Morning Open Thread: What Is June Anyway?

“Poetry and beauty are always
making peace. When you read
something beautiful you find
coexistence;
it breaks walls down.”
—Mahmoud Darwish,
Palestinian poet
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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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Thirteen poets born in a
week of lingering twilights
and early cockcrows

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June 11

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1572 – Ben Jonson born in London’s Westminster district, English playwright, poet, and critic. His father died before his birth, and his mother married a master bricklayer. Though educated at Westminster School, he became an apprentice bricklayer, then joined English forces fighting with the Dutch revolting against Spanish rule. He next became a strolling player, then joined the Admiral’s Men troupe. By 1597, he was writing plays, mostly comedies, and soon gave up acting. His first big hit was Every Man in His Humour, presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1578 – the same year he killed a fellow actor in a duel, considered murder. He pleaded “benefit of clergy” (ability to read the Latin Bible), paid a forfeit, and was branded on his left thumb. By 1603 he was creating masques (stories told through singing and dancing) for the royal court of JamesIV/ I. The masques paid much better than writing plays. In 1616, Jonson was granted a yearly pension, and published the first volume of his collected works, including his epigrams (poems in a classical style). By the 1620s, he’d written almost all his best works, and suffered a series of strokes. In 1625, Charles I came to the throne. Jonson got fewer commissions for masques, though Charles did increase his pension. Jonson had started work on The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral drama instead of a comedy, when he died at age 65 in August 1637.

On Playwright

by Ben Jonson

^.
Playwright, convict of public wrongs to men,
Takes private beatings and begins again.
Two kinds of valor he doth show at once:
Active in ’s brain, and passive in his bones.

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1877–Renée Vivien born as Pauline Tarn in London to a wealthy British father and an American mother; British Symbolist poet who wrote in French and was a high-profile Belle Époque lesbian. She was attending school in Paris when her father died in 1886. Legal battles over his fortune began, but by age 21, Pauline Tarn inherited the bulk of her father’s fortune. She moved to Paris, became Renée Vivien, and lived lavishly and notoriously as a lesbian, while indulging in alcohol, drugs, fetishes and sadomasochism. She died at age 32 in 1909 from the cumulative effects of anorexia, alcoholism, and drug abuse, weighing only 70 pounds. Her poems have been published in Poésies complètes, and in translation in A Crown of Violets, and A Woman Appeared to Me.

Undine

by Renée Vivien

^.
Your laughter startles, your caresses rake.
Your cold kisses love the evil they do.
Your eyes—blue lotuses drifting on a lake.
Lilies are less pallid than your face.
^.
You move like water parting.
Your hair falls in rootlike tangles.
Your words like treacherous rapids rise.
Your arms, flexible as reeds, strangle,
^.
Choking me like tubular river reeds.
I shiver in their enlacing embrace.
Drowning without an illuminating moon,
I vanish without a trace,
lost in a nightly swoon.

– translated by Michael R. Burch

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1948–David Lehman was born in New York City, the son of Holocaust refugees; American poet, non-fiction writer, literary critic, and founder/series editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthologies. His books of poetry include Playlist; Poems in the Manner Of; Yeshiva Boys; and When a Woman Loves a Man.

Poem 076: June 11

by David Lehman
^.
It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day

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June 12

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1892–Djuna Barnes born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York; American notable modernist novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Her works include her poetry collection The Book of Repulsive Women; Ladies Almanack, a satiric chronicle of amorous intrigues in 1920s Paris; and Nightwood, a classic of lesbian fiction. She drank heavily and wrote little in the 1940s, but swore off alcohol in 1950. She then wrote The Antiphon, a verse play, and much poetry. Though ravaged by arthritis in later years, Barnes continued writing until her death just after her 90^th birthday in June, 1982.

This Much and More

by Djuna Barnes

^.
If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.
^.
Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
And I’d plunge home!

This poem is in the public domain.

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June 13

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1865–William Butler Yeats born in Sandymount, Ireland, a seaside suburb of Dublin; Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and politician; admired as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century; awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival (also ironically called the Celtic Twilight), and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Lady Augusta Gregory. His collected works take up fourteen volumes.

A Coat

by William Butler Yeats

^.
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
^.

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1893–Dorothy L. Sayers born in Oxford, England; British novelist, poet, and translator; best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries, but she considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy as her best work. Although Gaudy Night is cited as “the first feminist mystery novel,” Sayers was “not sure I wanted to ‘identify myself’…with feminism,” believing recognition of our shared humanity was what equality should be built on.

from Lay

by Dorothy L. Sayers

Mummers! let love go by
With his crown upon his head,
Beaten royally
Of gold, heavy and red;
Your tinsel garments fly
To the trip of a lightsome tread,
The gusty gale has fled,
And your garlands are blown awry.
^.
Sniggering, whisperingly,
What was the thing you said?
"Poor old love? Oh, ay!
Put him away to bed
With his wearisome song and sigh--
We've a ragtime tune instead."--
But yours is already dead,
And his can never die.

“Mummers” from Lay, OP.I. by Dorothy L. Sayers - 1916

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1940–David Budhill born in Cleveland, Ohio; American poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, who lived for many years in Vermont’s northern mountains. Author of eight poetry collections, eight plays, two novels, a short story collection, a children’s picture book, and dozens of essays. In 2011, he was honored with the Kjell Meling Memorial Award for Distinction in the Arts & Humanities. He died at age 76 in 2016, and was posthumously named The People’s Poet of Vermont by the state’s legislature.

