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“Don't join the book burners. Don't think
you're going to conceal faults by concealing
evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid
to go in your library and read every book...”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th U.S. President
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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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13 poets born this week
each in their way a
defender of free speech
and the written word
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February 4
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1876 – Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn born as Sarah Norcliffe Dalton in Norfolk, Virginia; American writer, essayist, poet, social reformer, and teacher. She spent her early childhood in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but went to live with her father’s spinster sisters in Manchester, Vermont, after her mother died. In Manchester, she and Dorothy Canfield Fisher became friends and later collaborated on the novel Fellow Captains. In 1895, Sarah graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary, a co-educational boarding school, then spent a year at Radcliffe College. Cleghorn was a Quaker pacifist, became a member of the Socialist Party of America, was opposed to lynching, capital punishment, and child labor, but advocated for vegetarianism, animal rights, and prison reform. Her early poetry was published in magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, and but her later work appeared in The Masses and social reform publications. She taught at Manumit Farm, a socialist school for the children of workers for over 20 years, retiring at age 60 because of declining health. Her best-known poem, ‘The Golf Links,” first appeared in the New York Tribune column of F.P. Adams around 1914. Her poetry collections include Portraits and Protests and Poems of Peace and Freedom. She died at age 83 in April 1959.
The Golf Links
by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
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1941 – Janice Mirikitani born in Stockton, California – she was interned with her parents in an Arkansas camp during WWII; American poet, author, community activist, dancer, and anthology editor. Mirikitani was founding president of the Glide Foundation, an organization she and her husband, minister and activist Cecil Williams, started to empower marginalized communities in San Francisco. They coauthored Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Creating Radical Change in a Community Called Glide (2013). Mirikitani also served on the San Francisco Arts Commission. Among the anthologies she edited are Third World Women and Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology. Collections of her poetry include: Awake in the River; Shedding Silence; Love Works; and Out of the Dust. In 2000, she was named as San Francisco’s 2nd Poet Laureate. She died from cancer at age 80 in July 2021.
For a Daughter Who Leaves
"More than gems in my comb box shaped by the
God of the Sea, I prize you, my daughter. . ."
― Lady Otomo, 8th century, Japan
.
by Janice Mirikitani
.
A woman weaves
her daughter's wedding
slippers that will carry
her steps into a new life.
The mother weeps alone
into her jeweled sewing box
slips red thread
around its spool,
the same she used to stitch
her daughter's first silk jacket
embroidered with turtles
that would bring luck, long life.
She remembers all the steps
taken by her daughter's
unbound quick feet:
dancing on the stones
of the yard among yellow
butterflies and white breasted sparrows.
And she grew, legs strong
body long, mind
independent.
Now she captures all eyes
with her hair combed smooth
and her hips gently
swaying like bamboo.
The woman
spins her thread
from the spool of her heart,
knotted to her daughter's
departing
wedding slippers.
.
“For a Daughter Who Leaves” from Love Works, © 2002 by Janice Mirikitani – City Lights Foundation Books
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February 5
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1962 – Jeremy Michael Clark born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky; Black American poet and writer; his poems have appeared in Poetry magazine; Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review, and in Once Said a City: A Louisville Poets Anthology. His first collection, The Trouble with Light, was published in 2014, and a chapbook, some blues I know by name, came out in 2017. He now lives in Brooklyn. NY.
In the Hometown I’ve Tried to Love
by Jeremy Michael Clark
.
Remember earlier, when I showed
you around town, how all my maps were mental,
.
my sense of direction based on landmarks
long gone? A kind of proof, you said, of how
.
so clearly I’m a small-town boy, pointing out
ghosts wherever I go. In bed with you,
.
calm as a city just after a storm—
your eyes, two wet leaves on a windshield,
.
my hand, still as a stalled car in the small
of your back—I still can’t get out of my mind
.
the spiderwebs spun in the corners of this room,
or how this whole building’s unstable.
.
