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“Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and
blooded with emotions, all held together
by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
― Paul Engle, American poet and
Iowa Writers’ Workshop director
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13 poets born in the dark of
December, some overtaken,
and some finding light in
longing and remembrance
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December 10
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1830 – Emily Dickinson born, American’s best-known woman poet and one of the nation’s greatest and most original authors, lived the life of a recluse in Amherst Massachusetts. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, ignoring the traditional poetic forms prevailing among most of the other poets of her day. The extent of her work wasn’t known until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered her cache of poems.
I dwell in Possibility (466)
by Emily Dickinson
.
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
.
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
.
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
.
“I dwell in Possibility” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1999
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1891 – Nelly Sachs born, German-Swedish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate; born into a Jewish family in Berlin, she started writing as a teenager, and became a pen-pal of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf. Shortly before Lagerlöf died in 1940, she convinced the Swedish royal family to help Sachs and her mother escape to Stockholm, as Sachs had been told to report to work at a concentration camp. They lived in a tiny apartment, and Sachs supported them by translating from German into Swedish. Sachs wrote poetry and plays inspired by family members who lost their lives in concentration camps. Best known for her first collection of poems, In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Habitations of Death). Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966
If Only I Knew
by Nelly Sachs
.
If only I knew
what the last thing you saw was.
Was it a stone, that had drunk in
countless last looks, until, in blindness,
they fell on the blind?
.
Or was it earth,
enough to fill a shoe,
and already black
from so many partings
and causing so much death?
.
Or was it your final path,
bringing you farewells from all the paths
you had ever walked?
.
A puddle, a reflection in metal,
perhaps your enemy’s buckle,
or some other small interpreter
of heaven?
.
Or did this earth,
which lets no one depart from here unloved,
send you a bird omen through the air,
reminding your soul that it flinched
in its pain-scorched body?
.
“If Only I Knew” by Nelly Sachs, translated by Rebekah Wilson, appeared in Transference, Summer 2013 – Western Michigan University
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1925 – Carolyn Kizer born, American poet, essayist, and translator. In 1946, Kizer married Stimson Bullitt, the scion of a wealthy Seattle family, and had three children in quick succession. During this time, she nearly stopped writing poetry. They divorced in 1954. Kizer became the first editor of the journal Poetry Northwest (1959-1964). Her first poetry collection, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961. Through the State Department, she got a job teaching in Pakistan (1964-1965), then was the first director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts (1966-1970). In 1975, she married architect John Marshall Woodbridge, this time a true love match. She won three Pushcart Prizes, the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Yin, and in 1988 she won both the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. She died at age 82 in 2014.
A Widow in Wintertime
by Carolyn Kizer
.
Last night a baby gargled in the throes
Of a fatal spasm. My children are all grown
Past infant strangles; so, reassured, I knew
Some other baby perished in the snow.
But no. The cat was making love again.
.
Later, I went down and let her in.
She hung her tail, flagging from her sins.
Though she’d eaten, I forked out another dinner,
Being myself hungry all ways, and thin
From metaphysic famines she knows nothing of,
.
The feckless beast! Even so, resemblances
Were on my mind: female and feline, though
She preens herself from satisfaction, and does
Not mind lying even in snow. She is
Lofty and bedraggled, without need to choose.
.
As an ex-animal, I look fondly on
Her excesses and simplicities, and would not return
To them; taking no marks for what I have become,
Merely that my nine lives peal in my ears again
And again, ring in these austerities,
.
These arbitrary disciplines of mine,
Most of them trivial: like covering
The children on my way to bed, and trying
To live well enough alone, and not to dream
Of grappling in the snow, claws plunged in fur,
.
Or waken in a caterwaul of dying.
“A Widow in Wintertime” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000, © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer – Copper Canyon Press
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1935 – Shūji Terayama (aka Terayama Shūji) born in Hirosaki, Japan, in the northern section of Honshu, Japan’s largest island; Japanese poet, writer, film director, and photographer. His father died during WWII when he was 10 years old. He has written radio dramas, experimental television, plays for Angura (underground) theatre, and countercultural essays. He left college in the 1950s when he fell sick, but by age 18, he was the second winner of the Tanka Studies Award. He died at age 47 of liver failure in May 1983. His poetry collections include Sora ni wa hon (Book in the sky); Chi to mugi (Blood and wheat); To you, alone (Hitoribocchi no anata ni; and Kafun-koukai (Pollen voyage).
