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MONDAY, 30 OCTOBER, 2006
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Poem: "An Empty Suit" by Robert Phillips, from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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An Empty Suit
You can tell he was a big man,
46 Long, sleeves that would hang
below your knuckles, back vent
that would flap below your butt.
You can tell by the fine Italian wool
and cut he was a stylish man.
Not some mail-order or Sears suit,
but a designer label from Neiman's.
You can tell he preferred the subtle:
fabric a miniscule tic-weave,
shaded a smoky dove gray,
any color tie would go with it.
You can tell by the hair-oil stain
inside the back collar he was vain,
or at least well-groomed, a man
for whom appearances mattered.
You can tell he was a smoker,
or socialized with one—two tiny
cigarette burns, one on the right sleeve,
one by the middle button.
You can tell by the small gray stain
to the left of the breast pocket
he hadn't had much time lately
to attend to the dry cleaner's.
You can tell by the frayed bottoms
of the trousers he had lost a lot
of weight. They had drooped
till he was walking on his cuffs.
You can tell by the two red pills
in the right-hand jacket pocket—
potent prescription-strength
for pain—he underwent some ordeal.
You hope that's a lipstick smudge
high on the pearl gray silk lining;
maybe he was loved by somebody
who saw him through, you can't tell who.
But you can tell by the fact it hangs
in the thrift shop here, it isn't
the suit he was laid out in,
that once lucky, now unlucky stiff.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the second president of the United States, John Adams, born in Braintree, Massachusetts (now part of Quincy, Massachusetts) (1735). Though he was one of the most important founders of our country, he has long been overshadowed by the president who came before him, George Washington, and the president who came after him, Thomas Jefferson.
He made a name for himself as a young man by arguing against the British right to tax the colonies. When the British passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Adams argued that people should just stop buying stamps, and they did. When the British began taxing paint, lead, paper, and tea, Adams said people should stop buying those things as well. Colonists in Massachusetts stopped painting their houses and switched from drinking tea to drinking New England rum.
The British sent troops to Boston to keep the peace, as the colonists grew more and more disobedient. A riot in 1770 led to several colonists' getting shot by British troops, the incident that became known as the Boston Massacre. Adams took the surprising step of defending the British troops in court, because no one else would take the case. He argued that the violence was the fault of the British government, not the soldiers, and he managed to get most of the soldiers acquitted. Adams later said, "[Taking that case] was one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country."
Adams's defense of the soldiers made him unpopular among the radical wing of the American revolutionaries, but it also gave his a reputation as a man of great principle. He was elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and began to argue that the British Parliament lacked any legal authority over the colonies. He quickly became the most respected advocate for breaking with Great Britain. People began to call him the "Atlas of Independence."
It was Adams who nominated Washington to serve as commander of the Continental Army, and it was Adams who chose Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. And it was he who persuaded the delegates from the colonies to adopt the resolution in favor of independence. He stood up on July 1, 1776 and spoke without notes for about two hours in favor of independence. No one knows exactly what he said that day, because no one transcribed his words, but Thomas Jefferson later said, "[Adams spoke] with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats." The resolution was adopted the following day, on July 2, 1776. It was probably the greatest day of Adams's life.
He was only 5 feet 6 inches tall, and he was overweight. Unlike Ben Franklin, he was not a great wit. He had no talent for flattery, and instead was always ruthlessly honest in his opinions. He also wasn't a wealthy man, and spent much of his later life struggling with debts.
John Adams said, "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."
It's the birthday of journalist and biographer Robert Caro, (books by this author) born in Manhattan (1936). He started out as an investigative journalist for New York Newsday, but he decided to write about the legendary public works commissioner Robert Moses, who had been called the most powerful non-elected public official in American history.
So Caro got a grant to write the book and quit his job. He thought the book would take him a year to write, but it dragged on for seven. Part of what took him so long was that he found a city storage room that contained a carbon copy of every document that Robert Moses ever produced as a city official, and he read every single document. The result was his book The Power Broker (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was named by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Since 1974, Caro has been working on a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. His most recent volume about Johnson, Master of the Senate, came out in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
TUESDAY, 31 OCTOBER, 2006
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Poem: "Motown, arsenal of democracy" by Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
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Motown, arsenal of democracy
Fog used to bloom off the distant river
turning our streets strange, elongating
sounds and muffling others. The crack
of a gunshot softened.
