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13 poets born in December,
who give us true words in
this twisted season of lies
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December 7
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1878 – Yosano Akiko born as Shō Hō, in Sakai, Osaka prefecture; Japanese author, poet, pioneering feminist, and social reformer. Published in 1901, Midaregami (Tangled Hair), her first of several collections of tanka, a traditional Japanese poetry form, contained around 400 poems, the majority of them love poems. It was denounced by most literary critics as vulgar or obscene, but was widely read by freethinkers, as it brought a passionate individualism to this traditional form, unlike any other work of the late Meiji period. The poems defied Japanese society’s expectation of women to always be gentle, modest, and passive. In her poems, women are assertively sexual. She frequently wrote for the all-woman literary magazine Seitō (Bluestocking). Even though she gave birth to 13 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood, she rejected motherhood as her main identity, saying limiting a sense of self to a single aspect of one’s life, however important, entraps women in the old way of thinking. In her later years, she supported her country’s military ambitions, but these poems are regarded as lacking the brilliance and originality of her previous work. She died of a stroke at age 63 in May 1942.
The Day the Mountains Move
by Yosano Akiko
.
.The day the mountains move has come.
I speak, but no one believes me.
For a time the mountains have been asleep,
But long ago, they all danced with fire.
It doesn’t matter if you believe this,
My friends, as long as you believe:
All the sleeping women
Are now awake and moving.
.
“The Day the Mountains Move” from Feminist Theory Reader, © 2016, edited by Carole R. McCann and Seung-kyung Kim – Routledge Books
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1920 – Tatamkhulu Afrika born as Ismail Joubert in Sallum, Egypt to an Arab father and a Turkish mother, but orphaned in South Africa at age 3; South African poet, novelist, and artist. Fostered by family friends after his parents died, he became a soldier in the WWII North Africa Campaign, and was captured at Tobruk. His experiences as a prisoner of war are prominently featured in his writing. In the 1960s, he became an anti-apartheid activist, and a member of the armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation). In 1987, he was arrested for terrorism and banned from speaking in public or publishing his work for 5 years, but continued writing under the name Tatamkhulu Afrika. He served 11 years in prison until his release in 1992. Just after the 2002 publication of his final novel, Bitter Eden, he was run over by a car and died of his injuries at age 82 two weeks later.
Nothing’s Changed
by Tatamkhulu Afrika
.
Small round hard stones click
under my heels,
seeding grasses thrust
bearded seeds
into trouser cuffs, cans,
trodden on, crunch
in tall, purple-flowering,
amiable weeds.
.
District Six.
No board says it is:
but my feet know,
and my hands,
and the skin about my bones,
and the soft labouring of my lungs,
and the hot, white, inwards turning
anger of my eyes.
.
Brash with glass,
name flaring like a flag,
it squats
in the grass and weeds,
incipient Port Jackson trees:
new, up-market, haute cuisine,
guard at the gatepost,
whites only inn.
.
No sign says it is:
but we know where we belong.
.
I press my nose
to the clear panes, know,
before I see them, there will be
crushed ice white glass,
linen falls,
the single rose.
.
Down the road,
working man's cafe sells
bunny chows.
Take it with you, eat
it at a plastic table's top,
wipe your fingers on your jeans,
spit a little on the floor:
it's in the bone.
.
I back from the
glass,
boy again,
leaving small mean O
of small mean mouth.
Hands burn
for a stone, a bomb,
to shiver down the glass.
Nothing's changed.
.
“Nothing’s Changed” from Nightrider: Selected Poems, by Tatamkhulu Afrika – NB Publishers, 2010 edition
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1948 – Pearl Cleage born in Springfield, Massachusetts; African-American playwright, novelist, essayist, poet, and political activist. In the 1970s, she was press secretary and speechwriter for Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first Black mayor, but soon left to pursue writing in her own voice. As a Black feminist, political activist, and writer, she tackles issues at the crux of racism and sexism. Her best-known novel is What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, and her poetry collections are: Dear Dark Faces: Portraits of a People; One for the Brothers; and We Speak Your Names: A Celebration. We Speak Your Names is a tribute to all the inspiring black women who came before. Her memoir, Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs, was published in 2014.
