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Poem: "Leaving Kansas City" by George Bradley, from Terms to Be Met. © Yale University Press, 1986. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Leaving Kansas City

Kansas City depends a lot on the way
You look at it. If you approach from the West,
It takes on a certain weary beauty:
Misguided, uninspired, familiar.
But driving through from the East,
It's just another group of grubby people
After you thought you'd passed all that.

Lying partly on ground that considered
Being a bluff, and partly on the plain,
It's a city where different states are possible
For people who don't often get that kind of choice.
In the middle, running nowhere from nowhere,
Is the Missouri, a river that moves off
Like a lake that got a little restless.
There are a few office buildings, from the late
Thirties, which is when the government stopped
Giving them away, and when folks here stopped
Worrying about keeping up with the times.
The city pumps out smog, absentmindedly,
Because that is what big cities do.

You don't know you loved it till you left it;
From now on there isn't much of anything:
Several towns like Abilene, which mean a lot
In the movies, and one or two ghost towns,
If you want to be where other people
Decided not to be. Steadily, inexorably,
The desolation opens out in front of you...
There is some satisfaction in realizing
That it's just as bad as you heard it was.
The sun burns everything jackrabbit brown,
And nothing grows high enough to be noticed.
Infrequently, and in questionable taste,

There are garish green spots of irrigation
Where someone just gave it up and stayed.
Before long you have travelled to the point
Where it would be pointless to turn back.

The next point of reference is twenty miles off,
An ill-defined part of the horizon,
A slight rise like the one twenty miles back.

You find so much ground to pass over
That covering it quickly isn't much help.
On the only radio station, a voice explains,
In an accent you wouldn't have thought possible,
The most practical way of doing something
It would never have occurred to you to do.
The voice is distant and doesn't seem aimed at you.

By now you've lost track of precisely
What you had in mind. You move on because
For some reason you have come here to do that,
Although what you are doing is completely
Unremarkable. You wouldn't know to look around,
But they take this route every day; incredibly,
People far worse equipped than yourself
Did the same thing a long time ago.
You move on because somewhere up ahead,
If you remember right, if you're going the right way,
If everything they told you was true...
There is a place called Colorado where you will,
Of course, be very glad to arrive, where the others
Wanted to go; and you will sit smug in the shade
High up on a mountain, feeling the wind
Send shivers over your body, looking back
At the great sickening swoop of the plain
And think it part of a grand design:
Satisfying, necessary, even beautiful.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of American novelist and essayist Toni Morrison, (books by this author) born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). Morrison's first big success was the 1977 novel Song of Solomon, about a rich black businessman who tries to hide his working-class background. She is perhaps known best for her intricate and moving novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and later made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. Morrison is the winner of a Nobel Prize in literature, and her new book, Mercy, is scheduled to be released later this year.

It is the birthday of writer and editor Helen Gurley Brown, (books by this author) born Helen Gurley in Green Forest, Arkansas (1922). Her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, was published in 1962. The book served as a kind of manual for the newly emergent young, career-oriented, financially independent single woman. It was due partially to the success of Sex and the Single Girl that Brown was appointed editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965. She remained in that position until her retirement in 1996 at the age of 73. Brown went on to publish several other books, including Outrageous Opinions (1966), Sex and the New Single Girl (1970), Having It All (1982) and, more recently, Dear Pussycat: Mash Notes and Missives from the Desk of Cosmopolitan's Legendary Editor (2004). Brown continues to live and work in New York City.

Poem: "Where Else Can You Go" by Jim Daniels from Blessing the House. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Where Else Can You Go

to get those wonderful T-shirts
with the pocket for your smokes
the pocket for your smokes?

In all colors all sizes
blue and dark blue and light blue
and black   and brown   green and red
light brown   dark red    all colors.

Where else can you go
for the blue light   the blue light
     the blue light specials?

You know what I'm talking about
that place    that savings place
you've been there
wandering the aisles dazed.
You have to be in the right mood
to go in. you have to be slow
and happy   and sad.

I am buying T-shirts and basketball shoes
I am buying a Hula Hoop and a can of oil
I am buying a travel alarm and an eraser
in the shape of Mr. T's head—
oh, Mr. T where are you now?