The sky at night was a dull red:
a bonfire built of old creosote soaked
logs by the railroad tracks. A red
almost pink painted by factories—
that never stopped their roar
like traffic in canyons of New York.
But stop they did and fell down
ending dangerous jobs that paid.
We believed in our unions like some
trust in their priests. We believed
in Friday paychecks sure as
winter's ice curb-to-curb
where older boys could play
hockey dodging—wooden
pucks, sticks cracking wood
on wood. A man came home
with a new car and other men
would collect around it like ants
in sugar. Women clumped for showers—
wedding and baby—wakes, funerals
care for the man brought home
with a hole ripped in him, children
coughing. We all coughed in Detroit.
We woke at dawn to my father's hack.
That world is gone as a tableau
of wagon trains. Expressways carved
neighborhoods to shreds. Rich men
moved jobs south, then overseas.
Only the old anger lives there
bubbling up like chemicals dumped
seething now into the water
building now into the bones.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Halloween, one of the oldest holidays in the Western European tradition.
Today, 70 percent of American households will open their doors and offer candy to strangers, most of them children, 50 percent of Americans will take photographs of family or friends in costume, and the nation as a whole will spend more than 6 billion dollars.
For the Celtic people of northeastern Europe, November 1st was New Year's Day and October 31 was the last night of the year. Celts believed it was the night that spirits, ghosts, faeries, and goblins freely walked the earth. It was Pope Gregory III in the eighth century A.D. who tried to turn Halloween into a Christian holiday. Christians had been celebrating All Saints Day on May 13. Pope Gregory III decided to move the holiday to November 1st, to divert Northern Europeans from celebrating an old pagan ritual. Instead of providing food and drink to the spirits, Christians were encouraged to provide food and drink to the poor. And instead of dressing up like animals and ghosts, Christians were encouraged to dress up like their favorite saints.
In the United States, Puritans tried to outlaw Halloween, in part because of its association with Catholicism. So it was the Irish Catholics who brought Halloween to this country, when they immigrated here in great numbers after the potato famine in the 1840s. By the late 1800s, Victorian women's magazines began to offer suggestions for celebrating Halloween in wholesome ways, with barn dancing and apple bobbing. And by the early 20th century, it became a holiday for children more than adults. In 1920, The Ladies' Home Journal made the first known reference to children going door to door for candy, and by the 1950s it was a universal practice in this country. By the end of the 20th century, 92 percent of America's children were trick-or-treating.
Halloween no longer has any real connection to the festival it came from. Unlike most major holidays in this country, it is not a religious holiday, it does not celebrate an event in our nation's past, it does not involve traveling to visit family, it doesn't even give us a day off work. But it gives us the chance to try out other identities. For one day, people can feel free to dress as the opposite gender, as criminals, as superheroes, celebrities, animals, or even inanimate objects.
It's the birthday of the poet John Keats, (books by this author) born in London (1795). It was after his parents' deaths, when he was just a boy, that Keats became obsessed with literature. The book that changed Keats's life was Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. His friend Charles Brown later said, "It was the Fairy Queen [sic] that awakened his genius. In Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being." That same year (1814), Keats wrote his first poem, called "In Imitation of Spenser."
But he didn't begin writing his greatest poetry until he fell in love with an 18- year-old girl named Fanny Brawne. It was in the six months after he met her that he wrote most of his famous poems, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale."
That summer, he was already suffering the early signs of the tuberculosis he had probably caught from his brother. He moved to Italy in hopes of improving his health, but he only got worse. In one of his last letters to Fanny Brawne, Keats wrote, "I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered." He was just 25 years old when he died, and he had published only 54 poems in his lifetime.
John Keats wrote, "Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel."
WEDNESDAY, 1 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "The Marriage-Bed" by Michael Simms, from The Happiness of Animals. © Monkey Sea Editions. Reprinted with permission.
The Marriage-Bed
for Eva
The marriage-bed is the center of happiness,
a point from which all things ripple outward,
a nest from which all things learn to fly.
It is the sign of return, part of the great rhythm
of the seasons and of the years.
It is the dream of return, the strength and faith
that sing of home.
It is the wren's nest woven of twigs and string,
the swallow's nest of saliva and mud.
It is what we return to, as migratory birds
passing over marshes and fields
dream of the end of the journey.
It is what frightens night-devils away,
even in winter.