Feelings of a Very Light Negro as the Confrontation Approaches
by Pearl Cleage
.
When it comes
(and make no mistake—
it’s coming)
which way will I go?
.
Whose bullet will send
my life
choking and bubbling
up from my chest in the filth
of some unknown,
but silently waiting, street?
My pale skin and
thin lips
alienate me from my
people.
They are suspicious of
my claim to
blackness.
They gaze into my pale
blue eyes
and they know that I have
never danced
naked and gleaming with sweat
under a velvet African sky.
But my soul screams
against an alliance with
you.
I am Black inside myself
and I hate you,
for with your whiteness
and your power
you have destroyed me.
.
“Feelings of a Very Light Negro as the Confrontation Approaches” © 1970 by Pearl Cleage, appeared in the 1970 anthology We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets – Dodd, Mead & Company
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December 8
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65 BCE – Horace born as Quintus Horatius Flaccus in Venosa, Italy, Roman Republic; noted Roman lyric poet, also known for satiric hexameter verses and caustic iambic poems. He lived during Rome’s momentous change from a republic to an empire. Horace served as an officer in the republican army defeated by Octavian and Mark Antony at the Battle of Philippi in in Greece in 42 BC. He accepted an amnesty offered by Octavian, and Maecenas, Octavian’s right-hand man in civil affairs, befriended him. When Horace returned to Italy, he discovered his father’s estate had been confiscated, so he took a civil service position as a scriba quaestorius, and began writing his Satires and Epodes. With Maecenas as his patron, he prospered, and attained the rank of eques Romanus (a position in the second rank of Roman citizens). He died at age 56 in November, 8 BC.
Bki:Xiv The Ship Of State
by Horace
.
O ship the fresh tide carries back to sea again.
Where are you going! Quickly, run for harbour.
Can’t you see how your sides
have been stripped bare of oars,
.
how your shattered masts and yards are groaning loudly
in the swift south-westerly, and bare of rigging,
your hull can scarce tolerate
the overpowering waters?
.
You haven’t a single sail that’s still intact now,
no gods, that people call to when they’re in trouble.
Though you’re built of Pontic pine,
a child of those famous forests,
.
though you can boast of your race, and an idle name:
the fearful sailor puts no faith in gaudy keels.
You must beware of being
merely a plaything of the winds.
.
You, who not long ago were troubling weariness
to me, and now are my passion and anxious care,
avoid the glistening seas
between the shining Cyclades.
.
“Bki:Xiv The Ship Of State” from Horace: Satires. Epistles. Art of Poetry by Horace – Harvard University Press, 1929 edition
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1021 – Wang Anshi born in Linchuan, Jiangxi province; Chinese statesman, economist, reformer, and poet; Chancellor (1070-1074 and 1075-1076) to Emperor Shenzong, of the Song dynasty. His economic reforms included increasing currency circulation, the breaking up of private monopolies, and early forms of government regulation and social welfare. He also expanded the use of local militias by the military, expanded the civil service examination system, and tried to suppress nepotism in the government. He died at age 64 or 65 in 1086.
poem by Wang Anshi:
The seasons change so suddenly
the strongest heart is stunned,
and with no one to share their sorrows with mine,
why even bother to pour the wine?
– from Bird Tracks in the Air: Selected Poems of Wang Anshi, translations and commentary © 2019 by Jan W. Walls and Yvonne L. Walls – New World Press
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December 9
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1899 – Léonie Adams born in Brooklyn NY; American poet, editor, anthologist, children’s book author, and translator. Her family was very strict – she wasn’t allowed on the subway until she was 18, and only if accompanied by her father. Adams was the 7th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1948-1949, now called U.S. Poet Laureate). Her roommate at Barnard College was Margaret Mead. Her poetry began being published in magazines while she was an undergraduate. Her first poetry collection, Those Not Elect, was published in 1925, while she was an editor at The Measure, a poetry journal. In 1928, she went to Europe, meeting literary figures such as H.D., Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. She published four more poetry collections: High Falcon; Midsummer; This Measure; and Poems; A Selection, which won the 1954 Bollingen Prize. She was also honored with the 1955 Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America. Adams died of heart disease at age 88 in June 1988.
