Wednesday

Jun. 6, 2001

Appetite

by Maxine Kumin

WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE 2001
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Appetite," by Maxine Kumin from Selected Poems 1960-1990 (W.W. Norton and Company).

Appetite

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

It's the birthday of playwright Harvey Fierstein, born in Brooklyn in 1954. Fierstein is the author of Torch Song Trilogy, the story of a drag queen's search for lasting love.

It was on this date in 1949, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The novel is set in a future world dominated by three police states, continually at war with each other. The hero, Winston Smith, a minor official, longs for truth and decency and rebels, secretly, against the government.

On this day in 1944, the largest amphibious assault ever, D-Day, took place. The Allies crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of western Normandy. The American troops landed at 'Omaha' and 'Utah' beaches; the Canadians landed at 'Juno' beach, and the British troops landed at beaches named 'Gold' and 'Sword.' At least half of the Allied casualties came at Omaha Beach, where the Allied air and sea bombardment had been misdirected, striking far inland. 130,000 men landed by the end of D-Day; 9,000 were killed or wounded.

It's the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin, born in Philadelphia in 1925. Her poetry collection Up Country: Poems of New England, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. She began writing poetry seriously in her mid-30s. She was married, the mother of three, living in a Boston suburb, and was, in her words, "acutely miserable." She joined an adult education poetry workshop that included Anne Sexton, with whom she stayed close friends. She has also published five novels for adults and more than 20 books for children.

It's the birthday of novelist Thomas Mann, born in Lübeck, Germany in 1875. His first novel was Buddenbrooks, published in 1901. It was for The Magic Mountain in 1924 that he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He himself considered his greatest work to be his four-book cycle on Joseph (of the Bible), but this evaluation was shared by very few critics.

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

 

«

»

  • “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
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show