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Poem: "The Calf-Path" by Sam Walter Foss. Public Domain
The Calf-Path
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell—wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell—wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed this zigzag calf about
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way.
And lost one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet David Lehman (books by this author), born in New York City (1948), who, for a time, tried writing a poem a day. He published them in his collections The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun.
It's the birthday of the novelist Allan Gurganus (books by this author), born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (1947). He was the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.
It's the birthday of William Styron (books by this author), born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He was a young man when he learned that a girl he had once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back home, a novel took shape in his head about a girl's suicide, which was his novel Lie Down in Darkness. It came out in 1951.
It's the birthday of the poet and playwright Ben Jonson (books by this author), born in London (1572). He once killed a man in a duel but escaped prison because he had written a play that everybody liked, Every Man in His Humour. William Shakespeare acted in it. Ben Jonson went on to write Volpone and The Alchemist and referred to his son as his "best piece of poetry."
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Poem: "Knoxville, Tennessee" by Nikki Giovanni. Used with permission of the author. (buy now)
Knoxville, Tennessee
I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Anne Frank (books by this author), born in Frankfurt, Germany (1929), who, on this day in 1942, her 13th birthday, received a diary as a birthday present. She was living with her family in Amsterdam. They'd gone there to get away from the Nazis, but the Nazis had followed them. And since 1940, Anne and her family had been living under Nazi occupation. Still her life was fairly ordinary when she got the diary in 1942, and her earliest journal entries are about her grades, her classmates, and the boys that she knew.
She didn't have any close friends at the time, so she treated her diary like a friend. She addressed it by the name of "Kitty" and said, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me." Less than one month after she wrote those words in 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anne and the Frank family went into hiding in an attic above her father's offices where they lived for the next two years.
While she was in hiding, she wrote regularly in her diary, not so much about the experience of living in secret as about the ordinary details of her life: how much she hated potatoes, how her older sister was clearly her parents' favorite, the jokes that people made in hiding, her romance with Peter, the son of the other family living in the attic, and her first kiss, after which she wrote in her diary, "My head lay on his shoulder, with his on top of mine. Oh, it was so wonderful. I could hardly talk. My pleasure was too intense; he caressed my cheek and arm, a bit clumsily, and played with my hair."
In 1944, Anne Frank heard on the radio someone saying that people should hang on to their war letters and diaries. They'd be historical documents some day. And then she started to think about the diary as a literary work and thought about turning it into a novel.
Near the end of her diary, Anne Frank grew less optimistic about the future. She wrote, "I simply can't imagine the world will ever be normal again for us. I do talk about 'after the war,' but it's as if I were talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true."
On August 4, 1944, the hiding place was raided by Nazi police. The Frank family was among the last Jews shipped out of the Netherlands to concentration camps, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen Belsen camp six weeks before it was liberated by the Allies. Her father was the only member of the family who survived. He came back to Amsterdam and found Anne's diary. He took several weeks to read it. He could only bear to read a little bit at a time. It was published in 1947. It was an immediate best-seller.
The Diary of Anne Frank has now sold more than 25 million copies. It's one of the most popular nonfiction books ever written, and it became the standard book used in schools to introduce children to the story of the Holocaust.
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Poems: "A Drinking Song" & "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by W.B. Yeats. Public Domain.
A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It is the birthday of William Butler Yeats (books by this author), born in Dublin (1865). He grew up at a time when Ireland was an English colony and most members of the Irish Protestant upper class were pro-British. The Catholic middle class was in favor of Irish independence. It didn't help them get along that Catholics were denied equal access to education and jobs and government positions.
William Butler Yeats was brought up in a Protestant family, so he should have been pro-British, but he was actually more interested in mysticism. A friend of his took him to his first séance in 1886, and during it Yeats's whole body began to shake. He felt himself thrown back against the wall. It was terrifying, but it also confirmed for him the existence of the spirit world. He became interested in the occult. His father wanted him to become a scientist, but Yeats wrote to his father in a letter, "The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
He began wandering around in an old, dark cloak, studying fairytales and mythology and Buddhism, playing the part of a mystic poet. A woman described him as wearing seedy, black clothes with a big, black bow at his throat, muttering verse to himself with a wild eye.
It all changed when he met an Irish nationalist named Maud Gonne, who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and then he became interested in Irish nationalism in order to impress her. He organized rallies for Irish independence and wrote nationalist plays and poetry.
Yeats came to believe that if he could just get in touch with the mythic history of the Irish people, he could write about something that would tie the whole country together — Protestants and Catholics.
Maud Gonne married somebody else, a soldier who was a hero of the Easter Uprising in 1916. The Irish Free State came about in 1921, and Yeats served as one of the first members of the new Irish senate.
It was William Butler Yeats who said, "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work, and if he take the second, must refuse a heavenly mansion raging in the dark."