It is the tree that grows through the house,
the hollow of the tree that has never known death.
It is the crystal of all feeling, the flower of all
understanding, the small containing the large.
It is the nautilus growing its many chambers of love.
It is the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent.
It is the idea that a calla lily can be shaped
like a wineglass on a long green stem.
It is the heart-stone.
It is the name of all names
that thinks it is a star and a rose.
It is a conch-shell rough on the outside,
pearly in its intimacy.
It is a snail rolling over and over
building a staircase.
It is an animal, an almond, a repose.
It is an oyster opening in the full of the moon.
It is a mouth telling a secret.
It is a kiln where clay battles fire.
It is the simple happiness of sleeping on a boat.
These are the walls we've pressed back into a circle
in the shape of our merged bodies
And it will take a long time for the waves
spreading from the center of our intimacy
to reach the ends of the world.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the sports writer Grantland Rice, (books by this author) born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1880). The most popular sports writer of his day, he wrote an estimated 67 million words in his 53-year career. In 1925, when other newspapermen were happy with a weekly salary of $50, Grantland Rice was making $1,000 a week, about the same as Babe Ruth.
It was Grantland Rice who wrote the lines: "For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks—not that you won or lost—/ But how you played the game."
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Stephen Crane, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1871). As a young man, he considered becoming a professional baseball player He played catcher on his prep school team. At the time, baseball catchers wore almost no protective gear, and the catcher's mitt was basically a gardening glove with a little extra padding. Stephen Crane became famous within his prep school league for being able to catch anything, even barehanded. One of his teammates said, "He played baseball with fiendish glee."
Crane had started cutting classes to spend all his time in New York City, and he was fascinated by what he found there. He began writing for New York City tabloids while he was still a teenager. His first novel was Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Then, after reading a series of reminiscences of Civil War veterans published in newspapers, Crane decided to write a Civil War story himself. The result was his novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of Henry Fleming, who signs up for the 304th New York regiment, hoping to experience the glory of battle that he's read about in school.
The Red Badge of Courage made Stephen Crane famous, but he died a few years later of TB. He was just 28 years old.
Today is All Saints Day, and Pope Julius II chose this day in 1512 to display Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the first time. Michelangelo didn't want to take on the job. He tried to explain that he was a sculptor not a painter. But the Pope wouldn't take no for an answer. And so Michelangelo had to take on one of the most difficult fresco paintings in history. To paint a fresco, you have to apply wet plaster to a wall and then paint over the plaster before it dries. Michelangelo had to do all this on a 10,000-square-foot ceiling 60 feet above the ground. Study of the ceiling has shown that while Michelangelo started out by making sketches for his paintings, he may have been in a rush to finish, because he wound up painting a lot of the ceiling freehand.
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Poem: "Anger" by C.K. Williams, from Love About Love. © Ausable Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Anger
I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you were
watching, disapproving,
which made what I would do much worse but I was angry with
you anyway and so I put my foot on it,
leaned on it, tested how much I'd need to make that resilient,
resisting cartridge give way
and crack! abruptly, shockingly it did give way and you turned
sharply and sharply now
I felt myself balanced in your eyes—why should I feel myself so
balanced always in your eyes;
isn't just this half the reason for my rage, these tendencies of
yours, susceptibilities of mine?—
and "Why?" your eyes said, "Why?" and even as mine sent back my
answer, "None of your affair,"
I knew that I was being once again, twice now, weighed, and this
time anyway found wanting.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1948 that Harry S. Truman (books by this author) accomplished one of the greatest upsets in an American election by beating the governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, for the presidency. Truman had been serving as vice president when Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. Truman took office that day, and over the next three years he helped arrange Germany's unconditional surrender, defeated Japan by ordering the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and began implementing the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe.
Despite all that, Truman was not all that popular. Republicans had retaken control of the Congress in the midterm elections in 1946, and there was a sense in the country that the New Deal was dead. The Democrats even considered nominating someone else for president. Some liberal Democrats threw their support to Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. Conservative Democrats in the South also formed their own party, the Dixiecrats, in opposition to the Democrats' stance on civil rights.
Two months before the election, the pollster Elmo Roper announced that he was going to stop surveying voters, because Dewey was so far ahead. He said, "[I've decided to] devote my time and efforts to other things." The most recent poll had shown Dewey leading Truman by 44 to 31 percent.
