Poem: "The Lyric" by Tom Clark from Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems. © Coffee House Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Lyric

Suffering
lament, sorrow and wild
joy commingle in

the lyric—a collective
sigh of relief comes cascading
out of the blue—

a yearning to submerge
in life like the swimmer
in the pool forgetful

immersed and quenched—
water trailing scattered
diamonds in a rustling

voice of resigned subsidence
as though in the same stroke
everyone alive were speaking through you—

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of one of America's first embedded reporters, Ernie Pyle, (books by this author) born Ernest Taylor Pyle in a little white farmhouse near Dana, Indiana (1900). He wrote for newspapers about World War II in the form of daily letters home from the war front. When he covered the war, he never made it look glamorous. He hated it, and he described all the horror and agony around him. He included the names and hometown addresses of all the soldiers he wrote about.

For three years Pyle wrote about the war, until he couldn't stand it any longer. But four months later, he went back, this time to the Pacific. On April 18, 1945, he and a colonel were in a jeep riding to the command post on an island just west of Okinawa when they were shot at by Japanese machine guns. They dove into a ditch, where a second shot hit Pyle in the left temple, killing him instantly.

It's the birthday of the poet Hayden Carruth, (books by this author) born in Waterbury, Connecticut (1921). He studied journalism and literature in school and went on to a job with a publisher, where he tried to publish as many books by contemporary poets as he could. Then, in 1953, he had a nervous breakdown. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and he was subjected to electroshock therapy. When he was released from the hospital, eighteen months later, he said, "I was in worse shape than when I had entered it, and I slipped into a period of phobic isolation."

He moved to a small cabin in rural Vermont, supporting himself as a freelance book reviewer and ghostwriter. And he started to concentrate on writing poetry. He said, "[My isolation] afforded me the opportunity to put everything together, the land and seasons, the people, my family, my work, my evolving sense of survival ... in one tightly integrated imaginative structure. The results were my poems, for what they're worth, and in my life a very gradual but perceptible triumph over the internal snarls and screw-ups that had crippled me from childhood on."

His first collection, The Crow and the Heart, came out in 1959. Carruth kept writing and publishing poems from that isolated cabin, without giving any readings or making any public appearances, for about twenty years. Then, in the 1980s, he began to venture back out into the world. His Collected Shorter Poems came out in 1992, and his Collected Longer Poems came out in 1994.

It's the birthday of mystery author P D (Phyllis Dorothy) James, (books by this author) born in Oxford, England (1920). She's known for her novels starring Detective Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, who first appears about fifty pages into her first novel when he is sent out by Scotland Yard to investigate a death among the gentry at a remote country estate. He's a dedicated, hard-working policeman who is also a sensitive and successful poet.

She said, "The classical detective story affirms our belief that we live in a rational and generally benevolent universe."

On this day in 1955, Waiting for Godot had its premier in English at London's Art Theatre. It had been running in a small Paris theater for over a year, and Samuel Beckett, its author, had translated the play. It's the story of Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, who have an appointment to meet Godot on a country road. Instead of meeting Godot, they encounter two strange men: Pozzo, a tyrant, and his "servant" Lucky, whom he drags along on a rope. There is hardly any other action, and Godot never arrives.

The play got mostly bad reviews, but Harold Hobson, critic for the Sunday Times, wrote about the production for the next seven Sundays. The play became the talk of London.

It's the birthday of Rupert Chawner Brooke, born in Warwickshire, England (1887). He signed up for the Royal Naval Division in World War I and died soon after his enlistment, on April 23, 1915, from blood poisoning he got from an infected mosquito bite on his lip. But just before he died, he wrote a war poem called "The Soldier," which became a classic. It included the lines "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

FRIDAY, 4 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "The Word is Too Often Profaned" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Public domain. (buy now)

The Word is Too Often Profaned

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother;
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love;
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the crime writer Dennis Lehane, (books by this author) born in Dorchester, Massachusetts (1965). He grew up in a poor Irish neighborhood in Boston that he once described as "[a place] cramped with corner stores, small playgrounds, and butcher shops ... [where] days, the mothers searched the papers for coupons. Nights, the fathers went to bars. You knew everyone; nobody ever left."

