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Poem: "A Primer of the Daily Round" by Howard Nemerov, from New and Selected Poems. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
A Primer of the Daily Round
A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives into town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Larry Brown (books by this author), born in Oxford, Mississippi (1951). He liked school when he was a kid, but read mostly hunting stories and fishing stories and cowboy stories—nothing that qualified as literature. He failed English his senior year in high school.
He enlisted in the Marines, was stationed at a barracks in Philadelphia. He spent a lot of time listening to the stories of veterans who'd come back from Vietnam. He went back to Mississippi and joined the Oxford Fire Department in 1973 and loved the job. It didn't pay well, though. He had been reading best-selling novels by Stephen King and Louis L'Amour and thought maybe he could do that too.
He wrote a novel about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone Park. It got turned down by everybody. So he went to the library and checked out every how-to book about writing that he could find. He started writing short stories and started reading Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Raymond Carver.
His first book of stories, Facing the Music, came out in 1988. And his first novel, Dirty Work, the year after, which was based on the stories he had heard from veterans back in the Marines. The book got great reviews. And he went on to become a renowned southern fiction writer and published three more novels before he died of a heart attack at the age of 53.
Larry Brown said, "There's no such thing as a born writer. It's a skill you've got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter." His story Falling Out of Love begins, "Sheena Baby, the one that I loved, and I were walking around. It was late one evening. All the clouds had gathered up into big marshmallows and mushrooms, and it was an evening as fine as you could ask for, except that we had two flat tires on our car some miles back down the road and didn't know where we were or who to ask. We were about ready to kill one another."
It's the birthday of the science writer Oliver Sacks (books by this author), born in London (1933). He's the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.
It's the birthday of author Dean Koontz (books by this author), born in Everett, Pennsylvania (1945). He's the author of more than 70 supernatural and science fiction thrillers, including The Bad Place and Mr. Murder. The turning point in his career was in 1969, when his wife told him that, if he wanted to try to be a writer, he could quit his job and she would support him for five years. He published 18 novels in those first five years, and his career was on its way.
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Poem: From "Trees" by W. S. Merwin, from The Compass Flower. © Macmillan Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Trees
I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Marcel Proust (books by this author), born in Paris (1871). He's the author of the great, 3,000 page autobiographical novel that we know as either Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time.
It's the birthday of the journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (books by this author), born in Chicago (1867). Dunne created a character for his column, Martin Dooley—an Irish barkeeper. Finley Peter Dunne said, "Trust everybody, but cut the cards."
It's the birthday of short story writer Alice Munro (books by this author), born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up on a farm in the poor part of town. Her father tried to make a living raising minks and foxes. She said, "We lived in this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived ... a little town where nobody was interested in writing or the world of literature." She was though, and she loved to make up stories. She said, "You were never praised for the things you could do well. You were taught to pay attention to whatever you were bad at." Every day on the way to school she told herself a new story, though she never told them to anybody else.
She ran away to go to college, University of Western Ontario, and studied journalism. She dropped out after a couple of years, got married, and had children. She became a housewife in the suburbs, a life which she did not care for. She said, "So many things were forbidden, like taking anything seriously." She was trying to write fiction, but her schedule was very tightly managed. She couldn't find time to do it, though she did try to get her kids to nap a lot.
She was in her 30s when she and her husband opened a bookstore. That, she said, made her feel as if she had a function in the real world. She locked herself in the bookstore on Sundays to write, and after nearly 20 years of struggle, she published her first collection of stories, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968.
Her marriage broke up. She took a trip back to her home town to care for her aging father. She was only going to stay for a year, but she found that the landscape she had hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world. She said, "People's lives in [my home town] were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable—deep caves paved with linoleum. It did not occur to me [as a child] that one day I would be so greedy for [my hometown] ... to want every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."
Returning to her hometown gave her the material that she needed, and she's gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since. Munro is the author of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, and many other books.
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Poem: "Cherish" by Raymond Carver, from All of Us. © Knopf. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Cherish
From the window I see her bend to the roses
holding close to the bloom so as not to
prick her fingers. With the other hand she clips, pauses and
clips, more alone in the world
than I had known. She won't
look up, not now. She's alone
with roses and with something else I can only think, not
say. I know the names of those bushes
given for our late wedding: Love, Honor, Cherish—
this last the rose she holds out to me suddenly, having
entered the house between glances. I press
my nose to it, draw the sweetness in, let it cling—scent
of promise, of treasure. My hand on her wrist to bring her close,
her eyes green as river-moss. Saying it then, against
what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurried
petal
can still find her.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom (books by this author), born in New York City (1930) to Jewish immigrants. His first language was Yiddish, and he started reading poetry in English before he'd ever heard English spoken. He didn't do well in high school but took the statewide Regents exams, got the highest score in the state, and that won him a scholarship to Cornell.
He went on to study literature at Yale in the 1950s at a time when there was a dress code. The students wore jackets and ties. Harold Bloom wore an old Russian leather coat and a pair of fisherman's trousers. He became famous at Yale for his great love of poetry. He memorized everything that he read. He could recite enormous, long poems.