But Truman set out on one of the most ambitious campaigns in American history. He had a private railroad car outfitted for a cross-country journey that became known as the "whistle-stop tour." He would pull into a train station in a small town and give a speech directly from the train, which was equipped with a sound system. That fall of 1948, he covered 21,928 miles, and he managed to deliver more than 300 speeches around the country.
Thomas E. Dewey had decided that the best course of action was to say little and just maintain his lead in the polls. But Truman went on the attack. About 5,000 to 10,000 people showed up at every stop. Journalists believed these people were just curious, but Truman believed they were really listening to him. All the major newspapers in the country still predicted his defeat, but Truman privately estimated that he would win about 340 electoral votes, and Dewey would get about 108.
On Election Day, he went to bed early, after a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. He woke up around midnight and turned on the radio. They were reporting that he was ahead in the popular vote by more than 1 million, but the announcer said that he was still undoubtedly beaten. It turned out that Truman had won 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. Of the popular vote, he won 24 million to Dewey's 22 million. Not one news organization in the country had predicted the election correctly.
It was two days after the election that Truman was making an appearance in St. Louis and somebody handed him a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune that had run the day before with the headline, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Truman held the paper up over his head for the photographers in attendance, and that picture became the most famous picture of Truman ever taken.
It's the birthday of critic and novelist Thomas Mallon, (books by this author) born in Glen Cove, New York (1951). He said, "[I had] the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer ... where our fathers were all World War II veterans and our mothers were always at home."
His novels include Henry and Clara (1994) and Dewey Defeats Truman (1997). His novel Bandbox, about a 1920s men's magazine, came out in 2004.
It's the birthday of Marie Antoinette, born in Vienna (1755). She was married to the son of King Louis XV when she was 14 years old. She was beautiful, blond, and a good dancer. She played the harp and the clavichord and could speak French, German, Italian, and Latin. After the French Revolution, she was guillotined on October 15, 1793.
It's the birthday of Daniel Boone, born near Reading, Pennsylvania (1734). He was one of the first to explore the Cumberland Gap in the late 1760s, and in 1775, he and the Transylvania Company established the first road through the Cumberland Gap.
He said, "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."
FRIDAY, 3 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "How to Live" by Charles Harper Webb, from Amplified Dog. © Red Hen Press. Reprinted with permission.
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How to Live
"I don't know how to live."
–Sharon Olds
Eat lots of steak and salmon and Thai curry and mu shu
pork and fresh green beans and baked potatoes
and fresh strawberries with vanilla ice cream.
Kick-box three days a week. Stay strong and lean.
Go fly-fishing every chance you get, with friends
who'll teach you secrets of the stream. Play guitar
in a rock band. Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka,
Shakespeare, Twain. Collect Uncle Scrooge comics.
See Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, and everything Monty Python made.
Love freely. Treat ex-partners as kindly
as you can. Wish them as well as you're able.
Snorkel with moray eels and yellow tangs. Watch
spinner dolphins earn their name as your panga slam-
bams over glittering seas. Try not to lie; it sours
the soul. But being a patsy sours it too. If you cause
a car wreck, and aren't hurt, but someone is, apologize
silently. Learn from your mistake. Walk gratefully
away. Let your insurance handle it. Never drive drunk.
Don't be a drunk, or any kind of "aholic." It's bad
English, and bad news. Don't berate yourself. If you lose
a game or prize you've earned, remember the winners
history forgets. Remember them if you do win. Enjoy
success. Have kids if you want and can afford them,
but don't make them your reason-to-be. Spare them that
misery. Take them to the beach. Mail order sea
monkeys once in your life. Give someone the full-on
ass-kicking he (or she) has earned. Keep a box turtle
in good heath for twenty years. If you get sick, don't thrive
on suffering. There's nothing noble about pain. Die
if you need to, the best way you can. (You define best.)
Go to church if it helps you. Grow tomatoes to put store-
bought in perspective. Listen to Elvis and Bach. Unless
you're tone deaf, own Perlman's "Meditation from Thais."
Don't look for hidden meanings in a cardinal's song.
Don't think TV characters talk to you; that's crazy.
Don't be too sane. Work hard. Loaf easily. Have good
friends, and be good to them. Be immoderate
in moderation. Spend little time anesthetized. Dive
the Great Barrier Reef. Don't touch the coral. Watch
for sea snakes. Smile for the camera. Don't say "Cheese."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, (books by this author) born in St. Louis, Missouri (1903). He dropped out of college after one year and went off to Paris to become a writer. He spent a lot of his time at Sylvia Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and one day he saw James Joyce there, but he was too shy to introduce himself. He didn't meet any other important writers, and his own writing didn't amount to much. He said, "I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word."
