Poem: "On the Subway Station" by Grace Paley, from Leaning Forward. © Granite Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

On the Subway Station

The child is speaking to the father
he is looking into the father's eyes
father doesn't answer
child is speaking Vietnamese
father doesn't answer
child is speaking English
father doesn't answer
The father is staring at a mosaic in blue and green
and lavender     three small ships in harbor
set again and again in the white tiled
beautiful     old     unrenovated subway
station     Clark Street     Brooklyn

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded.

It's the birthday of the singer, songwriter and actor Tom Waits, (books by this author) 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. He became known for lyrics that resembled beat poetry, and in his performances, Waits played a kind of hobo wise man, singing in a gravelly, cigarette-scarred voice that made him sound much older than 25.

It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, (books by this author) 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.

As a young woman, she went off to New York and became a successful magazine editor. But after living in New York for 15 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. That inspired the novels we remember her for, including O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

It's the birthday of the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, (books by this author) born in Philadelphia (1928). Though he's best known today for his leftist political writings, he's also known as the father of modern linguistics.

He grew up during the Great Depression, and growing up with poverty all around him left a deep impression. He said, "My earliest memories are of seeing people coming to the door selling rags; and in a trolley car with my mother, I saw people beating up women strikers outside a textile factory." His father was a Ukrainian immigrant and a famous Hebrew scholar. His family was one of the only Jewish families in the neighborhood, and he was surrounded by anti-Semitism. Some of his neighbors actually threw pro-Nazi beer parties in the late 1930s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on his 13th birthday, his neighbors suddenly began to hate the Nazis, and Chomsky was fascinated by how quickly they could change their political sympathies.

He was reading newspapers every day at a young age, and as a teenager, he liked to spend his free time with an uncle he described as "a hunchback with a background in crime" who owned a newspaper stand on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City. Chomsky would take a train from Philadelphia to New York and spend the day at the newsstand with his uncle, where Jewish intellectuals would show up to discuss political philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Chomsky got interested in linguistics in college at a time when most linguists believed that language is something children only learn through habit and practice. But Chomsky believed that language is something instinctive in human beings. He began working on a way of describing certain grammatical properties of all languages, to prove that they all shared the same underlying structure.

He had a hard time publishing his theories, because they were so radical, but he finally came out with a book called Syntactic Structures (1957), in which he argued that there is a universal grammar innate to the human brain, which is why children don't have to be taught language. They just pick it up instinctively. At the time, this was a revolutionary idea, because social scientists believed that all human behavior was learned. Chomsky was compared to Copernicus and Darwin for revolutionizing his field of study.

It was a few years later that Chomsky became horrified by the United States' policy in Vietnam. He began encouraging his students at MIT to resist the draft, and he spoke at some of the earliest anti-war rallies in the country. He stopped paying his taxes in protest of the government, and helped organize the protest march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in his book Armies of the Night. Since then, Chomsky has continued to write about linguistics, but he's become much more famous as one of the fiercest critics of American foreign policy.

FRIDAY, 8 DECEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Regarding (Most) Songs" by Thomas Lux, from The Street of Clocks. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Regarding (Most) Songs

        Whatever is too stupid to say
        can be sung.
                  –JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
It trills a string of banal words,
but your blood jumps, regardless. You don't care
about the words but only how they're sung
and the music behind — the brass, the drums.
Oh the primal, necessary drums
behind the words so dumb!
That power, the bang and the boom and again the bang
we cannot, need not, live without,
nor without other means to make sweet noise,
the guitar or violin, the things that sing
the plaintive, joyful sounds.
Which is why I like songs best
when I can't hear the words, or, better still,
when there are no words at all.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the humorist James Thurber, (books by this author) born in Columbus, Ohio (1894). 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 was living in a basement apartment with his first wife. She thought that after 20 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 45 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, attracting crowds and the police, and eventually setting the world record for revolving door laps. It was the first piece of his published in The New Yorker.

He published more than 30 books of short pieces. Most of his work is collected in Writings & Drawings (1996). He became famous for writing stories and drawing cartoons about a certain type of exasperated man. E. B. White said, "These 'Thurber men' ... are frustrated, fugitive beings; at times they seem vaguely striving to get out of something without being seen (a room, a situation, a state of mind), at other times they are merely perplexed and too humble, or weak, to move."

It's the birthday of the novelist Mary Gordon, (books by this author) born in Far Rockaway, New York (1940). 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 he was a publisher of pornography magazines. And though he'd grown up Jewish, he'd converted to Catholicism and become an anti-Semite. She remembered his 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).

A new collection, The Stories of Mary Gordon, came out this year (2006).

It's the birthday of the novelist John Banville, (books by this author) born in Wexford, Ireland. He's the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Shroud (2002).

