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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 poets born as one year ends
and a new year begins —
with dreams as fragile as a
snowflake, and new thoughts
evolving from the old
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December 29
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1948 – William Baer born in Geneva, New York, but grew up in the Bronx NYC and New Jersey; American mystery novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator, academic, and editor. He studied for a time with James Dickey, and has Master’s degrees in Creative Writing and Cinema. He was the founding editor (1990-2004) of The Formalist, a poetry journal. His mystery novels feature private detective Jack Colt. Baer’s poetry collections include The Unfortunates, which won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize and “Bocage” and Other Sonnets, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.
Snowflake
by William Baer
.
Timing’s everything. The vapor rises
high in the sky, tossing to and fro,
then freezes, suddenly, and crystallizes
into a perfect flake of miraculous snow.
For countless miles, drifting east above
the world, whirling about in a swirling free-
for-all, appearing aimless, just like love,
but sensing, seeking out, its destiny.
Falling to where the two young skaters stand,
hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips
itself about to ever-so-gently land,
a miracle, across her unkissed lips:
as he blocks the wind raging from the south,
leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.
.
“Snowflake” from Borges and Other Sonnets, © 2003 by William Baer – Truman State University Press
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December 30
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1865 – Rudyard Kipling born in British India; prolific English novelist, short-story writer, children’s author, poet, and journalist. Known for The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories, The Light That Failed, and Captains Courageous, as well as his poems “Recessional”, “If”, and “Gunga Din.” Though he enthusiastically supported the “War to End All Wars,” privately he was deeply critical of how the British Army was fighting the war. He paid a very high price for his support of the war. His only son John immediately tried to join up, but was turned down by the Royal Navy because of his very poor eyesight, and was also turned down twice by the army. Kipling asked his friend Lord Roberts, a Colonel of the Irish Guards, to use his influence, and John was accepted into the Irish Guards in August 1915, just before his 18th birthday. A month later, John Kipling was listed as “wounded and missing” in France. In the confusion of the ongoing battle, he was not found. In vain, Kipling and his wife searched field hospitals and spoke to his fellow soldiers. Eventually, it was determined that John was killed on September 27, 1915, and had been buried in France. Kipling wrote, “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Because of his support for Britain’s expansive colonialism, Rudyard Kipling’s reputation has suffered, but he remains a consummate storyteller, and a memorable poet.
New Year’s Resolutions
by Rudyard Kipling
.
I am resolved throughout the year
To lay my vices on the shelf;
A godly, sober course to steer
And love my neighbors as myself—
Excepting always two or three
Whom I detest as they hate me.
.
I am resolved—to flirt no more,
It leads to strife and tribulation;
Not that I used to flirt before,
But as a bar against temptation.
Here I except (cut out the names)
Perfectly Platonic flames.
.
I am resolved—that vows like these,
Though lightly made, are hard to keep;
Wherefore I’ll take them by degrees,
Lest my back-slidings make me weep.
One vow a year will see me through;
and I’ll begin with Number Two.
.
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1917 – Yun Dong-ju aka Yoon Dong-ju or Dongju Yun born in Longjing, Manchuria; Korean poet who grew up and wrote during Japanese Colonial rule (1910-1945) of Korea. He was educated at schools in Pyongyang (now the capital of North Korea) before attending Yonhi College in Seoul. In 1942, he went to Japan to study English literature at Japanese universities, but in 1943, he was arrested for “anti-Japanese activities” because he joined a movement for Korean independence. He was sent to the notorious Fukuoka Prison, where he died at age 27, of unrevealed causes. His book, Sky, Wind, and Stars, was published posthumously.
Prelude
by Yun Dong-ji
.
Let me have no shame
Under the heaven
Till I die.
Even winds among the foliage
Pained my heart.
.
With a heart that sings of the stars,
I'll love all dying things.
And I must fare the path
That's been allotted to me.
.
Tonight also
The winds sweep over the stars.
.
“Prelude” from Sky, Wind, and Stars, by Yun Dong-ji, translations © 2003 by Kyung-nyun Kim Richards, and Steffen F. Richards – Asian Humanities Press
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1949 – Dara Wier born as Dara Barrois/Dixon in New Orleans; American poet and writer who went to Catholic schools in Gretna, LA, and Baton Rouge. After attending Longwood University in Virginia, she earned an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green University in Ohio. She has been a poet-in-residence at several universities, and now lives in Factory Hollow, Massachusetts. She was married to poet James Tate until his death in 2015. Her many poetry collections include: Blood, Hook & Eye; The Ride Home; Our Master Plan; Voyages in English; Hat on a Pond; Reverse Rapture; In the Still of the Night; and Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina.
Stargazer
by Dara Wier
You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning.
You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea.
Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's
In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's
The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way.
You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all
Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves
And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You
Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter.
It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of
A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer.
And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear.
From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like
If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.
.
