Wednesday

Apr. 16, 2003

For a Sleepless Child

by Peter Schmitt

WEDNESDAY, 16 APRIL 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "For a Sleepless Child," by Peter Schmitt from Country Airport (Copper Beech Press).

For a Sleepless Child

If your room is ever too dark,
small one, look out through your window
up at the moon, that little bulb
left on for you in the sky's black wall.
It will still be there come morning,
burning in a bright room of blue.

And if your room, restless one,
is much too still, listen to the clatter
of the freight, rattling past trestles
on the cool night breeze. Then follow
the moon to the side of the tracks,
where the train is a long, slow dream

you can jump on. An open car
is waiting for you -- one step up --
you're on! Now watch the dark towns, the lights
deep in the porches, and lie down
in the soft straw, and sleep till morning,
when the train chugs into the station,

noisy with birds and wires overhead.

 

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of British writer Kingsley Amis, born in London, England (1922). He went off to Oxford, where he met the poet, Philip Larkin, who became his lifelong friend. Amis was a poet as well, but he's best known for his satiric novels. His first, Lucky Jim (1954), is about Jim Dixon, a young university instructor who bumbles his way through a thankless job. The novel's outspoken irreverence for the British class system made Amis one of Britain's "Angry Young Men." He went on to write more than 40 books, including I Like It Here (1958), One Fat Englishman (1963), and The Old Devils (1986). Amis said, "I dislike men and women when they are cold-hearted…, unpleasant to those who can't hit back…, unable to allow others to finish a sentence, stingy, disinclined to listen to reason and fact, bad hosts, bad guests, affected, racialist, intolerant of homosexuality, anti-British, members of the New Left, passively boring." His son, Martin Amis, is also a well-known novelist.

It's the birthday of aviator Wilbur Wright, born near Millville, Indiana (1867). His brother was Orville Wright. They lived in Dayton, Ohio; they were in the bicycle business and set out to make an airplane. In 1899, Wilbur wrote to the U.S. Weather Bureau to get a list of the windiest places in America. Number six was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and that's where he made the first sustained flight of a self-propelled plane, on December 17, 1903. On a sandy beach in high winds he flew 852 feet in 59 seconds. There were no reporters at the test flight -- the audience was five men, two boys, and a dog.

It's the birthday of Irish playwright John Millington Synge, born in Rathfarnham, near Dublin (1871). He met William Butler Yeats in Paris in 1896; Yeats encouraged him to go to the Aran Islands, off the western coast of Ireland, a place where local customs and the Irish language were untouched by British rule. For four years Synge spent summers there, and the islanders' stories inspired his best work, the plays The Riders to the Sea (1902), In the Shadow of the Glen (1902), and The Playboy of the Western World (1907).


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