Morning Open Thread: You’ll Have Poor Company On That Other Road

Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
–Raymond Carver,
on his tombstone
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13 poets this week:
Youth, Life, Death,
Wild Violets, Exile,
Love, Death, Greed,
and Blackbirds
with Red Wings

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July 16

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1313 ― Giovanni Boccaccio born in Certaldo, Republic of Florence; Italian Renaissance humanist, author, short storywriter, and poet. One of the “Three Crowns” of Italian literature, along with Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, a mentor with whom he corresponded at length. His father was a merchant, but it is likely that he was born out of wedlock, though Giovanni grew up in his father’s household. In 1326, his father was appointed head of a bank in Naples. Giovanni studied law, but spent as much time on literature, science, and mythology. The conflict between competing rulers in Naples and Florence in the 1340s led to his father returning to Florence bankrupt. The “Black Death” (bubonic plague) decimated the city, and Giovanni spent much time in Ravenna. His father died in 1349, the same year Boccaccio began writing The Decameron, which he later revised and rewrote. He studied Greek, began translating works by Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle; went on missions for the Florentine government; and took Church minor orders. He met Francesco Petrarch in 1350, who encouraged his studies of classical Greek and Latin literature. Boccaccio ably challenged arguments of clerical intellectuals who wanted to limit access to classical sources to prevent any “moral harm” to Christian readers. The revival of classical antiquity became a foundation of the Renaissance. He wrote De mulieribus claris, a collection of biographies of famous women (1361, revised up to 1375), but disappointment in love soured his idealistic view of women. He was ill during his final years, and died at age 62 of what was probably congestive heart failure in December 1375, back in Certaldo, his birthplace.

Ballata

by Giovanni Boccaccio

^.
I am young and fain to sing
In this happy tide of spring
Of love and many a gentle thing,
I wander through green meadows dight
With blossoms gold and red and white;
Rose by the thorn and lily fair,
Both one and all I do compare
With him who, worshipping my charms,
For aye would fold me in his arms
As one unto his service sworn.
Then, when I find a flower that seems
Like to the object of my dreams,
I gather it and kiss it there,
I flatter it in accents fair,
My heart outpour, my soul stoop down,
Then weave it in a fragrant crown
Among my flaxen locks to wear.
The rapture nature’s floweret gay
Awakes in me doth last alway,
As if I tarried face to face
With him whose true love is my grace;
Thoughts which its fragrancy inspires
I cannot frame to my desires,
My sighs their pilgrimage do trace.
My sights are neither harsh nor sad
As other women’s are, but glad
And tender; in so fond a wise
They seek my love that he replies
By coming hither, and so gives
Delight to her who in him lives
Yet almost wept: “Come, for hope dies.”
^.

An Anthology of Italian Poems 13th-19th Century, selected and translated by Lorna de’ Lucchi – Alfred A. Knopf, 1922 edition

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July 17

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1952 ―Dana Wildsmith born, American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Author of the novel Jumping, the environmental memoir Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South, and five poetry collections. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park and Everglades National Park. She lives with her family on a 125-year-old farm in her hometown of Bethlehem, Georgia. She also teaches ESL classes. Wildsmith’s poetry collections include One Good Hand, With Access to Tools, and Christmas in Bethlehem.

One Light

by Dana Wildsmith
^.
A single light can lead you home. One light
is all you need to break the back of night
when darkness seems to weigh more than it has
on all the nights before, and nothing's as
it was. Bit by bit, the lighter shades
^.
of night you used to trust have faded as
you stopped believing in relief. The dark
goes on forever, and begins right where you are.
^.
But when your eyes can't guide your steps, you learn
to trust your heart instead. You rise and turn
toward where you need to go, and in the dark
you think you see a glimmer like a star
that wasn't there until you headed home
through darkness, trusting that a light would come.
^.

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July 18

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1893 ―Anna Timiryova, Russian poet and painter born in Kislovodsk, a mineral springs spa town in southwestern Russia. Her father was a musician and conservatory director. In 1912, at age 19 she married a Russian admiral, but six years later divorced him to become the mistress of Alexander Kolchak, another admiral who was an anti-Bolshevik, and briefly the Supreme Ruler of Russia (1918-1920). He was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad, leaving a message for his wife and son who were in Paris, but no word for Timiryova. She was arrested several times, spending years in prisons and labour camps, but still wrote many poems dedicated to Kolchak’s memory. After WWII, she was released from prison and became the property manager at a small theatre, but was imprisoned again in 1949. Timiryova was finally considered “rehabilitated” in 1960. In January 1975, she died in Moscow at age 81.

fromDeception

by Anna Timiryova
^.
II.

