Tuesday
Jun. 27, 2000
Animals
Poem: "Animals" by Frank O'Hara, from The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara (Random House).
It's the birthday of novelist Alice McDermott, born in Brooklyn, New York, (1953) author of A Bigamist's Daughter (1982), That Night (1987), At Weddings and Wakes (1991), and other novels and stories. She says, "When I'm not writingand I have considered many times trying something elseI can't make sense out of anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
It's the birthday of science fiction writer James P(atrick) Hogan, born in London, England (1941). By 1979 he had written four novels, and would average a science-fiction novel a year thereafter, including Giants' Star (1981) and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978).
It's the birthday of poet Lucille (Thelma) Clifton, born in Depew, New York (1936). Her first volume of poetry, Good Times, was cited by the New York Times as one of 1969's ten best books.
It's the birthday of poet, playwright and art critic Frank O'Hara, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1926). From age 25 until his death a month after he turned 40, he lived in New York City, working for Art News and the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a curator for painting and sculpture exhibitions. He was killed by a car on Fire Island. His collections include A City Winter and Other Poems (1952) and Meditations In An Emergency (1956). He said, "What is happening to me goes into my poems. I don't think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them."
It's the birthday of Richard Bissell, born in Dubuque, Iowa (1913). His father owned a pajama factory, and he wrote about it in his novel 7 1/2 Cents (1953). With George Abbott he turned the novel into the Broadway musical The Pajama Game (1954), and won a Tony award. Bissell also wrote several novels about his experiences as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and other American waterways: A Stretch On The River (1950), The Monongahela (1952), and High Water (1954). He said, "After you have been on the river long enough to get the disease, everything looks different: Chicago is a town 200 miles east of the river. South Dakota is someplace west of Minneiska and of no interest as it hasn't even a mile of Mississippi River in the whole state. Lake Superior is an inferior watery deposit of some kind, northeast from Grey Cloud Landing. And as for St. Louis, Quincy, Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, Dubuque, La Crosse, Winonawhat are they? River towns, of course. Not townsriver towns. And what a difference that makes."
It's the birthday of poet Vernon P. Watkins, born in Maesteg, Glamorgan, Wales (1906). He was the author of many collections of poems, and, for many years, a close friend of Dylan Thomas.
On this day in 1847, telegraph wires were strung between New York and Boston, enabling citizens of those two cities, for the first time, to communicate electronically with one another, using short and long signals tapped out over the wire.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®