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“The problem in America isn't
so much what people don't know;
the problem is what people think
they know that just ain't so.”
– Will Rogers, humorist
and social commentator
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“Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ...
People often ask me at this age, 'Who am
I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not
giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using
my torch to light other people's torches ... If
we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.”
Gloria Steinem, feminist icon
who turned 90 in 2024
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13 Poets born this week,
Feminists, exiles,
two poet laureates,
a widow, and a Sufi
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July 28
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1874 – Alice Duer Miller born in Staten Island, New York; American poet, novelist, screenwriter, satirist, and feminist. The New York Tribune published a series of her wonderful satirical poems lambasting the objections to women voting, which were then published in 1915 as a book called Are Women People? Her title became a catchphrase of the woman suffrage movement. She died at age 68 in August 1942.
Why We Oppose Votes for Men
by Alice Duer Miller
.
1. Because man’s place is the armory.
.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question
otherwise than by fighting about it.
.
3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women
will no longer look up to them.
.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their
natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters
than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct
at baseball games and political conventions shows this,
while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders
them particularly unfit for the task of government.
“Why We Oppose Votes for Men” is in the public domain.
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1917 – Gloria Fuertes born in Madrid; prolific Spanish poet, children’s author, short story writer, playwright, pacifist, environmentalist, and feminist. Even during Franco’s dictatorship, she never concealed that she was a lesbian. Fuertes started making up poems at age 5. She attended the Institute of Vocational Education of Women, where she studied shorthand, typing, and childcare. In 1934, she started working as an accountant and secretary, but continued writing children's stories, plays, and poetry, which began appearing in children’s magazines in 1940. She was a co-founder in 1951 of Verses in Skirts, which organized poetry readings at bars and local cafes, and collaborated on the magazines Directions, Spanish Poetry, Straw Bird, and Archer. Fuertes studied library science and English (1955-1960), then taught Spanish in the U.S. at Bicknell University and Bryn Mawr College. In the mid-1979s, she worked on children’s programs for Spanish television. Gloria Fuertes died of lung cancer at age 81 in November 1998. Among her many poetry collections are: Isla Ignorada (Ignored Isle); Canciones para niños (Songs for Children); Que estás en la tierra (That you are in earth); Sola en la sala (Alone in the room);and Poemas prácticos más que teóricos (Poems practical rather than theoretical).
Now
by Gloria Fuertes
.
Now I will tell you
how the worms
I kept in an empty soap carton
and fed white mulberry leaves,
changed themselves without my help,
curling into scoops of color,
and how later I watched them
transform into butterflies,
and all this just because it was May
and because insects possess a bit of magic.
.
Then I’ll tell you
how Eloisa Muro,
fourth mistress of Cervantes,
was the author of Don Quixote.
.
For though I’m small, I know many things,
and my body is an endless eye
through which, unfortunately, I see everything.
.
translated by Brian Barker
“Now” from Off the Map: Selected Poems, © 1984 by Gloria Fuertes – Weselyan University Press, bilingual edition
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1940 – Judy Grahn born in Chicago, but grew up in New Mexico; American feminist poet, nonfiction writer, women’s and LGBTQ+ rights activist, and editor. She was discharged at age 21 from the Air Force for being openly gay. She co-founded the Women’s Press Collective in 1969, and was a founding member of the West Coast New Lesbian Feminist Movement. She is an editor and contributor to Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture. Grahn has given many readings and lectures, frequently collaborating on programs with dancer-choreographer Anne Blethenthal, and singer-songwriter Anne Carol Mitchell. She has taught at the California Institute for Integral Studies, where she earned her Ph.D. Her poetry collections include A Woman is Talking to Death; The Queen of Swords; Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling; and Hanging on Our Own Bones.
VII. VERA, from my childhood
by Judy Grahn
.
Solemnly swearing, to swear as an oath to you
who have somehow gotten to be a pale old woman;
swearing, as if an oath could be wrapped around
your shoulders
like a new coat:
For your 28 dollars a week and the bastard boss
you never let yourself hate;
and the work, all the work you did at home
where you never got paid;
For your mouth that got thinner and thinner
until it disappeared as if you had choked on it,
watching the hard liquor break your fine husband down
into a dead joke.
For the strange mole, like a third eye
right in the middle of your forehead;
for your religion which insisted that people
are beautiful golden birds and must be preserved;
for your persistent nerve
and plain white talk --
the common woman is as common
as good bread
as common as when you couldnt go on
but did.
For all the world we didnt know we held in common
all along
the common woman is as common as the best of bread
and will rise
and will become strong -- I swear it to you
I swear it to you on my own head
I swear it to you on my common
woman's
head
.
