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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 poets born in December,
a hobo, rebels, and activists,
inventors and translators,
refugees and home bodies —
all with stories to tell, and
things that need saying
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December 15
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1883 – Harry Kemp born in Youngstown, Ohio; American poet and prose writer. He was raised by his grandmother, who lived near the local train yards. At age 17, he left home to become a common seaman. When he returned to the U.S., he saw the country by riding the rails as a hobo before becoming a college student, but was expelled near the end of 1906. His poems began appearing in newspapers and magazines. In 1911, Upton and Meta Sinclair invited him to camp on their land in Arden, Delaware. When Meta left Upton for Harry, the Sinclairs’ divorce became a scandal. Harry Kemp continued to travel, and wrote about his experiences. His Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative was a best-seller. He lived at times in Greenwich Village, and off and on in a shack in the Provincetown, Cape Cod dunes, where he died in 1960 at age 76. Among his poetry volumes are: Sea and the Dunes; Provincetown Tideways; and Poet of the Dunes.
The Beach Comber
by Harry Kemp
.
I'd like to return to the world again,
To the dutiful, work-a-day world of men, —
For I'm sick of the beach-comber's lot,
Of the one volcano flaming hot,
With the snow round its edge and the fire in its throat,
And the tropical island that seems a-float
Like a world set in space all alone in the sea . . .
How I wish that a ship, it would stop for me.
I'm sick of the brown girl that loves me, I'm sick
Of the cocoanut groves, — you can't take me too quick
From this place, though it's rich in all nature can give . . .
For I want to return where it's harder to live,
Where men struggle for life, where they work and find sweet
Their rest after toil, and the food that they eat . . .
What? A ship's in the offing? . . . dear God, let me hide, —
They're in need of a sailor, are waiting for the tide
To put off? . . . I will hide where the great cliff hangs sheer —
Give 'em mangoes and goats, and don't tell 'em I'm here!
.
“The Beach Comber” from Chanteys and Ballads, © 1920 by Harry Kemp – Brentano’s
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1913 – Muriel Rukeyser born, American poet, playwright, writer, social justice and feminist activist; known for her poems with feminist, social justice and Judaic themes. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. She died at age 66, in February, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. Her poetry collections include: Theory of Flight; The Book of the Dead; The Speed of Darkness; and Breaking Open.
10.
by Muriel Rukeyser
.
Surely it is time for the true grace of women
Emerging, in their lives’ colors, from the rooms, from the harvests,
From the delicate prisons, to speak their promises.
The spirit’s dreaming delight and the fluid senses’
Involvement in the world. Surely the day’s beginning
In midnight, in time of war, flickers upon the wind.
.
O on the wasted midnight of our pain
Remember the wasted ones, lost as surely as soldiers
Surrendered to the barbarians, gone down under centuries
Of the starved spirit, in desperate mortal midnight
With the pure throats and cries of blessing, the clearest
Fountains of mercy and continual love.
.
These years know the separation. O the future shining
In far countries or suddenly at home in a look, in a season,
In music freeing a new myth among the male
Steep landscapes, the familiar cliffs, trees, towers
That stand and assert the earth, saying: “Come here, come to me.
Here are your children.” Not as traditional man
But love’s great insight—“your children and your song.”
.
Coming close to the source of belief, these have created
Resistance, the flowering fire of memory,
Given the bread and the dance and the breathing midnight.
Nothing has been begun. No peace, no word of marvelous
Possible hillsides, the warm lips of the living
Who fought for the spirit’s grace among despair,
Beginning with signs of belief, offered in time of war
As I now send you, for a beginning, praise.
.
“10.” from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, © 1978 by Muriel Rukeyser – McGraw-Hill
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1930 – Edna O’Brien born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland; prolific Irish novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and poet. Her time at St.Raphael’s College, a boarding school run by the Sisters of Mercy, caused her to rebel against “the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred.” In the 1950s, she earned a license as a pharmacist, worked in a Dublin pharmacy, then married writer Ernest Gébler. They moved to London in 1959, where she became a reader for Hutchinson & Co, which published her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960. Because of its frank portrayal of the girls’ sex lives, it was banned by the Irish censorship board, her family’s parish priest denounced the book from the pulpit, and it caused an estrangement with her mother. But she also won the 1962 Kingsley Amis Award for The Country Girls. The 2001 Irish PEN Award, and the 2019 Prix Femina special for body of work are the many honours she received. Her poetry collection, On the Bone, was published in 1989. She died at age 93 in July 2024.