Years from now it’ll be condemned, reduced
to rubble, & they’ll build over it, or not,
.
just leave it forever an empty lot, one more
memorial dedicated to neglect. By now, you know
.
how most of my stories end: someone walks out
on the porch, wonders which will be the storm
.
that splinters the oak & brings it down on their home.
.
“In the Hometown I’ve Tried to Love,” 2020 © by Jeremy Michael Clark, appeared in Wildness Issue 21, February 2020
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February 6
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1882 – Anne Spencer born as Anne Bethel Bannister on a farm in Henry County, Virginia, the daughter of former slaves; African American poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. Though she lived in Virginia her entire life, she was a notable contributor to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, published in periodicals like The Crisis, and the anthologies The New Negro; The Book of American Negro Poetry; and Shadowed Dreams. She was one of three African American women poets included in the 1973 Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. She met Charles Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary, and they married in 1901, then moved to Lynchburg, and had three children. Their son Chauncey would serve during WWII with the Tuskegee Airmen. Anne was the librarian (1923-1945) at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School to help pay for her children’s college education. She and her husband helped revive the NAACP chapter in Lynchburg, and hosted speakers and activists, including Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Anne Spencer was also an enthusiastic gardener, and used garden imagery in many of her poems. She died at Age 93 in July, 1975. The Spencer home is now a museum.
Translation
.
by Anne Spencer
.
We trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.
He told me how calm his soul was laid
By the lack of anvil and strife.
“The wooing kestrel,” I said, “mutes his mating-note
To please the harmony of this sweet silence.”
And when at the day’s end
We laid tired bodies ’gainst
The loose warm sands,
And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet;
When star after star came out
To guard their lovers in oblivion—
My soul so leapt that my evening prayer
Stole my morning song!
.
“Translation” from The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)
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1898 – Melvin B. Tolson born as Melvin Beaunorus Tolson in Moberly, Missouri; African American poet, professor, debate coach, columnist, and politician. His parents, a a Methodist minister and a seamstress, were mostly self-educated, and emphasized education for their children. Tolson graduated with honors from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1923. He married another student, Ruth Southall of Virginia, in 1922. They moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English (1924-1947) at Wiley College, a small black school noted for its academic reputation. In 1930-1931, Tolson took a leave of absence to study for a Master’s degree at Columbia University. His thesis, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers," was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance, and had a profound impact on his own poetry. He was awarded his degree in 1940. At Wiley, in addition to teaching, he coached football, directed the theatre club, and started the Wiley Forensic Society, which became an award-winning debate team that was a pioneer in interracial collegiate debate. They competed in 1935 against the University of Southern California, and won. This was fictionalized in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, who also starred as Tolson (the USC debate was changed to a debate with Harvard in the film). In 1947, he began teaching at Langston University in Oklahoma, and was director of the school’s Dust Bowl theatre. Also that year, he was appointed as Poet Laureate of Liberia. Tolson served as mayor of Langston, OK (1954-1960). He was appointed as Avalon Poet at Tuskegee Institute (1965-1966). Melvin Tolson died at age 68 from cancer in August 1966. His four poetry collections are: Rendezvous with America; Libretto for the Republic of Liberia; Harlem Gallery; and A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, published posthumously.
The Sea-Turtle And The Shark
by Melvin B. Tolson
Strange but true is the story
of the sea-turtle and the shark- the instinctive drive
of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometime the shark
swallows the sea-turtle whole.
The sly reptilian marine
withdraw, into the shell of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip a rhinoceros' hide or strip a crocodile to
fare-thee-well;
now inside the shark,
the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaw
of his decent into pelagic hell;
then…then with ravenous jaws that cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws…and gnaws…and gnaws…his way
to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark, beyond the stomach walls of
the shark.
