Tuesday
Sep. 17, 2002
Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
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Poem: "Landscape With The Fall of Icarus," by William Carlos Williams from Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II (New Directions Publishing Corp.).
Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
It's the birthday of country western singer and guitarist
Hank Williams, born in
Mount Olive West, Alabama (1923).
It's the birthday of Robert Brown Parker, born in Springfield, Massachusetts (1932). He was the author of the "Spenser" detective stories. His first novel, The Godwulf Manuscripts introduced the famous Spenser character, who is a Boston policeman turned private eye investigator after being fired for insubordination. Spenser is also a gourmet chef, and many of Parker's books include descriptions of his dishes. They include: "duck breast sliced on the diagonal and served rare, onion marmalade, brown rice, broccoli tossed with a spoonful of sesame tahini," "buffalo tenderloin marinated in red wine and garlic served with fiddle head ferns, corn pudding, and red potatoes cooked with bay leaf," and "German sausages with green apples sliced dipped in flour and fried in the sausage fat. Served with coarse rye bread and wild strawberry jam."
It's the birthday of Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, born in La Junta, Colorado (1935). In high school he was an accomplished wrestler. He was voted "most likely to succeed." During his young life he was very interested in anything to do with surrealism. He learned magic, ventriloquism, hypnosis, and eventually got into mind-altering drugs. In college, at Stanford, he participated in experiments run by the psychology department. The experiments involved taking certain drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. After the experiments, he worked at the psych ward of the Veterans Administrative Hospital, where his drug experiences caused him to hallucinate about an Indian sweeping the floors. This character ended up being central in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, about a sane man who enters a mental hospital in order to escape a prison sentence.
It's the birthday of poet William
Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. HE fell in
love with poetry when he was a boy, decided he would become a doctor so he could
earn a living. He was a writer. Went to medical school at the University of
Pennsylvania, met Ezra Pound there. Did his postgraduate work in Leipzig, Germany
and then became a pediatrician in his hometown of Rutherford. He was in practice
for over forty years; he delivered about two thousand babies. He brought a typewriter
to his office and wrote in between appointments. His patients, mostly blue-collar
workers and their wives. About his patients he said, "I lived among these
people. I knew them, and saw the essential qualities, the humor, the basic tragedy
of their lives, and the importance of it. Nobody was writing about them, anywhere,
as they ought to be written about."
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