Zoo Lion
by Edna O’Brien
.
The lion had a stony mouth,
Leastwise his teeth looked hard and gray,
And one who fell upon those teeth,
Would end up in a bitter way.
.
The lion had a coat like grass
Burnt dully yellow by the sun,
And shaggy, as if curried by wind,
Drawn over his long skeleton.
.
The lion had two pools for eyes,
Mud-colored, as if after rain,
And here is where confinement showed,
In little darting fish of pain.
.
“Zoo Lion” © 1960 by Edna O’Brien appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, September 17, 1960
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1931 – Shuntarō Tanikawa born in Tokyo, Japan; prolific, highly regarded, and widely read Japanese poet and translator. His poetry collection Floating the River in Melancholy, translated into English by William I. Elliott, won the American Book Award in 1989. In addition to his 60 books of poetry, he is known for his translations of Mother Goose rhymes and Charles Schultz’s Peanuts into Japanese. He also wrote lyrics for songs, including the theme song for the 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle. He died at age 92 in November, 2024. His poetry collections include: Two Billion Lights Years of Love; On Love; To You; and 21.
Dirt
by Shuntarō Tanikawa
.
Memories are
deep
evening darkness
.
To an aging mind
even regret is
a subtle source of light
.
Seeds
from many flowers
that no longer bloom
.
I still keep on sowing them
to make the dirt
sing
.
“Dirt” from The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009, © 2011 by Shuntarō Tanikawa and translator Takako U. Lento – Cornell East Asia Series
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December 16
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1905 – Piet Hein born in Copenhagen, Denmark; Danish polymath – mathematician, designer, inventor, puzzle-maker, writer, poet, and pen-and-ink artist. When the Germans invaded Denmark in April 1940, Hein felt he had three choices: do nothing, flee to neutral Sweden, or join the Danish resistance. As he explained in 1968, “Sweden was out because I am not Swedish, but Danish. I could not remain at home because, if I had, every knock at the door would have sent shivers up my spine. So, I joined the Resistance.” His method of resisting was unique –he invented a new kind of poetry. Calling his poems Grooks (pronounced “gruks” in Danish), he wrote under the pen name Kumbel, Old Norse for “tombstone,” outwitting the Nazi censors by writing his seemingly innocuous little poems with subtle double meanings, which were published in the Danish daily paper Politiken. His first,“Consolation Grook,” translates as: “Losing one glove / is certainly painful, / but nothing /compared to the pain / of losing one, / throwing away the other, / and finding / the first one again.” The Danes, looking for hope and encouragement during the occupation, saw what the censors missed. The gloves were metaphors: even if you’ve lost your freedom, don’t lose your self-respect by collaborating with the enemy, or you will never forgive yourself when your country is free again. The poem soon appeared as graffiti on walls all over Denmark. He would write over 7,000 Grooks (some were in English, which he knew well because of his undergraduate studies at Yale). After the war, Hein developed uses for the superellipse curve in city planning, road network designs, furniture making, and housewares. He used his math skills to create numbers games and puzzles. Hein died at age 90 in April 1996. There are at least 10 books of his Grooks, and several collections in English translation.
An Ethical Grook
by Piet Hein
.
I see
and I hear
and I speak no evil;
I carry
no malice
within my breast;
yet quite without
wishing
a man to the Devil
one may be
permitted
to hope for the best.
.
“An Ethical Grook” from Collected Grooks I, © 1995 by Piet Hein – published by Borgen, 2005 edition
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1990 – Safia Elhillo born in Rockville, Maryland; Sudanese-American poet. She earned a BA from the Gallatin School at New York University, an MFA in poetry from The New School, and has taught at Split This Rock. Elhillo won the 2016 Sillerman Prize for African Poets. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poetry collections include: The January Children; Home Is Not A Country; Girls That Never Die; and Bright Red Fruit.
Self-Portrait with Profanity
by Safia Elhillo
.
ninety-nine names for my god
though i know none for my [ ]
.
a failing not of my deity but of
my arabic not the language
.
itself rather the overeager mosaic
i hoard i steal i borrow
.
from pop songs & mine
from childhood fluency i guard
.
my few swearwords like tinkling
silver anklets spare & precious
.
