Wednesday

Feb. 2, 2000

The Woman With Five Hearts

by Stephen Dunn

Broadcast Date: WEDNESDAY: February 2, 2000

Poem: "The Woman With Five Hearts" by Stephen Dunn from his New and Selected Poems published by W. W. Norton and Company.

Today is GROUNDHOG DAY.

It's the birthday of poet and children's author JUDITH VIORST, born in Newark, New Jersey (1931). She's the author of It's Hard to Be Hip over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life; How Did I Get to Be Forty and Other Atrocities, and The Tenth Good Thing about Barney (1971). She said, "A normal adolescent isn't a normal adolescent if he acts normal. But it is possible to find delight in just hanging around the kitchen while one kid is making a chicken sandwich and the other is tossing a napkin into the trash and missing. Family life is better than most any other thing going on in the universe."

It's the birthday of poet and novelist JAMES DICKEY, born in Atlanta (1923). He was a fighter pilot in World War Two and the Korean War, then wrote ads for Coca-Cola, fertilizer, and potato chip companies before chucking it all to write poetry full-time (1960). He's best remembered for his novel Deliverance (1970), about four Atlanta businessmen canoeing through the north-Georgia woods.

It's the birthday of novelist AYN [ine] RAND, born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). She's best known for Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943), novels based on the idea that selfishness is good. She said "Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?" Rand called herself "a radical for capitalism" and for a brooch wore a gold dollar sign.

It's the birthday of JAMES JOYCE, born in Dublin (1882). He left Ireland for Paris when he was 21 and started work on his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). It took him 10 years to finish, then he went right on to the novel Ulysses , which took him seven years to write, and was promptly banned as obscene in Britain and the United States, but is now at the head of Modern Library's list of 100 Greatest Books of the 20th century. He said, "If I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

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

 

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