Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent,
makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that
or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown
world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and
forever all your own. ─Dylan Thomas
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13 poets born this week ─ with lots to say about
love, war, loss, sex,
wisdom, and words
in a dictionary
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October 22
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1934–Gerald Vizenor born in Minneapolis, MN, as an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation; prolific American novelist, nonfiction writer, essayist, poet, and scholar of the Native American Renaissance. His father was murdered when Gerald was less than two years old, and the case was never solved. Raised by his Swedish-American mother and his Anishinaabe grandmother and uncles, Vizenor served in the U.S. Army in Post-WWII Japan. There, he learned about haiku, and later wrote the “kabuki novel”Hiroshima Bugi. Funded by the G.I. Bill, he completed his undergraduate degree at New York University, then did postgraduate study at Harvard and the University of Minnesota. In the 1960s, he was director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, then became a staff reporter and contributor at the Minneapolis Tribune. He taught at Lake Forest College in Illinois, then the University of Minnesota before moving to California. He was Director of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, and also taught at the University of New Mexico. Vizenor was honored in 2001 with the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award, and won the 2011 American Book Award for his novel Shrouds of White Earth. His poetry collections include Water Striders; Raising the Moon Vines; Empty Swings; and Almost Ashore.
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even my shadow
moves as I do in the moon
listless October
_._._._._._
like silver buttons
the moon comes through his shirt
threadbare scarecrow
_._._._._._
city squirrels
tease the calico house cat
at the window .
1844 –Robert Seymour Bridges born in Walmer, Kent in the UK; British physician and poet who was England’s Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. He wrote and published poetry while practicing medicine, before Lung disease forced him to retire in 1885. He then devoted himself to writing and literary research. In addition to poetry, he also wrote hymns, verse drama, and studies of Milton, Keats, and Gerald Manley Hopkins, as well as essays, and an anthology of French and English philosophers and poets. He died of cancer at age 85 in April 1930.
At the Farragut Statue
by Robert Seymour Bridges . To live a hero, then to stand In bronze serene above the city's throng; Hero at sea, and now on land Revered by thousands as they rush along; If these were all the gifts of fame— To be a shade amid alert reality, And win a statue and a name— How cold and cheerless immortality! . But when the sun shines in the Square, And multitudes are swarming in the street, Children are always gathered there, Laughing and playing round the hero's feet. .
“At the Farragut Statue” from The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges– hansebooks 2917 edition
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October 24
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1923–Denise Levertov born inIlford in east London; British-American poet. She married an American in 1947, and moved to the U.S. in 1948. Known for her anti-Vietnam war poems in the 1960s and 1970s, which also included themes of destruction by greed, racism, and sexism. Her later poetry reflects her conversion to Catholicism. No matter the subject, she was always an acute observer, and wrote with a rare combination of economy and grace. Levertov was the author of 24 books of poetry, as well as non-fiction, and served as poetry editor of The Nation and Mother Jones. She was honored with the Robert Frost Medal in 1990, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1993. In 1997, Levertov died from complications of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four.
A Cloak
by Denise Levertov . 'For there's more enterprise in walking naked.'– W. B. Yeats .
And I walked naked
from the beginning .
breathing in
my life,
breathing out
poems, .
arrogant in innocence. .
But of the song-clouds my breath made
in cold air .
a cloak has grown,
white and, where here a word there another
froze, glittering,
stone-heavy. .
A mask I had not meant
to wear, as if of frost,
covers my face. . Eyes looking out,
a longing silent at song's core.
1930–Elaine Feinstein born to Jewish parents in Bootle, Lancashire, in the UK, but grew up in Leicester, in the East Midlands. Feinstein is a novelist, poet, translator, short story writer, teleplay writer, and biographer. After WWII, she was horrified by the revelations of the Holocaust. “In that year I became Jewish for the first time.” She explored her Russian Jewish heritage, and Russian poetry. After attending Newnham College, Cambridge, she became a lecturer at the University of Essex. She went to Russia in the early 2000s to do research for her biography of poet Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias. Feinstein has written 15 novels, and an equal number of poetry collections, including At the Edge; City Music; Daylight; Talking to the Dead; and The Clinic.
A Visit
by Elaine Feinstein . I still remember love like another country
with an almost forgotten landscape
of salty skin and a dry mouth. I think
there was always a temptation to escape
from the violence of that sun, the sudden
insignificance of ambition,
the prowl of jealousy like a witch's cat. . Last night I was sailing in my sleep
like an old seafarer, with scurvy
colouring my thoughts, there was moonlight
and ice on green waters.
Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia.
And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side: .
Are you still angry with me? And spoke my
name with so much tenderness, I cried.
I never reproached you much
that I remember, not even when I should;
to me, you were the boy in Ravel's garden
who always longed to be good,
as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.
1977–Tess Taylor born and grew up in El Cerrito, California; American poet, academic, and contributor to NPR. After majoring in English and urban studies at Amherst, she earned an MA in journalism from New York University, and an MFA in creative writing and poetry at Boston University. She has taught literature and writing at UC Berkeley, Ashland University, and Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Her published works include The Misremembered World; The Forage House; Work & Days ; Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange; and Rift Zone.