Country Of The Proud
by Léonie Adams
.
A fall over rock,
Metal answering to water,
Is the seal of this spot;
A land trodden by music
And the tune forgot.
.
Of a region savage,
The territory that was broken,
Silver gushed free;
And earth holy, earth meek shall receive it
In humility.
.
This, not dwelt in, this haunted,
The country of the proud,
Is curdling to stone,
And careless of the feet of the waters
As they glance from it down.
.
“Country of the Proud” from Poems: A Selection © 1954 by Léonie Adams – Funk & Wagnalls
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December 10
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1830 – Emily Dickinson born in Amherst, Massachusetts; American’s best-known woman poet and one of the nation’s greatest and most original authors. She lived the life of a recluse in Amherst, and 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 cache of poems.
She sights a Bird–she chuckles (507)
by Emily Dickinson
.
She sights a Bird – she chuckles –
She flattens – then she crawls –
She runs without the look of feet –
Her eyes increase to Balls –
.
Her Jaws stir – twitching – hungry –
Her Teeth can hardly stand –
She leaps, but Robin leaped the first –
Ah, Pussy, of the Sand,
.
The Hopes so juicy ripening –
You almost bathed your Tongue –
When Bliss disclosed a hundred Toes –
And fled with every one –
.
“She sights a Bird–she chuckles” from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – Pantianos Classics, 1924 edition
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1925 – Carolyn Kizer born in Spokane, Washington; American poet, essayist, translator, and feminist. In 1946, Kizer married Stimson Bullitt, scion of a wealthy Seattle family, and had three children in quick succession. During this time, she nearly stopped writing poetry. They divorced in 1954. Kizer became the first editor of the journal Poetry Northwest (1959-1964). Her first book of poems, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961. Through the State Department, she got a job teaching in Pakistan (1964-1965), then was the first director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts (1966-1970). She won three Pushcart Prizes, the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Yin, and in 1988 she won both the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. Her poetry collections include: The Nearness of You; Harping On: Poems 1985-1995; Pro Femina; and Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. She died age 88 in October 2014.
Fearful Women
by Carolyn Kizer
.
Arms and the girl I sing – O rare
arms that are braceleted and white and bare
.
arms that were lovely Helen’s, in whose name
Greek slaughtered Trojan. Helen was to blame.
.
Scape-nanny call her; wars for turf
and profit don’t sound glamorous enough.
.
Mythologize your women! None escape.
Europe was named from an act of bestial rape:
.
Eponymous girl on bull-back, he intent
on scattering sperm across a continent.
.
Old Zeus refused to take the rap.
It’s not his name in big print on the map.
.
But let’s go back to the beginning
when sinners didn’t know that they were sinning.
.
He, one rib short: she lived to rue it
when Adam said to God, “She made me do it.”
.
Eve learned that learning was a dangerous thing
for her: no end of trouble would it bring.
.
An educated woman is a danger.
Lock up your mate! Keep a submissive stranger
.
like Darby’s Joan, content with church and Kinder,
not like that sainted Joan, burnt to a cinder.
.
Whether we wield a scepter or a mop
It’s clear you fear that we may get on top.
.
And if we do – I say it without animus –
It’s not from you we learned to be magnaminous.
.