Good cheap stuff, don't you love it
cheeseballs and vitamins
a bag of cement   a light-up fish

a lightbulb with three speeds
a lightbulb that lasts forever.
It's cotton candy on my tongue—
it disappears   yet is so sweet
yet is so sickening.

Why did I come here, what did I really need?
I am lonely and it is raining.
I am tired of flossing.
I want to wander these cluttered aisles
till what brought me here
slides off into shoe boxes and dish drainers
into stale bags of caramel corn

and circus peanuts, into disposable lighters
and sugar-free gum. I want to be emptied
emptied of it all, I want to pass through
the checkout counter past the security guard
having mumbled all my sins to the plastic dolls.
I want to be purified by the smells of ammonia
and Colorforms, the taste of junk America
the sweet sweet blues—I hope I can afford it.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of author Amy Tan, (books by this author) born in 1952, in Oakland, California. Tan is best known for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club. A first-generation daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, Tan spent much of her youth trying to deny her heritage. From third grade on, she was the only Chinese-American girl in her class. Tan once went a week sleeping with a close pin on her nose, trying to make it narrower and more like her classmates' noses. She was embarrassed by her mother's broken English and by her Chinese customs.

When Tan was 15, her father and older brother both died of brain tumors, within six months of each other. Her mother became convinced spirits were cursing the family, and she moved Tan and her younger brother to Switzerland. Tan continued to rebel against her mother, who wanted her to become a part-time concert pianist and a full-time brain surgeon. Instead, Tan became an English and linguistics major, and fell in love with an Italian. She and her mother didn't speak for six months.

Tan worked as a freelance business writer, working 90-hour weeks to keep up with demand. But she eventually realized she was addicted to work she didn't like. She went into counseling and began writing short stories.

When her mother went into the hospital in 1985, Tan promised herself that if her mother survived, she would take her to China and learn her mother's stories. It was a trip that would change Tan's perspective. She said later, "When my feet touched China, I became Chinese."

Tan's short stories became The Joy Luck Club (1989), a novel about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with their American-born daughters. It was an instant best seller and was made into a film. Tan has written five novels, all best sellers, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). Her most recent novel is Saving Fish from Drowning (2005).

It's the birthday of songwriter Smokey Robinson, born William Robinson in Detroit, Michigan, 1940. His mother died when he was 10, around the same time he got his nickname, Smokey. His uncle took him to a cowboy matinee and gave William a cowboy name as a joke, "Smokey Joe."

Growing up in Detroit, Smokey was friends with Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross. While he was still in high school, he formed the singing group "The Miracles." Smokey wrote about love in Motown, hits like "My Girl," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and "You've Really Got a Hold on Me." Fellow musician Bob Dylan called Smokey "America's greatest living poet."

It's the anniversary of the first state literature censorship board in the country. On this day, 55 years ago (1953), the Georgia Assembly unanimously voted to create the Georgia Literature Commission, a censorship board that would keep "obscene" literature out of the state. The commission defined obscenity as "literature offensive to chastity or modesty." Three men made up the commission; one of them, a Baptist minister. If these three men decided something was obscene, they had the power to prevent its sale and could also recommend criminal prosecution.

The commission took offense to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, among others, but the commission found its match when it ruled Alan Marshall's Sin Whisper obscene. Its war against the book marked the beginning of the end for the commission, as its decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The board faded out of existence after 1973, a victim of budget cuts.

Poem: "Writing On Napkins At The Sunshine Club; Macon, Georgia 1970" by David Bottoms, from Armored Hearts. © Copper Canyon Press, 1995. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Writing On Napkins At The Sunshine Club; Macon, Georgia 1970

The Rock-O-La plays Country and Western
three for a quarter and nothing recorded since 1950.
A man with a heart
tattoo had a five dollar thing for Hank and Roy,
over and over the same tunes
till someone at the bar asked to hear a woman's voice.

All night long I've been sitting in this booth
watching beehives and tight skirts,
gold earrings glowing and fading in the turning light
of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign,
beer guts going purple and yellow and orange
around the Big Red Man pinball machine.