Punctuations & Wind
by Tess Taylor . Then once again someone is shot at a school by a sniper by police in a movie theater & the many homeless . are hustled & hunted. You read how your clothes are sewn by slaves your dinner fished by slaves . your fruit picked by starving children. Mostly you don't get away. Mostly you raise the children you have, . afraid of no health care, of losing the one goodish job you've finally got. Mostly you keep your nose to the grindstone. . Your heart flails a thick fish in your throat. You have a felt for a long time that someone is watching: . The administration is eroding your benefits. But you are lucky, so you try to feel lucky. By the numbers you have always lived . in an apartheid state. You look at your child. Read reports of the tear gas. . Text a friend. Cry at night. Some days you march when people are marching some batter windows some are hit things are cancelled: The year has been dry even small rain will lead to mudslides. . Some nights you wake only to feel yourself for a few minutes grieving or praying & hearing in darkness . the old tree tossing & tossing & wild
1914–John Berrymanborn as John Smith in Oklahoma; American poet and scholar noted for The Dream Songs, a collection of 385 eighteen-line lyric poems in three stanzas, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he was 12 years old, his father shot himself just outside the boy’s bedroom window, which became a recurring subject in his poetry. After his mother remarried, he took his stepfather’s surname. Berryman graduated from Columbia in 1936, then went to study at Cambridge University for two years on a scholarship. In 1948, he published his first important book of poetry, The Dispossessed. After teaching at Harvard and Princeton, he became a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1956, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a “dialogue”with the 17th century poet Anne Bradstreet, brought more critical acclaim. 77 Dream Songs from 1964 and 1968’s His Dream, His Rest were combined in The Dream Songs in 1969, and became his masterwork. Berryman’s lifelong struggles with alcoholism and depression ended at age 58 in 1972, when he jumped off a Minneapolis bridge a week after New Year’s.
The Curse
by John Berryman . Cedars and the westward sun. The darkening sky. A man alone Watches beside the fallen wall The evening multitudes of sin Crowd in upon us all. For when the light fails they begin Nocturnal sabotage among The outcast and the loose of tongue, The lax in walk, the murderers: Our twilight universal curse. . Children are faultless in the wood, Untouched. If they are later made Scandal and index to their time, It is that twilight brings for bread The faculty of crime. Only the idiot and the dead Stand by, while who were young before Wage insolent and guilty war By night within that ancient house, Immense, black, damned, anonymous. .
“The Curse” from Collected Poems of John Berryman– from Farrar, Straus & Giroux – 1991 edition
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. 1942–Diana Hartog born in Palo Alto, CA; Canadian poet and fiction author who lives in British Columbia. She has written a bestiary called Polite to Bees, a short story collection No hippies allowed: Stories, and a novel, The Photographer’s Sweethearts. Hartog won the 1983 Gerald Lampert Award for her poetry collection Matinee Light, and the 1987 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for Candy from Strangers. Her latest poetry collection is Ink Monkey.
The Couple in Room 212
by Diana Hartog . The tv flickers mute, the remote knocked
to the orange shag carpet
by a wing. . Leda, sprawled naked across the sheets — mind a blank —
stares up at the ceiling's watermarks. Turns her head
towards the high window and the plucked moon above the motel. . Swans-down in the ashtray. Pillows flung to the floor.
Thank Jupiter for maid service.
No need to pick up after him
in here,
or in the bathroom, where he treads damp towels and hisses in the steam. .
1973–Suheir Hammad born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees; her family came to the U.S. when she was five, and she grew up in Brooklyn. Hammad is an American poet, author, playwright, film narrator and performer, and political activist. Hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons signed her for HBO’s Def Poetry Jam because of her poem “First Writing Since”– her reaction to the September 11 attacks. She recited original works on the Def Poetry Jam tour (2002-2003). In 2007, she was cast in her first fiction role in cinema, the Palestinian film Salt of this Sea by Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, which debuted as an official selection in the Un Certain Regard competition of the Cannes Film Festival. She has written a memoir, Drops of This Story, and several plays, including Blood Trinity and Libretto. Her poetry collections are Born Palestinian, Born Black/ The Gaza Suite and Zaatar Diva.
What I will
by Suheir Hammad . I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin beak for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain't
louder than this breath. .
1952– Sir Andrew Motion born in London, England, into a family of successful brewers; English poet, literary critic, biographer; novelist; academic; and editor. He served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (1999-2009). When he was 12, his family moved to the village of Stisted in Essex, but he was already in boarding school, so he spent most of his holidays there taking solitary walks. When he was 17, his mother was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident, and died nine years later. Motion has said he began writing to keep his memory of his mother alive. He studied English at University College, Oxford, where he met W.H. Auden. He won the Oxford’s Sir Roger Newdigate’s Prize for Best Composition in English Verse by an undergraduate in 1975, and graduated with first class honours. Motion taught English at the University of Hull, where he became friends with Philip Larkin. In 1993, he wrote Philip Larkin, A Writer’s Life, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Motion was editorial director and poetry editor at Chatto & Windus (1983–1989); edited the Poetry Society's Poetry Review (1980-1982) and was professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and then on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His poetry collections include Dangerous Play; Natural Causes; The Price of Everything; Peace Talks; and Randomly Moving Particles.