"Stargazer" from You Good Thing, © 2013 by Dara Wier – Wave Books
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December 31
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1936 – Clarence Major born in Atlanta, Georgia; prolific African-American short story writer, novelist, poet, painter, anthologist, and in 1959 became the founder-editor of the literary magazine Coercion Review. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Davis. As a finalist for the National Book Award, he won a Bronze Medal for his book Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958-1998, and in 2015 he was honored with the "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts" by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. His poetry collections include: Swallow the Lake; The Syncopated Cakewalk; Surfaces and Masks; Parking Lots; Down and Up; and Sporadic Troubleshooting.
Regenerative Forces
by Clarence Major
.
I’m at the summit.
I’ve so far managed to elude the rules.
I was told yesterday to watch out
up here for a culmination.
So far, only an eruption has taken place.
I know, I know. I need to elucidate.
But so much remains marginal.
That is the problem with fluid elements.
Up here, so high up,
nightmares easily become daydreams.
Multifaceted problems melt into one.
Oh, I forgot to tell you.
I’m wearing a farmer’s smock.
I’m pretty sure nobody so far recognizes me.
I’m forging a new identity.
.
“Regenerative Forces” from From Now On: New and Selected Poems, © 2015 by Clarence Major – University of Georgia Press
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1969 – Jane Springer born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee; American poet and academic. In 2007, her debut poetry collection, Dear Blackbird, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Her second book, Murder Ballad, won the 2011 Beatrice Hawley Award. She also won the 2010 Whiting Award for Poetry. She has published a third collection, Moth, and Genocide: A Groundwork Guide, a nonfiction book designed for use in teaching young students. Springer is a professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton College near Utica, New York.
Mules
by Jane Springer
.
When they told us Don’t speak until spoken to, we grew
ears the size of corn.
.
When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed
their hurt whole.
.
When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted
doors that opened behind curtains.
.
For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to
save us—not knowing how.
.
& all the while we found love in unlikely places: In
the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces,
.
refracted in their long faces.
.
“Mules” from Murder Ballad, © 2012 by Jane Springer - Alice James Books
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January 1
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1906 – Benedict Wallet Vilakazi born, South African Zulu poet , novelist, and linguist; the first Black South African to receive a doctorate in literature. Known for his ground-breaking Bantu poetry collection Amal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons), originally published in 1945, which combined the Zulu izibongo poetic form with Western poetic forms. He also collaborated on the first Zulu-English dictionary
from KwaDedangendlale
(The Valley of a Thousand Hills)
by Benedict Vilakazi
.
I remember far away at home
There where the sun comes up
Above the tall hills
And goes down shining red below
Until dusk comes
With its pure silence
There where you go outside and breathe in,
Breathe in deeply with full nostrils
And feel your whole body affected by
The moist air of the sea.
.
“KwaDedangendlale” from Amal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons), © 1945 Benedict Vilakazi – Wits University Press 2021 Bilingual edition
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1911 – Audrey Wurdemann born in Seattle, American poet and novelist; at age 24, she became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1935, for her collection, Bright Ambush. She was the great-granddaughter of Percy Bysshe Shelly and published five books of poems, her first, The House of Silk when she was only 16. After graduating from the University of Washington, she traveled through Asia. She married Joseph Auslander in 1932, and they moved to New York City, then to Washington DC when he was named as the first Consultant in Poetry (1937-1941) to the Library of Congress. They collaborated on two novels, My Uncle Jan and The Islanders. She died at age 49 in May 1960.
The Secret Heart
by Audrey Wurdemann
.
Suppose we never met! Suppose you were
That casual figure on the station bench,
Waiting for trains that might go anywhere.
Suppose your gaze from mine pulled with a wrench
When the long whistle shrieked the train has come
You sucked a slow drag from your cigarette,
And gathered up your handbag—and my doom—
Suppose you were some man I never met!
Such were impossible, I do not think
Had our eyes looked upon each other, any
War, mad fashion, death, disaster’s brink
Or ticket to paradise would mean a penny
But on the instant, one the other follow
Sure as her mate pursues the southbound swallow.
.
“The Secret Heart” from Bright Ambush, © 1934 by Audrey Wurdemann – Reynal & Hitchcock
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1959 – Elise Paschen born in Chicago IL; American poet, anthologist, educator, member of the Osage nation, and daughter of renowned prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Poetry in Motion, a program which places poetry posters in subways and buses across the country. Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry collections are Houses: Coasts (1985), Infidelities (1996), Bestiary (2009), and The Nightlife (2017). She was the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America (1988-2001), and has edited numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (1997).
The Tree Agreement
by Elise Paschen
.
The neighbor calls the Siberian Elm
a “weed” tree, demands
it down, says the leaves overwhelm
his property, the square backyard.
.
He’s collar-and-tie. A weed tree?
Branches screen buildings, subway tracks,
his patch of yard. We disagree,
claim back the sap, heartwood, wild bark.
.
He declares the tree “hazardous.”