& never nearly enough to muster
a proper arabic anger proper arabic
.
vulgarity only a passing spar
always using the names of animals
.
i am not polite i am only inarticulate
overproud of my little arsenal
.
a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss
through the window of my taxi
.
& i deploy my meager weapons
[dog] [pig] [donkey]
.
& finally my crown jewel
i pass my tongue across my teeth
.
crane my neck about the window
& call [your mother’s ]
.
“Self-Portrait with Profanity” © 2018 by Safia Elhillo appeared in the December 2018 issue of Poetry magazine
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December 17
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1916 – Penelope Fitzgerald born Lincoln, England UK; best known as a novelist, but she was also a biographer, essayist, and poet. Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, and the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Blue Flower, the historical novel that was her final work. She died at age 83 in April 2000.
Arrival of a Stray Cat in the Poet’s Lodgings
by Penelope Fitzgerald
.
1. The cat’s whiskers are as wide
as the cat from side to side –
.
2. – which gives it sound anticipation
in an entrance situation
.
3. – if the whiskers will pass through
A hole, the cat can get out too.
.
4. Milk, pour, gas-fire, burn
Cat and poet have much to learn.
.
5. He will learn to use discretion,
Pussy shall learn affection.
.
6. The milk pours, the shilling drops,
Pussy sits and licks her chops.
.
7. But she has not acquired a soul
And he is still in a hole.
.
“Arrival of a Stray Cat in the Poet’s Lodgings” by Penelope Fitzgerald
(This poem was originally sent to her daughter in the 1970s. It was printed in The London Review in 2002.)
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1987 – Joshua Jennifer Espinoza born in Riverside, California; They are a bi-gender person, and a visiting professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Their poetry collections are: There Should Be Flowers; I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It; and I Don’t Want to Be Understood.
This Is What Makes Us Worlds
by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
.
Like light but
in reverse we billow.
.
We turn a corner
and make the hills
disappear.
.
You rearrange
my parts until no
more hurting.
.
No more skin-sunk
nighttime fear.
.
No more blameless death.
.
My hair loses its atoms.
My body glows
in the dark.
.
Planets are smashed
into oblivion,
stripped of their power
to name things.
.
Our love fills the air.
.
Our love eats
the deadly sounds men
make when they see
how much magic
we have away
from them.
.
“This Is What Makes Us Worlds” © 2017 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database
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December 18
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1894 – John Rodker born as Simon Solomon in Manchester, England, to a Polish Jewish immigrant family. They moved to London when he was six. He was a British writer, essayist, poet, translator, and publisher of modernist writers. By 1911, he was one of the “Whitechapel Boys,” a group of Jewish male writers who met at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Rodker was a conscientious objector during WWI. He was arrested in 1917, and sent to the Home Office work Centre in Princetown – formerly the infamous Dartmoor Prison. He describes that time in Memoirs of Other Fronts. In 1919, Rodker started the Ovid Press, a short-lived press which published T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and drawings by Vorticist artists Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, and the French artist Henri-Gaudier-Brzeska. Fluent in French and German, he moved to Paris, where he worked on a French translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, set up the Casanova Society, which published limited editions, then published occult works under the imprint ‘J. Rodker’. He went bankrupt during the Depression, and eked out a living working for Preslit, the Soviet overseas literature organ, as well as making English translations of French literature. Back in London in the 1940s, he founded the Imago Publishing Company. Rodker’s poetry collections include: Poems; Hymns; and Collected Poems: 1912-1925. He died suddenly of a heart attack at age 60 in October 1955.
The Searchlight
by John Rodker
.
The searchlights over London
Are like the fingers of a woman,
Wandering over the dead form of a lover.
.
She had not thought to do that
While he was living,
To better know his loveliness;
Or if she had
He'd stopped her with his kisses.
Now in her great grief
Her fingers are to her
Sight and sound and hearing.
.
By all the ways of sense
She knows him lost to her,
Yet cannot voice her grief.
.
Only can she raise white hands towards the heavens,
And passionate cursings and great grief;
Yet no sign comes, no portent.
Oh, if one blistering tear might come from on high
To crumple up and twist the earth,
She'd know her nightly passion not so vain―
When her first pang
Burst the heavens with howling of guns!
.