“VII. VERA, from my childhood” one of The Common Woman Poems, from The Work of a Common Woman: Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn 1964-1977, © 1984 by Judy Grahn – The Crossing Press
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1962 – Kwame Dawes born in Ghana, but his family moved to Kingston, Jamaica when he was nine; prolific Ghanaian-Jamaican poet, documentary writer, editor, academic, actor, and musician. He earned a BA from the University of the West Indies, and earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of New Brunswick. Dawes taught English at the University of South Carolina (1992-2012), and was Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. His first poetry collection, Progeny of Air, won the 1994 Forward Poetry Prize, Best First Collection. He is a Chancellor's Professor of English and Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He won a 2009 Emmy Award for his film about HUV-AIDS in Jamaica. In 2018, Dawes was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2021 he succeeded Ted Kooser as host of the American Life in Poetry column. In 2024, Kwame Dawes was named poet laureate of Jamaica, with a 3-year tenure. His many poetry collections include: Prophets; Midland; Impossible Flying; Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems; City of Bones: A Testament.
Vagrants and Loiterers
by Kwame Dawes
South Carolina, c.1950
You got that clean waistcoat,
the bright white of a well-tailored
shirt, you got those loose-as-sacks
slacks and some spit-polished shoes,
and you know, whether you are looking
like money, or about to take a stroll,
to tilt that hat like you own
the world; yeah, smoke your pipe,
roll your tobacco, and hold loose
as authority, your muscles, lithe
and hard; and every so often, when
you feel the urge, you reach into the waist
pocket and pull out that watch on its
chain, then look in the sky and say
Gonna be a cold one when it come,
like God gave you that fancy clock
to tell the future. These are the easy
boys of the goodly South; waiting for
what is out of frame to happen:
the sheriff with his questions, the
paddy wagon, the chain gang, the weight
of the world. Waiting, with such delicate
dignity, fickle as the seasonal sky.
“Vagrants and Loiterers” © 2018 by Kwame Dawes, appeared in Poetry magazine’s April 2018 issue
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July 29
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1905– Stanley Kunitz born in Worcester Massachusetts; Jewish American poet, editor, and translator. His father committed suicide, and he was raised by his mother. At fifteen, Kunitz became a butcher’s assistant, then became a cub reporter for The Wooster Telegram & Gazette. He graduated summa cum laude in 1926 from Harvard with an English major and a philosophy minor, then earned a master’s degree in English from Harvard in 1927. He wanted a doctorate degree, but was told that “Anglo-Saxon” students wouldn’t like to be taught by a Jew, so he returned to working as a reporter full-time for The Worcester Telegram, then went to work for the H. W. Wilson Publishing Company in New York. His poems began to appear in magazines. Drafted into the Army in 1943 as a conscientious objector, he served as a noncombatant in the Air Transport Command. After WWI, he taught at several different American universities. Kunitz was appointed as the U.S. Poet Laureate twice, in 1974 and again in 2000. He was an outspoken critic of censorship. As founder and editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin (1928-1943), his influence helped bring about the Library Bill of Rights, written by librarian Forrest Spauling, and later adopted by the American Library Association, a cornerstone of intellectual freedom in libraries. He won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in 2006 for The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Kunitz died at age 100 in May 2006. Among his many collections of poetry are Next-to-Last Things; The Terrible Threshold; The Testing-Tree; Passport to the War; and Intellectual Things.
The Portrait
by Stanley Kunitz
.
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
.
“The Portrait” from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz, © 2000 by Stanley Kunitz – W. W. Norton & Company
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July 30
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1940 – Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore born in Oakland CA; prolific American poet, essayist, librettist, playwright, and children’s author. In 1970, he converted to Sufism. He founded the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, for which he wrote several theatrical pieces. Some of his early work was published by City Lights Bookstore, but he self-published his later work under the name Ecstatic Exchange. He died of cancer at age 75 in April 2016.
Great Cruelty and Heartlessness
by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
.
We’re living in a time of great cruelty and heartlessness
.
where instead of a sun they’re throwing up anvils
.
Instead of sunlight there’s the sound of
hammers beating
Instead of walking there’s kicking
.
Instead of thinking there’s talking
.
It’s almost as if there’ve never been times like
these before
.
Even shadows thrown by cartwheels on dirt roads
resemble the grimaces of armies as they
slide across rocks
.
In the palaces of power clocks go off but no one
wakes
.
Decisions are made by pouring acid down drains
or waiting for nightfall in a room lit by
neon tubes
.
If anyone speaks all eyes are upon them
.
I saw a sparrow fly over a fence
.
An ant stop and not go on
.
But laughter has turned to pebbles
falling on zinc
.
And children have been torn from their futures
.