We shelter under leaf-hoard, crossway
for squirrels, branch house for sparrows, jays.
The balcony soaks up the shade.
.
Chatter-song drowns out cars below.
Sun branches down. Leaves overwhelm.
The tree will stay. We tell him “no.”
Root deep through pavement, Elm.
.
© 2016 by Elise Paschen, first appeared in Poetry magazine’s January 2016 issue
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January 2
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1894 – Robert Nathan born in New York City; American novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and children’s author; known for the novels The Bishop’s Wife (which was made into the film that was nominated in 1948 for a Best Picture Oscar) and Portrait of Jennie. His poetry collections include A Winter Tide, The Green Leaf, and Evening Song: Selected Poems. He was a screenwriter for MGM in the 1940s, and also wrote for radio and television. Nathan was a cousin of poet Emma Lazarus and jurist Benjamin Cardozo.
At the Symphony
by Robert Nathan
.
The ‘cellos, setting forth apart,
Grumbled and sang, and so the day
From the low beaches of my heart,
Turned in tranquility away.
.
And over weariness and doubt
Rose up the horns like bellied sails,
Like canvas of the soul flung out
To rising and orchestral gales;
.
Passed on and left irresolute
The ebony, the silver throat . . .
Low over clarinet and flute
Hung heaven upon a single note.
.
“At the Symphony” from The Green Leaf: Collected Poems of Robert Nathan, © 1950 by Robert Nathan – Knopf
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January 3
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1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien born as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein in South Africa, where his English parents worked in a bank; English author, philologist, and poet. His mother took him and his younger brother back to England in 1895. His father died while they were away, and they stayed with his mother’s parents in King’s Heath, Birmingham, before moving to Sarehole, a Worcestershire village. The nearby Malvern Hills were the inspirations for some of the landscapes of Middle Earth. In his early teens, he invented his first language, Nevbosh. Much of his early writing was poetry. In 1911, he began studying at Exeter College, Oxford, and graduated in 1915 with first-class honours in English language and literature. Because of WWWI, he joined the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915. In 1916, just three days after marrying his teenage sweetheart, Edith Bratt, who converted to Catholicism for him, he was sent to France to be a signals officer and arrived at the Somme in early July. By November 1916, suffering from trench fever caused by the hoards of lice in the trenches, he was invalided to England. He was deemed medically unfit for general service, and spent the rest of the war between hospitals and garrison duties. When the war ended in 1918, he went to work for the Oxford English Dictionary, and tutored women students of Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hugh’s College, before joining the academic staff of the English department at the University of Leeds in 1920. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College. It was here that he wrote The Hobbit, and the first drafts of the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings. In 1945, he became the Merton Professor of English Language at Merton College, Oxford. He completed the Lord of the Rings in 1948. Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours. He died at age 81 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection in September 1973.
CAT
by J.R.R. Tolkien
.
The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom —
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.
.
“pard” = leopard
“CAT” from Poems and Stories, by J.R.R.Tolkien, 1994 edition – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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1933 – Anne Stevenson born in Cambridge, England, to American parents; prolific American-English poet and author of studies of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop; Stevenson played cello and piano, destined to be a professional musician. But while studying music and languages at the University of Michigan, at the age of 19 she began to lose her hearing, so she shifted to writing instead. Since 1962, she has lived and worked almost entirely in the U.K., including Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, and, most recently, North Wales and Durham. While she considers herself an American, she says, “I belong to an America which no longer really exists.” Stevenson was the inaugural winner in 2002 of the Northern Rock Foundation’s Writer’s Award, and the 2007 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, awards that are among the richest literary prizes in the world. She died from heart failure at age 87 in September 2020. Among her many poetry collections are: Living in America; Travelling Behind Glass; Four and a Half Dancing Men; The Other House; and Collected Poems.
Drench
by Anne Stevenson
.
You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It’s the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.
.
“Drench” from Poems 1955-2005, © 2005 by Anne Stevenson – Bloodaxe Books
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January 4
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1931 – Nora Iuga born, Romanian poet, writer, novelist, journalist, translator, and editor; Romanian poet, writer, novelist, journalist, and editor; she was censored between 1971 and 1978 by the communist government in Romania after the publication of her second collection of poems, Captivitatea cercului (Trapped in a Circle). Her books were also withdrawn from public libraries and bookstores. However, since then she has published 13 poetry collections. The first English translation of her work, a collection of poems called The Hunchbacks’ Bus, was published in 2016.
I’d give anything to be like
by Nora Iuga
.
this little poem
that still knows how to dance
the white moon leaves behind
its eternal kitsch
I wonder what diet
you feed your thoughts on
what physical exercises
you make them do
clumsy and fat I hide
behind this book
but alas it doesn’t cover me
.
– translation by Diana Manole, Adam Sorkin, and Nora Iuga
“I’d give anything to be like that” from The Hunchback’s Bus, © 2016 – Bitter Oleander
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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