He went back to the United States, feeling like a failure. And then one day he picked up a camera and started taking pictures. One of the first pictures was of the parade honoring Lindbergh's flight in 1927. Instead of focusing on the parade itself, he focused on the street the parade had just passed through, littered with crumpled handbills and confetti. He had felt so reverential toward literature that it blocked him up, but with a camera he could point and capture anything he wanted. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat. Evans especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers' bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He'd photograph what people had on their mantles, on their dressers, and in their dresser drawers. By the early 1930s, he was one of the most celebrated photographers in the United States. In 1933, was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art. He's perhaps best known for his photographs that accompany James Agee's text in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
It's the birthday of the humorist and cultural critic Joe Queenan, (books by this author) born in Philadelphia (1950). He's a journalist and critic who's become known for ridiculing almost every aspect of popular culture in his writing. His working-class background inspired him to become a critic, because he said, "Blue collar people like me have zero tolerance level for the problems of celebrities."
SATURDAY, 4 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Droplets" by C.K. Williams, from Love About Love. © Ausable Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Droplets
Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,
but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,
all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can't help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,
but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Charles Frazier, (books by this author) born in Asheville, North Carolina (1950). He grew up in a rural area of North Carolina, near Cold Mountain, where his family has lived for more than 200 years. After college, he went off to Colorado to teach English literature for several years, but he didn't like the West, so he eventually moved back to North Carolina. He'd been away so long that he hardly recognized his home state. In his absence, there had been new interstate highways built, and the rural areas were now full of developments and shopping centers.
He felt that Appalachian culture of his childhood was quickly disappearing from North Carolina, and he set out to recapture as much of it as he could. He began going to bluegrass festivals and reading up on local folklore and history. He went on hikes through the remaining rural parts of the state and studied the indigenous plants and animals. He was especially interested in the area around Cold Mountain, where his family was from.
At the same time, Frazier's father had been researching the family history, and one day he told Frazier that one of their ancestors, Frazier's great-great uncle, was a Confederate soldier who had deserted the Confederate army and walked more than 250 miles to his home near Cold Mountain. Suddenly, Frazier realized that he could use all his research to write a novel loosely based on his ancestor's journey home from the war.
He took a sabbatical from his job that stretched from two into seven years. Still, he was resigned to the fact that he might never publish the book. He had never shared it with anyone but his wife and his daughter, and he didn't care if anyone ever read it as long as he was personally satisfied with the result. But while he was working on the 15th draft, his wife smuggled 100 pages of it to the local novelist Kaye Gibbons, who was in their carpool group, and Kaye Gibbons was blown away. She sent the novel to an agent, and it got picked up immediately by the Atlantic Monthly Press.
The first printing of Frazier's novel Cold Mountain (1998) was just 25,000 copies. It sold out within a week of publication. The book went on to sell almost 2 million copies, and it won the National Book Award.
Frazier second novel, Thirteen Moons, came out this year (2006).
It's the birthday of the poet C. K. (Charles Kenneth) Williams, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1936). When he was growing up, he said, "I wasn't particularly compelled by words for their own sake, or by 'literature,' which had always repelled me with its auras of mustiness and reverence. I detested almost any book I had to read, hated English in school, and I must have been surprised, maybe even a little put off, to find myself, just as the dreary poetry survey courses ended, turning the stuff out myself." He wrote his first poems to impress his girlfriend, who liked poetry, but he found that he grew to care more about the poetry he wrote than the effect it had on his girlfriend.
After graduating from college, he sat down and tried to read everything he'd ever heard of. He read Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Shelley, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Miller, Frazer, Jung, Plath and Ginsberg. He said, "I'd fall asleep every night over a book, dreaming in other people's voices. In the morning I'd wake up and try, mostly fruitlessly, to write acceptable poems."
Growing up Jewish, he'd never once been told about the Holocaust by his parents or any other adult. He'd only learned about it from an older friend, in 1958, when he was in his 20s. He was stunned that 6 million people had been murdered during the first few years of his own lifetime, and he hadn't even heard about it. So he began a huge epic poem about the subject, which he wrote and rewrote, rearranged and revised, again and again, never getting it right.
