The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. – Seamus Heaney
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“Poetry has never been the
language of barriers, it’s always
been the language of bridges.”
– Amanda Gorman
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“Poetry and beauty are always making
peace. When you read something
beautiful you find coexistence;
it breaks walls down.”
— Mahmoud Darwish,
Palestinian poet
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with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 Poets born in October,
born in different places,
into different times, even
using different languages,
but all captured by
the power of words.
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October 6
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1933 – Alokeranjan Dasgupta born in Calcutta, India; Bengali poet, translator, essayist, and academic. He taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavaput University (1957-1971). In 1971, he joined the faculty of the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is the author if over 20 books of poetry, and has translated Bengali and Santalo poetry and plays into English and German, as well as translating German and French literature into Bengali. He won the 1985 Goethe Prize, and the 2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest prize for Non-Resident Indians. Dasgupta died in Germany at age 87 in November 2020.
Watching with Ears
by Alokeranjan Dasgupta
.
"There is no religion other than poetry; the poetry of today
will be tomorrow's religion." This I declared ― and then
drifted away. But to whom did I make this assertion?
This question of mine gave rise to an evening raga.
.
I have become aware that nothing can be stated
now with ultimate certainty. Whatever the thesis,
its effect will be thwarted; for in becoming confined
to some limited viewpoint, it can never amount to truth.
.
So now that vision and concept have split apart,
I see with my ears; proceeding and talking
have become intertwined; I listen unceasingly.
No category, none whatsoever, can fetter me now.
.
― translated by Alokeranjan Dasgupta, © by Alokeranjan Dasgupta, posted at parabaas.com
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1989 – Jamila Woods born in Chicago; American singer-songwriter, rapper; poet, teaching artist and Black feminist. She is the Associate Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors and a founding member of YCA’s Teaching Artist Corps, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective of poets & educators of color. She is also the front-woman of soul-duo band M&O. Woods has made three studio albums: HEAVN; Legacy! Legacy!; and Water Made Us.
Blk Girl Art
by Jamila Woods
―after Amiri Baraka
.
Poems are bullshit unless they are eyeglasses, honey
tea with lemon, hot water bottles on tummies. I want
poems my grandma wants to tell the ladies at church
about. I want orange potato words soaking in the pot
til their skins fall off, words you burn your tongue on,
words on sale two for one, words that keep my feet dry.
I want to hold a poem in my fist in the alley just in case.
I want a poem for dude at the bus stop. Oh you can’t talk
ma? Words to make the body inside my body less invisible.
Words to teach my sister how to brew remedies in her mouth.
Words that grow mama’s hair back. Words to detangle the kitchen.
I won’t write poems unless they are an instruction manual, a bus
card, warm shea butter on elbows, water, a finger massage to the scalp,
a broomstick sometimes used for cleaning and sometimes
.
to soar.
“Blk Girl Art” © 2015 by Jamila Woods, appeared the anthology The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop – Haymarket Books
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October 7
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1576 – John Marston baptized at Wardington, Oxfordshire, England, son of an eminent lawyer of the Middle Temple; English Jacobean poet, playwright, and satirist; his plays were too racy for London’s public playhouses, and were written for private performances for London gallants and younger members of the Inns of Court. In 1603, he became a shareholder in the Children of Blackfriars company, at that time known for steadily pushing the allowable limits of personal satire, violence, and lewdness on stage. Marston had an ongoing feud with Ben Jonson, who satirized Marston as Clove in Every Man Out of His Humour. But by 1603, he ended his dramatic career, and sold his shares in the company of Blackfriars, probably because he had offended King James I. He turned to the study of philosophy, and later took holy orders. Marston died at age 57 on June 1634.
O Love, How Strangely Sweet
by John Marston
.
O Love, how strangely sweet
Are thy weak passions,
That Love and Joy should meet
In self-same fashions!
Oh, who can tell
The cause why this should move?
But only this:
No reason ask of Love.
.
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1934 – Amiri Baraka born as Everett LeRoi Jones, black American playwright, poet, social critic, and a major figure in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ‘70s ; best known for his play Dutchman, his poetry collection The Dead Lecturer, and the historical survey Blues People: Negro Music in White America.
As a Possible Lover
by Amiri Baraka
.
Practices
silence, the way of wind
bursting
in early lull. Cold morning
to night, we go so
slowly, without
thought
to ourselves. (Enough
to have thought
tonight, nothing
finishes it. What
you are, will have
no certainty, or
end. That you will
stay, where you are,
a human gentle wisp
of life. Ah…)
.
practices
loneliness,
as a virtue. A single
specious need
to keep
what you have
never really
had.
.
“As a Possible Lover” © 1962 by Amiri Baraka appeared in Poetry magazine’s April 1972 issue
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1970 – Patricia Colleen Murphy born in Cincinnati, Ohio; American poet and teacher of creative writing and magazine production at Arizona State University. In 2008, she founded ASU’s Superstition Review, an online literary magazine. Murphy won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award for Hemming Flames, which also won the 2017 Milt Kessler Award for Poetry. Her second poetry collection, Bully Love, was published in 2019.
