Poem: "Small Town" by Midge Goldberg, from Flume Ride. © David Roberts Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Small Town

                             For Alfred Nicol

What goes around comes around, I tell you.
One minute I'm squinting out the car window,
sure I recognize the mom of one
of my Little Leaguers, 'cept she's kissing some guy
not her husband under the parking lot light
down to the Stop and Shop, so I wave, big-like,
kind of being a jerk, although I wouldn't
ever really say anything about it.
Next thing I know, a siren, flashing red
and blue, some cops waving at me to stop.
I pull over, roll down the window, blinded
by the flashlight. They start to say they saw
me rolling through the stop, then get a whiff —
really, it's just the way the leather jacket
picks up all the smoke and the smell of the booze —
and I'm out of the car, walking the damn straight line,
saying the alphabet way too loud, then standing
on one leg (like I could do that sober)
counting one-mississippi, two-
mississippi with the kid's mom
across the street watching the whole damn thing
or at least part of it, 'cause I looked once
and saw her watching, then I looked again
during the mississippi's, and she was gone.
They let me go with a warning — gotta love 'em.
Maybe I'll give her a call. Probably not.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He's known for writing and illustrating many morbidly funny books, including The Beastly Baby (1962), The Wuggly Ump (1963), and The Epiplectic Bicycle (1969).

It's the birthday of the best-selling mystery novelist Richard North Patterson, (books by this author) born in Berkeley, California (1947). He studied law as a young man and became a securities lawyer. He wound up working for the Securities and Exchange Commission and helped look into whether members of the Nixon administration had violated any securities laws during the Watergate investigation. But by the time he was 29, he began to wonder if the legal profession was right for him. He was traveling all the time, and one day, as he was leaving on another business trip, he watched his one-year-old son waving to him through the screen door of their house, and he decided then and there to try to find a profession that would let him spend more time with his family.

He'd never published any fiction, or even tried to write anything, but he had recently read 17 novels by the mystery writer Ross MacDonald. So he took what he knew from the Watergate case and wrote an outline for a novel about a lawyer who investigates a possible stock scam involving a friend of the president. That novel was The Lasko Tangent (1979), and it became a minor best-seller.

Patterson wrote two more novels that were also successful, but his fourth novel didn't do as well, and he decided he wasn't sure he should be a writer after all. He went back to his law practice to make a living, but he kept thinking about writing, and finally after eight years of producing nothing, he took a three month vacation and cranked out more than 500 pages of a novel about a TV journalist accused of murdering a famous author. The result was his novel Degree of Guilt (1993), which became a huge best-seller.

Since then, most of his novels have been about the world of Washington, D.C. When asked why he likes to write so much about politicians and media personalities, Patterson said, "There is a school of fiction ... the premise of which is a guy gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, decides whether to leave his apartment and by the end of the story decides not to. That is not the kind of person or the kind of fiction that engages me." His most recent novel is Exile, which just came out last month.

It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, (books by this author) born in Rockland, Maine (1892). Her mother couldn't afford to send her to college, but when she was 19, she entered a poem called "Renascence" in a poetry contest hoping to win the large cash prize. One of the judges was so impressed that he started a correspondence with her, fell in love, and nearly divorced his wife. Her poem didn't win first prize, but when she recited it at a public reading in Camden, Maine, a woman in the audience offered to pay for her to go to Vassar College, and Millay accepted.

At Vassar, she was the most notorious girl on campus, famous for both her poetry and her habit of breaking rules. Vassar's president, Henry Noble McCracken, once wrote to her, "You couldn't break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don't want a banished Shelley on my doorstep." She wrote back, "Well, on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole."

She had red hair and green eyes and people had often stopped and stared at her on the street, she was so beautiful. When Millay moved to Greenwich Village after college, most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her. The critic Edmund Wilson was one of those smitten men.

Millay wrote poems about bohemian parties and free love in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and she became one of the icons of the Jazz Age. When she gave readings of her poetry, she drew huge crowds of adoring fans, more like a rock star than a poet. One man who saw Millay perform her own work said, "The slender red-haired, gold-eyed Vincent Millay, dressed in a black-trimmed gown of purple silk, was now reading from a tooled leather portfolio, now reciting without aid of book or print, despite her broom-splint legs and muscles twitching in her throat and in her thin arms, in a voice that enchanted."

It's the birthday of poet Gerald Stern, (books by this author) born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1925). He began to write poetry in college but he didn't know any other poets, so he didn't try very hard to get anything published. He later said, "I was too harsh a critic of my own work, and I couldn't focus my thoughts and feelings in a way that would satisfy me."

He worked a series of teaching jobs but began to suffer from depression. Then, one day, in his late 30s, after a doctor's appointment, he suddenly realized that his life was almost half over, and he began to write poems furiously. He published his first poetry collection, The Pineys, in 1971, and has gone on to write many more collections, including Leaving Another Kingdom (1990), Bread Without Sugar (1992), and Odd Mercy (1995).