All night a platinum blonde has brought beer
to the table,
asked if I'm writing love letters on the folded napkins,
and I've been unable to answer her
or find any true words to set down on the wrinkled paper.
What needs to be written is caught already
in Hank's lonesome wail,
the tattooed arm of the man who's all quarters,
the hollow ring and click of the tilted Red Man,
even the low belch of the brunette behind the flippers.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco (1902) and best known for his black-and-white Western landscapes, many of them shot in national parks. His nose was broken in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and never was set properly. It jutted to the left. As a boy he loved to hike around Golden Gate Park and along Lobos Creek, or out to Baker Beach - a boy who didn't care so much for school, who wanted to become a concert pianist. But when he was 14, his parents gave him a Kodak Brownie camera, and that same summer he saw Yosemite for the first time. He went back every year from then until he died at 81. He joined the Sierra Club when he was 17 and became their photographer, publishing his first pictures in the 1922 Sierra Club Bulletin. He supported himself with commercial photography, but he's remembered for his images of the Sierra and Yosemite. Ansel Adams said, "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."

It's the birthday of Robert Altman, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1925), the son of an insurance broker who loved to gamble. The boy was educated by the Jesuits and at the age of 18, he joined the Army Air Corp. During the course of World War II, he flew more than 50 missions on a B-24 bomber in Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. He studied engineering after the war, then moved to California and tried acting, screenwriting, and songwriting. He went back to Kansas City, got into industrial film production, made 60 of them for various clients, including a feature on how a self-service gas station works, and a film on highway safety. He made a low-budget feature of his own called The Delinquents, which didn't do well in theaters but it brought him to the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who offered him the job of directing episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series. His breakthrough came when he was 45: the success of M.A.S.H. (1970) - a dark comedy about a medical unit in the Korean War, which had been turned down by dozens of other directors. It was a hit, and Altman's career took off with McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Nashville (1975). Altman said, "Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes."

It's the birthday of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana, born near Aberdeen, Washington (1967), the son of an auto mechanic and a cocktail waitress. His parents divorced when he was seven, and the split was traumatic. He said later that he never felt loved or secure again and that his parents' divorce fueled a lot of the anguish found in Nirvana lyrics.

The band formed in 1986, and in 1991 the group came out with its second album, Nevermind, which received rave reviews and propelled the band to stardom. The album featured the singles "Come as You Are" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The album sold over 24 million copies and Cobain became the reluctant poster child of Generation X. The success of the band intimidated him; he was uncomfortable with fame and began using heroin heavily. He committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 27. Nirvana was one of the first punk bands to be popular with a mainstream audience. Its songs bridged punk with pop and helped put Seattle on the musical map as the capital of grunge.

Poem: "109" by William Shakespeare. Public Domain.

109

O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart,
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie.
That is my home of love; if I have ranged
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good —
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of W.H. Auden, (books by this author) born in York, England (1907), the son of a physician and a nurse. He went to Christ Church, Oxford on a biology scholarship. He switched to English literature, met young poets who became his lifelong friends, and he glided into a literary career. Just before the start of World War II, he immigrated to the United States to teach English. Auden once said, "A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep." He was a New Yorker for much of his life, a kindly man with a wrinkled face. He said, "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

He published more than 400 poems, essays, plays, and opera librettos. "No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible," he said. His poem "Funeral Blues" begins:

Stop all of the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Auden once said, "Words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do." He said, "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer David Foster Wallace, (books by this author) born in Ithaca, New York (1962). The son of a philosophy professor and an English professor, Wallace double-majored in these subjects and described himself as "obscenely educated."

He is best known for his 1,079-page Infinite Jest, an ambitious, sprawling novel published in 1996. In this novel's future world, the U.S. is part of one unified state that includes Mexico and Canada, and New England has become a vast hazardous waste dump. The book, which frequently includes lengthy footnotes and invented vocabulary, juxtaposes the struggles of outpatients in a drug and alcohol treatment house against life in a posh tennis academy. In it years are referred to not by numers but by the name of their corporate sponsor: the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland.

Wallace said, "Fiction's about what it is to be a human being."