Monsoon Season: Morenci AZ
by Patricia Colleen Murphy
.
The three ton mine trucks reek
of burning oil, brakes. They rev,
.
stop to refuel. Today the reservoir
is lapis. The sky is slate but clearing.
.
The rock is drenched chalk.
Our cuffs are rolled nearly to knees.
.
Our raised voices are tangling
the way I wish our bodies would.
.
It rained for five minutes, rock steaming,
This air is not the only heaviness.
.
I watch the belts drop chalcocite,
malachite, azurite and chrysocolla.
.
Lion, dragon, hummingbird, sheep:
this way the clouds have meaning.
.
My only power is this ability to name.
.
“Monsoon Season: Morenci AZ” © 2019 by Patricia Colleen Murphy, appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, July 9, 2019
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October 8
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1910 – Rosalie Moore born Gertrude Elizabeth Moore in Oakland CA; American writer, poet, children’s author, and playwright. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley and also earned an MA in English Literature from Berkeley. In 1937, she went to Lawrence Hart’s poetry-writing classes, and became part of the Activists, a poet’s group co-founded by Hart. In 1938, she won the University of Chicago's Charles H. Sergel poetic drama award for her play The Calydonian Boar Hunt. She also won the 1949 Yale Series Younger Poet Award for her collection The Grasshopper's Man. Moore married in 1942 and raised three daughters, then taught at the College of Marin (1965-1976). Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate (2008-2010), was one of her students. Moore’s works include: Year of the Children; Big Rig; Of Singles and Doubles; and Gutenberg in Strasbourg. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies. Rosalie Moore died at age 90 in June 2011.
Catalog
by Rosalie Moore
.
Cats sleep fat and walk thin.
Cats, when they sleep, slump;
When they wake, pull in -
And where the plump's been
There's skin.
Cats walk thin.
.
Cats wait in a lump,
Jump in a streak.
Cats, when they jump, are sleek
As a grape slipping its skin-
They have technique.
Oh, cats don't creak.
They sneak.
.
Cats sleep fat.
They spread comfort beneath them
Like a good mat,
As if they picked the place
And then sat.
You walk around one
As if he were City Hall
After that.
.
If male,
A cat is apt to sing upon a major scale:
This concert is for everybody, this
Is wholesale.
For a baton, he wields a tail.
.
(He is also found,
When happy, to resound
With an enclosed and private sound.)
.
A cat condenses.
He pulls in his tail to go under bridges,
And himself to go under fences.
.
Cats fit
In any size box or kit;
And if a large pumpkin grew under one,
He could arch over it.
.
When everyone else is just ready to go out,
The cat is just ready to come in,
He's not where he's been.
Cats sleep fat and walk thin.
.
“Catalog” © 1966 by Rosalie Moore was included in the anthology Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle – Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books
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1910 – Hilda Conkling born in New York state, daughter of a poet mother and an English professor father who died when she was four years old. Hilda composed most of her poetry between ages four and fourteen. She never wrote them down herself –instead, they came out in conversation with her mother, who wrote down Hilda’s words either in the moment, or from memory later, then she’d read the lines back to Hilda, who corrected any deviation from her original words. As Hilda grew up, her mother stopped recording the poems, but Hilda apparently didn’t write down any for herself. Nature was the theme of many of her poems, and they appeared in several magazines. They were also published in three collections: Poems by a Little Girl; Shoes of the Wind; and Silverhorn. She died at age 75 in June 1986.
Dandelion
by Hilda Conkling
.
Little soldier with the golden helmet,
What are you guarding on my lawn?
You with your green gun
And your yellow beard,
Why do you stand so stiff?
There is only the grass to fight!
.
“Dandelion” from Poems by a Little Girl, by Hilda Conkling – Kessinger Publishing, 2010 reprint
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October 9
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1924 – Jane Cooper born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but raised in Jacksonville, Florida; American poet, essayist, and teacher. In 1950, Cooper joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College where, with author and poet Grace Paley, and later with poet Muriel Rukeyser, she developed and enhanced its writing program. She suffered from a primary immune deficiency, and didn’t publish her first book of poetry, The Weather of Six Mornings, until 1969. Her other collections include Maps & Windows; Scaffolding: New and Selected Poems; and Green Notebook, Winter Road. She died in October 2007 at age 83.
Rent
by Jane Cooper
.
If you want my apartment, sleep in it
but let’s have a clear understanding:
the books are still free agents.
.
If the rocking chair’s arms surround you
they can also let you go,
they can shape the air like a body.
.
I don’t want your rent, I want
a radiance of attention
like the candle’s flame when we eat,
.
I mean a kind of awe
attending the spaces between us—
Not a roof but a field of stars.
.
“Rent” from Scaffolding: Selected Poems, © 1993 by Jane Cooper – Tilbury House
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1956 – Judith Baumel born in the Bronx NY; American poet, writer, essayist, and translator. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of Creative Writing at Adelphi University. Her books include: The Weight of Numbers, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; Now; The Kangaroo Girl; and Passeggiate.