As a professor at Yale and as a critic, Bloom has moved further and further away from the mainstream of literary criticism in this country. Most other critics look at literature as a product of history, politics, and society. Whereas Harold Bloom is one of the last who believes that great literature is a product of pure genius, and who believes that we should read not to learn about history or politics but to learn about the human soul.
In the last few years, he's begun writing books for general readers, believing that scholars have forgotten how to read for pleasure, and many of his recent books have become best-sellers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and How to Read and Why and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.
Today is the birthday of the man who gave us Charlotte's Web, E.B. (Elwin Brooks) White (books by this author), born in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). He was a writer for many years for the New Yorker magazine. He later moved with his wife to a farmhouse in Maine. E.B. White wrote, "Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace."
For all his love of the country, E.B. White is also the author of a classic about New York City, Here is New York, which people still read today.
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Poem: "Beans in Blossom" by John Clare. (buy now)
Beans in Blossom
The south-west wind! how pleasant in the face
It breathes! while, sauntering in a musing pace,
I roam these new ploughed fields; or by the side
Of this old wood, where happy birds abide,
And the rich blackbird, through his golden bill,
Utters wild music when the rest are still.
Luscious the scent comes of the blossomed bean,
As o'er the path in rich disorder lean
Its stalks; when bees, in busy rows and toils,
Load home luxuriantly their yellow spoils.
The herd-cows toss the molehills in their play;
And often stand the stranger's steps at bay,
Mid clover blossoms red and tawny white,
Strong scented with the summer's warm delight.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau (books by this author), who was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). We know him as the author of Walden, and the essay "Civil Disobedience." He became the first member of his family to go to college. He went to Harvard, but didn't much care for the place. He didn't much care for school teaching either. He went to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord and did odd jobs around the house and took care of the children. It was Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to write poetry and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do for the rest of his life.
He was 27 years old when he built that little cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and moved in, in an attempt, he said, to "Simplify, simplify, simplify ... to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."
It's the birthday of the man who gave us the Kodak camera, George Eastman, born in Waterville, New York. He was working at a bank when he got interested in photography around 1877. He took his first dry plate photograph the next year with the camera that he invented—a view of the building across the street from his window. He developed this little handheld camera, and he called it the Kodak because it was easy to remember, difficult to misspell, and it meant nothing, so it could only be associated with his product.
It's the birthday of a very prolific and productive lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (books and music by this author), born in New York City (1895). He wrote lyrics for Sigmund Romberg. He wrote "Old Man River" and "Can't Help Loving That Man" for Jerome Kern's Showboat in 1927, and then all of the hits that he wrote with Richard Rogers, Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.
It's the birthday of the poet Pablo Neruda (books by this author), born in Parral, Chile (1904). He was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but since his father didn't approve of him writing poetry, so he took the pen name Pablo Neruda.
It's the birthday of Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C.
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Poem: "Water-Lilies" by John Clare. (buy now)
Water-Lilies
The water-lilies on the meadow stream
Again spread out their leaves of glossy green;
And some, yet young, of a rich copper gleam,
Scarce open, in the sunny stream are seen,
Throwing a richness upon Leisure's eye,
That thither wanders in a vacant joy;
While on the sloping banks, luxuriantly,
Tending of horse and cow, the chubby boy,
In self-delighted whims, will often throw
Pebbles, to hit and splash their sunny leaves;
Yet quickly dry again, they shine and glow
Like some rich vision that his eye deceives;
Spreading above the water, day by day,
In dangerous deeps, yet out of danger's way.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet John Clare (books by this author), born in Nottinghamshire, England (1793). He may be the poorest person ever to become a major writer in English literature. His father was a peasant farmer. The family often had to live off the proceeds from a single apple tree in their yard. John Clare went to the village school between the ages of five and eleven. He learned to read and write and decided he wanted to write poetry.
He had to support himself as a farm laborer. Malnutrition had stunted his growth. He was never more than five feet tall, so he couldn't do heavy work. He mostly weeded and stacked hay bales and looked after animals. He couldn't afford to buy paper, so he made his own out of birch bark and made his own ink as well. Some of his poems were written on old envelopes.
Other romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats were writing nature poetry, but they wrote about nature as a metaphor for something, whereas John Clare always tried to write about nature as it was, the thing itself.
His first book came out in 1820. The fact that he was a peasant helped to make the book a best-seller. But within a few years there was a bank crash, and there was a recession in England. His books sold fewer and fewer copies, and he moved back to the farm.
John Clare wrote, "I live here among the ignorant like a lost man ... they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings." He began to suffer from a psychiatric disorder. His behavior grew more and more erratic. He began to see things, spirits and demons. He was committed to an asylum where he forgot who he was. At some points he thought he was Lord Byron and wrote some poems in Byron's style. He escaped from the asylum at one point but was returned and lived there for the rest of his life.
John Clare wrote about 3,500 poems of which only 400 were published in his lifetime, and his great importance as an English poet has only become clear in the last few decades.