Garnet
by Shūji Terayama
.
If I could harden a memory
If I could somehow turn it into stone
I would want to take that day we watched the sunset
And capture it in a perfect stone
She wrote these words in a letter
.
In response, her lover sent to her
A garnet ring
.
And when they look at the small red garnet ring
The two of them
Always remember the day they were engaged
.
“Garnet” from Gogatsu No Shi/Poems of May: A Collection of Miscellaneous Poems, © by Shūji Terayama, translated by David A. Schmidt and Fusae Ekida – Edwin Mellen Press
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December 11
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1922 – Grace Paley born, American author, poet, pacifist, and anti-war activist. During the Vietnam War, she joined the War Resisters League, and in 1968, signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In 1969, Paley accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She was a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and, in 1978, was arrested as one of “The White House Eleven” for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner (that read “No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR”) on the White House lawn. In the 1990s, Paley campaigned for human rights and against U.S. military intervention in Central America. Noted for her short story collections: The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
Walking in the Woods
by Grace Paley
.
That’s when I saw the old maple
a couple of its thick arms cracked
one arm reclining half rotted
into earth black with the delicious
hospitality of rot to the
littlest creatures
the tree not really dying living
less widely green head high
above the other leaf-crowded
trees a terrible stretch to sun
just to stay alive but if you’ve
liked life you do it
.
“Walking in the Woods” from Begin Again: Collected Poems, © 2001 by Grace Paley – Farrar Straus Giroux
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December 12
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1873 – Lola Ridge born in Dublin, Ireland as Rose Emily Ridge; anarchist, feminist, proletariat poet, and editor. Her poems were published in several magazines, and in five books of poetry. When she was a toddler, her mother emigrated with her to New Zealand. Ridge was briefly married in 1895, but moved to Australia, and studied painting at the Sydney Art School. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, and settled in San Francisco, where she began using the name Lola, and gave her age as ten years younger. In 1908, The Overland Monthly was the first American magazine to publish one of her poems. She moved to New York, where she worked in a factory, and became involved in working class politics and protests. She also worked for Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. In 1918, her long poem, The Ghetto, was published in The New Republic, and then in her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, which was a critical success, leading to work for her as an editor on avant-garde magazines. Her other poetry collections include Red Flag; Firehead; and Dance of Fire. She won the Shelley Memorial Award twice, in 1934 and 1935. In 1941, she died at age 67 of pulmonary tuberculosis.
The Foundling
by Lola Ridge
.
Snow wraiths circle us
Like washers of the dead,
Flapping their white wet cloths
Impatiently
About the grizzled head,
Where the coarse hair mats like grass,
And the efficient wind
With cold professional baste
Probes like a lancet
Through the cotton shirt…
.
About us are white cliffs and space.
No façades show,
Nor roof nor any spire...
All sheathed in snow...
The parasitic snow
That clings about them like a blight.
.
Only detached lights
Float hazily like greenish moons,
And endlessly
Down the whore-street,
Accouched and comforted and sleeping warm,
The blizzard waltzes with the night.
.
“The Foundling” from The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge, originally published in 1918 – Aeterna Publishing, 2023 edition
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December 13
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1933 – Jack Hirschman born in New York City; American poet, editor, translator, activist in the anti-war movement, and advocate for the rights of the homeless. Ernest Hemingway’s “Letter to a Young Writer” was written to Hirschman when he was 19. He earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University, and his first poetry collection, A Correspondence of Americans, was published in 1960 by Indiana University Press. He taught at Dartmouth College and UCLA, where Jim Morrison was one of his students. During the Vietnam War, Hirschman was fired by UCLA for encouraging his students to resist the draft. He moved to San Francisco in 1973, where he became a well-known figure. Hirschman translated some of Joseph Stalin’s youthful poems into English, and was an assistant editor at the literary journal Left Curve. As a Poet-in-Residence by San Francisco Public Library, he was active in the founding of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and curated the Poets 11 Anthology, a collection of poems from each of San Francisco’s 11 districts. Among his many poetry collections are: Black Alephs: Poems 1960-1968; Endless Threshold; Front Lines; All That’s Left; and The Arcanes: 2006-2016. He died at age 87 in August 2021, after testing positive for COVID-19.