I: At The Limen
by Judith Baumel
.
One night we opened the door for Elijah
and he brought instantly to my nose
the rain-green wet, the brown-black-grey-
pink-yellow wet of early spring. There is no red-
wet—just red light in the eye as he enters the fire.
.
Limen – noun; I: in anatomy, the limen nasi is the boundary between the bony and cartilaginous parts of the nasal cavity. II: in psychology, limen is a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another.
.
“I: At The Limen” from Thorny, © 2022 by Judith Baumel – Arrowsmith Press
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October 10
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1870 – Louise Mack born as Marie Louise Hamilton Mack in Hobart, Tasmania; Australian poet, novelist, journalist, columnist, pioneering woman war correspondent, and eye witness to the WWI German invasion of Antwerp. She was under shell-fire for thirty-six hours in Antwerp, then stole through the German lines to Brussels. Her fearlessness earned her great fame in Australia, and many audiences came to hear Mack’s lectures about her war experiences, and when she spoke at fundraisers for the Australian Red Cross Society. Her books include Dreams in Flower: Book of Poems, and the novels The World is Round, Girls Together, and The Romance of a Woman of Thirty.
Of a Wild White Bird
by Louise Mack
.
To soar as a wild white bird,
With a song unbound and fetterless!
With a gush of song in the throat,
Loosened and loud and letterless,
And the wind its only accompaniment.
.
To sing and soar and look down
On a world one leaves when one tires of it:
With a glancing wing for a sail,
Dashing, when one desires of it,
Through the spray of the great sea-wilderness.
.
Or sweeping with mighty curves
From land to sky, and to land again:
To cast off Time, and to stay
Where one’s will alone lays hand on one:
Not to own or owe in the universe.
.
Sudden and swift some day
Meet Death, and know no fear of Him,
But close the eyes and have done.
... When a wild bird dies none hear of him.
He has sung and ceased, and is happiest.
.
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October 11
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1897 – Joseph Auslander born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American poet, anthologist, translator, and novelist. He graduated from Harvard in 1917, and attended the Sorbonne in Paris (1921-1922). He was married to poet Audrey Wurdemann in 1932. Auslander was the first to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1937-1941) – the title was changed to Poet Laureate Consultant in 1985, and is now commonly referred to as U.S. Poet Laureate. He is best-known for The Unconquerables, a collection of poems published in 1943, addressed to the German-occupied countries of Europe. His other collections include Sunrise Trumpets; Letters to Women; More than Bread; Riders at the Gate; and The Islanders. Auslander died of a heart attack at age 67 in June 1965.
Home-Bound
by Joseph Auslander
.
The moon is a wavering rim where one fish slips,
The water makes a quietness of sound;
Night is an anchoring of many ships
Home-bound.
.
There are strange tunnelers in the dark, and whirs
Of wings that die, and hairy spiders spin
The silence into nets, and tenanters
Move softly in.
.
I step on shadows riding through the grass,
And feel the night lean cool against my face;
And challenged by the sentinel of space,
I pass.
.
“Homebound” from More Than Bread, © 1936 by Joseph Auslander – MacMillan Company
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1948 – Becky Birtha born in Hampton, Virginia; African American poet and children’s author whose heritage also includes Cherokee and Catawba; known for poems and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships. Her family moved to Philadelphia when she was four, and she attended the Philadelphia School for Girls, a college prep public magnet school. She earned a BS in Child Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and a MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Birtha has worked as a teacher, a librarian in a law library, and as an adoption agency representative. In 1983, her work appeared in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and her first book was published, a short story collection called For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women. Her first poetry collection, The Forbidden Poems, was published in 1991. Her children’s book Grandmama’s Pride won the 2005 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Honor Book for Picture Book Text.
How I Became A Lesbian
by Becky Birtha
.
It’s not that you
become this way
so much as it is
something you always were
someone you one day realize
you are
.
like the discovery
that you would have always loved
star fruit
kiwis or
mangoes
only you never knew they existed until
you were halfway through your life.
.
Maybe you remember the day you
discovered mangoes
when you and a friend
fed thick, pulpy slices
into each other
mouths open in astonishment.
.
Maybe you remember
your first taste—
and the startling comprehension
of the possibilities
of life in a world that included
this incredible
sweet
reality.
.
“How I Became A Lesbian” © 1983 by Becky Birtha from Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology – Kitchen Table Press, first edition
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October 12
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1896 – Eugenio Montale born in Genoa, Italy; Italian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and editor. He worked as an editor for the Florentine publisher R. Bemporad in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1940s, he moved to Milan, and became a contributor and the music editor for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the 1950s and 1960s, he also worked as a reporter. In 1975, he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Montale died of heart failure in 1981 at age 84.
It’s Only an Error
by Eugenio Montale
.
Clowns got up as poets
arrogant bureaucrats,
pedantic criers,
you are the standard bearers:
carrying faded colors.
Being a poet isn’t a matter of pride.
It’s only an error of nature.
A burden to be shouldered
with fear.
.
– translator not credited
“It’s Only an Error” appeared in the October-November 1989 issue of Poetry magazine
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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