stories, Facing the Music, came out in 1988. And his first novel, Dirty Work, the year after, which was based on the stories he had heard from veterans back in the Marines. The book got great reviews. And he went on to become a renowned southern fiction writer and published three more novels before he died of a heart attack at the age of 53.
Larry Brown said, "There's no such thing as a born writer. It's a skill you've got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter." His story Falling Out of Love begins, "Sheena Baby, the one that I loved, and I were walking around. It was late one evening. All the clouds had gathered up into big marshmallows and mushrooms, and it was an evening as fine as you could ask for, except that we had two flat tires on our car some miles back down the road and didn't know where we were or who to ask. We were about ready to kill one another."
It's the birthday of the science writer Oliver Sacks, born in London (1933). He's the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.
It's the birthday of author Dean Koontz, born in Everett, Pennsylvania (1945). He's the author of more than 70 supernatural and science fiction thrillers, including The Bad Place and Mr. Murder. The turning point in his career was in 1969, when his wife told him that, if he wanted to try to be a writer, he could quit his job and she would support him for five years. He published 18 novels in those first five years, and his career was on its way.
SUNDAY, 10 JULY, 2005
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Poem: From "Trees" by W. S. Merwin, from The Compass Flower. © Macmillan Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission.
Trees
I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Marcel Proust, born in Paris (1871). He's the author of the great, 3,000 page autobiographical novel that we know as either Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time.
It's the birthday of the journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne, born in Chicago (1867). Dunne created a character for his column, Martin Dooley—an Irish barkeeper. Finley Peter Dunne said, "Trust everybody, but cut the cards."
It's the birthday of short story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up on a farm in the poor part of town. Her father tried to make a living raising minks and foxes. She said, "We lived in this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived ... a little town where nobody was interested in writing or the world of literature." She was though, and she loved to make up stories. She said, "You were never praised for the things you could do well. You were taught to pay attention to whatever you were bad at." Every day on the way to school she told herself a new story, though she never told them to anybody else.
She ran away to go to college, University of Western Ontario, and studied journalism. She dropped out after a couple of years, got married, and had children. She became a housewife in the suburbs, a life which she did not care for. She said, "So many things were forbidden, like taking anything seriously." She was trying to write fiction, but her schedule was very tightly managed. She couldn't find time to do it, though she did try to get her kids to nap a lot.
She was in her 30s when she and her husband opened a bookstore. That, she said, made her feel as if she had a function in the real world. She locked herself in the bookstore on Sundays to write, and after nearly 20 years of struggle, she published her first collection of stories, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968.
Her marriage broke up. She took a trip back to her home town to care for her aging father. She was only going to stay for a year, but she found that the landscape she had hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world. She said, "People's lives in [my home town] were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable—deep caves paved with linoleum. It did not occur to me [as a child] that one day I would be so greedy for [my hometown] ... to want every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."
Returning to her hometown gave her the material that she needed, and she's gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since. Munro is the author of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, and many other books.
