MONDAY, 5 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Deer Season" by Barbara Tanner Angell from The Long Turn Toward the Light: Collected Poems © Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Reprinted with permission.
Deer Season
My sister and her friend, Johnny Morley,
used to go on Saturdays to the Bancroft Hotel
to visit his grandfather.
One autumn, the beginning of deer season,
the old man told them,
"Used to hunt when I was a boy,
woods all around here then,
but I never went again after that time...
the men went out, took me with them,
and I shot my first buck.
It was wounded, lying in the leaves,
so they told me,
take the pistol, shoot it in the head.
I went straight up to it,
looked right into its eyes.
Just before I pulled the trigger,
it licked my hand."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of English poet Christina Rossetti, born in London (1830) to Italian parents.
It's the birthday of the humorist Ellis Parker Butler, born in Muscatine, Iowa (1869). Butler went to New York, and it was there that an editor suggested he write a story about a railway agent who has to assess the shipping rate on two guinea pigs, and decides that they must be livestock rather than pets because they are some breed of pig. Butler didn't like the idea, but he decided to try to write it anyway, to please his editor. The result was his story "Pigs Is Pigs" which first came out in The American Magazine in 1905.
The story might not have been remembered if it weren't for the fact that the Railway Appliances Company chose to use it as part of a marketing campaign. They reprinted the story as a pamphlet and distributed 10,000 copies to customers. It proved to be so popular that the story was reprinted as a book, and went on to become a silent movie and an animated Disney cartoon.
Ellis Parker Butler went on to write more than thirty other books, and also became the president of a bank, and he always regretted the fact that he was best known as the author of "Pigs Is Pigs," a book he hadn't even wanted to write.
It's the birthday of Austrian film director Fritz Lang, born in Vienna (1890). After coming to the United States he made Westerns and crime movies like Western Union (1941) and The Big Heat (1953).
It's the birthday of the essayist and humorist Calvin Trillin, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1935). His father was a Russian immigrant and grocery store owner, and from the time Calvin Trillin was born, his father planned for him to go to Yale and become President of the United States. Trillin did go to Yale, but he got into journalism instead of politics. He edited the Yale Daily News and then got a job working for Time magazine.
It was the 1960's and what Trillin wanted to do was write a book about the lives of people involved in the Civil Rights struggle. But instead of writing about the movement as a whole, he decided to follow the first two black students at the University of Georgia and write about the ordinary details of their daily lives. The result was his first book An Education in Georgia (1964).
In 1967, Trillin began writing a regular column for the New Yorker magazine called "U.S. Journal," which he saw as a chance to write about ordinary people who didn't usually get covered in the national press. He would scour local newspapers from across the country, and whenever he ran across something particularly interesting, he'd travel there and cover it.
Trillin said, "Upwardly mobile reporters tend to gauge themselves by the importance of the people they interview... Most of the people I talk to have never spoken to a reporter before."
As a result of traveling all over America, Trillin began eating in a variety of local restaurants, and he realized that he could start writing about regional American food. At that time, most food writers focused on gourmet food from France, so Trillin wrote about barbecue ribs in the Midwest. His first collection of food writing was American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater (1974), in which he declared that the top four or five restaurants in the world are in Kansas City, Missouri.
His most recent book is Obliviously On He Sails (2004), a book of poems about George W. Bush.
It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, "I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it... I thought about the atomic bomb a lot... after there was one."
She began keeping a notebook when she was five years old, and she later wrote, "Keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with a sense of loss." At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation.
Didion became associated with the so-called New Journalism, because she often made herself a character in whatever she was covering, and she went much further than most journalists in revealing her own states of mind. The title essay of her collection The White Album (1979) includes notes from a psychiatrist's evaluation after she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband's recent death from a heart attack at the dinner table, came out this year.
Joan Didion said, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. . . . Writers are always selling somebody out."
It's the birthday of novelist James Lee Burke, born in Houston, Texas (1936). He's best known for his series of detective novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans policeman, Vietnam veteran, and recovering alcoholic. Burke's novels have been compared to those by master crime novelists like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. His big breakthrough book came out in 1985, The Lost Get-Back Boogie.
TUESDAY, 6 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "You Go to School to Learn" by Thomas Lux from New & Selected Poems © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
You Go to School to Learn
You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It—money—makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
There's no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working—for it.
