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“Seldom, very seldom, does complete
truth belong to any human disclosure;
seldom can it happen that something is
not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma
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13 poets born this week
as the light of day
grows stonger
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January 7
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1861 – Louise Imogen Guiney born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, daughter of an Irish-born Union officer and lawyer; American poet, essayist, editor, and biographer. She was raised Roman Catholic, educated at a convent school, and graduated in 1879 from the Academy of the Sacred Heart. She worked as a postmistress, and cataloged books at the Boston Public Library, but also belonged to the Visionists, a social club for artists, writers, musicians, and photographers. Poets Gelett Burgess and Bliss Carman were also members. In 1901, she moved to Oxford, England, to focus on writing poetry and essays, but began to have health problems, though she remained a contributor to several magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, Blackwood's Magazine, Dublin Review, and The Catholic World. Louise Guiney died in England of a stroke at age 59, leaving much of her work unfinished. Her poetry collections include Songs at the Start; The White Sail; Brownies and Bogles; A Roadside Harp; and The Princess of the Tower.
Emily Brontë
by Louise Imogen Guiney
.
What sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
’Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man’s delight,
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.
“Emily Brontë” from Happy Ending: The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney, © 1955 by Grace Guiney – Houghton Mifflin Company
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1954 – Cornelius Eady born in Rochester NY; Black American poet, writer, writer-in-residence and workshop leader, and co-founder with Toi Derricotte of Cave Canem Foundation, which sponsors writing workshops, poetry prizes, and anthology publications for African-American poets. He has also worked with jazz composer Deirdre Murray on theatre pieces with music. His poetry collections include Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (winner of the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize); The Gathering of My Name; and Brutal Imagination (a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry).
Nina's Blues
by Cornelius Eady
.
Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.
.
What you can't know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching
.
On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.
You won't be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.
.
Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.
.
"Nina's Blues," from Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems, 2008 by Cornelius Eady – Putnam
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January 8
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1037 – Su Shi, aka Dongpo, born, Chinese writer, poet, essayist, painter, calligrapher, travel chronicler, and statesman of the Song dynasty, an important figure in the dynasty’s politics, and a highly accomplished author in classical Chinese literature. He wrote some of his best-known poems while banished (1080-1084) to Huangzhou.
The Red Plum Blossom
by Su Shi
.
Timorous, a late sleeper, she blooms alone in winter,
Fearing, too, her icy look not the style of the season.
So she makes herself up like peach or apricot petals,
On branches so slim that can brave the frost and snow.
Her heart’s cold doesn’t go with the fashions of spring.
What does she drink that turns her jade skin to crimson?
The old poet knows only the look, not the true value.
Her black boughs don’t need lush green to stand proud.
– translated by G. Osing, Julia Min, and H. Huang
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1949 – Nona Blyth Cloud was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for over 50 years, spending much of that time commuting on the 405 Freeway. After Hollywood failed to appreciate her genius for acting and directing, she began a second career managing non-profits, from which she is retired. Nona has now resumed writing whatever comes into her head, instead of reports and pleas for funding. She lives in a small house overrun by books with her wonderful husband.
To the Disputed Woman Who First Graced the English Stage as Desdemona
by Nona Blyth Cloud
December 8, 1660 – A woman– likely Margaret Hughes, but
possibly Anne Marshall – appears on an English public stage as
an actress for the first time, in the role of Desdemona in a
production of Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello’
.
How careless men are with our histories!
How easily one pretty face confused for another.
Perhaps they were so beguiled
.
By a glimpse of feminine ankle,
Or the sighs raising your womanly bosom,
They never noticed your face at all.
.
Even now, the first thing ‘historians’ tell us
Is whose mistress you probably were.
.
© 2016 by Nona Blyth Cloud
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January 9
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1919 – William Morris Meredith Jr born in New York City; American poet, author, and educator. He graduated from Princeton in 1940, and his senior thesis was on Robert Frost. He worked briefly for the New York Times before joining the U.S. Army in 1941, then transferred to the U.S. Navy as a carrier pilot, and served in WWII in the Pacific theater, and later in the Korean War, earning two Air Medals. He taught English and Creative Writing at Princeton, University of Hawaii, and Connecticut College. Meredith learned to be an arborist, and taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (1964-1971). He was the first known gay poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate (1978-1980), but suffered a stroke in 1983, and was immobilized for two years. He regained most of his language skills after intensive therapy. He won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Partial Accounts, and the 1997 National Book Award for Effort at Speech. Meredith died at age 88 in May 2007.
The Illiterate
by William Meredith
.
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
.