Losses
by Andrew Motion . General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, . and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, . tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be . reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’
1955–Michelle Boisseau born in Cincinnati, Ohio; American poet and academic. She taught in the MFA program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and was a contributing editor of New Letters. She won the 1995 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for Understory. Boisseau wrote Writing Poems, considered the gold standard in how-to-write-poetry textbooks, now in its 8th edition. Her five poetry collections are: No Private Life; Understory; Trembling Air; A Sunday in God-Years; and Among the Gorgons. She died of lung cancer at age 62 in November 2017.
Counting
by Michelle Boisseau . After a while, remembering the men you loved
is like counting stars.
From the arbitrary constellations
you pick out those the brightest. Then the others,
dimmer and dimmer, till you can’t tell
if they’re real or only reflections
from your eyes watering with the strain.
The body’s memory is a poor thing. Ask the adopted child
who falls asleep against any steady heart,
to a lullabye in any language.
Between my first lover who was thin
and my second who was warm and nostalgic,
my arms remember little. Though, yes,
there was one who had that sweet smell in his skin
of a child who still drinks nothing
but milk. A milk ladled out
by the Big and Little Dippers. If you look up
long enough into the night sky,
it becomes surer of itself, and you less sure
whether you’re lying on the lawn, skirt tucked
against mosquitoes, a cigarette
about to burn your fingers,
or if you’re falling, and the sky
is a net that can’t catch you
since, like everyone else, your are water
nothing can stop. So you lie on your bed,
all night staring at the cracks
in the plaster, terrified of falling through. .
1914–Dylan Thomas born in Uplands, Swansea, in Wales; Welsh poet and author; he left school at 16 and worked as a journalist for a short time. By 1934, he was a well-known poet and short story writer, but found earning a living as a writer was difficult, so he augmented his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. Under Milkwood, A Child’s Christmas in Wales and other works were broadcast by BBC radio. He also went on tours in America during the early 1950s, before his death at age 39 in New York City in 1953, from the combined effects of alcoholism and bronchial disease.
Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man
Aged a Hundred
by Dylan Thomas . When the morning was waking over the war He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide, He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor. Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang. Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart. The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound Assembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage. O keep his bones away from the common cart, The morning is flying on the wings of his age And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand. .
1903–Evelyn Waugh born in West Hampstead, London; English author of novels, biographies, essays, and travel books; journalist; and poet. As an adult, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Best known for his novels Decline and Fall;A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited, his WWII trilogy Sword of Honour; and The Loved One.
Prayer to the Three Kings
by Evelyn Waugh . Like me, you were late in coming.
The shepherds were here long before,
even the cattle. They had joined the chorus
of angels before you were started. . For you the primordial discipline
of the heavens had to be relaxed
and a new defiant light set to blaze amid
the disconcerted stars. . How laboriously you came, taking sights
and calculating, where the shepherds
had run barefoot. How odd you looked
on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries,
and laden with such preposterous gifts. . You came at length to the first stage
of your pilgrimage and the great star
stood still above you. What did you do?
You stopped to call on King Herod.
Deadly exchange of compliments
in which there began that un-ended war
of mobs and magistrates against the innocent. . Yet you came, and were not turned away.
You too found room before the manger.
Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted
and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. . In that new order of charity
that had just come to life, there was room for you, too.
You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than
the ox or the ass. . You are our special patrons, and patrons
of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to
make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge
and speculation,
of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt,
of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents. . May we, too, before and at the end
find kneeling-space in the straw. . For His sake Who did not reject your curious gifts,
pray always for all the learned,
the oblique, and the delicate. . Let them not be quite forgotten
at the Throne of God when the simple
come into their kingdom. . Amen. .
“Prayer to the Three Kings” from The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh– Oxford University Press
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1946–Sharon Thesen born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, but her family moved to British Colombia when she was six; Canadian poet, academic, and anthology editor; her 2000 poetry collection, A Pair of Scissors, won the Pat Lowther Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and now runs the Pinecone Poetry Workshops. Her many poetry collections include Artemis Hates Romance; Holding the Pose; Confabulations; The Beginning of the Long Dash; The Pangs of Sunday; The Good Bacteria; Oyama Pink Shale; and The Receiver.
Looking Something Up in the Dictionary
by Sharon Thesen . It gives me such great pleasure to spin my office chair around to face the bookshelf and pull out Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary with the softening navy-blue leather covers . heavy in the hand, but happy to fall open at any page— . to look up the word laconic which I thought described some recent poems, but then I wondered what laconic actually means. . It turns out it means what I thought it did, “terseness, sparing of words.” What a strange thing it is to open a dictionary inherited via one’s ex-husband in the long-ago divorce— . & to wonder how he might feel now so far away to see his grandmother’s handwriting on the flyleaf in blue fountain-pen ink some words she’d wanted to look up: . nostalgia, arthritis, recluse.