It's the birthday of the short story writer Isaak Babel (books by this author), born in Odessa, Ukraine (1894). He was the author of Tales of Odessa. In 1939, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, and that following January, after a 20-minute trial, he was executed in Moscow.
It was Isaak Babel who said, "There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect, as a period placed at just the right moment."
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Poem: "Dandelions" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Dandelions
These golden heads, these common suns
Only less multitudinous
Than grass itself that gluts
The market of the world with green,
They shine as lovely as they're mean,
Fine as the daughters of the poor
Who go proudly in spangles of brass;
Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.
Inside a week they will be seen
Stricken and old, ghosts in the field
To be picked up at the lightest breath,
With brazen tops all shrunken in
And swollen green gone withered white.
You'll say it's nature's price for beauty
That goes cheap; that being light
Is justly what makes girls grow heavy;
And that the wind, bearing their death,
Whispers the second kingdom come.
— You'll say, the fool of piety,
By resignations hanging on
Until, still justified, you drop.
But surely the thing is sorrowful,
At evening when the light goes out
Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters,
All down the field their ghostly hair,
Dry sinners waiting in the valley
For the last word and the next life
And the liberation from the lion's mouth.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote the first big cowboy novel, Owen Wister (books by this author), born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1860). He went to Harvard, studied music in Paris, and became a lawyer in Philadelphia. He became ill and needed to rest for the summer, and went to Wyoming and became fascinated by the Old West. He used that fascination to write The Virginian, which made the cowboy into an American literary hero and set the standard for all Western novels to come. It also made famous the line, "When you call me that, smile."
It's the birthday of Isaac Bashevis Singer (books by this author), born in Leoncin, Poland (1904). His father was a sort of unofficial rabbi who counseled the people in his neighborhood, and Singer sat in the corner eavesdropping as they told his father their problems. His father was devout, but Singer's older brother was a free thinker. His father forbade him to read anything other than religious writings, but his older brother gave him a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Singer moved to New York City in 1935 and felt very homesick. He sat in cafeterias reading Yiddish newspapers and taking long walks. He got a job writing reviews for the Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish. He wrote almost no fiction at all for almost 10 years because he felt he was living in the shadow of his brother who had also moved to New York and had become a successful writer.
In 1944, his brother died of a heart attack, and though it was a terrible misfortune for Singer, it also cured his writer's block. The result was his book, The Family Moskat (1950), the story of a Jewish family in Warsaw at the turn of the century.
Isaac Bashevis Singer's work was translated into English and soon had a much larger audience in English than he had in Yiddish. The Yiddish community to which he'd belonged came to see him as a sell-out. He went on to become one of the most popular writers of the 20th Century and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.
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Poem: "At the Children's Violin Concert" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: Selected Poems of Susan Cataldo 1979–1999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
At the Children's Violin Concert
Firmly bowed
strands of horse hair
tightened or
gathered up by
a small hand to play
a piece by J.S. Bach
who drank 36 cups of coffee every day.
I like him because he was
inspired by his belief in God
& he played the organ in a church
in Leipzig & he walked on
cobblestone streets to his home
every evening where he fathered
many children & wrote music
for his wife to clean house by.
He worked hard all his life
& when he died, he left us
all the little notes he made
for himself while he was alone.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of journalist and writer Arianna Huffington (books by this author), born in Athens, Greece (1950). She went to Cambridge and moved to America in 1980. She was a conservative columnist, but over the years she's become more and more liberal. Arianna Huffington wrote, "One of the definite changes in my thinking was born of the hard reality I confronted when I discovered how much easier it was raising money for the opera and fashionable museums than for at-risk children. So I came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty will not be achieved without the raw power of government appropriations." Her book, How to Overthrow the Government, came out in 2000.
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Richard Russo (books by this author), born in Johnstown, New York (1949). He was the author of many novels about small-town life in New England, including Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls.
It's the birthday of novelist Iris Murdoch ( books by this author ), born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish parents (1919). Her novels include A Severed Head, The Sea, The Sea, and Jackson's Dilemma. She was a philosopher before she was a novelist. She wrote 26 novels over 40 years. She wrote them all in longhand, copied them out, sealed the two handwritten manuscripts in plastic bags, and carried them down to her publisher herself. She never let any editor change a word of what she had written.
It's the birthday of Clive Cussler (books by this author), born in Aurora, Illinois (1931). His novels about underwater action adventures have sold more than 120 million copies around the world. The hero is a federal agent named Dirk Pitt, the special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency who exposes government corruption and also explores for lost treasure.
It's the birthday of Ralph Hammond Innes (books by this author), born in the county of Sussex, England (1914), who wrote 35 novels, including Delta Connection, Wreckers Must Breathe, and The Doppelganger.
It's the birthday of Thomas Bulfinch (books by this author), born in Newton, Massachusetts (1796). He was famous for his books about legends and myths of other cultures—especially Greek and Roman myths—collected in 1855 in his book The Age of Fable, which became known as Bulfinch's Mythology, a basic reference work for many years.