“The Illiterate” from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems, © 1997 by William Meredith – TriQuarterly Books
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1969 – Kelli Russell Agodon born in Seattle; American poet, writer, and editor. Zshe is on the poetry faculty at the Ranier Writing Workshop, an MFA program of Pacific Lutheran University, and was co-director of Poets on the Coast: aWeekend Writing Retreat for Women. She was editor-in-chief of the Crab Creek Review (2009-2014) and co-founded Two Sylvias Press with Annette Spaulding-Convy in 2010. Her poetry collections include: Dialogues with Rising Tides; Geography; Hourglass Museum; and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room.
A Mermaid Questions God
by Kellie Russell Agodon
.
As a girl, she hated the grain of anything
on her fins. Now she is part fire ant, part centipede.
Where dunes stretch into pathways, arteries appear.
Her blood pressure is temperature plus wind speed.
.
Where religion is a thousand miles of coastline,
she is familiar with moon size, with tide changes.
She wears the cream of waves like a vestment,
knows undertow is imaginary, not something to pray to.
.
Now her questions involve fairytales, begin
in a garden and lead to hands painted on a chapel's ceiling.
She wants to hold the ribbon grass, the shadow of angels
across the shore. She steals a Bible from the Seashore Inn;
.
she will trust it only if it floats.
“A Mermaid Questions God” from Small Knots, © 2004 by Kellie Russell Agodon – Cherry Grove Collections
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January 10
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1887 – Robinson Jeffers born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; American poet, playwright, philosopher, pacifist, and conservationist. In 1914, he and his new wife Una first came to Carmel-by-the-Sea in Northern California. He was 26 years old, and he had found his place in the world. They bought land there in 1919. Jeffers reached the height of his popularity in the early 1930s. In the 1940s, his “free adaptation” of the play Medea by Euripides was a hit on Broadway, even as his star began to wane because he spoke out against America’s imperial ambitions and against the nation’s involvement in WWII. Embittered, he espoused a philosophy of ‘inhumanity’ – that people were detrimental to the Earth and, spurned by an uncaring God, they would eventually become extinct, leaving the planet to heal in a return to Nature. This was not popular in the 1950s. His work was re-discovered in the late 1960s by budding environmentalists, who rallied in the 1970s to save his home and writer’s retreat, his beloved Tor House and Hawk Tower, from developers. The property is now affiliated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Carmel Point
by Robinson Jeffers
.
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses–
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads–
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.–As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
.
“Carmel Point” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers – Stanford University Press 1989 edition, Volume II: 1928-1938, 1989
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1928 – Philip Levine born Detroit, American poet and teacher; U.S. Poet Laureate (2011-2012). He was the second of three sons born to Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when he was five years old, and at age 14, he was already working nights in auto factories when a teacher told him, “You write like an angel. Why don’t you think about becoming a writer?” Levin earned an A.B. at Wayne University, then monitored classes at the University of Iowa taught by Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Levine got a mail-order master’s degree in 1954 with a thesis on John Keats’ “Ode to Indolence,” then earned an MFA at the University of Iowa in 1957. He taught for over 30 years in the English department of California State University, Fresno. Most of his best-known poems are about the working-class in Detroit. Levine served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States (2011–2012). He died of pancreatic cancer in February 2015 at age 87.
The War
(from For the Country)
.
by Philip Levine
.
The Michigan Central Terminal
The day after victory. Her brother
home from Europe after years
of her mother’s terror, and he still
so young but now with the dark
shadow of a beard, holding her
tightly among all the others
calling for their wives or girls.
That night in the front room
crowded with family and neighbors─
he was first back on the block─
he sat cross-legged on the floor
still in his wool uniform, smoking
and drinking as he spoke of passing
high over the dark cities she’d
only read about. He’d wanted to
go back again and again. He’d wanted
to do this for the country,
for this─a small house with upstairs
bedrooms─so he’d asked to go
on raid after raid as though
he hungered to kill or be killed.
“The War” (a section of “For the Country”) © 1983 by Philip Levine appeared in Poetry magazine’s November 1983 issue
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1952 – Dorianne Laux born in Augusta, Maine, American poet. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid, before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988, when she was 36 years old. Her first published poetry collection, Awake, appeared two years later. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her second husband, fellow poet Joseph Millar. She is a professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University, and often travels with her husband team-teaching poetry workshops. Laux’s work has won awards, including the Paterson Prize for The Book of Men, and the Oregon Book Award for Facts About the Moon. Her book What We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected, which came out in 2019, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other poetry collections include The Book of Women and Smoke.
Dust
by Dorianne Laux
.
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
“Dust” from What We Carry, © 1994 by Dorianne Laux – BOA Editions, Ltd.
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January 11
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1825 – Bayard Taylor born as John Bayard Taylor in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania to a Quaker family of farmers; American author, poet, translator, literary critic, and diplomat. He entered the printing business as an apprentice, and published his first book of poems Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena when he was 19. His work as a journalist for the New York Tribune and other publications led to extensive global travel, and publication in 1846 of Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff, the first of his numerous travel books. Taylor died in Berlin in 1878 at age 53.
