“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
March 4, 1933—Inaugural address
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"All the war-propaganda, all the
screaming and lies and hatred,
comes invariably from people
who are not fighting."
– George Orwell
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“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure.”
– President Abraham Lincoln,
Gettysburg Address,
November 19, 1863
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Thirteen poets born in June,
with thoughts on war and
destiny, and the moments in
life, both large and small,
that mark our paths
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June 15
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1763 – Kobayashi Issa born as Kobayashi Nobuyuki in Shinano, Nagano, Japan; Japanese poet who used ‘Issa’ as his pen name (meaning cup of tea); one of the ‘Great Four’ haiku masters, with Bashō, Buson, and Shiki. He wrote over 20,000 haiku, and is also known for his drawings, which frequently illustrated his poetry. He was a lay Buddhist priest.
A World of Dew
by Issa
.
A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.
. . . . . . .
Goes Out
by Issa
.
Goes out,
comes back—
the love life of a cat.
– both poems from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho Buson and Issa – The Ecco Press, 1994
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1920 – Amy Clampitt born in New Providence, Iowa to Quaker parents; American poet and author who began writing poetry while studying English literature at Grinnel College. After graduation, she moved to New York, where she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. She returned to writing poetry in 40s. She produced a couple of chapbooks, and one of her poems appeared in the New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, Clampitt published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher, at age 63. It was followed by several more poetry collections, and three prose works on Keats, Donne, and other poets. Amy Clampitt died of cancer at age 74.
Thermopylae
by Amy Clampitt
.
When the bay flashed, and an unrecorded number
of the Persians troops, whip-flicked toward the spear-
clogged hourglass of the pass, were impaled and fell
screaming from the precipice to drown, the mirror
.
clogs: geography too gathers dust, though busloads
of us (sandaled Germans mostly), hankering for
the glitter of an essence, a principle that still
applies, a cruse of oil, a watershed no rain erodes,
.
find small inkling of what was staved off here,
or saved. A calcined stillness, beehives, oleanders,
polluted air, the hung crags livid; on a little hill
(beneath, the bay flashed as men fell and went under
.
screaming) where a stone lion once stood in honor
of that grade-school byword of a troop commander
Leonidas, we ponder a funneled-down inscription: Tell
them for whom we came to kill and were killed, stranger,
.
how brute beauty, valor, act, air, pride, plume here
buckling, guttered: closed in from behind, our spears
smashed, as, the last defenders of the pass, we fell,
we charged like tusked brutes and gnawed like bears.
.
“Thermopylae” from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, © 1997 by the Estate of Amy Clampitt – Alfred A. Knopf
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1965 – Marjorie Agosín born in Bethesda Maryland while her father was in grad school; Chilean-American poet, novelist, anthologist, memoirist, women’s rights and human rights activist. Her Jewish parents had fled to Chile as refugees and she spent much of her childhood in Santiago de Chile. In 1970, her family returned to the U.S. where her father became a professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens. Because of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, they made the move to the U.S. permanent. She earned a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at Indiana University Bloomington, became an assistant professor at Wellesley College, then became the youngest woman to be a full professor at Wellesley, where she continued teaching. Agosín has been honored for her activism with a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights and a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights. She has written much of her poetry in Spanish. Her collections, some of them in Bilingual editions and often combining essays with poetry, include: Starry Night: Poems; Melodious Women; An Absence of Shadows; and The Angel of Memory.
1939
by Marjorie Agosín
I
.
She knew how to seduce her destiny,
predict the time of flight
In 1939, dressed in garments
of night and happiness
at the threshold of a fearful
Hamburg Harbor
resolved to live,
she sailed
to Southern seas.
.
In 1938, the windows
of her house of water and stone
resisted the extreme
horror of that night
of broken crystals.
.
She, my grandmother,
taught me to recognize
the landscape of danger,
the shards of fear,
the impenetrable faces
of women,
fleeing,
accused,
audacious in their will to live.
.
II
.
Helena Broder,
created a domain
of papers, fragile vessels,
clandestine poems and
notes to be made,
discreet addresses.
With little baggage,
like a frail and ancient
angel,
she arrived,
although ready to embark again.
.
I survived next to her
and I was thankful for the gift of her presence.
.