^.
The wind is stifling and parching,
Sun-burnt fingers in the grass,
Overhead, the heaven’s arches
Are made of blue and fragile glass;
^.
The fallen immortelles are drying,
Near the sickle swinging loose.
Working ants have formed a highway
Running up the twisting spruce.
^.
The silver pond is idly gleaming,
Life is easy — no regret…
O, I wonder whom I’ll dream of
In my hammock’s motley net?
^.

(1910, Kiev)

translated by Andrey Kneller, © 2018

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^.

1990 ―Xu Lizhi, Chinese poet and factory workerborn in Jieyang in Guangdong Province to a farming family. He was interested in reading and learning, but had very limited access to books. After his test scores on the national entrance exams for college for too low to gain admission, he became depressed. In July 2010, he went to Shenzhen, a larger city in his province which is a center for technology and manufacturing. He went to work for Hon Hai, multinational electronics manufacturer. In October, 2010 while recovering from an appendectomy, he posted one of his poems on his blog for the first time. He had a three-year contract at Hon Hai, but working conditions were poor, causing coughing, headaches and trouble sleeping. He wrote for a local newspaper, and published poems and reviews online and in magazines. Xu tried to find other work, applying for jobs in libraries, but wasn’t hired. In September 2014, at age 24, he committed suicide by jumping off a building. His blog posted a new message after his death, and his friends published a collection of his poems, leading to some of them being translated into English.

Waiting in Line

by Xu Lizhi
^.
The packed crowds in this city
crawl up and down the streets
crawl up and down the pedestrian bridges, into the subway
crawl up and down this earth
one lap around is one life
this fire-driven fire-singed species
busy from birth to death
only at the moment of death do they not cut in line
they lower their heads, follow in order
and burrow back into their mothers’ wombs
^.

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July 19

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1875 ―Alice Dunbar Nelson born as Alice Ruth Moore, in New Orleans, Louisiana; African-American author poet, columnist, short story writer, activist, diarist, and teacher. Her heritage was a complex mix: Creole, which in her city meant descendants of early French and Spanish inhabitants; African American, Native American, and Anglo. She published her first book, Violets and Other Tales, when she was 20 years old. Dunbar Nelson was active in politics, and the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements, working as a field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states’ woman’s suffrage movement. In 1918, she was a field representative for the WWI Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1924, she campaigned for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, but it was defeated by the white Southern bloc. Between 1928 and 1932, she toured as a public speaker for the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee. Dunbar Nelson died from a heart ailment in September, 1935, at age 60.

Sonnet

by Alice Dunbar Nelson
^.
I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists’ shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
^.

“Sonnet” from The Works of Alice Dunbar Nelson, Volumes 1 and 2, Oxford University Press, 1988

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^.

1893 ―Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor born in Baghdati, Georgia, at the edge of the Ajameti forest. By 1917, he was already a prominent member of the Russian Futurist movement, and a co-signer of its manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Mayakovsky produced a large body of work including 24 poetry books, five plays, appearances as an actor in films, editing the art journal LEF, and producing agitprop posters supporting the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). He also wrote My Discovery of America, a combination of travelogue, sketches, and poems, and How to Make Verse, his views on individual artistic integrity and the demands of committed Marxist populism. In his last years, he completed The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, two plays satirizing bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism. He shot himself at age 37 on April 14, 1930, after a dispute with his current lover, actress Veronica Polonskaya, who was unwilling to leave her husband. He had often spoken to friends about his fear of growing old, and about committing suicide.

Past One O’Clock ...

by Vladimir Mayakovsky
^.
Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
^.

– translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey; found among Mayakovsky’s papers after his suicide.

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July 20

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1304 ―Francesco Petrarch (Petrarca)born in Arezzo in eastern Tuscany; Italian scholar, humanist, prolific poet, and writer. Dante Alighieri and his father were friends. Though his father insisted he study law, Petrarch wanted to be a writer, and was so often distracted from his legal studies that his father once threw his personal books in the fire. He had an unrequited passion for “Laura,” believed to be a married lady who died young, a frequent subject of his poetry. Petrarch wrote mostly in Latin, but some of his poetry is in Italian. He traveled widely in Europe, both for pleasure and as an ambassador, collecting crumbling Latin manuscripts. His rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is credited with initiating the Italian Renaissance. In the 16^th century, Pietro Bembo based his model for the modern Italian language on Petrarch’s works, as well as the work of Boccaccio, and to a lesser extent on Dante’s work. Petrarch died at age 69 in July, 1374. A number of his major works have been translated into English, including My Secret Book, the 24 volumes of Letters on Familiar Matters, and On Religious Leisure.

