Wednesday

Jun. 23, 1999

Living

by Denise Levertov

Broadcast Date: WEDNESDAY: June 23, 1999

Poem & Quotation: "Living," by Denise Levertov, from Denise Levertov: Poems 1960-1967 (New Directions, 1968). Quotation from Czeslaw Milosz.

It's the birthday in Pittsburgh, 1961, of writer DAVID LEAVITT, best known for his short story collection Family Dancing, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel The Lost Language of Cranes came out in 1986.

It's the birthday in Cincinnati, 1943, of the director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, JAMES LEVINE. After an apprenticeship with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, he debuted at the Met in 1971 conducting Tosca. He was 28 years old.

It's the birthday in Arroyo Grande, California, 1941, of ROBERT HUNTER, author of the poetry collections Night Cadre and Sentinel, translator of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's work, and the lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

It's poet ROBERT SWARD's birthday, born in Chicago, 1933. The latest collection of his poems, called Four Incarnations, came out in 1991.

It's the birthday in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1929, of MICHAEL SHAARA, author of The Killer Angels, a fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. He died in 1988 of a heart attack and his children, while settling his estate, found his last manuscript which they published posthumously: For the Love of the Game, about an aging baseball pitcher whose life is falling apart but who pitches one perfect game.

It's the birthday in Middlesex, England, 1915, of JOHN PREBBLE. The British know him as the author of The Massacre at Glencoe, Culloden, and The Darien Disaster #151; all about wars in the Scottish highlands. Here in the States he won awards for Spanish Stirrup, and The Buffalo Soldiers, Westerns that came out in the 1950s. His latest book, the memoir Landscapes and Memories, was published in 1993.

It's the birthday in London, 1912, of ALAN MATHISON TURING, the mathematician who pioneered computer theory. In 1937, when he was 25 years old and a student at King's College, Cambridge, he wrote a paper called "On Computable Numbers."

It was on this day in 1845, after ten years as an independent republic, that TEXAS VOTED FOR ANNEXATION BY THE UNITED STATES.

It was on this day in 1683 that WILLIAM PENN SIGNED A TREATY WITH THE LENNI LENAPE INDIANS. Two years earlier King Charles II had given Penn a huge tract of land in the New World, which he named Pennsylvania, after his father.

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

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
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  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
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