“1939” from At the Threshold of Memory, © 2003 by Marjorie Algosín; translation © 2003 by Cola Franzen and Monica Bruno Galmozzi – White Pine Press
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June 16
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1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born in Lockport, New York; prolific American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, and editor. Among her many awards and honors, she was the recipient of two O. Henry Awards (1967 and 1973), the 1970 National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize. She graduated from Syracuse University as valedictorian with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960. Vanguard Press published Oates’ first book, a short-story collection, By the North Gate, in 1963. After getting her M.A, she became a Ph.D. student at Rice University, but left to become a full-time writer. By 2021, she had published a dozen poetry collections, including Women In Love and Other Poems; Angel Fire; Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982; and American Melancholy: Poems.
The First Room
by Joyce Carol Oates
.
In every dream of a room
the first room intrudes.
No matter the years, the tears dried
and forgotten, it is the skeleton
of the first that protrudes.
.
“The First Room” © 2018 by Joyce Carol Oates, appeared in Poetry magazine’s July/August 2018 issue
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1950 – Kalli Dakos born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; prolific Canadian children’s poet, elementary school teacher, and reading specialist. She earned BAH and Bed degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston. The popularity of her children’s poems led to her success as a visiting poet and poetry workshop leader in schools across North America. Her poetry collections include: If You’re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand; Don’t Read This Book, Whatever You Do!; “I Heard You Twice the First Time”; and Why Am I Blue?
A Teacher’s Lament
by Kalli Dakos
.
Don’t tell me the cat ate your math sheet,
And your spelling words went down the drain,
And you couldn’t decipher your homework,
Because it was soaked in the rain.
.
Don’t tell me you slaved for hours
On the project that’s due today,
And you would have had it finished
If your snake hadn’t run away.
.
Don’t tell me you lost your eraser,
And your worksheets and pencils, too,
And your papers are stuck together
With a great big glob of glue.
.
I’m tired of all your excuses;
They are really a terrible bore.
Besides, I forgot my own work,
At home in my study drawer.
.
“A Teacher’s Lament” from If You’re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand, © 1990 by Kalli Dakos – Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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June 17
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1867 – Henry Lawson born as Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson in Grenfell, New South Wales, Australia; prolific Australian short story writer and poet; son of poet and feminist Louisa Lawson. He regularly contributed to The Bulletin magazine, but began to struggle with alcoholism and mental illness in his 40s. At times destitute, he spent periods in Darlinghurst Gaol and in psychiatric institutions. After he died at age 55 in September 1922 following a cerebral haemorrhage, Lawson was the first Australian writer to be granted a state funeral. His poetry collections include: In the Days When the World Was Wide; When I Was King and Other Verses; and The Roaring Days.
Every Man Should have a Rifle
by Henry Lawson
.
So I sit and write and ponder, while the house is deaf and dumb,
Seeing visions "over yonder" of the war I know must come.
In the corner - not a vision - but a sign for coming days
Stand a box of ammunition and a rifle in green baize.
And in this, the living present, let the word go through the land,
Every tradesman, clerk and peasant should have these two things at hand.
.
No - no ranting song is needed, and no meeting, flag or fuss -
In the future, still unheeded, shall the spirit come to us!
Without feathers, drum or riot on the day that is to be,
We shall march down, very quiet, to our stations by the sea.
While the bitter parties stifle every voice that warns of war,
Every man should own a rifle and have cartridges in store!
.
“Every Man Should have a Rifle” from For Australia and Other Poems, by Henry Lawson, originally published in 1913
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1871 – James Weldon Johnson born in Jacksonville, Florida; African American writer, anthologist, and civil rights activist, married to civil rights activist and feminist Grace Nail Johnson. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration appointed him as consul of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he was transferred to Corinto, Nicaragua. He wrote substantial portions of his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and his poetry collection, Fifty Years, during this period. He published the novel anonymously to avoid controversy during his diplomatic career. However, when Johnson returned to the U.S., he abandoned diplomacy to become part of an anti-lynching campaign (1917-1920). As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first black executive secretary (1920-1930), he helped increase membership and extended the NAACP’s reach by organizing many new chapters in the South. During the 1920s, he and his wife promoted the Harlem Renaissance, encouraging young black writers, and helping them to get published. He also collaborated with his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, on many songs, including “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” In 1933, he was honored with the W.E.B. Du Bois Prize for Negro Literature. His poetry collections include Fifty Years and Other Poems; God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse; and Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems. He was killed at age 67 in an automotive accident. His wife, who was driving, was seriously injured but survived the crash.
Mother Night
by James Weldon Johnson
.
Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.