It's the birthday of the travel writer Bill Bryson, (books by this author) born in Des Moines, Iowa (1952). As a young man he settled in England and supported himself with a series of jobs as a copy editor, and then he began writing about books lexicography, including The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984). He had been living outside of the United States for more than a decade, when he got the idea go back to America and write about how the country had changed in his absence. He borrowed his mother's Chevy and began driving to all the places he'd visited with his family on vacations as a child. He ultimately covered almost 14,000 miles, and visited 38 states.

The result was his book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), in which Bryson poked fun at his home country, while reminiscing about his Iowa childhood. He wrote, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

SATURDAY, 9 DECEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Threepenny Opera" by George Bilgere, from The Good Kiss. © The University of Akron Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Threepenny Opera

The elderly modern dance instructor
And his elderly wife are dancing
In top hats and tails, doing a Kurt Weill
Number as old as their marriage.

They've reached that age when the body
Is starting to wonder how it got here,
When it has become strange, even to itself,
And moves around uncertainly
As if looking for a lost pair of glasses.

They do not mean for what they're doing
To be a parody, but, of course, it is;
The word means something like
"To sing alongside," and it's just
Possible to see the lithe dark lovers
They used to be, singing just beyond
The penumbra of the spotlight.
When they tap dance and set
Their old skeletons clattering

Across the stage, the teenage boy
In front of me smiles and nudges his girlfriend
Who has reached the moment
Of her beauty that will keep everyone
On the edge of their seats
For the next two or three years.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton, (books by this author) born in London (1608). As a young man, he wanted to become a poet, and he wrote several shorter poems that are still read today, including "Lycidas," about a classmate who had drowned in a shipwreck in 1637. But before his career as a poet could really take off, England began to fall into a civil war. Over the course of several years, the king was eventually overthrown and a new form of government, known as the Commonwealth, was established, led by Oliver Cromwell.

It was a tumultuous time, and Milton responded by putting his poetry on hold and becoming a pamphleteer. He believed that the Commonwealth might give way to a new form of democracy, and he became an advocate for greater civil rights and religious liberty. He argued for the right to divorce, and he made one of the first comprehensive arguments for the freedom of the press.

By the time he was in his 40s, Milton had taken a job as a Latin secretary for the government, translating letters into Latin for international correspondence. He was struggling to raise his three daughters, and the eyesight that had been growing steadily worse his whole life had finally failed completely.

And things only got worse for Milton. In 1660, the Commonwealth dissolved, King Charles II was restored to the throne, and all the leaders of the Commonwealth were hanged. That summer, a warrant was issued for Milton's arrest, but he was kept in hiding by his friends. His pamphlets were publicly burned. He was eventually pardoned, but he became a kind of outcast, and people said that God had struck him blind for his sins against the king.

He was devastated by the restoration of the monarchy, but without a job, he finally had time to devote to his poetry again. So he started writing an epic poem in English that he'd long been thinking about, centered on the biblical story of Adam and Eve and humanity's fall from grace.

Because of his blindness, he wrote the poem by composing the verses in his head at night, and in the morning he would recite them to anyone near by that would take dictation. And when Paradise Lost appeared in print in 1667, Milton's contemporaries were astonished. People couldn't believe that a man generally thought of as a washed-up, outcast political journalist had written the greatest work of literature in a generation. Milton was 58 years old, and he'd finally become a famous poet.

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 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. They turned her down at first they said she was too old at 35, and that she didn't weigh enough, at 105 pounds. But she wouldn't give up, and they eventually accepted her. With her math skills, she was assigned to work on a machine that might help calculate the trajectory of bombs and rockets.

Hopper learned how to program that early computing machine, and wrote the first instruction manual for its use. And she went on to help write an early computer language known as COBOL — "Common Business-Oriented Language." She remained in the Navy, and eventually she became the first woman ever promoted to rear admiral.

SUNDAY, 10 DECEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" by Emily Dickinson. Public domain. (buy now)

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Carolyn Kizer, (books by this author) born in Spokane, Washington (1925). Her collection of poems Cool, Calm, & Collected came out in 2000.

It is the birthday of poet Thomas Lux, (books by this author) born in Northampton, Massachusetts (1946). He grew up on the family dairy farm. He started writing his own poetry in high school by imitating the poems on the back of Bob Dylan's albums.

He's become known for his often humorous poems on a wide variety of subjects, with titles such as "Commercial Leech Farming Today," "Traveling Exhibition of Torture Instruments," "The Oxymoron Sisters," "Walt Whitman's Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor," "Institute of Defectology," and "Pecked to Death by Swans."

It's the birthday of the poet Emily Dickinson, (books by this author) 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 20 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, and then 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 visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. 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 there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

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. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

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 handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

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. 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, and one of the greatest American poets ever.

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

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