It's sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you're taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That's nice, dear,
but there's no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It's true,
and so, every morning—it's still dark!—
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Susannah Moodie, born Susannah Strickland in Suffolk, England (1803). She grew up in a middle class English family and was accustomed to ordinary life, but as a young woman, she married an adventurous man who had traveled around Africa, and the two of them sailed off to live in the backwoods of Canada, which at the time was still wild country.
She had thought that life in the new colony would be exciting, but in fact she endured extremely harsh winters, malaria, and the economic depression of the 1830's. Her family in England often sent her fancy dresses and dancing shoes, which were completely useless to her in the wilderness. She decided that someone needed to write about the reality of pioneer life to warn other people away from it. But in the course of writing about her experiences, she found that she actually loved her adopted country.
Her book Roughing it in the Bush, (1852) became a classic of early Canadian literature. Today most children in Canada read that book, the way most American children read Little House in the Big Woods.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, born in Middlesex, England (1893). As a child, Warner loved listening to her mother's stories about growing up in India. She said, "[My mother's memory was] this astonishing storehouse, full of scents and terrors, flowers, tempests, monkeys, beggars winding worms out of their feet." When she became a writer, Warner tried to write fiction that would reproduce the feeling she got from her mother's stories, of something fantastic emerging from something ordinary.
Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), was about a woman who makes a deal with the Devil and becomes a witch in order to get away from her restrictive family. She wrote The Cat's Cradle Book (1940), about a woman who believes that cats crawl into the beds of children at night to tell them fairytales, and The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), about a magical world where women are the rulers.
It's the birthday of poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer, born in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1886). He was a struggling poet, working as a writer of definitions for the Standard Dictionary, when he got a chance to hike through the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. When he got home, he wrote a poem, trying to express the beauty of what he saw in the forest. He called the poem "Trees." It begins, "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree" and ends with the lines, "Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree."
He never wrote anything else that got so much attention, but "Trees" is still incredibly popular. It was set to music and memorized by millions of people across America.
It's the birthday of lyricist Ira Gershwin, born Israel Gershvin on the East Side of New York City (1896). He's considered one of the great lyricists of the twentieth century, best known for writing the lyrics to songs like "I've Got Rhythm" (1930) and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (1937). He collaborated on many musicals, including Funny Face (1927), Strike Up the Band! (1930), and Porgy and Bess (1935).
After his brother died of a brain tumor in 1937, Ira took a break from songwriting for four years, but he eventually came back and worked with other composers like Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill.
He wrote,
They're writing songs of love—but not for me
A lucky star's above—but not for me
With love to lead the way I've found more clouds of gray
Than any Russian play could guarantee."
WEDNESDAY, 7 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Ice" by Albert Garcia from Skunk Talk © Bear Star Press. Reprinted with permission.
Ice
In this California valley, ice on a puddle
is a novelty for children
who stand awkward in their jackets
waiting for the school bus.
They lift off thin slabs
to hold up in the early light
like pieces of stained glass.
They run around,
throw them at each other,
lick them, laughing as their pink tongues stick
to the cold, their breath fogging
the morning gray.
Between the Sierras
in the distance and a faint film
of clouds, the sun rises
red like the gills of a salmon.
From your porch, watching the kids,
you love this morning more
than any you remember. You hear
the bus rumbling down the road
like the future, hear the squealing
voices, feel your own blood warm
in your body as the kids sing
like winter herons, Ice, ice, ice.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the singer, songwriter and actor Tom Waits, born in Pomona, California (1949). As a teenager, his parents moved around a lot, and instead of making friends, Waits became obsessed with music. He didn't listen to rock and roll like his classmates. He was more interested in older music: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, Jerome Kern, Cab Calloway, and the old Nat "King" Cole Trio. He later said, "I... slept right through the '60s. Never went through an identity crisis. Never had no Jimi Hendrix posters on the wall, never ate granola, never had any incense."
Out of high school he worked odd jobs, as a fireman, a cab driver, a gas station attendant. He said, "[At one point] I worked in a restaurant... [as] dishwasher, waiter, cook, plumber, janitor—everything. They called me Speed-O-Flash." He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life until 1968, when he read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The book made him want to do something big, and a few weeks later he saw a local guy he knew playing jazz at a nightclub, and he realized that he needed to start making his own music.