What Is June Anyway?

by David Budhill

^.
After three weeks of hot weather and drought,
we've had a week of cold and rain,
just the way it ought to be here in the north,
in June, a fire going in the woodstove
all day long, so you can go outside in the cold
and rain anytime and smell
the wood smoke in the air.

^.
This is the way I love it. This is why
I came here almost
fifty years ago. What is June anyway
without cold and rain
and a fire going in the stove all day?

"What Is June Anyway?" from Tumbling toward the End,© 2017 by David Budbill –
Copper Canyon Press

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June 14

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1907–René Char born L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in southeastern France; prolific French poet and member of the French Résistance. His first poetry collection, Cloches sur le cœur (Bells on the Heart), was published in 1928. Char joined the Résistance in 1940, and commanded the Durance parachute drop zone. In the 1960s, he joined the campaign against the stationing of atomic weapons in Provence. Among his many books are Seuls demeurent (Remain Alone); Les Matinaux (The Mornings); and Éloge d'une soupçonnée (Eulogy of a Suspect). Char was in Paris when he died of a heart attack at age 80 in February 1988.

The Window

byRené Char

^.
Pure rains, expected women,
The face you wipe,
This glass bound to torment,
Is the face of revolt;
The other, the happy glass,
Shivers before the wood fire.
I love you twin mysteries,
I touch each of you;
I am in pain and I am light.

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June 15

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1763–Kobayashi Issa born as Kobayashi Nobuyuki in ; Japanese poet who used ‘Issa’ as his pen name (meaning cup of tea); one of the ‘Great Four’ haiku masters, with Bashō, Buson, and Shiki. He wrote over 20,000 haiku, and is also known for his drawings, which frequently illustrated his poetry. He was a lay Buddhist priest.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Goes out,
comes back—
the love life of a cat.

Both poems are from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho Buson and Issa– The Ecco Press, 1994

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1953–Ana Castillo born in Chicago, Illinois a Mexican mother and a father born also in Chicago; Mexican-American author, poet, novelist, editor, playwright and scholar, recipient of an American Book Award in 1987, and a Carl Sandburg Award. She was the first appointee to the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She describes Chicana feminism as Xicanisma, and much of her work centers on identity, racism, sexism, and classism. She often intermingles Spanish and English in her poetry.

What Is Your Writing Process?

by Ana Castillo

^.
With mop in one hand,
cocktail in the other,
at 9:00 a.m. or night,
flies swatted,
roach corpses swept.
Lola Beltrán belts “Mi ranchito”
through house speakers
from room to room.
I hum off key.
Mares fed, dogs let out,
sun beating on the flat roof,
moon rising behind a cloud—
verses take form.
^.

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June 16

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1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born in Lockport, New York; prolific American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, and editor. Among her many awards and honors, she was the recipient of two O. Henry Awards (1967 and 1973), the 1970 National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize. She graduated from Syracuse University as valedictorian with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960. Vanguard Press published Oates’ first book, a short-story collection, By the North Gate, in 1963. After getting her M.A, she became a Ph.D. student at Rice University, but left to become a full-time writer. As of 2021, she had published a dozen poetry collections, including Women In Love and Other Poems; Angel Fire; Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982; and American Melancholy: Poems.

The First Room

by Joyce Carol Oates

^.
In every dream of a room
the first room intrudes.
No matter the years, the tears dried
and forgotten, it is the skeleton
of the first that protrudes.

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1947–Ellen Bass born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but grew up in New Jersey; American poet, author of nonfiction and children’s books. She won a Lambda Literary Award for her 2002 poetry collection Mules of Love. With Florence Howe, she co-edited No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women, and co-authored with Laura Davis the 1991 nonfiction child sexual abuse book The Courage to Heal. In 2017, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Bass has taught poetry at Pacific University and founded poetry programs for prison inmates. Her poetry books include Of Separateness and Merging; Our Stunning Harvest; Like a Beggar; and Indigo.

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

^.
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

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June 17

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1871 – James Weldon Johnson born in Jacksonville, Florida; African American writer, anthologist, and civil rights activist, married to civil rights activist and feminist Grace Nail Johnson. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration appointed him as consul of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he was transferred to Corinto, Nicaragua. He wrote substantial portions of his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and his poetry collection, Fifty Years, during this period. He published the novel anonymously to avoid controversy during his diplomatic career. However, when Johnson returned to the U.S., he abandoned diplomacy to become part of an anti-lynching campaign (1917-1920). As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first black executive secretary (1920-1930), he helped increase membership and extended the NAACP’s reach by organizing many new chapters in the South. During the 1920s, he and his wife promoted the Harlem Renaissance, encouraging young black writers, and helping them get published. He also collaborated with his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, on many songs, including “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” His poetry collections include Fifty Years and Other Poems; God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse; and Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems. He was killed at age 67 in an auto accident. His wife, who was driving, was seriously injured but survived the crash.

Sonnet

by James Weldon Johnson

^.
My heart be brave, and do not falter so,
Nor utter more that deep, despairing wail.
Thy way is very dark and drear I know,
But do not let thy strength and courage fail;
For certain as the raven-winged night
Is followed by the bright and blushing morn,
Thy coming morrow will be clear and bright;
‘Tis darkest when the night is furthest worn.
Look up, and out, beyond, surrounding clouds,
And do not in thine own gross darkness grope,
Rise up, and casting off thy hind’ring shrouds,
Cling thou to this, and ever inspiring hope:
Tho’ thick the battle and tho’ fierce the fight,
There is a power making for the right.
^.