“Fearful Women” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer, Copper Canyon Press
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December 11
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1810 – Alfred de Musset born in Paris, French poet, playwright, and novelist. His first poetry collection, Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (Contes of Spain and Italy), was published in 1829, before he was 20 years old. His second collection, La Nuit Vénitienne (The Venetian Night), was not well received, but A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles (With What the Girls Dream) was more successful. He had a brief but intense affair with author George Sand, during which they went to Venice, but he became ill, broke off the relationship, and returned to Paris. He continued to write poetry, and also wrote a number of plays, including Lorenzaccio and Les Caprices de Marianne (The Moods of Marianne). He published two novels, Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confessions of a Child of the Century) and Histoire d’un merle blanc (published in English as The White Blackbird). De Musset’s health continued to decline, and he suffered from depression. His popularity waned, and when he died at age 46 in 1857, few attended his funeral.
I love the first shiver of winter
by Alfred de Musset
.
I love the first shiver of winter! That day
When the stubble resists the hunter’s foot,
When magpies settle on fields fragrant with hay,
And deep in the old chateau, the hearth is lit.
.
That’s the city time. I remember last year,
I came back and saw the good Louvre and its dome,
Paris and its smoke—that whole realm so dear.
(I can still hear the postilions shouting, “We’re home!”)
.
I loved the gray weather, the strollers, the Seine
Under a thousand lanterns, sovereign!
I’d see winter, and you, my love, you!
.
Madame, I’d steep my soul in your glances,
But did I even realize the chances
That soon your heart would change for me too?
.
– translated by Zack Rogow
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1922 – Grace Paley born in the Bronx, NY; American author, poet, pacifist, and anti-war activist. During the Vietnam War, she joined the War Resisters League, and in 1968, signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War. In 1969, Paley accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She was a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and, in 1978, was arrested as one of “The White House Eleven” for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner (that read “No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR”) on the White House lawn. In the 1990s, Paley campaigned for human rights and against U.S. military intervention in Central America. Noted for her short story collection: The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. She died at age 84 in August, 2007.
Sisters
by Grace Paley
.
My friends are dying
well we’re old it’s natural
one day we passed the experience of “older”
which began in late middle age
and came suddenly upon “old” then
all the little killing bugs and
baby tumors that had struggled
for years against the body’s
brave immunities found their
level playing fields and
victory
.
but this is not what I meant to
tell you I wanted to say that
my friends were dying but have now
become absent the word dead is correct
but inappropriate
.
I have not taken their names out of
conversation gossip political argument
my telephone book or card index in
what ever alphabetical or contextual
organizer I can stop any evening of
the lonesome week at Claiborne Berovici
Vernarelli Deming and rest a moment
on their seriousness as artists workers
their excitement as political actors in the
streets of our cities or in their workplaces
the vigiling fasting praying in or out
of jail their lightheartedness which floated
above the year’s despair
their courageousness sometimes hilarious
disobediences before the state’s official
servants their fidelity to the idea that
it is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world at an absolute minimum
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed
.
“Sisters” from A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Grace Paley – edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley, © 2017 by Nora Paley and Danny Paley – Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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1943 – Julia Vinograd born in Berkeley, CA; prolific American poet known to the Telegraph Avenue community of Berkeley as “The Bubble Lady” because she blew bubbles during the People’s Park demonstrations in 1969. Her family had moved to Southern California when her father, a chemist, joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, but Vinograd earned a BA from the University of Berkeley in 1965, then graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa before returning to Berkeley where she was part of the city’s “street culture” of the 1960s and 70s. She later was a regular at the Mission District’s Café Babar poetry slam. Among her many poetry collections are: Revolution: and Other Poems; Street Spices; Time and Trouble; Berkeley Street Cannibals: New & Selected Work; Leftovers; Neon Bones; Holding Up the Wall; Speed of Dark; Cannibal Café; Between The Cracks; and A Symphony for Broken Instruments (published posthumously). She won a Pushcart Prize for her poem “For The Young Men Who Died of AIDS” and a 1985 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Julie Vinograd died of cancer at age 74 in December 2018.
Street Crazy Playing the Flute
by Julia Vinograd
.
Her mind ran over her face like a train wreck.
What was left twitched, at off moments.