Waits recorded a series of albums in the 1970's, but his breakthrough as an artist came in 1981 when he married the playwright Kathleen Brennan. He said, "She gave me the guts to just do it... …helped me open up and not be afraid to do something." He began to write concept albums about oddball characters, conmen, murderers and lunatics, and he often sang like a circus sideshow barker. Instead of using conventional piano or guitar, he filled his songs with tuba, pipe organ, accordion, and all kinds of percussion. It took him thirteen months to find a distributor for the first album in his new style Swordfishtrombones (1983) but when it finally came out, it was cited by many critics as one of the best albums of the year.
Waits has since begun to write for musical theater, including an operetta he wrote with William S. Burroughs called The Black Rider (1993), and the musical Alice (2002) loosely based on the life of the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack came after the United States had frozen Japanese assets and declared an embargo on shipments of petroleum to Japan.
On the morning of December 7, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers not to worry about it.
A sailor named James Jones, who would go on to write the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), was in the mess hall that morning.
There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded. Two days after the attack, the Navy passed out postcards to the survivors and told them to write to their families, but not to describe what had happened. Some families did not get their postcards until February.
It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873). Her family moved west when she was a little girl, to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic that had killed all of her father's brothers. Congress had recently passed the Homestead Act, and thousands of people were moving west to take advantage of the free government land.
She always remembered the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. She said, "As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron." Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky."
She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure's magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Willa Cather said, "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while."
THURSDAY, 8 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "258" by Emily Dickinson from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson © Little, Brown. Reprinted with permission.
258
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —
None may teach it—Any —
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —
When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows—hold their breath —
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the conservative columnist Ann Coulter, born in New Canaan, Connecticut (1961). She founded the conservative Cornell Review in college at Cornell and then went on to law school at the University of Michigan, where she started a new chapter of the Federalist Society. She practiced law for more than a decade before she began her syndicated column for the Universal Press Syndicate in 1999. She was fired from a spot as a commentator on MSNBC when she told a disabled Vietnam veteran, "People like you caused us to lose that war." She later said that she hadn't realized he was disabled. After September 11, 2001, she lost her column on the National Review website when she wrote a column that said of muslims, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
She's gone on to write several controversial and bestselling books of political commentary, including Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003).
It's the birthday of the humorist James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio (1894). He was one of the most important early staff writers for the New Yorker magazine, but he had a lot of trouble getting started there. He started submitting humor pieces to the New Yorker in 1926, when the magazine was barely a year old. He said, "My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine."
He took a job at the New York Evening Post, but he knew he wanted to write humor, so he kept at it. He was living in a basement apartment with his first wife. She thought that after twenty of his humor pieces had failed to find a publisher he should probably give up. But one night, he set his alarm clock to go off forty five minutes after he'd fallen asleep, and he woke up in sleepy daze and wrote the first thing that came to mind: a story about a man going round and round in a revolving door, setting the world record for revolving door laps. It was the first piece of his published in the New Yorker.
James Thurber said, "The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself."
It's the birthday of Delmore Schwartz, born in Brooklyn, New York (1913). He's remembered mainly for a story he published when he was twenty-three years old: "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," (1938) about a Jewish man who goes to a movie theater and sees the lives of his own immigrant parents projected on the screen.
That story made him famous, but Schwartz never fulfilled his own early potential. He published the poetry collections Shenandoah (1941) and Genesis: Book I (1943), and the short story collection The World is a Wedding (1948). But when he quit his job teaching at Harvard in 1948, he was almost penniless. He suffered from alcoholism and mental illness. His life was a long slow decline and he eventually died in a Times Square hotel.
It's the birthday of the novelist Mary Gordon, born in Far Rockaway, New York (1949). Her father read her Peter Pan as a child, invented new characters and stories for her, and he taught her to write poems and stories. He took her to the New York City Public Library every Saturday.
He had a heart attack in the main reading room of that same library when Mary Gordon was seven years old. She said, "When my father died, it was like all lights went out."
After college Gordon published several novels, including Final Payments (1978) and Men and Angels (1985), and in each one there was usually a character based on her father. After years of writing about him in her fiction, she decided to write a nonfiction book about his life. But once she began to do some research, she realized that she hadn't known anything about him at all.
She had grown up thinking he was a Harvard graduate, but in fact he'd never passed 10th grade. She'd always thought he was a writer, but in fact he was a publisher of pornography. And though he'd grown up Jewish, he'd converted to Catholicism and become an anti-Semite. She remembered him going to work in the city every day, but in fact her mother had supported the family.
