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“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
– Lord Byron,
from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
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"All water has a perfect memory
and is forever trying to get
back to where it was."
– Toni Morrison,
Nobel Prize in Literature Winner
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13 poets born in September,
lovers of the natural world,
activists, some born to poor
families, some to rich ones,
but all seekers after that
elusive something more.
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September 1
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1882 – Sara Bard Field born in Cincinnati, Ohio; American writer, poet, suffragist, newspaper reporter, free love advocate, and Christian Socialist. In 1900, she married Albert Ehrgott, a minister twice her age, but she divorced him in 1914. There was a scandal when she began living with attorney and author Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose wife refused to give him a divorce. Field’s ex-husband gained custody of their children. She worked on successful campaigns for women's suffrage in Oregon and Nevada and co-authored with Jane Addams a history of the Nevada suffrage fight. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Field worked with Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party. Field then drove from California to Washington, D.C., with four other suffragists to present to President Woodrow Wilson a petition containing 500,000 signatures demanding a federal suffrage amendment. A skilled orator, Field gave speeches at events organized by suffragist Mabel Vernon, who preceded them via train, to publicize the petition and the suffrage cause. In Washington, Field spoke before Congress. She took up writing poetry in the mid-1920s, and published her first poetry collection, The Pale Woman, in 1927, followed by an epic poem, Barabbas, in 1932, and another collection, Darkling Plain, in 1936. Field and Wood were finally married in 1938, after his first wife died. Sara Bard Field died of coronary artery disease at age 91 in June 1974.
Wild Flowers
by Sara Bard Field
.
No surveyor marks your plot,
Country road or city lot;
No judge, no precedent of law,
If your title has a flaw.
A sudden fall or flight of seeds
Caught among the withered weeds,
And all the future days and nights
You hold fast to squatter’s rights.
.
“Wild Flowers” from Selected Poems of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field, privately printed in 1937 at the Grabhorn Press
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1887 – Blaise Cendrars was born as Frédéric-Louis Sauser in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; Swiss-French novelist and poet. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. After fighting in WWI, he travelled extensively, drawing on (and embellishing considerably) the experiences that he had around the world for his surreal documentaries in verse and prose. Cendrars’ best-known poem is the epic La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, which documents in vivid, sometimes dreamlike detail his journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway at the time of the Russian Revolution. He died at age 73 in January 1961.
Chinks
by Blaise Cendrars
.
Sea vistas
Waterfalls
Trees long-haired with moss
Heavy rubbery glossy leaves
Glazed sun
High burnished heat
Glistening
I’ve stopped listening to the urgent voices of my friends discussing
The news that I brought from Paris
On both sides of the train close by or along the banks of
The distant valley
The forest is there watching me unsettling me enticing me like
a mummy’s mask
I watch back
Never the flicker of an eye.
.
– translated by Dick Jones
“Chinks” was published in April, 2011, by qarrtsiluni, an online literary magazine
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1888 – Clement Wood born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and grew up in Birmingham; American writer, lawyer, poet, short story writer, novelist, biographer, and author of books on history and about games. He was also a political activist. Wood graduated from the University of Alabama in 1909, and earned a law degree from Yale in 1911. As a member of the Socialist Party of America he ran for mayor of Birmingham in 1913, and was endorsed by the Birmingham Labor Advocate and Birmingham Trades Council. He lost. Wood was also a member and lecturer of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. In 1914, he moved to New York City, and was briefly Upton Sinclair’s secretary. Though best known for his poetry, Wood also wrote pulp fiction, and his story “The Coffin” was included in The Best Short Stories of 1922. His work often appeared in magazines. His poetry collections include Glad of Earth and The Eagle Sonnets. Clement Moore suffered a stroke, and died at age 68 in October 1950.
Wide Haven
by Clement Wood
.
Tired of man’s futile, petty cry,
Of lips that lie and flout,
I saw the slow sun dim and die
And the slim dusk slip out . . .