Poets Eleven Poem
by Jack Hirschman
.
Between the page with the heart
and the mind wrestling upon it,
.
and the ear which later will receive
those limbs of light as perfect harmony,
.
there's a stillness whose volume speaks
worlds of words defiant of measure,
.
treasures of the unsayable, secrets
of the ever-beginning enchantment
.
and the never-ending gathering
at the lips of the kiss of the poem.
.
“Poets Eleven Poem” from All That's Left, © 2008 by Jack Hirschman – City Lights Publishers
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December 14
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1640 – Aphra Behn born, English Restoration playwright, author and poet, one of the first women to earn her living as a writer, becoming a literary role model for future generations of women authors; she sometimes used the pen name Astrea, especially for her early work. She had been recruited as an ‘intelligence gatherer’ for King Charles II, and the Crown paid for her passage to Antwerp, but when the time came for her return to England, there’s no response to pleas for payment of her fare, so in December 1666 she reluctantly borrowed money to pay her own way. Back in England, the King continues to turn a deaf ear to all her requests for payment. By 1668, she had been thrown into debtor’s prison. Most 17th century women left destitute and imprisoned would probably resorted to bartering their bodies for food (debtors in prison were responsible for providing life’s necessities for themselves). But Aphra been launched her writing career from prison, and was able to get out within two years. She became one of the most influential Restoration era playwrights, as well as a famous (and sometimes infamous) poet and novelist. In her poetry, Behn boldly tackled the sexual “double standard” and same-sex love, and often wrote poems in the voice of a character
Love Armed (song)
by Aphra Behn
.
Love in fantastic triumph sat,
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flow'd,
For whom fresh pains he did create,
And strange tyrannic power he shew'd;
From thy bright eyes he took his fire,
Which round about in sport he hurl'd;
But 'twas from mine he took desire
Enough to undo the amorous world.
.
From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his pride and cruelty;
From me his languishments and fears,
And every killing dart from thee;
Thus thou and I the God have arm'd,
And set him up a Deity;
But my poor heart alone is harm'd,
Whilst thine the victor is, and free.
.
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1945 – Carolyn M. Rodgers born and grew up on Chicago’s South Side; American poet, teacher, publisher, and critic. She attended Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, where she got her MA in English. Early in her career she was associated with the Black Arts Movement, attending writing workshops led by Gwendolyn Brooks and through the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Rodgers co-founded Third World Press in 1967, dedicated to publishing African American works. Her collections of poetry include Paper Soul; Songs of a Blackbird, which won the Poet Laureate Award of the Society of Midland Authors; how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems; The Heart as Ever Green: Poems; and Morning Glory: Poems. She died of cancer at the age of 69 in 2010
Food for Thought
by Carolyn M. Rodgers
.
you understand how
very often
you are
the one
who creates the traps you fall into
.
the thing that destroys a person/a people
is not the knowing
but the knowing and not
doing
.
strange
how we women
know
when a man
leaves us—
even when
he’s still
with us…
.
when you need
give
.
it is not ugly to dream in life
but it is ugly to make life a dream
.
i wonder if
the sunrays are like the fingertips of
God?
.
“Food for Thought” from how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems, © 1975 by Carolyn M. Rodgers – Anchor Press
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December 15
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1883 – Harry Kemp born in Youngstown, Ohio; American poet and prose writer. He was raised by his grandmother, who lived near the local train yards. At age 17, he left home to become a common seaman. When he returned to the U.S., he saw the country by riding the rails as a hobo before becoming a college student, but was expelled near the end of 1906. His poems began appearing in newspapers and magazines. In 1911, Upton and Meta Sinclair invited him to camp on their land in Arden, Delaware. When Meta left Upton for Harry, the Sinclairs’ divorce became a scandal. Harry Kemp continued to travel, and wrote about his experiences. His Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative was a best-seller. He lived at times in Greenwich Village, and off and on in a shack in the Provincetown, Cape Cod dunes, where he died in 1960 at age 76. Among his poetry volumes are: Sea and the Dunes; Provincetown Tideways; and Poet of the Dunes.
