Morning Open Thread: Write Me Down in History – National Character Counts Week

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This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

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So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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Yesterday, CaptBLI got this topic started, asking “Who Am I?” I don’t know if he knew Sunday was the first day of National Character Counts Week or not, but his post was certainly timely. Not to mention that this day, October 19, is Evaluate Your Life Day.

Like an M. C. Escher graphic which is both birds and fish at the same time, I read National Character Counts Week as both “National Character” Counts – and as [Individual] Character Counts Week, celebrated Nationally.

National Character, if there is such a thing, has suffered severe fractures here in America – the United States are far from united, and factionalism overwhelms us. It remains to be seen if the coming election will begin to knit our bones, or tear us all limb from limb.  It takes some painful effort now for me to cross my arthritically-boned fingers - please imagine them crossed.

Ah, but ‘Character Counts’ and ‘Evaluate Your Life Day’ do fit together well.

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The most obvious - and daunting –‘Character Counts’ poem I know is Rudyard Kipling’s famous ‘If.’

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If

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by Rudyard Kipling

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If you can keep your head when all about you  

   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

   But make allowance for their doubting too;  

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

   Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

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If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  

   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

   And treat those two impostors just the same;  

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

   And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

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If you can make one heap of all your winnings

   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

   And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

   To serve your turn long after they are gone,  

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

   Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

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If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  

   Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

   If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

   With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  

   And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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“If” from Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse, © 1940 by Elsie Kipling Bambridge, © 1935 by Rudyard Kipling – First Anchor Books, 1989 edition

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, but returned with his parents to England at the age of five; English novelist, poet, short-story writer, children’s author, and journalist. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, he was an immensely popular author. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to that date. His reputation has since suffered – George Orwell called him a “jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive”– but he remains in print because he is a consummate story-teller. Noted for Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous, and his poems If, Gunga Din, and Recessional.

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Molly Case gives us both the National and Individual Character of Britain’s women, who helped their country get through WWI. Her poem was commissioned for the 2018 centennial exhibition for WWI at the Imperial War Museum in London. 

Molly Case, spoken word poet, writer, and nurse, was born and brought up in south London. She received a First-class degree in Creative Writing and English Literature from Bath Spa University and during this time spent two years as a care worker looking after people with dementia. She then pursued a career in nursing and currently works at St George’s Hospital, London, as a cardiac nurse specialist. In April 2013, as a student nurse, she was invited to speak at the Royal College of Nurses Congress. “I didn't realize this was going to be a Bruce Springsteen stadium arena of 5,000 health care workers in Liverpool,” she said. “And even when I saw that it was going to be, I thought that my little kind of three minutes on stage would be the interlude whilst people went for their toilet breaks or they went to get their coffee. I thought people would be kind of bustling in and out as I try to read poetry because, as I'm sure most people know, it's hard to get an audience for poetry at the best of times.” After she recited her poem, “Nursing the Nation” the entire stadium leaped up and gave her a standing ovation. By the next morning, her You Tube channel had reached a 100,000 views overnight. Her debut collection of poetry, Underneath the Roses Where I Remembered Everything, was published in 2015. Her book, How To Treat People: A Nurse’s Notes, was published in 2019.

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Regret is part of the human condition – Giannina Braschi offers her confessional lament as part of Empire of Dreams– her remarkable, and much longer, poem.

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Empire of Dreams

[excerpt]

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by Giannina Braschi

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Listen to me, ladies and
gentlemen. Listen to the sermon
of memories and sorrows. Listen
to hell. Why didn’t I do what I
should have done. I repent. I’ve
sinned. I have memories. And
torments. I am burning in
the flames of memories. Why didn’t
I keep quiet? Why did I do that?
I repent a thousand times. Why
did I betray you, and why do I
remember you? Oh woe, woe
is me! Oh, and I stood you up in
the street. Listen to memories.
Listen to them again. Why did I
betray you? Why did you leave
and forget me? And I grieve and
remember you. And the worst
were my tears. And the worst
was your memory. Listen to the
soap opera and listen to memory.
Oh, and now what’s left for me.
I’m left with monologues,
soliloquies, and memories. I’m
left with shadows. I’m left with
memories. I don’t want
monologues or sorrows or
soliloquies. I am a singing bird. I
am a child. I am the nightingale.
What does winter or autumn or
spring or summer know of
memory? They know nothing of
memory. They know that
seasons pass and return. They
know that they are seasons. That
they are time. And they know
how to affirm themselves. And
they know how to impose
themselves. And they know how
to maintain themselves. What
does autumn know of summer?
What sorrows do seasons have?
None hate. None love. They
pass.