Poem: "The Invention of Fractions" by Jessica Goodfellow, from A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland. © Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Invention of Fractions

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else
is the work of man.
                                                 —Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we've already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul's ten thousand and David's ten thousand.
'Be of one heart and one mind' —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the journalist and novelist William Shirer, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1904). He graduated from college in the spring of 1925, and he had a steady job waiting for him the following autumn, so he decided to spend his last summer before becoming a real adult traveling in Paris. Once he got there, he found that he loved European life. He became friends with writers and artists and began to think that he didn't want to go home. He tried to get a job with one of the local newspapers, but nobody would take him. So at the end of two months, he went to his own going-away party, assuming he'd be leaving the following morning for America. That following morning, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. His first assignment was to cover the Charles Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic.

He had originally hoped that journalism would help support him while he wrote novels, but after meeting and becoming friends with several novelists, he decided that he was not going to be a Fitzgerald or a Hemingway or a Dos Passos. And so he began to take his career as a journalist more seriously.

Shirer moved to Berlin in 1934 to serve as the foreign correspondent for The New York Herald, and he covered the rise of Nazism. When his job was eliminated, Edward R. Murrow hired him as the radio correspondent for CBS. He reported from Prague and Vienna on the growing preparations for war.

Because he couldn't say everything he wanted to say in his radio broadcasts, Shirer kept a diary of all the little details he was noticing about the changes in ordinary life under the Nazis. He had to smuggle the book out of Germany when he learned that the Gestapo were planning to arrest him for espionage. That book, Berlin Diary (1941), became one of the first accounts of life in Germany under the Nazis to be published, and it was a big best-seller.

After the war, Shirer was labeled a communist sympathizer, and couldn't find work as a journalist. In desperation to make a living, he began writing the book that became The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1961). It was the first historical overview of Nazi Germany for general readers, and it was published at a time when Americans who had lived through the war were ready to look back on what had happened. It became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the decade.

It's the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys, (books by this author) born in London (1633). Pepys began his diary in 1659, and he would keep it for almost 10 years. It wasn't uncommon at the time for well-educated men to keep a journal, but most of these men wrote dry descriptions of their travels, politics, and public affairs. As far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn't start incorporating into their work for more than 200 years. He also wrote about historical events like the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, and the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667.

Pepys quit writing the diary in 1669, because his eyesight was failing and he was worried that he was going to go blind. He bound it in six volumes and gave it to a college in Cambridge. The first edition of it was published in 1825, and it kept being republished again and again, with more and more of the explicit entries included. The complete diary was finally published in 1970.

Poem: "Ode to Hardware Stores" by Barbara Hamby, from Babel. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

Ode to Hardware Stores

Where have all the hardware stores gone — dusty, sixty-watt
     warrens with the wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red? Where are Eppes, Terry Rossa
     Yon's, Flint — low buildings on South Monroe,
Eight Avenue, Gaines Street with their scent of paint thinner,
     pesticides, plastic hoses coiled like serpents
in a garden paradisal with screws in buckets or bins
     against a brick wall with hand-lettered signs
in ball-point pen — Carriage screws, two dozen for fifty cents —
     long vicious dry-wall screws, thick wood screws
like peasants digging potatoes in fields, thin elegant trim
     screws— New York dames at a backwoods hick
Sunday School picnic. O universal clevis pins, seven holes
     in the shank, like the seven deadly sins.
Where are the men — Mr. Franks, Mr. Piggot, Tyrone, Hank,
     Ralph — sunburnt with stomachs and no asses,
men who knew the mythology of nails, Zeuses enthroned
     on an Olympus of weak coffee, bad haircuts,
and tin cans of galvanized casting nails, sinker nails, brads,
     20-penny common nails, duplex head nails, flooring nails
like railroad spikes, finish nails, fence staples, cotter pins,
     roofing nails — flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi
     or make eye contact. What a career in hardware
he could have had, his blue-black hair slicked back with brilliantine,
     rolling a toothpick between his teeth while sorting
screw eyes and carpet tacks. Where are the hardware stores,
     open Monday through Friday, Saturday till two?
No night hours here, like physicists their universe mathematical
     and pure in its way: dinner at six, Rawhide at eight,
lights out at ten, kiss in the dark, up at five for the subatomic world
     of toggle bolts, cap screws, hinch-pin clips, split-lock
washers. And the tools — saws, rakes, wrenches, rachets, drills,
     chisels, and hose heads, hose couplings, sandpaper
(garnet, production, wet or dry), hinges, wire nails, caulk, nuts,
     lag screws, pulleys, vise grips, hexbolts, fender washers
all in a primordial stew of laconic talk about football, baseball,
     who'll start for the Dodgers, St. Louis, the Phillies,
the Cubs? Walk around the block today and see their ghosts:
     abandoned lots, graffitti'd windows, and tacked
to backroom walls, pin-up calendars almost decorous
     in our porn-riddled galaxy of Walmarts, Seven-Elevens,
stripmalls like strip mines or a carrion bird's curved beak
     gobbling farms, meadows, wildflowers, drowsy afternoons
of nothing to do but watch dust motes dance through a streak
     of sunlight in a darkened room. If there's a second coming,
I want angels called Lem, Nelson, Rodney, and Cletis gathered
     around a bin of nails, their silence like hosannahs,
hallelujahs, amens swelling from cinderblock cathedrals
     drowning our cries of Bigger, faster, more, more, more.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Wilhelm Karl Grimm, (books by this author) born in Hanau, Germany (1786). Along with his older brother, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm helped publish the collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812), the first collection of folklore in modern publishing history.