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Poem: "Baby Girl Found" by Francette Cerulli, from The Spirits Need To Eat. © Nine-Patch Press, 1999. Reprinted with permission.
Baby Girl Found
He found her wrapped in a brown towel
Beside the highway department dumpster.
She was so cold she was blue, so new
her umbilical stump still drooped softly
from her belly like the limp stem
of some fantastic fruit.
He picked her up in his huge gloved
highway department hands and
carried her to his truck. Inside the cab
he turned on the light, peeled the damp towel
from her body and held her
under the blast of the truck heater.
Giant midwife bent over her in the frozen morning,
He watched for the smallest sign.
It was her second birth.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Flag Day, June 14, the day on which the stars and stripes became officially our national flag in 1777. No one knows for sure, but probably it was designed by Congressman Francis Hopkinson and sewn by a seamstress in Philadelphia named Betsy Ross.
It's the birthday of the man who helped us find quotations, John Bartlett (books by this author), born in Plymouth, Massachusetts (1820). His Familiar Quotations came out in 1855.
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (books by this author), born in Litchfield, Connecticut (1811). She lived for many years in Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Ohio didn't allow slavery, but Kentucky did, and so Cincinnati was a popular destination for escaped slaves. And Harriet Beecher Stowe saw many slaves rushing across the frozen river in the winter. Uncle Tom's Cabin came out in 1852.
It was on this day in 1940 that the German Army marched into Paris. The French had surrendered the city a few days earlier. There was no violence when the Nazis came in. The German soldiers marched through the Arc de Triomphe, while Parisians watched from the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. And a few weeks afterward, Hitler himself made a visit. He came to the Eiffel Tower and the Opera building and visited Napoleon's tomb. Hitler said, in 1941, "I'm getting ready to flatten Leningrad and Moscow without losing any peace of mind, but it would have pained me greatly if I'd had to destroy Paris."
It's the birthday of the travel writer Jonathon Raban (books by this author), born in Norfolk, England (1942), who grew up reading Huckleberry Finn, and in 1979 he flew into St. Paul, Minnesota, bought a little boat, set off down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and wrote about it in his first big travel book, Old Glory: An American Voyage. It came out in 1981.
And it was on this day in 1951 that the world's first commercially produced electronic digital computer was unveiled, known as the UNIVAC. It weighed eight tons, used 5,000 vacuum tubes and cost a quarter-million dollars. But it could perform a thousand calculations per second, the fastest rate in the world at the time. The first one was bought by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The president of IBM thought that computers were far too complex and would never sell, but with the invention of the microchip in 1971, all the processing power of those thousands of vacuum tubes could be crammed into a tiny space.
In 1975, an engineer named Ed Roberts was one of the first people to try to market a computer to ordinary people. It didn't sell very well. You had to know how to turn hundreds of little switches. But it was an inspiration to Stephen Wozniak – who went on to found Apple – and also to a young Harvard student named Bill Gates.
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Poem: : "The County Fair" by Ron Padgett, from You Never Know. © Coffee House Press, 2002. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
The County Fair
The Holstein looks at us with big eyes but with no expression
in them. What images are flashing in its brain? The white goat
walks over as if to ask a question, but it has no question to ask:
there is no question mark in the goat world. The rabbit's pink
eyes dilate when a hand draws near, but it does not move, and
like a horseshoe, it says nothing. The two holes in the top of the
goose's beak are in search of something to get huffy about: the
poor goose is angry and without real nostrils. The black and
white feathers exploding from the head of the rooster show that
he is ready for war against the Infidel. The piglet walks and
trots around with white eyebrows. He likes the Infidel.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Charles Dickens's famous illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne (books by this author), better known as "Phiz," born in Lambeth, near London (1815), who illustrated David Copperfield, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities.
It's the birthday of Saul Steinberg (books by this author), born in a little village near Bucharest, Romania, in 1914. He came to this country and became a longtime artist at The New Yorker magazine. He painted many covers, including his most famous, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," which shows a New Yorker's view of the country with New York City huge in the foreground and the rest of the country off in the distance, little bumps of details.
Saul Steinberg said of his childhood, "I got high on elementary things like the luminosity of the day and the smell of everything – mud, earth, humidity, the delicious smells of cellars and mold, grocers' shops."
His mother was a cake decorator. His father designed specialty cardboard boxes. As a boy, Steinberg liked to rummage through his father's supply of paper and rubber stamps and colored cardboard and blocks of type. He also loved to read, and he later said that he would have become a writer if he had inherited a better language, but instead he learned to draw.