Life held no room for doubt.
.
What though Death claim the ones I prize
In War’s insane crusade,
Last night I saw Orion rise
And the great day-star fade,
And I am not dismayed.
.
“Wide Haven” from “Glad of Earth” by Clement Moore, originally published in 1917 by Laurence James Gomme publishing
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September 2
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1894 – Bryher pen name of Annie Winifred Ellerman, born out-of-wedlock in Margate, England. Her father was a wealthy ship-owner. Her parents married when she was 14. She was a British novelist, poet, memoirist, and editor, who became a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920s, using her fortune to provide financial support to many struggling writers, and to found literary magazines and a publishing company. She had a long-time relationship with American poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), and two marriages of convenience with men, which both ended in divorce. In 1933, she published an essay about the increasingly perilous situation of Jews in Germany, and urged readers to take action. Her home in Switzerland became a “receiving station” for refugees, and she helped over 100 people escape Nazi persecution. Bryher’s two poetry collections are Region of Lutany and Arrow Music. She died at age 88 in January 1983.
Wild Rose
by Bryher
.
O wild rose, bend above my face!
There is no world—
Only the beat of your throat against my eyes.
.
White moss is harsh
Against these soft white petals of your feet.
It is hard to dream you have followed the wild goats
Aslant the perilous hills.
.
I have only the fire of my heart to offer you,
O peach-red lily of my love!
.
“Wild Rose” from Arrow Music, by Bryher, originally published in 1922 by J. & E. Bumpus Ltd.
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1934 – Jack Agüeros born in East Harlem NY to parents who moved to New York from Puerto Rico; American poet, community activist, writer, translator, and museum director. After graduating from high school in 1952, he joined the U.S. Air Force, became a guided missile instructor, then went to Brooklyn College on the G.I. Bill. He was studying to be an engineer, but his English professor inspired him to write plays and poems, and he graduated with a BA in English literature and a minor in speech and drama. In the 1960s, he worked for a settlement house, then the Johnson administration’s Office of Economic Opportunity. He then became deputy director of the Puerto Rican Community Development Project. In 1968, he was appointed deputy commissioner of NYC’s Community Development Agency, the highest-ranking Puerto Rican in the city’s administration, and staged a hunger strike to protest the lack of Puerto Ricans in city government. By 1970, he was director of Mobilization For Youth in the Lower East Side. Agüeros never stopped writing, and his one-act play, They Can’t Even Read Spanish, was produced on WNBC TV in May 1971. He wrote a script for Sesame Street’s 71-72 season. In 1974, two of his poems were included in Borinquen, an anthology of Puerto Rican literature. He became the director (1977-1986) of El Museo del Barrio, and started the museum’s annual Three Kings Day Parade on January 6 to celebrate the Epiphany. His three poetry collections are: Correspondence Between Stonehaulers; Sonnets from the Puerto Rican; and Lord, Is This a Psalm? Jack Agüeros was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in December 2004, and died from related complications at age 79 in May 2014.
Psalm For My Faith
by Jack Agüeros
.
Lord, it’s not true
That my faith is cooling.
It’s just that people
Are saying that candle smoke
Has caused cancer in church mice.
And I also worry that candle light
Is too weak to reach your cloud.
.
Do I need a hydrogen candle?
Are the Angels into lasers?
.
Lord, as I think about it,
Lately I haven’t had much to thank you for.
.
Are you on vacation?
.
"Psalm For My Faith" from Correspondence Between The Stonehaulers, © 1991 by Jack Agüeros – Hanging Loose Press
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September 3
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1849 – Sarah Orne Jewett born in South Berwick, York County, Maine; American short story writer, novelist, and poet. Much of her work was set on the southern seacoast of Maine, and she used the pen name A. C. Eliot on first of her works which were published in magazines. Best known for her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs and A White Heron, a collection of short stories. Many of her stories centered on the lives of women, and her descriptive powers and ear for dialect were much admired. She became a close friend of Annie Adams Fields, wife of James Fields, who was editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After he died suddenly in 1881, Jewett and Fields set up housekeeping in what was then termed a “Boston Marriage.” In September 1902, Jewett was severely injured in a carriage accident, which all but ended her writing career, then was paralyzed by a stroke in March 1909, and died at age 59 in June 1909. Her poetry was gathered in Verses, published posthumously in 1916.