“The Sea-Turtle And The Shark” from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson – University of Virginia Press, 1999 edition, annotated by Raymond Nelson
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February 7
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1946 – Brian Patten born in Bootle, Merseyside, England; prolific English author of children’s books and poetry – one of the 1960s Liverpool poets. He went to Sefton Park School in Liverpool, but left school at 15, and wrote a column on popular music for The Bootle Times. He moved to Paris at age 18, where he earned money by writing poems in chalk on the pavements. In 1967, he joined poets Roger McGough and Adrian Henri in publishing The Mersey Sound, one of the best-selling poetry anthologies of the 20th century. His own poetry collections include: Notes to the Hurrying Man; Vanishing Trick; Storm Damage; Armada; and The Book of Upside Down Thinking.
A Valentine
by Brian Patten
.
To be with one another forever and to have no doubt
(Nor feel exhaustion at the prospect)
Is the goal of those who, like us
Speak in whispers through the night.
Whose one fear is of how Eternity just might
Be too short a time,
And for whom the briefest separation is a crime.
.
“A Valentine” from Love Poems, © 1992 by Brian Patten – Flamingo Books
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1979 – Lebogang Mashile born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to exiled South African parents; South African-American actress, writer, poet, and spoken word performer. In 1994, she went to South Africa after the end of apartheid, and attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She, along with Myesha Jenkins and Ntsiki Mazwai, founded the poetry group Feela Sistah. As an actress, she has appeared onstage and in films like Hotel Rwanda. Her first poetry collection, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, won the 2006 Noma Award for works published in Africa. Her poetry has also appeared in two anthologies: Beyond Words: South African Poetics and New Daughters of Africa.
Love is Elastic
by Lebogang Mashile
.
When I am closed
Used up
You are stretched at your fullest width
Ready to give
I want to jump
Into you
And feel this life
As you do
Perhaps then
I could give as you do
Perhaps then
I could live as you do
.
“Love is Elastic” from In a Ribbon of Rhythm, © 2005 by Lebogang Mashile – Oshun Books
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February 8
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1911 – Elizabeth Bishop born in Worchester, Massachusetts; American poet, short story writer, and painter who was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1949-1950). The consultant title was later changed to U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 1970 National Book Award, and the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Elizabeth Bishop died at age 68 of a brain aneurism in October 1979. Her poetry collections include: North & South; A Cold Spring; Geography III; and Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.
Lullaby For the Cat
by Elizabeth Bishop
Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
Close your great big eyes;
Round your bed Events prepare
The pleasantest surprise.
.
Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.
.
Joy and Love will both be yours,
Minnow, don't be glum.
Happy days are coming soon --
Sleep, and let them come...
“Lullaby For the Cat” from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 –Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983 edition
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1924 – Lisel Mueller born in Hamburg, Germany as Elisabeth Neumann; German-American poet, translator, and academic. Her family left Germany in the mid-1930s, moving to Italy, and then France, because her father was a political dissident. By 1939, he had found work in America as a professor at Evansville College in Indiana, and 15-year-old Lisel, with her mother and sister, fled Europe to join him. She wrote some poetry in college, but planned to become a social worker. In 1943, Lisel Neumann married Paul Mueller, an editor, and they had two daughters, Lucy and Jenny. Mueller began writing poetry more seriously in 1953, and went on to win the National Book Award for Poetry in 1981 for The Need to Hold Still, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 for Alive Together: New & Selected Poems. She died at age 96 in February 2020.
Romantics
Johannes Brahms and
Clara Schumann
.
by Lisel Mueller
.
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
.
“Romantics” from Alive Together, © 1996 by Lisel Mueller – LSU Press
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1927 – Judson Jerome born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; American poet, author, literary critic, academic, and poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest from 1959 until shortly before his death. He taught poetry at Antioch College, where two of his students were Gregory Orr and Mark Strand (U.S. Poet Laureate 1990-1991). Jerome’s published works include: The Village: New and Selected Poems; Jonah & Job; and The Poet’s Handbook. He died of lung cancer at age 64 in August 1991.
Deer Hunt
by Judson Jerome
.
Because the warden is my cousin, my
mountain friends hunt in summer, when the deer
cherish each rattler-ridden spring, and I
have waited hours by a pool in fear
that manhood would require I shoot, or that
the steady drip of the hill would dull my ear
to a snake whispering near the log I sat
upon, and listened to the yelping cheer
of dogs and men resounding ridge to ridge.
