Poem: "At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press. (buy now)

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of American movie director John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1895), the youngest of 13 children. He made more than 120 films, most of them Westerns. On the sets of his movies he wore old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, a worn-out fedora, and a dirty scarf around his neck. He always had poor eyesight. He started wearing an eye patch like a pirate after he went blind in one eye. He usually worked with a glass of brandy in his hand and was always smoking a cigar.

It's the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, (books by this author) born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). He became obsessed with the poetry of William Butler Yeats in college when his roommate, the poet W. S. Merwin, woke him up one night and read Yeats to him until dawn. After that night, Kinnell devoted himself to writing poetry.

He's the author of many books of poetry, including Body Rags (1968) and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). His Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."

It's the birthday of humorist S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1904). He started working as a cartoonist when he was in college, but he eventually switched to writing humorous essays for various magazines, including The New Yorker. His friend Groucho Marx persuaded him to come to Hollywood to write screenplays. He worked on Marx Brothers movies such as Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), but Perelman hated Hollywood. He called it, "a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and a taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched." And he said, "[Working there] was no worse than playing the piano in a whorehouse."

He eventually went back to writing essays for The New Yorker and published many collections, including The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952) and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966). Much of his work is collected in Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman (2000).

Perelman was famous for his bizarre, absurdist humor. One of his essays begins, "I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes, (books by this author) born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). He was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, and he was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, / Rounders, / Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses — / Dream-singers all."

It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Reynolds Price, (books by this author) born in Macon, North Carolina (1933). He once described his birthplace as "a town of 227 cotton and tobacco farmers nailed to the flat red land at the pit of the Great Depression."

He always wanted to write, but he wasn't sure what he wanted to write about until he met the author Eudora Welty, who encouraged him to write about the world he'd known growing up in the South. He said, "[She] revealed to me what is most essential for any beginning novelist — which is that his world, the world he has known from birth, the world that has not seemed to him in any way extraordinary is, in fact, a perfectly possible world, [and a] subject for serious fiction."

FRIDAY, 2 FEBRUARY, 2007
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Poem: "The Past Is Still There" by Deborah Garrison, from The Second Child. © Random House. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Past Is Still There

I've forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I'm standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It is the birthday of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, (books by this author) born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). In 1917, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. A communist gang took over her father's shop, and her family was immediately reduced to poverty. After college, Rand worked as a guide in a historical museum, but when she got a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, she vowed never to return to Russia.

Within six months of living in America, Rand moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. She published her first screenplay in 1932, and that allowed her to work on novels in her spare time. Her first important novel was that novel she'd planned to write about skyscrapers: The Fountainhead (1943), about a brilliant architect named Howard Roark who blows up a housing project he built because his design was corrupted by the influence others. When he is put on trial, he explains his philosophy that, in order to achieve greatness, individuals have to be allowed to realize their own personal vision, and not be tied down by the concerns of society. These ideas became the basis of Rand's philosophy, called Objectivism, which she also explored in her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957).

It's the birthday of James Joyce, (books by this author) born in Rathgar, Ireland, just outside Dublin (1882). He's best known today for Ulysses (1922), his attempt to recreate a single day in the city of Dublin, with all its sights, sounds, smells, as well as the many different kinds of people, the way they talked, and what private thoughts floated through their heads as they went about their daily lives.

He wrote the novel while living in voluntary exile in Zurich, and he did all kinds of research to get the details right. He asked his Aunt Josephine to send him copies of anything to do with Ireland: newspapers, magazines, history books, guidebooks, maps, and photographs. Because he chose June 16, 1904 as the day on which the novel would take place, he made sure to include real details about things that had happened on that day, including sporting events, news items, and even newspaper advertisements that appeared in newspapers on that day.

The first printing of Ulysses, of one thousand copies, came out on this day, Joyce's birthday, in 1922. It tells the story of two Dublin men — a young aspiring writer named Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man whose wife is cheating on him. The two men go about their daily business, and finally meet each other at the end of the day. Years later, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov would force his students to study a map of Dublin and trace the characters' movements along the map while reading the novel, to demonstrate Joyce's rigorous attention to reality.

Part of what made Ulysses so revolutionary was that Joyce chose to write almost every chapter in a different style. There's a chapter in a newspaper office that is broken up into short sections with newspaper headlines; there's a chapter, from the point of view of a young woman on a beach, written in the style of a romance novel; there's a chapter written like a play, complete with stage directions, and there's a chapter that consists entirely of questions and answers.

It took him 17 years to write his next book, Finnegans Wake (1939), which is now considered possibly the most radical and difficult book ever published. Instead of writing it in ordinary English, he wrote the book in his own invented language, full of multilingual puns and hybrid words, snippets of nursery rhymes and songs, allusions to history and mythology, and sometimes pure nonsense.

Many people, even Joyce scholars, consider it unreadable. At one point, in the middle of the book, Joyce himself writes to the reader, "You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means."

SATURDAY, 3 FEBRUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Jack + Judy" by Doreen Fitzgerald, from Cake: Selected Poems. © The Ester Republic Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Jack + Judy

She was stuck on him like a three-cent stamp
on a postcard showing a roadside diner
shaped like a hat;
stuck like a stool on a chrome stem
waiting to swivel a customer,
or the naked thigh on a summer day
clinging to the vinyl seat.

He could read her like a two-bit cook
reads a scribbled order
jammed on a spike,
fluttering under the greasy fan;
like egg on a fork between the tines,
or a hot beef sandwich between the teeth.