“The Searchlight” by John Rodker appeared in the October 1919 issue of Poetry magazine
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December 19
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1970 – Deborah Paredez born in San Antonio, Texas; American poet, scholar, and critic. Her scholarly work, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, was published in 2009, the same year she co-founded Canto Mundo, an organization and workshop to promote Latinx poetry. She has also published American Diva, about the impact of performers like Celia Cruz, Tina Turner, and Rita Moreno. She teaches poetry and ethnic studies at Columbia University. Her poetry collections are This Side of Skin and Year of the Dog.
The Gulf, 1987
by Deborah Paredez
.
The day upturned, flooded with sunlight, not
a single cloud. I squint into the glare,
cautious even then of bright emptiness.
We sit under shade, Tía Lucia
showing me how white folks dine, the high life.
I am about to try my first oyster,
Tía spending her winnings from the slots
on a whole dozen, the glistening valves
wet and private as a cheek’s other side,
broken open before us. Don’t be shy.
Take it all in at once. Flesh and sea grit,
sweet meat and brine, a taste I must acquire.
In every split shell, the coast’s silhouette:
bodies floating in what was once their home.
“The Gulf, 1987” © by Deborah Paredez appeared in the September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
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December 20
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1899 – Claudia Lars, pen name of Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega, who was born in the Sonsonate department of El Salvador; El Salvadorian poet whose early education was at home, before she studied at the Colegio La Asunción de Santa Ana. In 1919, her parents sent her to the U.S to break up her relationship with Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva. She taught Spanish at the Berlitz School in Brooklyn, and married her first husband, Leroy F. Beers Kuehn. After Kuehn was appoints as U.S. consul to El Salvador, she returned to her homeland with him in 1927. In 1933, she started using the pen name Claudia Lars, and her first book, Estrellas en el Pozo (Stars in the Well) was published in 1934. By the late 1940s, she had divorced, and was working as cultural attaché to the Embassy of El Salvador in Guatemala. Later, she worked in the U.S. packing peaches, and translating stories for Walt Disney. Among her many works are: Romances de Norte y Sur; Fábula de una Verdad (Fable of a Truth); and Poesía Última (Last Poems). She died in July 1974 at age 74.
Sentinel
by Claudia Lars
.
The Water Carrier
and his starry river…
.
I, living the night:
not quite the angel
but already keeping watch.
.
An unknown planet:
my human heart.
.
Discovered, lost,
discovered again.
“Sentinel” from Poesía completa, © 1999 by the Estate of Claudia Lars. Translation © 2018 by Philip
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December 21
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1940 – Kelly Cherry born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the daughter of musicians, she grew up in Ithaca, NY and Chesterfield County, Virginia. American novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, translator, academic, and memoirist, who published over 30 books. Kelly Cherry served as Poet Laureate of Virginia (2008-2010). She died at age 81 in March 2022. Her poetry collections include: Time Out of Mind; Rising Venus; Death and Transfiguration; Physics for Poets; and Beholder’s Eye.
Their Pleas
by Kelly Cherry
.
They pluck my sleeve, tug my hand, pull
my hair. They do not kneel to kiss my hem.
No, it’s not like that but they want tokens.
Again, not souvenirs but something small
and useful, something that will help them out
after life, maybe in an underworld.
They need a sighted guide to lead them to
the river, and they need a remnant of
the old world as they embark for the older world,
the one that has existed since the first
grievous death. They need to feel they still
can touch and still be touched, as once they did
and were, and one would have to be a cold,
uncaring woman to deny their pleas:
a woman with a bulletproof heart,
without a memory of life on earth.
.
“Their Pleas” © 2013 by Kelly Cherry appeared in Poetry Magazine’s January 2013 issue
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1944 – James Sallis born in Helena, Arkansas; American noir crime fiction author of the Lew Griffin series. His novel The Killer is Dying won the 2011 Hammett Prize for excellence in crime fiction writing. He has worked as a creative writing teacher, respiratory therapist, musician, music teacher, screenwriter, periodical editor, book reviewer, and translator. His poetry collections include: Sorrow's Kitchen; Rain’s Eagerness; Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here; Ain’t Long Fore Day; and Night’s Pardon.
Finding Home
by James Sallis
.
Now at last you can set down
the luggage of the heart.
.
Its place is here, after all, here
where years ago you wrote:
.
Bus pulls into station, my suitcase
entering first your nation,
this new content and continent.
.
Now at last you can unpack
the luggage of the heart,
roll up and put away
these ill-fitting clothes,
.
this loose second skin
too long lived in.
.
“Finding Home” © 2002 by James Sallis, appeared the October 2002 issue of 3:AM Magazine
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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