Flowers in the Dark
by Sarah Orne Jewett
.
Late in the evening, when the room had grown
Too hot and tiresome with its flaring light
And noise of voices, I stole out alone
Into the darkness of the summer night.
Down the long garden-walk I slowly went;
A little wind was stirring in the trees;
I only saw the whitest of the flowers,
And I was sorry that the earlier hours
Of that fair evening had been so ill spent,
Because, I said, I am content with these
Dear friends of mine who only speak to me
With their delicious fragrance, and who tell
To me their gracious welcome silently.
The leaves that touch my hand with dew are wet;
I find the tall white lilies I love well.
I linger as I pass the mignonette,
And what surprise could dearer be than this:
To find my sweet rose waiting with a kiss!
.
“Flowers in the Dark” from Verses, by Sarah Orne Jewett,
re-published in 1949 by American Weave Press
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1907 – Loren Eiseley born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to a father struggling to support his family, and a deaf mother. Eiseley’s college years were interrupted by tuberculosis. He became an American anthropologist, academic, prolific natural science writer, essayist, and poet; noted for his science and philosophy books, including The Immense Journey; Darwin’s Century; The Mind as Nature; The Star Thrower; and The Unexpected Universe; for his memoir All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life; and for his poetry collections Notes of an Alchemist; The Innocent Assassins; Another Kind of Autumn; and All the Night Wings. He died at age 69 of cardiac arrest after surgery in 1977.
These Are the Stars
by Loren Eiseley
.
These are the stars that only one field knows
High in the sandhill barrens to the north.
Only the field mouse as he ventures forth
Only the fox that hunts him through the snows
Only the hare on the quick and windy toes
Catch such brief silver—into depths profound
Into the root-dark of the underground
Scurry with stars where no star ever goes.
.
Like these dim things that slip from weed to weed
When the great wings to other hunting fly,
Knowing the brain, though smaller than a seed,
Makes its own light—so here by means as sly
I steal your words—as mice in timid heads
Capture small stars to light them to dark beds.
.
“These Are The Stars” from Prairie Schooner, Fall 1938 issue – © 1938 by the Wordsmiths of Sigma Upsilon – University of Nebraska Press
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September 4
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1981 – Dora Malech born in New Haven CT, but grew up in Bethesda, Maryland; American poet, writer, and anthologist. She earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has since taught writing at several universities, including Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. She was a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California, and is a co-founder and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is editor-in- chief of The Hopkins Review, and associate professor of writing seminars in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Her first full-length poetry collection, Shore Ordered Ocean, was published in 2009, followed in 2010 by Say So. That same year, she was also honored with a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, including The Iowa Review, The Best New Poets 2007 anthology, Poetry magazine, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry 2015.
Each year
by Dora Malech
.
I snap the twig to try to trap
the springing and I relearn the same lesson.
You cannot make a keepsake of this season.
Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,
lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,
though for a moment it’s your guilty fist
that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this
extremity that points now, broken, back at
the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.
You flatter this small turn tip of a larger
book of matches that can’t refuse its end,
re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget
again. Here’s a new green vein, another
clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.
.
“Each Year” from Say So, © 2010 by Dora Malech – Cleveland State University Press
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September 5
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1943 – Sam Hamill raised in Utah; American poet, editor, essayist, translator, and peace activist, founding member of Poets Against War. He co-founded Copper Canyon Press with Tree Swenson and William O’Daly. He published 14 collections of his own poetry, including Heroes of the Teton Mythos; Habitation; Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995; Triada; and After Morning Rain, published posthumously. Sam Hamill died at age 74 in April 2018.