“Great Cruelty and Heartlessness” from In the Realm of Neither, © 2008 by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore – Ecstatic Exchange
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July 31
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1954 – Kim Addonizio born in Bethesda, Maryland; American poet, short story writer, and novelist; recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a 2004 Mississippi Review Fiction Prize; a 2000 Pushcart Prize for Aliens, and a 1994 San Francisco Club Poetry Medal. Her poetry collections include My Black Angel; Lucifer at the Starlite; and What is This Thing Called Love. Her fiction works include In the box called pleasure: stories; Little Beauties; and My Dreams Out in the Street.
Wine Tasting
by Kim Addonizio
.
I think I detect cracked leather.
I’m pretty sure I smell the cherries
from a Shirley Temple my father bought me
.
in 1959, in a bar in Orlando, Florida,
and the chlorine from my mother’s bathing cap.
And last winter’s kisses, like salt on black ice,
.
like the moon slung away from the earth.
When Li Po drank wine, the moon dove
in the river, and he staggered after.
.
Probably he tasted laughter.
When my friend Susan drinks
she cries because she’s Irish
.
and childless. I’d like to taste,
one more time, the rain that arrived
one afternoon and fell just short
.
of where I stood, so I leaned my face in,
alive in both worlds at once,
knowing it would end and not caring.
.
“Wine Tasting” © 2013 by Kim Addonizio, appeared in Poem-A-Day on September 3, 2013
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August 1
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1888 – Aline Murray Kilmer (1888-1941) American poet, children’s book author, essayist, and from 1908 until his death in 1918, wife of Joyce Kilmer, a poet mainly remembered for his poem “Trees.” She was the mother of five children, but their oldest daughter was stricken with infantile paralysis and died at age four in 1917, shortly before her husband was deployed to France. He was killed in 1918 at age 31 by a sniper’s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne. She turned to writing children’s books and poetry to support her four remaining children. Her second son, Michael, died at age 11 in 1927. Her poetry was mainly published individually in magazines, but she did publish four poetry collections: Candles That Burn; Vigils; The Poor Kings Daughter and Other Verse; and Selected Poems. In October 1941, Aline Murray Kilmer died at age 52, after three years of suffering from an excruciating illness.
Atonement
by Aline Murray Kilmer
.
When a storm comes up at night and the wind is crying,
When the trees are moaning like masts on laboring ships,
I wake in fear and put out my hand to find you
With your name on my lips.
.
No pain that the heart can hold is like to this one–
To call, forgetting, into aching space,
To reach out confident hands and find beside you
Only an empty place.
.
This should atone for the hours when I forget you.
Take then my offering, clean and sharp and sweet,
An agony brighter than years of dull remembrance.
I lay it at your feet.
.
“Atonement” is in the public domain.
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1947 – Lorna Goodison born in Kingston, Jamaica; Jamaican poet, writer, and painter; born on Emancipation Day in Jamaica. “I don’t think it is an accident that I was born on the first of August, and I don’t think it was an accident that I was given the gift of poetry, so I take that to mean that I am to write about those people and their condition, and I will carry a burden about what they endured and how they prevailed until the day I die.” (NOTE: The enslaved were not set free all at once, but in groups over a period of 4 years. The last group was set free on August 1, 1838.) Goodison was the first woman to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017-2021). She has been honored with the 1999 Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for literary contributions, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry, and the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Her poetry collections include I Am Becoming My Mother; Heartease; Oracabessa; Turn Thanks; Supplying Salt and Light; and Mother Muse. Goodison is also a talented painter, and the covers of her books are usually illustrated with her artwork.
From Testimony of First of August Negroes –
The Last to Be Set Free.
by Lorna Goodison
.
I tell my friend Quasheba, stop up you ears with this beeswax,
so that the bantering song of all who get fi leave scotch free
don’t mad we who still bind to cane piece. We who get left back
because spiteful Massa say: ‘Emancipation is like an aged white
rum—so strong not every Negro can imbibe at one time, lest they
grow drunken and stagger”. So him water down freedom, share
it out little little and what left in a barrel bottom is fi me and you.
.
I say, Dont bawl Q, we wait long already, we can wait more still.
She say: “Since them carry me come from Guinea me want go home.”
Me too. But if is one thing me learn from what Saint Paul preach
is: They that wait. No, is not him say that, must be the prophet
Isaiah or one other man who help write Massa bible with the lock
and key. My friend say she don’t want hear no comfortable words
today. My heart string stretch out too. Me disappoint. Me tired pray.
.
Bend down! Full-free hurrycomeup dem a come down the road
like a Syrian wolf upon the fold. I no rightly sure what that mean,
but me like how it sound. Turn you back and bend down lower,
inspect grass hard like a cruel overseer. Bend down, chop furious
and cuss like wicked slave driver. Tell grass how it good-fi-nothing,
lazy, and no make fi flourish. Say it bad like sin that Ham commit.
Them gone? We can stand up now. Our day of Jubilee a come.