Of the two brothers, Wilhelm was more romantic and literary, but less intellectually ambitious. Jacob did most of the theorizing about folklore, and Wilhelm did most of the actual footwork. It was Wilhelm who realized that the best people to help him gather folk stories were women, because it was women who did most of the storytelling in the first place.

So Wilhelm called upon the six daughters of his next-door neighbor to help in the project. The best collector was a pretty young woman named Dortchen Wild. She and Wilhelm would meet together on a regular basis, often in a nice spot in the countryside, and she would tell him the stories she'd heard from memory while he wrote them down. They later got married. Among the stories she contributed to the final collection were "The Six Swans" and "Hansel and Gretel."

It was on this day in 1988 that the Supreme Court issued an important decision in the history of satire in the case of Hustler Magazine v. Jerry Falwell. The court ruled that satire of a public figure — no matter how vulgar, insulting, or even false — is protected by the First Amendment.

Poem: "The Investigation" by Jeffrey Harrison, from Incomplete Knowledge: Poems. © Four Way Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Investigation

There were some things I would never know —
I realized that, but I wanted to understand
as much as I could before I let it go.

I couldn't stop making phone calls to Chicago —
to his doctor, his insurance agent, his doorman;
the coroner, who told me more than I wanted to know;

to his psychiatrist, who made a show
of sympathy and dismissed out of hand
my speculations — but I wouldn't let them go.

The detective sounded weary, which was no
surprise: it was 2 a.m. He patiently explained
what he could, then sighed, "You'll never really know."

I weighed the possibilities, made lists, wrote memos
to myself: was it spontaneous or planned —
and for how long? I couldn't let it go.

I kept calling my brother and sister to let them know
what I had figured out. Each time they listened
but then told me what I had always known:
we would never understand. I had to let it go.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the first recording star in the history of music, Enrico Caruso, born in Naples (1873). He arrived at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1903, and he was an enormous hit. Just three months after his debut there, he made some recordings for the Victor Company. At the time, the gramophone was just a curiosity, but Caruso had become a household name, and people all over the country wanted to hear his voice. His records inspired thousands of people to buy their first gramophones, and his were the first records ever to sell more than a million copies. It can therefore be argued that Caruso's voice was responsible for the beginning of the musical recording industry.

Caruso went on to perform 17 consecutive seasons at the Met, giving a total of 626 performances in New York, in 37 different operas. He gave his final performance at the Met on December 11, 1920.

It's the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England (1917). As a young man, he got frustrated by the literary scene in Great Britain, so he decided to give up writing, leave England, and take a teaching position in Malaya. But it turned out that living abroad inspired Burgess's writing more than ever. It was there that he published his first three novels, Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East (1959).

But none of Burgess's early novels was particularly successful. Then, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches. He went to see a doctor and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live.

He returned home to England, but instead of feeling miserable, he had a new sense of purpose. He later wrote: "I had been granted something I had never had before: a whole year to live. I would not be run over by a bus tomorrow, nor knifed on the Brighton racetrack. I would not choke on a bone. If I fell in the wintry sea, I would not drown. I had a whole year, a long time. In that year I had to earn for my prospective widow. ... I would have to turn myself into a professional writer."

Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last. And it turned out that the diagnosis was incorrect. He lived for many more years, and in 1962 he published the book for which he's now best known, A Clockwork Orange.

It's the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans, and might have spent his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter. He began taking some evening art classes, and it was there that he met a man named Claude Monet, and they began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases, where they were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature. Since there was no time to sketch out their pictures, they painted directly on the canvas. The result was that their paintings weren't as realistic as previous works. They looked like somewhat blurry memories of the scene rather than the scene itself.

The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. Renoir was one of the first of the painters to get some respect, in part because he preferred painting people to landscapes. He got orders for portraits, which helped him make a living. Renoir ultimately gave up some of the techniques of the Impressionists. His paintings became more solid and less blurry in their effects, and he started using black paint again, which the Impressionists had given up.

In the last period of his life, he began to suffer from rheumatism, which ultimately confined him to a wheel chair. But he never stopped painting. Even after he lost the ability to move his fingers, he just bound the paintbrush to his hands. His late paintings all consist of the people and things around him: portraits of his wife, his children, his maid, and still life paintings of the flowers and fruit from his own garden.