“The language we use to describe and operate in the
world affects the way we understand the world, our
place in it, and our interactions with one another.
Changing our language changes our world.”
― Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue
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13 poets born this week,
translators and interpreters of the
mysteries and miseries of the everyday
and the everyday of the extraordinary
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November 12
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1906 – George Dillon born in Jacksonville, Florida; American Jazz age poet, translator, and editor at Poetry magazine. His family moved to Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri before settling in Chicago. He met Edna St. Vincent Millay early in his career, and their love affair is chronicled in his collection The Flowering Stone, and her sonnet sequence Fatal Interview. The Flowering Stone won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Dillon was an associate editor at Poetry magazine. When founding editor Harriet Monroe died in 1936, he took over as editor (1936-1949). He also translated plays by Jean Racine, and worked with Millay on translations of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. George Dillon died at age 61 in 1968.
To Losers
by George Dillon
Let loneliness be mute. Accuse
Only the wind for what you lose,
Only the wind has ever known
Where anything you lost has gone.
It is the wind whose breath shall come
To quench tall-flaming trees and numb
The narrow bones of birds. It is
The wind whose dissipating kiss
Disbands the soft-assembled rose.
It is the wordless wind that knows
Where every kind of beauty goes.
And if you lose love in the end
Say it was taken by the wind.
“To Losers” from The Flowering Stone, © 1931 by George Dillon – Viking Press
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1945 – Judith Roitman born in and raised in New York City; American mathematician and poet. After living in the San Francisco Bay area and near Boston, she moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1978, where she has been a professor (now emeritus) of mathematics at the University of Kansas. Her poetry appears in the chapbooks The stress of meaning, Diamond notebooks, and Slippage, and the poetry collections No Face: Selected & New Poems and Roswell. She is the author of the textbook Introduction to Modern Set Theory.
Seventh cosmogony
by Judith Roitman
.
Inside vision erupted beings as if staring too long eyes motionless all
things stripped of existence what you are looking at forgotten but
disturbance always and concomitant pressure.
.
His material movements. His exerted forms. Mind trapped within mind
each purported exit another dream as if burnt-out walls within walls and the careful step to avoid debris.
.
Snap of firelight the wooden moth her eyes messages cannot be avoided far edge of trees calling and cockroaches, the movement of ants, ruin and divination.
.
Suffering the presence of others. Glue come undone. Politeness raised
to epic levels, the effort, no one can tell who is the postman. Your twin,
your pet, such easy manipulations each thing called into existence before dismissed.
.
Foot so light they thought no-one home as if floating such extreme care
you cannot be too cautious every thing checked out the belly of the
sheep—"I have stayed in these mountains too long, I do not
remember my home."
.
“Seventh cosmogony” from No Face: Selected & New Poems, © 2008 by Judith Roitman – First Intensity Press
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November 13
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1943 – Lola Haskins born in New York City, but raised in northern California; American poet, author, and computer science instructor at the University of Florida. She was also on the faculty of the Rainier Writer’s Workshop (2004-2015) in Washington state. Her poetry collections include: Planting the Children; Desire Lines; how small, confronting morning; Still, the Mountain; and Hunger.
The Sandhill Cranes
by Lola Haskins
.
The blue air fills with cries.
The cranes are streams, rivers.
They danced on the night prairie,
leapt at each other, quivering.
.
The long bones of sandhill cranes
know their next pond. Not us.
When something is too beautiful,
we do not have the grace to leave.
.
“The Sandhill Cranes” from The Grace to Leave, © 2012 by Lola Haskins – Anhinga Press
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1946 – Wanda Coleman born as Wanda Evans in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; Black American poet, short story, and soap opera script writer. Her poetry began to be published in a local newspaper when she was 13. By age 20, she was married and had two children, but went to writing workshops on the weekends. By 1969, she was divorced, and supporting her children by waiting tables and doing typing jobs. Her first published poetry volume was a chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, in 1977, but her first full-length book of poetry, published two years later, was Mad Dog Black Lady. Her other collections include Heavy Daughter Blues and African Sleeping Sickness, both mixes of poetry and short stories; Ostinato Vamps; Bathwater Wine; and Mercurochrome. She died in November 2013, just before her 67th birthday. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems was published in 2020.
The Saturday Afternoon Blues
by Wanda Coleman
.
can kill you
can fade your life away
friends are all out shopping
ain’t nobody home
suicide hotline is busy
and here i am on my own
with a pill and a bottle for company
and heart full of been done wrong
i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song
.
saturday afternoons are killers
when the air is brisk and warm
ol’ sun he steady whispers
soon the life you know will be done
suicide line i can’t get you
best friend out of town
alone with a pill and a bottle
i drink my troubles down
.
the man i love is a killer
the man i love is thief
the man i love is a junky
the man i love is grief
.
some call saturday the sabbath
it’s the bottom of the line some say
whether last or first, my heart’s gonna burst
and there ain’t no help my way
here with a pill and a bottle
and a life full of been done wrong
i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric
for a song
.
