Tuesday

Apr. 5, 2005

How It Is with Family

by William Stafford

In Second Grade Miss Lee I Promised Never To Forget You And I Never Did

by Alberto Rios

TUESDAY, 5 APRIL, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poems: "In Second Grade Miss Lee I Promised Never To Forget You And I Never Did," by Alberto Rios from The Smallest Muscle in The Human Body (Copper Canyon Press), and "How It Is with Family," by William Stafford from The Way It Is (Graywolf Press).

In Second Grade Miss Lee I Promised Never To Forget You And I Never Did

In a letting-go moment
Miss Lee the Teacher
Who was not married
And who the next year was not at school,
Said to us, her second grade,
French lovers in the morning
Keep an apple next to the bed,
Each taking a bite
On first waking, to take away
The blackish breath of the night,
You know the kind.
A bite and then kissing,
And kissing like that was better.

I saw her once more
When she came to sell encyclopedias.
I was always her favorite -
The erasers, and the way she looked at me.
I promised, but not to her face,
Never to forget
The story of the apples.
Miss Lee all blond and thin,
Like a real movie star
If she would have just combed herself more.
Miss Lee, I promised,
I would keep apples
For you.


How It Is with Family

Let's assume you have neglected to write
a brother or a sister. The closeness you had for years
is gone. But now there's a need-let's assume
it's about money or something. You still know
them so well you feel right about it. You begin,
and even if they don't respond, your words and the whole
idea go along as part of the world: you don't have to
be correct. You say, "It's Bob," "It's Peg," "I'm just
writing them." Let's assume someone blames
you-the reaching out as if no time had passed.
You're surprised: there's a part of the way things are
that calculating people can't know. You don't
waste much time following out that strangeness, you
just write, "Bob," or "Peg," "It's me-send the money."


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Joseph Rykwert, born in Warsaw (1926). He was trained as an architect and wrote mostly about architecture, but he also published several biographies and a couple of volumes of poetry. One of his books, The Seduction of Place, is a study of modern cities.


It's the birthday of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, born in New York City (1908). Together with her brother Frank, she wrote Cheaper by the Dozen, a memoir of life with her eccentric, time-obsessed father.


On this day in 1887, teacher Annie Sullivan taught her blind and deaf student Helen Keller that the spelled-out letters "W-A-T-E-R" meant the liquid that flowed out of the pump.


It's the birthday of the poet Charles Algernon Swinburne, born in London (1837). He wrote finely crafted poetry about daring subjects; his collection Poems and Ballads, published in 1866, contained poems about sadism and vampires. Two weeks after the first printing, when outraged reviews began to appear, the publisher withdrew all copies from sale and said they intended to sell them as scrap paper. Swinburne found another publisher, who gathered up all the scrapped copies, pasted in his own title page, and kept the book in print for another seven years.


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