It's the birthday of Anaïs Nin, (books by this author) born in Neuilly, France (1903), the daughter of a Spanish composer and Danish-Cuban classically trained singer. She is best known for her diaries, which she began writing at age 11 and continued for more than 60 years - and which include accounts of her passionate love affair with Henry Miller in Paris. Anaïs Nin said, "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Ha Jin, (books by this author) born in Liaoning Province, China (1956). When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the arrival of the Cultural Revolution, and at 14 he joined the People's Liberation Army, after which he began to educate himself by studying the classics of Chinese literature. He learned English by listening to the radio and studied English in college, then came to the U.S. for graduate school. He intended to go back to China, but after watching on TV the massacre at Tiananmen Square, he decided that "it would be impossible to write honestly in China," and so he decided to stay in the United States. He supported himself as a busboy at a Chinese restaurant, and then his novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999. His most recent novel is A Free Life (2007).

Poem: "Lament" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reprinted with permission of Elizabeth Barnett / Millay Society.

Lament

Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Ten Things You Never Knew about George Washington, born on this day in 1732:

1. His dentures carved from a hippopotamus tusk. They were drilled with a hole to fit over Washington's one remaining tooth, and they rubbed against his natural tooth in such a way that Washington was in constant pain, and so he used an alcoholic solution infused with opium.

2. By the time he reached 30, he had survived malaria, smallpox, pleurisy, dysentery. He was fired at on two separate occasions — and in one of them, his horse was shot out from under him and four bullets punctured his coat. He also fell off a raft into an icy river and nearly drowned.

3. During the last night of his life, a doctor friend came over to perform an emergency tracheotomy on Washington. Arriving too late, the doctor tried to resurrect Washington by thawing him in cold water, then wrapping him in blankets and rubbing him in order to activate blood vessels, then opening his trachea to inflate his lungs with air, and then transfusing blood from a lamb into him.

4. He enjoyed playing cards, hunting foxes and ducks, fishing, cockfighting, horse racing, boat racing, and dancing. He bred hound dogs and gave them names like "Sweet Lips" and "Tarter."

5. His favorite foods included mashed potatoes with coconut, string beans with mushrooms, cream of peanut soup, salt cod, and pineapples.

6. He snored very loudly.

7. He did not wear a powdered wig, as was fashionable at the time. Instead, he powdered his own red-brown hair.

8. Washington had a speech impediment and was not good at spelling. He would often mix up i's and e's when speaking and in writing.

9. There are 33 counties, seven mountains, nine colleges, and 121 post offices named after Washington.

10. He delivered the shortest inaugural address ever. It was only 133 words long and took 90 seconds to deliver.

It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, (books by this author) born in Rockland, Maine (1892). Her middle name came from a hospital - St. Vincent in New York - where one of her uncles was saved from death immediately before her birth.

Her parents divorced when she was little and she and her two sisters moved constantly with their mother. Throughout their moves, her mother always carried along a trunk full of classic literature, including the works of Shakespeare and John Milton, which she often read aloud to her daughters.

Edna was in high school when she entered a poetry contest and wrote a poem - "Renascence" - which she recited at a poetry reading, and a woman in the audience was so impressed that she paid Edna's way to go to Vassar College.

She was a rebellious student at Vassar, then moved to New York City, where she lived in Greenwich Village and had numerous love affairs with both women and men. Edmund Wilson thought she was almost "supernaturally beautiful." He proposed marriage and never got over the rejection.

In her poem "First Fig" she wrote: My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

And in "Second Fig," "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!"

Poem: "Crossing Kansas by Train" by Donald Justice from Night Light. © Wesleyan University Press, 1963. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles
have been holding their
arms out
a long time now
to birds
that will not
settle there
but pass with
strange cawings
westward to
where dark trees
gather about
a waterhole. This
is Kansas. The
mountains start here
just behind
the closed eyes
of a farmer's
sons asleep
in their workclothes.

Literary and Historical Notes:

In Mainz, Germany, on this day in 1455 began the mass printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first manuscript in Europe to be printed by movable type. About 180 copies were produced, the Bible contained more than 1,280 pages, and on each page the text was laid out in two 42-line columns.

Up until that time, manuscripts were usually copied by scribes, and a handwritten Bible could take one scribe more than a year to prepare. Sometimes woodblock printing was used, but it was also an expensive and time-consuming process.

