Saturday

Jan. 7, 2006

Complaint

by James Wright

SATURDAY, 7 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Complaint" by James Wright from James Wright: Selected Poems. © Farrar, Straus, and Girous and Wesleyen Press. Reprinted with permission.

Complaint

She's gone. She was my love, my moon or more.
She chased the chickens out and swept the floor,
Emptied the bones and nut-shells after feasts,
And smacked the kids for leaping up like beasts.
Now morbid boys have grown past awkwardness;
The girls let stitches out, dress after dress,
To free some swinging body's riding space
And form the new child's unimagined face.
Yet, while vague nephews, spitting on their curls,
Amble to pester winds and blowsy girls,
What arm will sweep the room, what hand will hold
New snow against the milk to keep it cold?
And who will dump the garbage, feed the hogs,
And pitch the chickens' heads to hungry dogs?
Not my lost hag who dumbly bore such pain:
Childbirth and midnight sassafras and rain.
New snow against her face and hands she bore,
And now lies down, who was my moon or more.


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, born in Rochester, New York (1957). He started out wanting to be a musician and was good enough at the bassoon that he got into the Eastman School of Music. He planned to become a composer and then one day he saw his mother laughing uncontrollably at a New York Times Book Review essay on golf by the writer John Updike. Baker later wrote, "[My mother's laughter] was miraculous, sourced in the nowhere of print, unaided by ham mannerisms... Nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical."

At that moment Baker decided that instead of becoming a composer he wanted to be a writer. His most recent book is Checkpoint (2004).

Nicholson Bakers said, "Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again."

He also said, "It makes me unhappy when certain things change or things are superceded... my nine year old daughter's personality... Card catalogues... Jiffy Pop right now feels imperiled... I want to stop time and get things down on paper before they've flown off like a flock of starlings."


It's the birthday of novelist, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, born in Notasulga, Alabama (1891). She eventually finished high school in Baltimore while working full time as a live-in maid. In 1920 she enrolled in Howard University. Her first story, Spunk, was published in Opportunity magazine in 1925 when it won second prize in a fiction contest. At the awards dinner Hurston met author Fanny Hurst who hired Hurston as her assistant and arranged for her to receive a scholarship to Barnard College. While in New York Hurston published the "Eatonville Anthology," a series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, including glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwards farmer, the greatest liar in the village and a cheating husband.

Hurston came to the attention of anthropologist Franz Boas who got her a grant to collect folklore, songs and stories from black Southerners. Unfortunately her subjects were highly suspicious of her New York accent and manners. She said, "When I went about [talking] in carefully accented 'Barnardese,'... the men and women who had whole treasuries of material seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around here. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn't I try over there?'"

On returning to New York, Hurston became part of what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. And it was there in just seven weeks that she wrote her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). It's the story of a black woman in rural Florida named Janie Crawford and her three marriages: the first to the farmer Logan Killicks who treats her like a slave, the second to the politician Jody Starks who treats her like a queen, and finally to the penniless Tea Cake Woods with whom she finally finds true love.

Although for a time Hurston was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years writing a few magazine articles every now and again. She wrote three novels which were rejected for publication. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Zora Neale Hurston said, "Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."


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

 

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