Gordon wrote about the experience of investigating her father in the memoir The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996).
FRIDAY, 9 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "The Ministry of Propaganda..." by David Ray from The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars. © Howling Dog Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Ministry of Propaganda...
Retired generals in various cities
are interviewed nightly about the war.
The maps are shown and strategies
discussed with great enthusiasm.
Our troops are grabbing the bulls
by their horns. Resistance is soon
to be overcome. But resistance
to what is never quite defined.
The news anchors gaze upon
these guests with the admiration
until now shown only to movie stars.
There are no views represented
other than this gung-ho enthusiasm
for war. From every military base
intelligence and publicity personnel
fan out to offer their services to media
as part-time advisers and experts.
They explain and make palatable
all the President's policies, e.g.,
allowing no photos of flag-draped
coffins bound for Arlington or home
town cemeteries, though it would be
hard to find one that has not added
a few from overseas to its holdings.
Every technique described by Orwell
or practiced by Goebbels is in place,
but so far few have dared say so.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the people who helped invent the modern computer: Grace Hopper, born in New York City (1906). She began tinkering around with machines when she was seven years old, dismantling several alarm clocks around the house to see how they worked. She was especially good at math in school.
She studied math and physics in college, and eventually got a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. Then World War II broke out, and Hopper wanted to serve her country. Her father had been an admiral in the Navy, so she applied to a division of the Navy called WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service. She was assigned to work on a machine that might help calculate the trajectory of bombs and rockets.
She learned how to program that early computing machine, and wrote the first instruction manual for its use. She went on to work on several more versions of the same machine. In 1952, Hopper noticed that most computer errors were the result of humans making mistakes in writing programs. So she attempted to solve that problem by writing a new computer language that used ordinary words instead of just numbers. It was one of the first computer languages, and the first designed to help ordinary people write computer programs, and she went on to help develop it into the computer language known as COBOL, or "Common Business-Oriented Language."
It's the birthday of the man who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, Joel Chandler Harris, born in Eatonton, Georgia (1848). He went to work as a printer's assistant at a newspaper published at a local plantation. While he was working for the newspaper, he met some of the slaves on the plantation. He loved listening to the stories they told about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and other animals in the Briar Patch. When the Civil War began, Chandler left the plantation to work for newspapers in cities all across the South.
He was working for the Atlanta Constitution when he began to publish the tales he had heard years earlier, under the title Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880). He wrote the tales in a southern, African-American dialect that he claimed was an exact reproduction of the speech he heard as a young man.
It's the birthday of the great English poet John Milton, born in London (1608). He's best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). But he spent twenty years of his life writing almost nothing but essays on political and religious topics.
He married a woman named Mary Powell in 1642, but she quickly grew tired of him and left him almost immediately after their honeymoon. Milton was furious, but it was against the law to get a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. The next year, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which he argued that couples should be able to divorce if the marriage turns out to be unhappy. He tried to prove that marriage was created to remedy the loneliness of men, and that if a wife failed to perform this function, her husband should have the right to divorce her. He also said that those who had lived freely in their youth were more likely to find happiness in marriage than those who were chaste and inexperienced. Milton addressed his tract to the British Parliament, but it didn't go over well. He remained married to Powell until her death in 1652.
Milton was also one of the early crusaders against the government's censorship of books and pamphlets. He argued that no one group should control the number of available opinions from which an individual can choose. He wrote, "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."
But his great masterpiece was Paradise Lost, from which many readers come away feeling that Satan is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the poem.
SATURDAY, 10 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poems: "1587" and "1665" by Emily Dickinson from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson © Little, Brown. Reprinted with permission.
1587
He ate and drank the precious Words—
His Spirit grew robust—
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust—
He danced along the dingy Days
And this Bequest of Wings
Was but a Book—What Liberty
A loosened spirit brings—
1665
I know of people in the Grave
Who would be very glad
To know the news I know tonight
If they the chance had had.
'Tis this expands the least event
And swells the scantest deed—
My right to walk upon the Earth
If they this moment had.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It is the birthday of poet Thomas Lux, born in Northampton, Massachusetts (1946).
It's the birthday of poet Carolyn Kizer, born in Spokane, Washington (1925).
It's the birthday of German poet Nelly Sachs, born in Berlin (1891).