He studied architecture in Italy, got a degree, and at the same time started contributing satirical drawings to humor magazines. He got out of Europe just in time – 1941– and he sailed for America from Portugal, carrying a passport that he had doctored with his own rubber stamps. Through the intervention of the editor of The New Yorker, he was allowed to enter the United States in 1942. He enlisted in the Navy, went off to fight in World War II, and then came back to draw cartoons and covers for The New Yorker magazine. He parodied most of the popular styles of painting of the 20th Century, cubism and abstract expressionism, even children's art. His work was always playful and funny. He put in Easter bunnies and the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse. He once drew Uncle Sam as a bullfighter, fighting a turkey instead of a bull. He loved to make elaborate counterfeit documents – currency, passports, licenses, and especially diplomas.
It was Saul Steinberg who said, "The life of the creative man is led directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."
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Poem: "Nurture" by Maxine W. Kumin, from Selected Poems 1960-1990. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1989. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Nurture
From a documentary on marsupials I learn
that a pillowcase makes a fine
substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.
I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.
They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,
from an overabundance of maternal genes.
Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,
lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.
Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.
And had there been a wild child–
filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called
in one nineteenth-century account–
a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,
given my fireside inked with paw prints,
there would have been room.
Think of the language we two, same and not-same,
might have constructed from sign,
scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:
Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Bloomsday, the day on which the action in James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place in 1904. Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, does not have much work to do, spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing some errands, leaves his house on Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn't know very well. In the afternoon, he has a cheese sandwich, feeds the gulls in the river, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son. He muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is going to cheat on him that afternoon at his house. In the evening, he wanders around the red-light district of Dublin and meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus, who is drunk. And so Leopold Bloom takes him home with him and offers to let him spend the night. And they stand outside, looking at the stars for a while. And then Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife.
It's the birthday of Joyce Carol Oates (books by this author), born in Lockport, New York (1938), one of the most prolific writers anywhere, having published almost 100 books in 40 years, novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays. She was born into a hardworking, rural family. Her parents were poor and uneducated, but both of them had artistic leanings. Her father came home from a tool-and-die shop and played piano in the evenings.
She went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, and when she was eight, her grandmother gave her a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which she loved so much, she memorized the whole book word for word. She went to a good high school in a suburb of Buffalo and became the first member of her family to get a high school diploma.
She won a National Book Award in 1970 for her novel Them. Since then, many of her novels have been best sellers, including Bellefleur (1980) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996).
Joyce Carol Oates said, "We [humans] are the species that clamors to be lied to."
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Poem: "One Day A Woman" by Miller Williams, from Imperfect Love. © Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
One Day A Woman
One day a woman picking peaches in Georgia
lost her hold on the earth and began to rise.
She grabbed limbs but leaves stripped off in her hands.
Some children saw her before she disappeared
into the white cloud, her limbs thrashing.
The children were disbelieved. The disappearance
was filed away with those of other women
who fell into bad hands and were soon forgotten.
Six months later a half-naked man in Kansas
working on the roof of the Methodist Church
was seen by half a dozen well-known
and highly respected citizens to move
directly upward, his tarbrush waving,
until he shrank away to a point and vanished.
Nobody who knew about the first event
knew of the second, so no connection was made.
The tarbrush fell to earth somewhere in Missouri
unnoticed among a herd of Guernsey cows.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson (books by this author), born in Jacksonville (1871), who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
It's the birthday of novelist John Hersey (books by this author), born in Tianjin, China, in 1914.
It's the birthday of the poet Ron Padgett (books by this author), born in Tulsa in 1942.
It's the birthday of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (books by this author), born in Lincolnshire, England (1703), who was saved from a fire when he was five years old, and came to believe that God had saved him for a purpose. He became an Anglican priest, and later joined a religious study group. The group was nicknamed the Methodists because of their emphasis on methodical rules of living. They prayed, and they fasted according to strict schedules.
In 1735, John Wesley came to this country. He was the priest in a settlement in Georgia, but they didn't care for his preaching and they ran him out of town. He went back to England and traveled around the backcountry on horseback, preaching to all the ordinary people he came across, through England and Scotland and Ireland, preaching 42,000 sermons along the way.
He was always a member of the Anglican Church. His only idea was to create small groups within the Anglican Church to meet for prayer and Bible study. But when Methodist missionaries traveled to the United States, their ideas took hold. Their followers considered themselves members of a new church and they appointed their own bishops and ministers and created their own laws, separate from those of the Church of England.
The Methodist Church became the church of many colonists on the frontier, and by 1850, the Methodist Church was the biggest denomination in the United States. A convert needed only to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and was everyone's personal savior. Methodists believe that all other questions about Christianity were up for discussion.
Methodists established more colleges, more hospitals, childcare facilities, retirement homes – more than any other Protestant denomination. William Booth, who founded the Salvation Army, was a Methodist. Methodists started Goodwill Industries in 1902. They started the Temperance movement. A Methodist founded the YMCA. They were a big part of the abolitionist movement and the anti-segregation movement.
Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, and President George W. Bush were all Methodists, as well as Barry Goldwater, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and Hillary Clinton.