And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay,
Shall run their fiery courses and then claim
The haven of the darkness whence they came;
Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way.
.
So when my feeble sun of life burns out,
And sounded is the hour for my long sleep,
I shall, full weary of the feverish light,
Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt,
And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep
Into the quiet bosom of the Night.
.
“Mother Night” from Complete Poems, by James Weldon Johnson – Penguin Books, 2000 edition
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June 18
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1965 – John Keene born in St, Louis, Missouri; Black American writer, translator, novelist, essayist, professor, and poet. He earned an MFA from New York University, and is a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, a foundation that encourages and advocates for African American poets. Keene is Distinguished Professor of English, chairs the African American and African Studies department, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New & Selected Poems, was honored with the National Book Award for Poetry, and he won a 2016 American Book Award for Short Fiction for Counternarratives.
Portrait of the Father as a Young GI
by John Keene
.
Orpheus behind the playboy’s gaze, turning mellow
youth toward every lens while inwardly roiling,
a cauldron of anger. What brother did not wear a mask
in those days? In Korea the “battle” was over, Vietnam
still undeclared, at home, the endless war. . . . Parisian arcades
soon to beckon, wing-roll slowly descending into defeated
Deutschland, the “Dutch girl’s” calming touch. Before that, camp,
K.P., the shouldered rifle that bows your spine, first flight
in a helicopter, your squadron of brother warriors
and white folks from far beyond the Mississippi.
Prone, in the barracks’ silent mine he hears streetcars
clanking toward their slow demise, like swing,
his daddy tuning organ pipes while riffing
on capacitors, his mama cooling rye in crystal,
freedom’s unsteady stagger down Market Street.
Soon he’ll father: never forgiven. Soon forgotten
he’ll fall in love again. Soon he’ll ride again the roads
he passed a thousand times without a thought,
recross the rivers left to bridge, deep, unbidden
as tunes that rise behind the ears becoming melodies
a man must sing aloud. Now one, unceasingly, breaking
the dark like a crack in the bone: “Don’t look back.”
.
“Portrait of the Father as a Young GI” from Punks: New & Selected Poetry, © 2021 by John Keene – The Song Cave
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June 19
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1918 – Mary TallMountain born as Mary Demonski in Nulato Alaska; American poet and storyteller of mixed Koyukon (an Alaskan Abthabscan people), Russian, and Scots-Irish heritage. Her mother, suffering from tuberculosis, gave her up for adoption to the white Randles family, who then moved to Oregon, cutting her off from everything she knew. She wasn’t allowed to speak her native tongue, her adoptive father abused and molested her, and she was bullied by white children at school. The 1930s Great Depression impoverished the family, then the father died of a heart attack. She married at 19, but her husband died three years later. She moved to Reno, Nevada, to train and work as a legal secretary, but also developed an alcohol addiction. After she quit drinking, she started a stenography business, but lost it after being diagnosed with cancer. She moved to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and began keeping a journal. After qualifying for a disability pension, she was able to pursue writing, adopting the name TallMountain, and began publishing her poetry. An Alaskan poet discovered her work, and arranged a grant for her to travel and teach. She went into remission, but the cancer came back, then went into remission again. In 1987, she was a co-founder of the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop. A stroke in 1992 left her unable to do readings or workshops, but she kept writing until her death at age 76 in September 1994..Her poetry collections include: Nine Poems; Continuum; There Is No Word for Goodbye; Listen to the Night; and A Quick Brush of Wings.
Farmers Market
by Mary Tallmountain
I.
.
Our plaza is sanctuary
for sunning, eating, and smoking
waiting to go up to Social Security
words to each other tripping on our tongues
looking curiously at pigeons.
.
A homeless man plans a life
around sneakers, clothes
and a bedroll
.
He buys a bunch of stringbeans for a quarter
and lives on it till next Wednesday.
.
II.
.
People are circling into families
Onions and greens from the Farmers Market
.
The good workers of the soil display their wares
The housewives and elderly men
stand in line to get their ingredients weighed
Soup would be hotfood for their families.
.
City fathers would lift off our market
from the bricks of the plaza
for the sake of ego
that puts down plaques here
.
Where will the vegetable sellers find refuge?
Where can we buy vegetables still smelling of earth?
.