It's the birthday of American poet Emily Dickinson, born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was twenty years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion.
Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, where the women were divided up into three categories: those who were "established Christians," those who "expressed hope," and those who were "without hope." Emily Dickinson finished her first year in the "without hope" category, and she never went back to school.
Instead, she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the topics of conversation among her father's friends were always tedious, and she found the job of hosting constant visitors to be utterly exhausting.
As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends get married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. In a letter to an acquaintance she wrote, "You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell... I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and my father, too busy with his [legal] briefs to notice what we do."
Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But even though she didn't much care for seeing people, she kept in touch with her closest friends by writing numerous letters.
No scholar has ever found any definite evidence that Dickinson had a tragic love affair. What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle.
She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her hand-written poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She often included poems in her numerous letters to friends.
Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. Only seven of all her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia found the huge stash of the rest of her poems after Dickinson's death, but they were heavily edited when they finally came out in 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet.
She wrote, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
SUNDAY, 11 DECEMBER, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Incommunicado" by Paul Groves from Wowsers © Seren Books. Reprinted with permission.
Incommunicado
What sort of a marriage is this? She hasn't
spoken to me all day. I've started to blame myself:
something I've said must be responsible for
those tears. And when I speak she doesn't answer;
she just looks disconsolate. Her behaviour
is atypical, hard to fathom; for years
we've got on well, with few disputes. Then this.
And why does she put our displayed photographs
in a drawer, prepare lunch only for herself, pick
at her food like a lovesick teenager? I try
to cheer her, but she's beyond reason, inarticulate,
inscrutable. This is ironic conduct for one
who spent time yesterday in church, though
what she was doing there—it being a Tuesday—
she has not said. "Look," I say, "be reasonable.
Tell me what's bothering you." But she rises, without
answering, and walks through me to the kitchen.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of American short story writer Grace Paley, born in New York City (1922). Here parents were Russian Jews and political outlaws who fled their home country and came to live in the Bronx. She grew up in a house that became a kind of way-station for Russian exiles who stayed in the house for weeks or even months as they got established in the United States. Every Friday or Saturday night, the family and all the guests would sit around the dining table telling stories about the old country.
Paley graduated from high school early and went to college when she was fifteen, but she dropped out after a year because she didn't care about anything other than poetry. She eventually got married and had two children, and helped support the family as a typist, writing poetry all the time, but not publishing much.
She was living in Greenwich Village, and she began to get politically involved with the neighborhood. Most of the other activists were women who came from all kinds of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and she realized that she had never read about any of these kinds of women in a book. She wanted to write about them, but she didn't know how to do that in a poem.
Then, one day, she got sick and was forced to arrange for her children to go to an after-school program for several weeks while she stayed home and rested. Without the children to take care of she sat down at a typewriter and started writing what would become her first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck."
Up until that point, all of Paley's poetry was self-consciously literary, in the style of W.B. Yeats and W.H Auden. But Paley said, "Writing the stories had allowed [my ear]—suddenly—to do its job, to remember the street language and the home language with its Russian and Yiddish accents, a language my early characters knew well, the only language I spoke."
That first story "Goodbye and Good Luck" begins, "I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused."
Paley's three collections of short stories were published as one book, The Collected Stories in 1994.
Grace Paley said, "I [was] sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman, I had no choice. Every day life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me, my portion... [Now] people will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women is politics."
It's the birthday of the novelist Jim Harrison born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). He grew up in rural Michigan, but when he was 16 years old he decided he wanted to be a writer and left home for New York City. He later said, "I wanted to be a bohemian; I wanted to meet a girl with black hair and a black turtleneck—and I did!" He came out with a couple collections of poetry, but he wasn't making any money off them and moved back to Michigan. One day, he was out hunting in the woods when he fell off a cliff and hurt his back. His friend Thomas McGuane suggested that Harrison write a novel while he recuperated. He began work on Wolf, and it was published in 1971.
Harrison wrote more poetry and another novel, but he was struggling to make just $10,000 per year. Then, in 1979, he came out with a series of novellas entitled Legends of the Fall.
It's the birthday of Thomas McGuane, who was born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). He's the author of many novels, including Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), The Cadence of Grass (2002), and a book about fishing in 1999 called The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing.
Thomas McGuane said, "America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
FOR OTHER INSTALLMENTS OF THE WRITER'S ALMANAC:
BROADCAST DATES