.
I flinched at every lonely rifle crack,
my knuckles whitening where I gripped the edge
of age and clung, like retching, sinking back
then gripping once again the monstrous gun,
since I, to be a man, had taken one.
.
“Deer Hunt” from The Village: New and Selected Poems, © 1987 by Judson Jerome –Dolphin-Moon Press
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February 9
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1847 – Amy Lowell born in Brookline Massachusetts: American poet, considered part of the imagist school of poetry. She never attended college because her parents didn’t consider it proper for a woman to do so. She became an avid reader and book collector to learn on her own. Her poetry first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1910. Lowell published her first collection, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, in 1912. Her other published works include: Sword Blades and Poppy Seed; Men, Women and Ghosts; and Pictures of the Floating World. She died of a stroke at age 51 in May 1925. Lowell was awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously for her collection What’s o’clock.
Listening
by Amy Lowell
.
’T is you that are the music, not your song.
The song is but a door which, opening wide,
Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,
Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong
Sing but of you. Throughout your whole life long
Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide
This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
The song of earth has many different chords;
Ocean has many moods and many tones
Yet always ocean. In the damp Spring woods
The painted trillium smiles, while crisp pine cones
Autumn alone can ripen. So is this
One music with a thousand cadences.
.
“Listening” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, © 1955, renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company
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1944 – Alice Walker born in Eatonton, Georgia, as Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker to parents who were sharecroppers; American novelist, short story and non-fiction writer, poet, essayist, and activist; author of The Color Purple, which won the National Book Award, and the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded for a novel by an African American woman. At age 8, she became blind in her right eye when one of her brothers fired a BB gun. Walker went to segregated schools through high school, graduating as valedictorian. She attended Spelman College on a full scholarship, but transferred after two years when offered a scholarship by Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY. She gave some of her poems to her professor and mentor Muriel Rukeyser, who showed them to her literary agent, and her first collection, Once, was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1968, three years after Walker graduated. She then worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi. As an editor at Ms. Magazine beginning in 1975, her article on Zora Neale Hurston caused renewed interest in Hurston’s work. In March 2003, on International Women's Day, Walker was arrested at a protest against going to war with Iraq outside the White House, for crossing a police line. Walker wrote about it in her essay "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For." Though best known as a novelist, Walker has published 11 poetry collections, including Revolutionary Petunias; Her Blue Body Everything We Know; Hard Times Require Furious Dancing; and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart.
Desire
by Alice Walker
.
My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it.
.
“Desire” from The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness Into Flowers, © 2013 by Alice Walker – The New Press
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February 10
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1898 – Bertolt Brecht born in Augsburg, in Swabia, Germany, as Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht; German political and experimental theatre playwright, director, lyricist, poet, and socialist. He developed ‘Epic Theatre’ a modernist form of theatre as a forum for political ideas; noted for The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Woman of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. After his plays were banned in Germany in 1933, he went into exile, moving from Denmark to Finland, and then to Southern California, where he hoped to write for Hollywood. But a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he moved to Switzerland. In 1949, he returned to Germany, and ran the Berliner Ensemble theatre company. Brecht’s poetry is collected in Poems 1913-1956; Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht, and The Complete Poems of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht died of a heart attack at age 58 in August 1956.
The Burning Of The Books
by Bertolt Brecht
.
When the Regime ordered that
Books with dangerous teachings
Should be publicly burnt and everywhere
Oxen were forced to draw cart loads of books
To the funeral pyre, an old poet, one of the best,
Discovered with fury when he studied the list
Of the burned, that his own books had
Been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath and wrote to those in power.
Burn me, he wrote with flying pen, burn me!
Don’t leave me out. Haven’t my books always told
The truth? And now you treat me like a liar!
I command you: Burn me!
―translator not credited
A somewhat different translation of “The Burning of the Books” is included in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht – Liveright 2018 translation edition (I just liked this uncredited version better than the one in the book)
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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