Saturday

Aug. 19, 2000

Deep Sorriness Atonement Song

by Glyn Maxwell

Broadcast date: SATURDAY, 19 August 2000

Poem: "Deep Sorriness Atonement Song," by Glyn Maxwell, from The Breakage (Houghton Mifflin).

It's the birthday of Orville Wright, 1871, in Dayton, Ohio, who in 1903 was the first man to fly an airplane. One day while watching some birds fly over his bicycle shop, Orville realized that planes would have to do exactly what birds did and fly on three axes: up or down, right or left, and bank to one side or another sometimes all at once. Orville and his older brother, Wilbur, tested their theories by building a wind tunnel; they also built gliders and made over a thousand flights in them on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, before attaching motors to them. Thirty-four year old Orville was the first to fly, on December 17, 1903.

It's the birthday of Ogden Nash, born Rye, New York, 1902. He went to Harvard for a year, then had to drop out to make a living. He went to work on Wall Street as a bond salesman, but he was a failure at that and tried ad writing. One summer afternoon in 1930, he jotted down a little nonsense poem and sent it to The New Yorker. The magazine bought it, and asked for more. Nash moved to Baltimore and for the next 40 years made his living entirely off of poems like: "You shake and shake the ketchup bottle, nothing comes, and then a lot'll."

It's the birthday of writer James Gould Cozzens, Chicago, 1903, best known for his 1957 legal novel, By Love Possessed.

It's writer Josephine Jacobsen's birthday, 1908, Cobourg, Ontario.

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

 

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