Chanteys
by Harry Kemp
.
These are the songs that we sing with crowding feet,
Heaving up the anchor chain,
Or walking down the deck in the wind and sleet
And in the drizzle and rain.
.
These are the songs that we sing beneath the sun,
Or under the stars of night,
And they help us through with the work to be done
When the moon climbs into sight.
.
These are the songs that tell our inmost hopes
While we pull and haul a-main,
The bo'sun booming as we lean with the ropes,
And we, bringing in the refrain.
.
“Chanteys” from Chanteys and Ballads, © 1920 by Harry Kemp – Brentanos
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1913 – Muriel Rukeyser born, American poet, playwright, writer, social justice and feminist activist; known for her poems with feminist, social justice and Judaic themes. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. She died at age 66, in February, 1980, from a stroke. Her poetry collections include: Theory of Flight; The Book of the Dead; The Speed of Darkness; and Breaking Open.
Poem
by Muriel Rukeyser
.
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
“Poem” from The Speed of Darkness, © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser – Vintage Books
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December 16
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1863 – George Santayana born as Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás in Madrid, Spain; philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. In 1912, at the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard University and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. During his 40 years in Europe, he wrote 19 books, including The Sense of Beauty, Reason in Religion, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.
‘Tis love that moveth the celestial spheres
by George Santayana
.
‘Tis love that moveth the celestial spheres
In endless yearning for the Changeless One,
And the stars sing together, as they run
To number the innumerable years.
‘Tis love that lifteth through their dewy tears
The roses’ beauty to the heedless sun,
And with no hope, nor any guerdon won,
Love leads me on, nor end of love appears.
For the same breath that did awake the flowers,
Making them happy with a joy unknown,
Kindled my light and fixed my spirit’s goal;
And the same hand that reined the flying hours
And chained the whirling earth to Phoebus’s throne,
In love’s eternal orbit keeps the soul.
.
‘Tis love that moveth the celestial spheres” from The Complete Poems of George Santayana– Bucknell University Press, 1979 edition
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1916 – Theodore (Ted) Weiss born in Reading, Pennsylvania; American poet, editor, professor, and essayist. He taught at the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina, Yale University, Bard College, and then at Princeton (1966-1987). Beginning in 1943, Weiss and his wife Renée Karol Weiss co-founded and co-edited the Quarterly Review of Literature. They also ran poetry workshops in the 1980s at Princeton, Hofstra College, and Cooper Union. Weiss was honored with many awards, including the 1956 Wallace Stevens Award, the 1988-1989 Shelley Memorial Award, and was co-recipient with his wife of the 1997 PEN/Nora Magid Lifetime Achievement Award. The 1987 documentary Living Poetry: A Year in the Life of a Poem was about Weiss and his poem “Fractions.” His poetry collections include: Outlanders; The World Before Us; Fireweeds; A Slow Fuse; and A Sum of Destructions. He died at age 86, after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, in April 2003.
Between the Lines
For Emily Dickinson
.
by Theodore Weiss
.
You, alive, as though you knew
the outrageous fire shuttered away
in you, if taken straight, most stark
when being most elate, must shrivel
its beholder, rarely put yourself
on view. Yet latecomers, prying
into your lines, are dead set
on finding you out.
But I doubt
somehow that you would mind.
Like a star that’s left and left
its light, grown stronger, gathering
as it travels, as it has the space
of dark and time to swell out in,
you might smile at seeing them
asquint to read you
by the radiance
you owned. Sly motes like butterflies,
your pulsed words light on them,
then flit away before their hands
can clutch. And still they feel
the warm, the buoyant rainbow-wind
those wings fan up, feel shadows
wading by
inside of them of a greater
(for its being so elusive) light.
And you will never give them
what they want and so they want
it more. And so they’re almost
satisfied. And so are you who long
ago discovered how to live, enormously,
containedly, between the lines.
“Between the Lines” from From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: The Collected Poems of Theodore Weiss, 1950-1986, © 1986 by Theodore Weiss – Collier-MacMillan Books
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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