La gola e ’l sonno et l’otïose piume

(Greed and sleep and slothful beds)

^.
by Francesco Petrarch
^.
Greed and sleep and slothful beds
have banished every virtue from the world,
so that, overcome by habit,
our nature has almost lost its way.
^.
And all the benign lights of heaven,
that inform human life, are so spent,
that he who wishes to bring down a stream
from Helicon is pointed out as a wonder.
^.
Such desire for laurel, and for myrtle?
‘Poor and naked goes philosophy’,
say the crowd intent on base profit..
^.
You’ll have poor company on that other road:
So much the more I beg you, gentle spirit,
not to turn from your great undertaking.
^.

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July 21

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1899 ― Hart Crane, American modernist poet born in Garrettsville, Ohio. His father invented the Life Savers candy, but sold the patent before it became popular. The family moved to Cleveland, where he made a fortune from chocolate candy bars. Crane’s parents divorced just before his 17^th birthday, and he dropped out of school and left for New York City. Between 1917 and 1924, Hart moved back and forth, working at his father’s Cleveland factory or as an advertising copywriter in New York. He began a relationship with a Danish merchant seaman. Raised as a Christian Scientist, he regarded himself as a social pariah, but his poems began to be published in small literary magazines, followed in 1926 by publication of his first volume of poetry, White Buildings. He struggled financially, and still took temporary jobs as a copywriter while writing The Bridge, about the Brooklyn Bridge, a collection of 15 linked lyric poems. The Bridge was published in 1930, but most reviews were unfavorable. He struggled against depression until April 27, 1932, when while traveling aboard ship, he leapt overboard and drowned in the Gulf of Mexico at age 32. His Collected Poems were published posthumously in 1938. Some of his literary correspondence with other writers was published in the 1970s.

Exile

by Hart Crane
^.
My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, --
No, ― nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.
^.
Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's wings clung about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.
^.

“Exile” from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Centennial Edition), 2001 – Liveright Publishing

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^.

1907 ―A.D. Hope born as Alec Derwent Hope in Cooma, New South Wales, Australian poet, critic, essayist, and university lecturer at Canberra University College (now Australian National University). His first collection of poems, The Wandering Islands, was published in 1955. He wrote over a dozen volumes each of poetry and criticism, winning many literature prizes and honours in Australia and internationally. He died after a series of debilitating strokes at age 93 in July 2000.

The School of Night

by A.D. Hope

^.
What did I study in your School of Night?
When your mouth's first unfathomable yes
Opened your body to be my book, I read
My answers there and learned the spell aright,
Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess
What spirits it raised nor where their questions led.
^.
Those others, familiar tenants of your sleep,
The whisperers, the grave somnambulists
Whose eyes turn in to scrutinize their woe,
The giant who broods above the nightmare steep,
That sleeping girl, shuddering, with clenched fists,
A vampire baby suckling at her toe,
^.
They taught me most. The scholar held his pen
And watched his blood drip thickly on the page
To form a text in unknown characters
Which, as I scanned them, changed and changed again:
The lines grew bars, the bars a Delphic cage
And I the captive of his magic verse.
^.

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^.

1943 ―Tess Gallagher born in Port Angeles, Washington, to a logging family, and knew the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the Ozarks – home to her grandparents – very well from an early age. American poet, short-story writer, essayist, and translator. She met Raymond Carver in 1977. He was a master of the short story, and inspired her to write three short story collections of her own. For 11 years they were friends, lovers, editors, and sounding boards. Carver became her third husband, and she his second wife, six weeks before his death from lung cancer at age 50. Gallagher manages his literary estate. Her poetry collections include Under Stars, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge (poems in remembrance of Raymond Carver), Midnight Lantern, and Is, Is Not Poems.

The Vilela were hunter-gatherers of the Grand Chaco in South America. Their language is now extinct, only its Ocol dialect still struggles to survive. The last Vilela people were absorbed into the surrounding Toba tribe, who are fighting their own battle to maintain their cultural heritage.

Redwing

by Tess Gallagher
^.
The readers of poetry, the writers
of poetry. Nation inside
the nation. That rainbow holding briefly over
the Strait of Juan de Fuca, its violet
inner rim, its guess-work dome
of crimson. My back to the sun for this
to happen at all, the eye extending
its shadow until it sees into
what it doesn’t see. I don’t have to think
of raindrops hanging as light, or to command
the schoolbook corpses of refraction and
internal reflection to be dazzled. The myth
of the Vilela Indians, its rainbow
a gigantic serpent charmed
by a small girl until it sheds her
sway and piecemeal ravages the world, vanquished
at last by an army of birds—that’s good enough
for me. And victory too, each bird
dipping itself in the blood
of the monster.