“Farmer’s Market” from The Light on the Tent Wall: A Bridging, by Mary Tallmountain, © 1990 — UCLA American Indian Studies Center
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1950 – Marianne Boruch born in Chicago, American poet, essayist, memoirist, and academic; raised Catholic, she was educated in parish schools, and spent many summers with her grandparents in the small rural Illinois town of Tuscola. She graduated from the University of Illinois, earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan and the University of Maine at Farmington. In 1967, she developed and directed the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, where she now continues as professor emeritus. She has run workshops and lectured at several summer writer’s conferences. Her essay collections include Poetry’s Old Air and The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays Toward Poetry. Among her dozen published poetry collections are: View from the Gazebo; Moss Burning; Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; The Anti-Grief; and Bestiary Dark.
Hospital
by Marianne Boruch
.
It seems so—
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk—
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop—ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be—
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.
“Hospital,” © 2006 by Marianne Boruch, appeared in Issue 126 of Triquarterly magazine
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June 20
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1786 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore born in Douai in northern France; French poet and novelist who was an orphan by 16. She became an actress and singer, at the Paris Opéra-Comique and other theatres, but retired from the stage in 1823; in 1819, she became one of the founders of French romantic poetry when she published her first poetic work, Élégies et Romances, followed in 1821 by her narrative Veillées des Antilles and five more volumes of poetry between 1825 and 1860 (the last one published posthumously). She was the only woman writer included in the notable Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884.
The Roses of Saadi
by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
.
I wanted to bring you roses this morning ;
But I have placed so many into my sashes
That the knots were too strained to contain them.
.
The knots have now burst ; the roses have flown
And have all gone to the sea in the wind
Where they followed the waters no more to return;
.
The wave appeared red as if bursting in flame.
This evening, my dress is still full of their fragrance…
Breathing remembrance in odours upon me.
.
translation © by David Paley
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1951 – Paul Muldoon born in Portadown, Northen Ireland; prolific Irish poet, winner of the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize for Achievement in the Humanities and Arts. He worked as an arts producer for the BBC in Belfast (1973-1986), then taught English and creative writing at the University of East Anglia and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, did a stint at Princeton University in the U.S. before becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford University (1999-2004). His many poetry collections include: New Weather; Meeting the British; Horse Latitudes; Maggot; and Frolic and Detour.
Pineapples And Pomegranates
by Paul Muldoon
.
To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple
with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.
Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you understand
where I’m coming from. As if the open hand
might, for once, put paid
to the hand-grenade
in one corner of the planet.
I’m talking about pineapples—right?—not pomegranates.
.
“Pineapples And Pomegranates” from Selected Poems 1968-2014, © 2016 by Paul Muldoon – Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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June 21
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1950 – Anne Carson born in Toronto, Ontario; Canadian poet, professor of classics, essayist, and translator. Since 1979, she has taught classics and creative writing at American universities, including the University of Michigan, NYU, and Yale. In addition to numerous translations of ancient Greek plays and poetry, she has published books of poetry, mixed collections of poetry and prose, and a verse novel. Her vast number of awards and honors include the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry; the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize (for The Beauty of the Husband); and the 2921 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She has held dual U.S. and Icelandic citizenship since 2022.
- Anne Carson did a fairly straightforward translation of a 6th century poem by Ibykos, then followed it by six different “translations” which seem increasingly unrelated to the original text. This is the third version in the series, which references Bertolt Brecht’s surveillance by the FBI, and his collaboration with actor Charles Laughton on an English translation of the play Leben des Galilei, and Brecht’s 1945 subpoenaed appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had a plane ticket to Paris in his pocket even while being interrogated, and flew to Paris the day after the hearing.
[Ibykos fr. 286, translated using words from Bertold Brecht’s FBI
file #100-190707]
by Anne Carson
.
At a cocktail party attended by known Communists, on the one hand,
the subject
being suitably paraphrased as Mr. & Mrs. Bert Brecht,
where ten years of exile have left their mark,
and beneath five copies of file 100-190-707,
Charles Laughton
returning to the stage as Galileo,
enters an elevator.
In the other hand, of my name with a hyphen between Eugene and Friedrich
the Bureau has no record.
Nay, rather,
like the name of a certain Frenchman to whom Charles Laughton might
send
packages,
accompanied by an unknown woman
who spoke to an unknown man,
or accompanied by an unknown man
who spoke to an unknown woman,
and in the event that all the captions are not correct,
please turn to page 307.
.
“[Ibykos fr. 286, translated using words from Bertold Brecht’s FBI file #100-190707]” from Float, © 2016 by Anne Carson – Alfred A. Knopf
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Visual: Trojan Horse