“The Saturday Afternoon Blues” from Imagoes, © 1983 by Wanda Coleman – Black Sparrow Press
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November 14
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1910 – Norman Alexander MacCaig born in Edinburgh; Scottish lyric poet and primary-school teacher. He was a lifelong pacifist and during World War II served a term in prison for his beliefs. He eventually left teaching and was appointed Edinburgh University’s first Writer-in-Residence in 1967. MacCaig won the Cholmondeley Medal in 1975 and in 1985 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He was made an OBE in 1979. Among his poetry collections are Riding Lights; A Common Grace; Rings on a Tree; The White Bird; and A World of Difference. He died at age 85 in 1996.
Hotel Room, 12th Floor
by Norman Alexander MacCaig
.
This morning I watched from here
a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect
the Empire State Building, that
jumbo size dentist's drill, and landing
on the roof of the PanAm skyscraper.
But now midnight has come in
from foreign places. Its uncivilised darkness
is shot at by a million lit windows, all
ups and acrosses
.
But midnight is not
so easily defeated. I lie in bed, between
a radio and a television set, and hear
the wildest of warwhoops continually ululating through
the glittering canyons and gulches –
police cars and ambulances racing
to the broken bones, the harsh screaming
from coldwater flats, the blood
glazed on sidewalks.
.
The frontier is never
somewhere else. And no stockades
can keep the midnight out.
.
“Hotel Room, 12th Floor” from The Poems of Norman MacCaig, © 2009 by the estate of Norman MacCaig – Birlinn Ltd
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1969 – Noelle Kocot born in Brooklyn, New York: American poet; Kocot graduated from Oberlin College, and teaches creative writing at The New School in New York. They were married to composer Damon Tomblin, whose death from a drug overdose inspired their collection Sunny Wednesday. They are the author of 9 poetry collections including: Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems; Phantom Pains of Madness; The Raving Fortune; and Ascent of the Mothers.
On My Sober Anniversary
by Noelle Kocot
A plausible place, this sea of air.
Somehow, the fragments of a later
Time get pulled out of the memory.
The earth surges up, the snow covers
Us. The blackened lungs of a bird
Cry out in the shaped bones
Of my hands. Walls of dust,
The bright little stars above us,
Who can crawl into the tiny black
Sky with reverse symmetry?
My brother, you really filled my head,
And now it’s time for me to fly
Out with or without the beautiful passages
Where my mind used to be.
"On My Sober Anniversary" © 2016 by Noelle Kocot
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November 15
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1887 – Marianne Moore born in Kirkwood, Missouri; influential American poet, critic, editor, and translator. In 1952, her book Collected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Her many poetry collections include The Pangolin and Other Verse, What Are Years, and O to Be a Dragon. She died at age 84 in 1972, after a series of strokes.
Roses Only
by Marianne Moore
.
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than
an asset – that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an
.
ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere perculiarity?
.
They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be
remembered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.
.
“Roses Only” from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, ©1967 by Marianne Moore – Macmillan Publishers
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November 16
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1930 – Chinua Achebe born in Ogidi, British Nigeria; Nigerian novelist, poet, critic, and academic. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is the most widely read book in modern African literature; he won the Man Booker International Prize for his literary career in 2007. Nadine Gordimer called him “the father of modern African literature.” His other novels include No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and A Man of the People. Influenced by the Igbo oral tradition and culture, he was fiercely critical of how European literature depicted Africa. He wrote in and defended the use of English, describing it as a means to reach a broad audience, particularly readers of colonial nations. He taught at U.S. universities in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. after a 1990 automobile accident left him partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair. He became a professor at Bard College in New York state. In 2013, he died after a short illness at age 82 in Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry collections include Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems, and Christmas in Biafra.
Dereliction
by Chinua Achebe
.
I quit the carved stool
in my father’s hut to the swelling
chant of saber-tooth termites
raising in the pith of its wood
a white-bellied stalagmite
.
Where does a runner go
whose oily grip drops
the baton handed by the faithful one
in a hard, merciless race? Or
the priestly elder who barters
for the curio collector’s head
of tobacco the holy staff
of his people?
.
Let them try the land
where the sea retreats
Let them try the land
where the sea retreats.
.
“Dereliction” from Collected Poems, © 2004 by Chinua Achebe – Anchor Books
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November 17
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1866 – Voltairine de Cleyre born in Leslie, Michigan; American anarchist, Freethought Movement activist, prolific writer, poet, and public speaker. She opposed capitalism, the state, marriage, and domination over women’s lives and sexuality by religion. In 1912, she died at age 45 from septic meningitis. De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on several issues. Many of de Cleyre’s essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth in 1914.
Germinal
by Voltairine de Cleyre
.
Germinal!─The Field of Mars is plowing,
And hard the steel that cuts, and hot the breath
Of the great Oxen, straining flanks and bowing
Beneath his goad, who guides the share of Death.
.