Lehane was one of the few kids from the neighborhood who went to college. He got a master's degree in a creative writing program, and moved back to Boston, where he took a job as a valet in a parking garage. He started writing detective novels, the first of which came out in 1994: A Drink before the War. He supported himself as a chauffeur, and wrote most of his next two books on a yellow legal pad while sitting in the front seat of a limousine. The fifth book in the series, Prayers for Rain, was successful enough that Lehane was able to quit his job and write full time.

Once he had the time to devote to writing, Lehane decided to try something more ambitious than what he'd ever done before. Instead of writing another book about his private detectives, he wrote about a part of Boston based on his own old neighborhood, and a murder that effects three men who've grown up in that neighborhood. The result was his novel Mystic River (2001), which got great reviews and became his first major best-seller.

It's the birthday of Knut Hamsun, (books by this author) born in Lom, Norway (1859). Hamsun had almost no formal schooling. When he was nine, he was taken to live with his uncle. His parents were in debt to the man, and so he treated Hamsun like a slave, starving and beating him to make him chop more wood. Finally, at the age of fourteen, Hamsun escaped. In the 1880s he went to the United States in search of literary fame, but all he found was a job as a streetcar operator in Chicago. He had a habit of reading Aristotle and Euripides between tram stops. He was very poor and wore newspaper under his clothes to keep warm in the bitter Chicago winter.

When Hamsun returned to Norway, he wrote his early novels that made him famous. In books such as Hunger (1890) and Mysteries (1892), the heroes were a lot like Hamsun himself: They struggled, starved, and had no family roots.

Hamsun came to hate America and Britain. He saw Western culture as noisy and superficial, and the British he met on his travels were arrogant and unkind. But a German captain of an ocean liner gave him free passage to America in 1882, and the German people appreciated his work, and most critics believe this is why he became a Nazi supporter.

And that was his downfall. He was arrested after the war as a traitor and sent to the Oslo Psychiatric Clinic. His health declined, and he spent the last few years of his life isolated from his family and countrymen, penniless.

It's the birthday of Louis Armstrong, (books by this author) born in the birthplace of American jazz: New Orleans, Louisiana (1901), in a poor section of town known as "The Battlefield." They called him Satchmo, short for "Satchel Mouth." In 1907, Louis formed a vocal quartet with three other boys and performed on street corners for tips. The Karnofskys, a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, hired Louis to work on their junk wagon. Louis purchased his first cornet with money the family lent him.

In 1913, he was sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent, and that's where he learned to play the cornet. Jazz was young then, and Armstrong listened to pioneers like New Orleans cornetist King Oliver, who gave Armstrong his big break by letting him play in the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1922. Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-1928) are among the classics of early jazz.

It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, (books by this author) born in Sussex, England (1792). Although he died before the age of thirty, many of his poems are considered masterpieces, including "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," and "Prometheus Unbound."

SATURDAY, 5 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "Naming for Love" by Hayden Carruth from Toward the Distant Isands. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Naming for Love

These are the proper names:
Limestone, tufa, coral rag,
Clint, beer stone, braystone,
Porphyry, gneiss, rhyolite,
Ironstone, cairngorm, circle stone,
Blue stone, chalk, box stone,
Sarsen, magnesia, brownstone,
Flint, aventurnine,
Soapstone, alabaster, basalt,
Slate, quartzite, ashlar,
Clunch, cob, gault, grit,
Buhrstone, dolomite,
Flagstone, freestone, sandstone,
Marble, shale, gabbro, clay,
Adamant, gravel, traprock,
And of course brimstone.

Some of the names are shapes:
Crag, scarp, moraine, esker,
Alp, hogback, ledge, tor,
Cliff, boulder, crater,
Gorge, and bedrock.

Some denote uses:
Keystone, capstone,
Hearthstone, whetstone,
And gravestone.

For women a painful stone called
Wombstone, which doctors say is
"A calculus formed in the uterus."
Gallstone and kidneystone hurt everyone.
Millstone is our blessing.

I will not say the names
Of the misnamed precious stones.

But a lovely name is gold,
A product of stone.

Underwards is magma;
May all who read this live long.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Guy de Maupassant, (books by this author) born in Normandy (1850), one of the great French short-story writers. He became an apprentice of Gustave Flaubert, who used to invite him to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his early work. Flaubert also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time, like Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Flaubert said, "He's my disciple and I love him like a son." Maupassant began publishing his first stories a few weeks before Flaubert's death. In just ten years, between 1880 and 1890, he wrote most of the work for which he is remembered, including three hundred stories and five novels.