But she played a wooden flute
as if her hands belonged to someone who never worried.
Thin shoulders huddled around the music,
stuck in a pile of clothes that would rather be in a closet.
Might’ve been young if she’d been someone else.
A cold grey evening.
People hurried off the street before it didn’t rain,
nobody stopped to watch her play.
She blew elbow-shaped notes and chords
stamping like boots for warmth, almost a crowd
but no faces, she always had trouble with faces.
Inside, people made dinners.
Hospital food had been beef stew without the beef
and frightened jello.
Her flute craved candied roses and catastrophes.
She’d passed a restaurant once.
Thru the window she’d seen lobsters piled on a tray
and bright small sharp instruments
either for cracking shells or brain surgery.
Her flute poured out soft warm butter sauce
into the cold evening till if you were a lobster
you’d love to be eaten. She’d been 51/50’d briefly.
She hadn’t noticed enough to be annoyed
except they defined her flute as a hard object
and took it away. Now she had it back.
What would’ve been a smile for someone else
crawled onto her face.
Her flute played Mount Rushmore for a closing flourish,
not president’s faces (she always had trouble with faces)
but a mountain-sized hot fudge sundae with a cherry.
.
“Street Crazy Playing the Flute” © 2017 by Julia Vinograd appeared at Street Spirit newspaper’s January 1, 2019 online site
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December 12
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1873 – Lola Ridge born in Dublin, Ireland as Rose Emily Ridge; anarchist poet, editor, feminist, proletariat, and editor. Her poems were published in several magazines, and in five books of poetry. When she was a toddler, her mother emigrated with her to New Zealand. Ridge was briefly married in 1895, but moved to Australia, and studied painting at the Sydney Art School. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, and settled in San Francisco, where she began using the name Lola, and gave her age as ten years younger. In 1908, The Overland Monthly was the first American magazine to publish one of her poems. She moved to New York, where she worked in a factory, and became involved in working class politics and protests. She also worked for Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. In 1918, her long poem, The Ghetto, was published in The New Republic, and then in her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, which was a critical success, leading to work for her as an editor on avant-garde magazines. Her other poetry collections include Red Flag; Firehead; and Dance of Fire. She won the Shelley Memorial Award twice, in 1934 and 1935. In 1941, she died at age 67 of pulmonary tuberculosis.
Dedication
by Lola Ridge
.
I would be a torch unto your hand,
A lamp upon your forehead, Labor,
In the wild darkness before the Dawn
That I shall never see…
.
We shall advance together, my Beloved,
Awaiting the mighty ushering...
Together we shall make the last grand charge
And ride with gorgeous Death
With all her spangles on
And cymbals clashing...
And you shall rush on exultant as I fall -
Scattering a brief fire about your feet…
.
Let it be so...
Better - while life is quick
And every pain immense and joy supreme,
And all I have and am
Flames upward to the dream...
Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,
Burning out the wick.
.
“Dedication” from The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge, originally published in 1918 – Aeterna Publishing, 2023 edition
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December 13
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1927 – James Wright born in Martins Ferry, Ohio; American poet and translator. Neither of his parents had more than an 8th grade education, so his father worked in a factory and his mother in a laundry. Wright suffered a nervous breakdown at age 16 in 1943, and graduated from high school a year late. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1946, and was sent to Japan. Following his discharge, he attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then spent a year in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship. After his return, Wright earned a master’s and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. His first collection, The Green Wall, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956. He collaborated with Robert Bly on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine The Fifties (laterThe Sixties). His 1972 Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Wright, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed in 1979 with cancer of the tongue, and died in 1980 at age 52. His poetry collections include The Branch Will Not Break; Two Citizens; and To a Blossoming Pear Tree.
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter,
I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor
by James Wright
.
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
— Written A.D. 819
.
Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
.
But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?
.
“As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor” from Above the River: The Complete Poems, © 1991 by Anne Wright – Farrar, Straus and Giroux / University Press of New England edition
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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