Together, they're waiting on the night,
halfway between Peoria and Baton Rouge,
where the word OPEN, in red block letters,
hangs under the words, EAT HERE,
spelled out in perfect blue.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell, (books by this author) born in New York City (1894). He loved drawing from an early age, and studied at the National Academy of Design. He wanted to go into the advertising business, but he had a hard time drawing beautiful women. He said, "No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking ... like somebody's mother." So he focused on the Boy Scout magazine, Boy's Life, and went on to paint covers for The Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell said, "The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art. Boys battling flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight."

It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Richard Yates, (books by this author) born in Yonkers, New York (1926). He was a writer whose work influenced many other writers, but he never sold many copies of his own books. He spent his life struggling to pay the bills with teaching jobs, trying to find time to write.

When he died in 1992, few of his books were still in print. But a group of writers, including Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, and Kurt Vonnegut, began to champion his work, and they brought many of his novels back into print, including Revolutionary Road (1961) and The Easter Parade (1976). They also published The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001), which became a minor best-seller.

It's the birthday of the novelist James A. Michener, (books by this author) born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1907). His parents abandoned him when he was a very young boy, and he was adopted by a poor young widow named Mabel Michener. He joined the Navy during World War II. It was in a Quonset hut that he began writing his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It was turned into the Broadway musical South Pacific, and the proceeds from the musical let him devote his life to writing.

He went on to write a series of big historical novels, most of them about places, including Hawaii (1959), Chesapeake (1978), Texas (1985) and Alaska (1988). He filled his books with historical and geographical details. His books sold more than 75 million copies, but even though he made a great deal of money, he lived an extremely frugal life, and gave most of his money away. Over his lifetime, he donated 117 million dollars to various institutions, including the University of Texas.

It's the birthday of the avant-garde novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, (books by this author) born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1874). She was one of the early students at Radcliffe College, the sister school to Harvard University, and her favorite professor was the psychologist William James. He taught her that language often tricks us into thinking in particular ways and along particular lines. As a way of breaking free of language, he suggested she try something called automatic writing: a method of writing down as quickly as she could whatever came into her head. She loved it, and used it as one of her writing methods for the rest of her life.

In one of her first novels, The Making of Americans, she started out writing about an American family, but because she wanted to incorporate everything that had led up to the life of this family, her novel grew into a 900-page history of the entire human race. She finished it in 1908, but it took her 17 more years to get it published.

Stein's first book to attract attention was Tender Buttons (1914), a book-length prose poem based on her automatic writing. Her most popular book was the one she wrote about herself from the point of view of her lover, Alice B. Toklas, called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).

Gertrude Stein wrote:

I am Rose my eyes are blue
I am Rose and who are you?
I am Rose and when I sing
I am Rose like anything.

SUNDAY, 4 FEBRUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Trust" by Thomas R. Smith, from Waking before Dawn. © Red Dragonfly Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Trust

It's like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
all show up at their intended destinations.

The theft that could have happened doesn't.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the experimental novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover, (books by this author) born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). He's the author of The Origin of the Brunists (1966), The Universal Baseball Association (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and his most recent book, Child Again, which came out in 2005.

Robert Coover said, "The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it. ... We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates."

It's the birthday of novelist MacKinlay Kantor, (books by this author) born in Webster City, Iowa (1904). He was a prolific writer who produced more than 40 books, including historical novels, westerns, crime novels, nonfiction, and collections of poetry. Kantor wrote about the Civil War in novels such as The Jaybird (1932), Long Remember (1934), and Arouse and Beware (1936). He spent more than 25 years researching his novel Andersonville (1955), about the Confederate prison camp where 50,000 Union soldiers were held. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

Kantor's novel Glory for Me (1945), about the lives of three World War II veterans in a small Midwestern town, was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which won nine Academy Awards in 1946.

It was on this day in 1945 that the Yalta Conference began, during which President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany. It was the last time the three men would ever meet, and one of the last times that any Western leader negotiated with Stalin as an ally.

Yalta was a resort in the Crimea that was once the site of Czar Nicholas's summer cottage. It was there that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin spent eight days and nights hashing out the future of the world. The meeting was totally secret, with no news reporters allowed, and there were no leaks to the press of anything that went on there.

At the time, Roosevelt and Churchill believed that they had to persuade Stalin to help fight against the Japanese, and they also wanted him to help establish the United Nations. So they were willing to make the concession that he could continue to occupy Eastern Europe, as long as he allowed free elections there.

Roosevelt's health was failing at the time. He'd given a speech on a battleship the previous summer, during which his words were slurred, and he seemed to lose the grasp of his message. Roosevelt died of a stroke a little more than two months after the Yalta Conference. Some historians have suggested that Roosevelt's health ruined his ability to negotiate effectively, but others have argued that Stalin just had the better hand. He had effectively won the war on the Eastern Front with Germany, and Roosevelt and Churchill desperately needed his help. They weren't in a position to challenge him.

After the conference, Stalin completely ignored his commitment to democracy and installed Communist Party dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania, and the Cold War began.

It's the birthday of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (books by this author) born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). He came from a family of Lutheran theologians and pastors and decided when he was 16 that he wanted to study for the ministry. He chose to study at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He had a maverick professor there who taught theology by way of the Harlem Renaissance, assigning books by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. Bonhoeffer was inspired to start attending a black church in Harlem, where he began to teach Sunday school, and he also witnessed his church's struggle against racism.

In 1931, when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin, he suddenly saw the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in his county with a new clarity. When Hitler took power in 1933, other pastors and theologians in Germany chose to ignore it, but Bonhoeffer joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. The assassination plot was a failure, and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

He spent his last months in prison writing letters to his fiancée, a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer. The correspondence between the two was collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).

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

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