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July 22

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1849 ―Emma Lazarus, American poet,born in New York City, into a large and wealthy Sephardic Jewish family. Her mother was related to Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Lazarus, privately educated by tutors, studied American and British literature, and German, French, and Italian. In the 1880s, Lazarus was an advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing from Russian pogroms. Appalled by the refugees’ miserable living conditions, she volunteered at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute (1884-1939), a vocational high school. She wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 for a fundraiser for the pedestal to support France’s gift of a statue for New York Harbor. She died in 1887, the year after “Liberty Enlightening the World” (the statue’s original title) was dedicated. Though her poem had been published in the New York Times, it was forgotten until 1901, when her friend Georgina Schuyler began a campaign for the poem to be memorialized. In 1903, the words were placed on the inner wall of the statue’s base, and changed forever the perception of the Lady with the Lamp.

The New Colossus

by Emma Lazarus

^.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
^.

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^.

1898 ―Stephen Vincent Benét,American poet, short story writer, and novelist, born in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania. His father was a colonel in the U.S Army, continuing a family tradition of military service. Stephen was sent at age 10 to Hitchcock Military Academy. He then graduated at the top of his class from Summerville Academy in Augusta, Georgia. He went to Yale, where he was involved with publication of the Yale Literary Magazine and contributed light verses to The Yale Record. His first book was published when he was aged 17 and he was awarded an M.A. in English upon submission of his third volume of poetry in lieu of a thesis. In 1920, Benét went to France on a Yale traveling scholarship, where he met writer and poet Rosemary Carr. They married in November 1921. In 1926, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship award and wrote John Brown's Body while in living in Paris. Among his many other works are Heaven and Earth, Ballads and Poems,The Devil and Daniel Webster, Cheers for Miss Bishop, and They Burned the Books. He died at age 44 of a heart attack in March 1943.

Talk

by Stephen Vincent Benét
^.
Tobacco smoke drifts up to the dim ceiling
From half a dozen pipes and cigarettes,
Curling in endless shapes, in blue rings wheeling,
As formless as our talk. Phil, drawling, bets
Cornell will win the relay in a walk,
While Bob and Mac discuss the Giants' chances;
Deep in a morris-chair, Bill scowls at "Falk",
John gives large views about the last few dances.
^.
And so it goes -- an idle speech and aimless,
A few chance phrases; yet I see behind
The empty words the gleam of a beauty tameless,
Friendship and peace and fire to strike men blind,
Till the whole world seems small and bright to hold --
Of all our youth this hour is pure gold.
^.

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^.

1939 ―Quincy Troupe, African-American poet, editor, journalist, UC San Diego professor emeritus, and children’s book author, born in St. Louis Missouri. He is the son of professional baseball player Quincy Thomas Trouppe. Known for his memoir Miles and Me; The Pursuit of Happyness, co-authored with Chris Gardner; The Architecture of Language, winner of the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement; and Transcircularities, which won the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. He was appointed in 2002 as California’s first poet laureate. His poetry collections include Avalanche, Skulls Along the River, and Snake-Back Solos.

The Hours Fly Quick

by Quincy Troupe
^.
the hours fly quick on wings of clipped winds
like nonsense blown from mouths of hot air—
people—including my own—form syllables, suds,
words shot through pursed lips like greased sleaze
& bloom inside all these rooms dominated by television’s
babble sluicing idiot images invented in modern test tubes—
clones—blinking, slathering all over controlled airwaves
of an up-for-sale world, blinking a paucity of spirit,
so dance you leering ventriloquists, marionettes,
you greedy counterfeits, dance, dance, dance
^.

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13 poets this week:Youth, Life, Death, Wild Violets, Exile, Love, Death, Greed, and Blackbirds with Red Wings

July 16

Ballata

July 17

One Light

July 18

fromDeception

Waiting in Line

July 19

Sonnet

Past One O’Clock ...

July 20

La gola e ’l sonno et l’otïose piume

July 21

Exile

The School of Night

Redwing

July 22

The New Colossus

Talk

The Hours Fly Quick

Trending Articles

13 poets this week:
Youth, Life, Death,
Wild Violets, Exile,
Love, Death, Greed,
and Blackbirds
with Red Wings