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translated by Tess O'Dwyer

excerpt from Empire of Dreams© 2011 Giannina Braschi, translation © 2011 by Tess O'Dwyer – AmazonCrossing

Giannina Braschi (1953 - )Puerto Rican poet, novelist, playwright, and scholar. Notable for Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes cross-genre literature and political philosophy in Spanish, Spanglish, and English.

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John Clare wrote ‘I Am’ in the 1840s while he was in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, cut off from from family and friends.

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I Am

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by John Clare

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I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

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Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

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I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

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“I Am” from I Am: The Selected Poems of JohnClare, FSG 1st Edition - 2003

John Clare (1793-1864) English poet, born the son of a farm laborer, considered one of the best laboring-class English poets of the 19^th century. He became a farm labourer while still a child, but went to a village school until he was 12. In his early adult years, he was a potboy in a public house, a gardener at Burghley House, enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with gypsies, and worked as a lime burner. By 1818, he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood was a main factor behind his five-foot stature and his poor health in later life. He began writing poetry after reading James Thomson’s The Seasons. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of Taylor & Hessey, publisher of John Keats. Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery appeared in 1820. This book was highly praised, and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems was published. He was given an annuity of 15 guineas by the Marquess of Exeter, which was supplemented by a subscription of £30, enabling him to marry, but by 1823 he was nearly penniless. His next book, The Shepherd’s Calendar, did not do well. He worked in the fields, but soon became seriously ill. Earl Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare was torn between literary London and the need to provide for his family. His last published work, The Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favourably by reviewers, but didn’t bring in enough to support his wife and seven children. His mental health as well as physical health suffered, and he began to drink heavily. Clare suffered from the delusion that he was Lord Byron, and he began re-writing Byron’s poems. After some time in an asylum at High Beach in Essex, he escaped, but then was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in 1841. He remained there for the rest of his life, and died of a stroke in 1864 at age 70.

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Some people long to be in the spotlight on the world stage, but Emily Dickinson did not. I wonder what she’d have thought if someone had told her how famous she would still be so long after her death?

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I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)

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by Emily Dickinson

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I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

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How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

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“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson,edited by R. W. Franklin –© 1999 by the President & Fellows of Harvard College – Harvard University Press

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) America’s best-known woman poet and one of the nation’s greatest and most original authors, lived the life of a recluse in Amherst Massachusetts. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, ignoring the traditional poetic forms prevailing among most of the other poets of her day. The extent of her work wasn’t known until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered her huge cache of poems.

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Is self-pity a uniquely human trait? D.H. Lawrence seemed to think so.

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Self-Pity

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by D. H. Lawrence

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I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

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“Self-Pity” from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence - Wordsworth Editions 1994

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) born David Herbert Lawrence, English novelist, short story writer, and poet. He spent much of his literary career battling censorship, which continued even after his death. When Penguin Books published the first full unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain in 1960, the publisher was tried under the Obscene Publications Act, and the trial became headline news, with a parade of famous writers called to testify as to the book’s literary merit. The verdict of “not guilty” led to greater freedom to publish explicit material in Great Britain.

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Maya Angelou boldly announced her indomitable spirit, and inspired countless women, with her black woman’s anthem, “Still I Rise.”

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Still I Rise

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by Maya Angelou

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You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

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Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

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Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

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Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

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Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

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You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

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Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

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Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

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Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

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Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems, © 1978 by Maya Angelou – Random House

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis Missouri. She was an American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist.  She published three books of essays, several books of poetry, and also wrote plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. Her best-known work remains the first of her seven memoirs, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She is also noted for “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem she recited at the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. Angelou was honored in 2011 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem is a view of Fame that is unique, and to me, hopeful of a better use for it.

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Famous

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by Naomi Shihab Nye

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The river is famous to the fish.

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The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.  

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The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.  

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The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.  

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The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.  

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The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

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The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.  

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I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

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I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

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“Famous” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems,© 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye – Far Corner Books

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 – ), American poet and writer,born in St. Louis, Missouri; her father was a Palestinian refugee. “I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.” During her teens, she lived in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, and the Old City in Jerusalem. Shihab Nye has published over 20 books, including poetry, novels and essays.  In 2019, she was appointed as the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She has won many awards, including several Pushcart Prizes, and the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle. She lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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