“Testimony of First of August Negroes: the Last to Be Set Free” from Collected Poems, © 2017 by Lorna Goodison – Carcanet Press
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August 2
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1949 ― Bei Dao is the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai, born in Beijing, China; Chinese-American poet, short fiction author, essayist, and memoirist. He was a member of the Young Pioneers of China, and joined the Red Guards, but became disillusioned by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He co-founded the literary journal Jintian (Today), and protesters at Tiananmen Square carried banners with lines of his poetry. He was on a lecture tour outside the country at the time of the Tiananmen protests, and he was banned from returning to China. Jintian was also officially banned. He was a stateless exile for the next 10 years. In 1990, he was honored with PEN/America’s Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. Eventually he settled in America, and became a U.S. citizen in 2009. His poetry collections include The August Sleepwalker; Old Snow; and The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems.
Declaration
by Bei Dao
for Yu Luoke
.
Perhaps the final hour is come
I have left no testament
Only a pen, for my mother
I am no hero
In an age without heroes
I just want to be a man
.
The still horizon
Divides the ranks of the living and the dead
I can only choose the sky
I will not kneel on the ground
Allowing the executioners to look tall
The better to obstruct the wind of freedom
.
From star-like bullet holes shall flow
A blood-red dawn
.
"Declaration" from The August Sleepwalker, © 1988 by Bei Dao - translation © 1988, 1990 by Bonnie S. McDougall – New Directions Publishing
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August 3
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1905 ― Frances M. Frost (no relation to Robert Frost) was born in St. Albans, Vermont; American novelist, poet, and children’s author. She married William Blackburn in 1926, but they divorced in 1930. Her book Hemlock Wall was published in 1929 as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Frost earned a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Vermont in 1931. After graduation, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York, and briefly married a second time. Her novel Yoke of Stars, published in 1939, was a bestseller. Frost’s son Paul Blackburn was also a poet. She died of cancer at age 54 in February 1959.
Night Plane
by Frances M. Frost
.
The midnight plane with its flying lights
looks like an unloosed star
wandering west through blue-black night
to where the mountains are,
a star that's come so close to earth
to tell each quiet farm and little town,
'Put out your lights, children of earth. Sleep warm.'
.
“Night Plane” from Mid-Century, © 1946 by Frances M. Frost – Creative Age Press
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1937 – Diane Wakoski born in Whittier, California; American poet and essayist. At the University of California, Berkeley, she took part in Thom Gunn’s poetry workshops and studied with Josephine Miles. She lived in New York (1960-1973), then moved to Michigan. Her many poetry collections include The Magellanic Clouds; The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems; Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, which won the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award; The Butcher’s Apron; and Bay of Angels.
Uneasy Rider
by Diane Wakoski
.
Falling in love with a mustache
is like saying
you can fall in love with
the way a man polishes his shoes
which,
of course,
is one of the things that turns on
my tuned-up engine
.
those trim buckled boots
.
(I feel like an advertisement
for men’s fashions
when I think of your ankles)
.
Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face
.
and I find myself
a bad moralist,
a failing aesthetician,
a sad poet,
.
wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles
that make a man’s body have so much substance,
that makes a woman
lean and yearn in that direction
that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day
in your presence
the pool of wax under a burning candle
the foam from a waterfall
.
You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson
She is the rain,
waits in it for you,
finds blood spotting her legs
from the long ride.
.
“Uneasy Rider” from The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems, © 1971 by Diane Wakoski – Simon & Schuster
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1974 – Amy King born in Baltimore, Maryland, but grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia; American poet, academic, essayist, and anthologist. She earned degrees in women’s and American studies from Towson University and State University of New York Buffalo, then earned an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. Since 2003, she has taught English and creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. King is a founding member of the literary arts activist group Vida: Women in Literary Arts, an activist group working for more publication of writing by women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities. She won the Women’s National Book Association Award in 2015. Her poetry collections include: The People Instruments; Antidotes for An Alibi; and The Missing Museum.
Perspective
by Amy King
.
When I see the two cops laughing
after one of them gets shot
because this is TV and one says
while putting pressure on the wound,
Haha, you're going to be fine,
and the other says, I know, haha!,
as the ambulance arrives—
I know the men are white.
I think of a clip from the hours
of amateur footage I've seen
when another man at an intersection
gets shot, falls, and bleeds from a hole
the viewer knows exists only by the way
the dark red pools by the standing cop's feet,
gun now holstered, who
yells the audience back to the sidewalk.
I know which one is dying
while black and which one stands by white.
I think this morning about the student
in my class who wrote a free write line
on the video I played
that showed a man pouring water
on his own chest, "...the homoerotic
scene against a white sky" with no other men
present. Who gets to see and who follows
what script? I ask my students.
Whose lines are these and by what hand
are they written?
.
"Perspective," © 2016 by Amy King, was read on PoetryNow, a Poetry Foundation program on the WFMT Radio Network
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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