Storm Song
by Bayard Taylor
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The clouds are scudding across the moon;
A misty light is on the sea;
The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune,
And the foam is flying free.
.
Brothers, a night of terror and gloom
Speaks in the cloud and gathering roar;
Thank God, He has given us broad sea-room,
A thousand miles from shore.
.
Down with the hatches on those who sleep!
The wild and whistling deck have we;
Good watch, my brothers, to-night we’ll keep,
While the tempest is on the sea!
.
Though the rigging shriek in his terrible grip,
And the naked spars be snapped away,
Lashed to the helm, we’ll drive our ship
In the teeth of the whelming spray!
.
Hark! how the surges o’erleap the deck!
Hark! how the pitiless tempest raves!
Ah, daylight will look upon many a wreck
Drifting over the desert waves.
.
Yet, courage, brothers! we trust the wave,
With God above us, our guiding chart.
So, whether to harbor or ocean-grave,
Be it still with a cheery heart!
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January 12
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1915 – Margaret Danner born in Kentucky, but grew up in Chicago’s South Side; American poet, editor, and African-American cultural activist. In 1951, she was the first Black woman on the staff of Poetry magazine. She lived for many years in Detroit, where she co-founded Boone House, a cultural center for black writers, artists and musicians. In the 1960s, she joined the Baháʼí Faith, and toured as a poet and writer sponsored by the Baháʼí Teaching Committee. Her poetry collections include Not Light, Nor Bright, Nor Feathery; To Flower: Poems; and Iron Lace. Danner died at age 68 on January 1, 1984, in Chicago. A retrospective of her work, These Blazing Forms: the Life and Work of Margaret Danner, was published in the March 2022 issue of Poetry magazine.
The Rhetoric of Langston Hughes
by Margaret Danner
.
While some "rap" over this turmoil
of who was Blackest first
and the ins and outs of the Spirituals
and the Blues
and how many of us have or have not
paid our dues;
.
Langston Hughes (in his traveling)
has sung to so many for so long
and from so very Black a Power
that we have clearly seen the "angels"
and dedicated ourselves
to the unraveling.
“The Rhetoric of Langston Hughes” from The Down of a Thistle, © 1976 by Margaret Danner – Country Beautiful
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1929 – Turner Cassity born as Alan Turner Cassity in Jackson, Mississippi; American poet, playwright, and short story writer. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed in Puerto Rico (1952-1954), then attended Columbia University on the GI Bill. From 1962 to 1991, Cassity taught poetry at Emory University, and worked at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. He died at age 80 in July 2009. His poetry collections include Steeplejacks in Babel; Hurricane Lamp; No Second Eden; The Destructive Element; and Devils & Islands.
Watching the Stopwatch Stopping
The great fear of the Maya was that
Time would stop. – Robert Kaplan
.
And if it should? The seasons calmly would continue
But be no longer measure. Keeping to it venue,
High tide reverse and go unnoticed, no erosion
Confirm the ages of its beaches; drying, Ocean
Become no saltier; rain born of it not freshen;
The rising of the blood not ever reach to passion;
Eternal present merge the later and the sooner;
Our racing solar year fall back to match the lunar;
Radioactive or our own, decay not threaten;
The lower reaches of a water clock not wetten.
Section the tree to count its rings and you will see there
A disc as featureless as porcelain might be there.
Become a tabulated list of random numbers,
A calendar is not some duty that encumbers,
Though Julian, Gregorian, if we endow them,
Exact from us as much of Time as we allow them.
The Maya need not worry; of such bits and pieces
As we spare – and Creation – Time before it ceases
Will bear its sons away. Hearts old and fortunes wilting,
The sand-glass turns. It is Time’s stream, its threat of silting.
“Watching the Stopwatch Stopping” © 2002 by Turner Cassity, appeared in Poetry magazine’s April 2002 issue
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January 13
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1957 – Claudia Emerson born in Chatham, Virginia; American poet; Poet Laureate of Virginia (2008-2010). Her poetry collections include Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion:An Elegy; Figure Studies; Secure the Shadow; and Late Wife, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She died of cancer at age 57 in December 2014, and three of her collections were published posthumously.
Frame, an Epistle
by Claudia Emerson
Most of the things you made for me—blanket-
chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker—I gave
away to friends who could use them and not
be reminded of the hours lost there,
not having been witness to those designs,
the tedious finishes. But I did keep
the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors,
most of these years it has been invisible,
part of the wall, or defined by reflection—
safe—because reflection, after all, does change.
I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed
yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.
“Frame, an Epistle” from Late Wife: Poems, © 2005 by Claudia Emerson – Louisiana State University Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Photo: Nina Simone