Germinal! ─The Dragon's teeth are sowing,
And stern and white the sower flings the seed
He shall not gather, though full swift the growing;
Straight down Death's furrow treads, and does not heed.
.
Germinal! ─The Helmet Heads are springing
Far up the Field of Mars in gleaming files;
With wild war notes the bursting earth is ringing.
.
Within his grave the sower sleeps, and smiles.
.
“Germinal” is in the public domain.
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1930 – Elizabeth Cook-Lynn born on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota; she is a Dakota and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. Cook-Lynn is an editor, essayist, poet, novelist, nonfiction author, and an advocate for tribal sovereignty. Her great-grandfather was a Native linguist and pioneer of early Dakota-language dictionaries, both her grandfather and father were on the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council, and her grandmother wrote articles in English and Dakota for Christian newspapers. Cook-Lynn earned a BA in English and Journalism from South Dakota State College, then did graduate work at New Mexico State University and Black Hills State College, and completed her doctorate at University of Nebraska in 1978. In 1985 Cook-Lynn co-founded Wíčazo Ša Review (Red Pencil), an academic journal devoted to Native American studies as an academic discipline. The other founding editors were Beatrice Medicine, Roger Buffalohead, and William Willard. Her books include Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice; Notebooks of Cook-Lynn, a mixed poetry and prose collection; and I Remember the Fallen Trees: New and Selected Poems.
Mount Rushmore
by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
.
Owls hang in the night air
between the visages of Washington, Lincoln
The Rough Rider, and Jefferson; and coyotes
mourn the theft of sacred ground.
.
A cenotaph becomes the tourist temple
of the profane.
.
“Mount Rushmore” from Seek the House of Relatives, © 1983 by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn – Blue Cloud Quarterly Press
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November 18
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1919 – Madeline DeFrees born in Ontario, Oregon, on the Snake River near the Idaho border, AKA Sister Mary Gilbert; American poet, teacher and Roman Catholic nun. She joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1936 and took the name Sister Mary Gilbert, but reclaimed her baptismal name in 1967 when she went to teach at the University of Montana (1967-1979). While in Missoula, she requested a dispensation from her vows, which she received in 1973. She then taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1979-1985). Her eight poetry collections include When the Sky Lets Go; Magpie on the Gallows; Imaginary Ancestors; Blue Dusk, winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Spectral Waves. She died just days before her 96th birthday in November 2015.
Skid Row
by Madeline DeFrees
.
Out of the depths have I cried, O Lord,
Where the lean heart preys on the hardened crust,
Where short wicks falter on candle-hopes
And winter whips at a patchwork trust.
.
From darkened doorways no welcome shines,
No promise waits up the broken stair,
And the coin that summons the night with wine
Buys a morning of sick despair.
.
Out of the depths have I cried in vain
And the still streets echo my lonely calls;
All the long night in the moaning wind
The bruised reed breaks and the sparrow falls.
.
“Skid Row” from Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001, © 2001 by Madeline DeFrees – Copper Canyon Press
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1936 – Suzette Haden Elgin born in Jefferson City, Missouri; American science fiction writer, researcher in experimental linguistics, and poet. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. Haden Elgin is an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages, and created the engineered language Láadan for her Native Tongue trilogy. Her books include The Ozark Trilogy; The Gentle art of verbal Self-Defense; and The Less Said: A Book of Poems. Haden Ellgin died at age 78 in January 2015.
Brochure From the Intensive Care Ward: 2081
by Suzette Haden Elgin
.
"Emerson has written that the poet is the only true doctor. I believe him, for the poet, lacking the impediment of speech with which the rest of us are afflicted, gazes, records, diagnoses, and prophesies."
— Richard Selzer; Mortal Lessons, page 16
.
You will be pleased to know:
.
Today we have therapists to provide
the blessed impediment — the tongue, tied,
the nerves laced decently, and laced inside.
.
Today we find them early, diapered, nested,
before their brains are hopelessly infested
with images; today, they can be tested,
.
the diagnosis made, the remedy applied
before the poison spreads. Our pride is justified —
poetry was a slow and agonizing suicide.
.
No more those gouts of wet and living rose.
Now we apply the tourniquet of prose
and staunch the torturing truth before it flows.
.
“Brochure From the Intensive Care Ward: 2081” © 2014 by Suzette Haden Elgin
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1939 – Margaret Atwood born in Ottawa, Canada; Canadian author, poet, critic, feminist, animal rights and environmental activist, and inventor; among her 16 novels to date, she best known for her iconic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; and The Blind Assassin, winner of the Man Booker Prize. The Testaments, Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was a co-winner with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other of the 2019 Booker Prize. Her poetry collections include Double Persephone; The Circle Game; Are You Happy; Interlunar; Morning in the Burned House; and Dearly.
Spelling
by Margaret Atwood
.
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
.
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.
.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
.
“Spelling” from True Stories, © 1981 by Margaret Atwood – Oxford University Press
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G’Morning/Afernoon/Evening MOTlies!
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