The movable type printing press featured individual blocks with a single character that could be rearranged endlessly. Passages of text would be covered in ink and used to make repeated impressions on paper. The printing press that Johann Gutenberg built was based on the design of presses for wine and paper.

It's estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after the movable type printing press was built than in the 1,000 years before it. Gutenberg's invention is credited with making the Renaissance possible: it allowed classical Greek and Latin texts to be distributed widely. It also made books affordable to lower classes.

It's the birthday of the diarist Samuel Pepys, born in London (1633), the son of a tailor and maid. He had a cousin, the Earl of Sandwich, who got him good government jobs and when he was 26 years old, he made a New Year's resolution to keep an account of the events in his life. On January 1, 1660, he made his first diary entry:

This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon. ... Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand. ... I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts; then went with my wife to my father's ...

Alongside the trivial, day-by-day details that he recorded, he also wrote about the coronation of Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666.

There was only one London newspaper at his time, and it was controlled by the government, so much of what we know about this period in history has been taken from Pepys's diary. He loved to go to plays and concerts, and he wrote about the performances that he attended.

Once, after attending a wedding, he mused in his diary, "Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them."

He wrote about going to the bathroom, having sex with his wife, and his extramarital affairs — and for content that was sexual in nature, he often replaced English words with a mixture of shorthand, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and his own secret code. It took three years for a scholar to transcribe the diaries into plain English.

Pepys quit writing the diary in 1669 — almost 10 years after starting it — because his eyesight was failing and he feared going blind.

Poem: "And One For My Dame" by Anne Sexton from Selected Poems. © Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

And One For My Dame

A born salesman,
my father made all his dough
by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.

A born talker,
he could sell one hundred wet-down bales
of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and sales

and make it pay.
At home each sentence he would utter
had first pleased the buyer who'd paid him off in butter.

Each word
had been tried over and over, at any rate,
on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.

My father hovered
over the Yorkshire pudding and the beef:
a peddler, a hawker, a merchant and an Indian chief.

Roosevelt! Willkie! and war!
How suddenly gauche I was
with my old-maid heart and my funny teenage applause.

Each night at home
my father was in love with maps
while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs.

Except when he hid
in his bedroom on a three-day drunk,
he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk,

his matched luggage
and pocketed a confirmed reservation,
his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.

I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,

the whole U.S.
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

He died on the road,
his heart pushed from neck to back,
his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac.

My husband,
as blue-eyed as a picture book, sells wool:
boxes of card waste, laps and rovings he can pull

to the thread
and say Leicester, Rambouillet, Merino,
a half-blood, it's greasy and thick, yellow as old snow.

And when you drive off, my darling,
Yes sir! Yes sir! It's one for my dame,
your sample cases branded with my father's name,

your itinerary open,
its tolls ticking and greedy,
its highways built up like new loves, raw and speedy.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist George Augustus Moore, (books by this author) born in County Mayo, Ireland (1852), who was, he later said, "the boy that no schoolmaster wanted." He read whatever novels and poetry he wanted rather than the assigned work, and in 1867 he was expelled for (as he described) "idleness and general worthlessness." He returned to Ireland.

His father wanted him to go into the military, but George wanted to be a painter. His father died, and George took his inheritance and moved to Paris to study art, and spent his time sitting in Parisian cafes reading philosophy. He had to return to Mayo, however, because his tenants had quit paying rent and the affairs of his estate were in financial disaster.

He decided to become a writer and moved to London. There he published his first novel, A Modern Lover, which was banned by libraries for its sexually explicit passages — which helped sales — and he began a lifelong crusade against censorship.

His other realist novels include A Mummer's Wife (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), and Esther Waters (1894). He wrote a memoir, Confessions of a Young Man (1888), and some books of art criticism. In 1901, Moore returned to Ireland, and along with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, he was a leader of the Irish Literary Revival.

He wrote, "A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

And, "Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end."

It's the birthday of Wilhelm Grimm, (books by this author) born in Hanau, Germany (1786), who — along with his older brother Jacob — published a collection of more than 200 fairy tales of the early 19th century. The volume gave rise to the scientific study of folklore and gave us "Cinderella," "Hansel and Gretel," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rapunzel," and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

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