It's the birthday of Wendell Berry, (books by this author) born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.

Berry had an uncle he described as "an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture ... and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories." His uncle kept a ramshackle cabin up in the woods, and Berry often went up there as a kid to get away from everything. It was in that cabin that he first read the work of Henry David Thoreau, and where he first fell in love with poetry.

He went to a military academy for high school, and then on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he often went back to his uncle's old cabin. He finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.

He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir (1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (2000).

It's the birthday of film director John Huston, (books by this author) born in Nevada, Missouri (1906).

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, (books by this author) born in Savannah, Georgia (1889).

On this day in 1850, Herman Melville (books by this author) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (books by this author) met at a picnic with friends on Monument Mountain near Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

SUNDAY, 6 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "Crossing the Bar" by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Public domain. (buy now)

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
     And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
     When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
     Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
     Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
     And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
     When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
     The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crossed the bar.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the artist Andy Warhol, (books by this author) born Andrew Warhola, in Pennsylvania (1928). His father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant and a coal miner. His mother was extremely protective, and she let him spend all his time as a child drawing copies of Maybelline advertisements.

He got a job as an advertising illustrator in New York City in the 1950s, but he wanted to be a serious artist. One day, he got the idea to start painting pictures of advertisements, movie stars, and other popular images. His made silk-screened pictures of Campbell's soup cans and sculptures of Brillo boxes, and his style became known as Pop Art.

Though he was surrounded by hard-partying rock stars and artists, he lived with his mother until her death in 1973, and went to a Catholic church almost every Sunday. His friends said that he never took drugs and only drank occasionally.

It was on this day in 1965 that Lyndon Johnson (books by this author) signed the Voting Rights Act that ended the long era of voter discrimination in many Southern states. Johnson had been delaying legislation on voting rights, because he thought it was too soon for it to succeed. But after a group of civil rights marchers were attacked in Selma, Alabama, he gave a speech on TV, in which he said, "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote ... it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

That was the first time the president of the United States had ever used the phrase, "We shall overcome." Martin Luther King Jr. was watching the address on TV that night, and he later said that when he heard Lyndon Johnson say the words, "We shall overcome," he burst into tears. The president signed the legislation a few months later, on this day in 1965.

It was on this day in 1945 that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. It was the first time that a nuclear weapon was ever used in combat, and only the second time that a nuclear weapon had ever been exploded. The attack led to the end of World War II.

It's the birthday of the poet Alfred Tennyson, (books by this author) born in Lincolnshire, England (1809). Tennyson lived at a time when authors like Charles Dickens were turning the novel into the most popular form of literature, and he was one of the last poets who could sell as many books as a novelist. Nearly every literate household owned at least one copy of his poetry. He was also one of the last poets of an era when poets wrote for the spoken voice. In Tennyson's day, poetry was meant to be read aloud among groups of people, as a form of parlor entertainment, like karaoke. He was a friend of Queen Victoria, and he wrote public poems for England, including "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), that became unofficial national anthems.

At the height of his career, he was one of the most famous men in England. He loved poetry so much that he wrote almost nothing else. Unlike other poets of his day, he never wrote a preface, an essay, a review, a diary, a memoir, or even a fragment of autobiography. He hated writing letters, because they took time away from his real work.

Tennyson moved with his wife, Emily, to the Isle of Wight to a big, secluded house called Farringford. Emily loved that their clocks were not even synchronized with those of the rest of the world. Alfred took walks on the great chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, composing his poems to the rhythm of his own footsteps.

In 1864, he published Enoch Arden, which had the largest sales of any book during his lifetime. More than 40,000 copies sold on publication, and in the first year it made Tennyson more than £8,000, as much as the income of many of the richest men in England. In London, Tennyson was followed in the streets by admirers, and the walls of his country estate were lined with tourists who sometimes even came up to the house and peered into the windows to watch the family eat their dinner.

At the age of seventy-five, he was offered a lordship in honor of his poetry. It was the first time in history that any Englishman had ever been given a title for literary achievement alone. Tennyson said that he accepted the title on behalf of all literature. And that is why we now call him Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch^®.

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