Then one afternoon, in 1964, he read a magazine article about civil rights activists in the South, and he decided to write a letter to the editor of the magazine comparing racism in America to the anti-Semitism under Hitler, and it was while he was writing that letter to the editor that he suddenly realized how to write his poem about the Holocaust. That poem was called "A Day for Anne Frank," and Williams has said that he's never struggled very hard to write a poem since.
He's the author of many collections of poetry, including Lies (1969), Flesh and Blood (1987), and Repair (2000), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
SUNDAY, 5 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Doctors" by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Toward God. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission.
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Doctors
They work with herbs
and penicillin.
They work with gentleness
and the scalpel.
They dig out the cancer,
close an incision
and say a prayer
to the poverty of the skin.
They are not Gods
though they would like to be;
they are only human
trying to fix up a human.
Many humans die.
They die like the tender,
palpitating berries
in November.
But all along the doctors remember:
First do no harm.
They would kiss if it would heal.
It would not heal.
If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.
If they are too proud,
and some are,
then they leave home on horseback
but God returns them on foot.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of America's first muckraking journalists, Ida Tarbell, (books by this author) born in Hatch Hallow, Pennsylvania (1857). Her book The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) was one of the first works of journalism ever to bring down a major American corporation.
She grew up in an oil boom town near Cleveland, Pennsylvania. Her father owned an oil refinery, and she grew up listening to him complain about the growing influence of a man named John D. Rockefeller, the owner of Standard Oil, who was slowly buying up all the oil refineries in the city or driving them out of business.
Tarbell went on to become a journalist, and she got a job at McClure's Magazine, where the editor, S.S. McClure wanted his journalists uncover corruption and public abuse in American life. Ida Tarbell volunteered to take on Standard Oil, the company that had made her father's life so difficult.
For two years, she interviewed everyone in the Pennsylvania oil industry who would talk to her, and she read every document she could get her hands on. It was Mark Twain who put her in touch with a Standard Oil insider named Henry Rogers, who provided her with all kinds of incriminating detail and evidence that Standard Oil was secretly colluding with railroad companies to charge smaller refineries higher rates to drive them out of business. She wrote 19 articles in all, and that exposé made her one of the most famous journalists in the country. Among her biggest fans was President Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to coin the term "muckrakers."
John D. Rockefeller tried to ignore Ida Tarbell's work at first. Then he said she was merely "misguided." Finally, he began calling her "Miss Tarbarrel." But it didn't help. After her articles were collected into the book The History of the Standard Oil Company, the federal government began its antitrust prosecution of Standard Oil. The break up of the company was finally decided by the Supreme Court on May 15, 1911.
Ida Tarbell said, "A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it."
It's the birthday of actor and playwright Sam Shepard, (books by this author) born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois (1943). Shepard grew up in the small town of Durante, California. His father was an abusive alcoholic. Shepard said that one of his father's rules was, "You weren't allowed to have any feelings." One night his father came home late and found the front door locked, so he tore the door right off the house. Sam Shepard left home the next day. He made his way all the way from California to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he got a job with a traveling theater troupe.
Shepard said, "That was one of the most exciting times of my life. ... We never spent more than one or two nights in the same place and our stages were always the altars of churches. ... We crisscrossed New England, up into Maine and Vermont. The country amazed me, having come from a place that was brown and hot and covered with Taco stands. Finally we hit New York City and I couldn't believe it. I'd always thought of the 'big city' as Pasadena and the Rose Parade. I was mesmerized by this place."
He got involved in the burgeoning Off Off Broadway theater scene in New York City. He was working as a busboy at a Greenwich Village cabaret when he learned that one of the head waiters had just founded a new experimental theater, which eventually produced his first play, Cowboys (1964).
It's the birthday of the "King of the Cowboys," Roy Rogers, born Leonard Franklin Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio (1911). When he was 18 he moved with his mother and father to California, where he earned money by harvesting fruit and working as a cowhand. He started playing guitar and singing in small theaters and on the radio in the 1930s. He met Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer, and they started the Sons of the Pioneers. The band made appearances in several motion pictures.
Rogers's first screen name was "Dick Weston." He changed it to Roy Rogers just before he got his first big break, replacing Gene Autry in the movie Under Western Stars (1938). The movie was a hit, and it launched Rogers's steady film career as a singing cowboy.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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