What the Water Knows
by Sam Hamill
.
What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.
.
It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.
.
A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.
.
Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?
.
Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.
.
“What the Water Knows” from Gratitude, © 1998 by Sam Hamill (American Poets Continuum) – BOA Editions Ltd.
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1950 – Frances Chung born in New York City’s Chinatown; American poet and teacher. She earned an MS in mathematics from Smith College, spent two years in the Peace Corps in Central and South America, then taught math in New York Public Schools. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and while in surgery, she was injected with antibodies to which she had an allergic reaction, and died at age 40 in December 1990. Her only published work is a two-part collection of her prose and poetry, Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung, published in 2000.
snapshot poem
by Frances Chung
.
a flower lifts on Mott Street
through window pane and
oily morning
a flower turns to color
the sky with pastel softness
to touch the stones on the
streets that bruised
the knees of the children
the flower that defies
sanitation trucks
motorcycle noise
out of order telephone booths
and oven laundromats
that sings a fresh song
every dawning.
“snapshot poem” from Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung, © 2000 by the estate of Frances Chung – Wesleyan University Press
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September 6
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1953 – Belinda Subraman was born in Wilkesboro, NC; American poet, writer, publisher, political activist, and registered nurse. She worked as a hospice nurse (2001-2007) in El Paso, Texas, which inspired her collection Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights. While living in Germany in the 1980s, she started Gypsy Literary Magazine and the Sanctuary Tapes series of the writings and vocal performances of an international array of poets. She traveled extensively, and by marriage, became part of an East Indian family for 22 years. She was on the Texas Green Party State Executive Committee from 2001-2003 and served as the El Paso County Green Party Co-chair (2000-2004). Currently she is politically independent and only works with peace groups. Her solo poetry collections include Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights and Left Hand Dharma. She also published The Innocents, in collaboration with Lyn Lifshin and David Transue.
Approaching The Veil, Scientifically
by Belinda Subraman
.
Eyes like stars sparkle and die
and cycle into new stars, new eyes.
.
The answer is outside our window.
Astronomers look
for the beginning
and find there is no end.
.
Down to earth
there are frozen lines,
winter trees,
stalled cars in dirty snow,
sorrow over endings.
.
The real world is through the window,
infinite, ageless.
Though a clear veil
keeps us distant,
the soul of what
we can never prove
keeps us close.
.
“Approaching The Veil, Scientifically” from Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights, © 2012 by Belinda Subraman – Unlikely Books
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197? – Christine Rhein was born in Detroit, Michigan; American poet, writer, teacher, and speaker; a former mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. Her father one of the German children who escaped to America during World War II, and he taught her to speak fluent German. Her poems have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review. Her collection, Wild Flight, published in 2009, won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry. Asked what she believed in, Rhein replied, “the pulse/ of algebra, all those x’s busy intersecting / all those y’s, points aligned” then added, “the tangle of science and poetry.”
Sunflowers
by Christine Rhein
.
I grow them every summer,
keep the pictures
.
on my phone — petals
of brilliant yellow,
.
skies, royal blue—nothing
like gray winter,
.
gray tanks, headline news.
The whole world
.
has pictures, explosions
we hold in our palms,
.
villagers walking us
into farm fields
.
full of shrapnel. Let it not be
useless to tend
.
the tractors, to talk of seeds
and seedlings,
.
of how fast stalks grow,
buds form,
.
open into blooms that turn—
east, west,
.
before our eyes—the need
for light to live.
.
“Sunflowers” © 2022 by Christine Rhein, from the anthology Busy Griefs, Raw Towns – Schuler Books
All proceeds from sale of the anthology will be forwarded to the International Rescue Committee to support relief efforts in Ukraine.
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September 7
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1887 – Dame Edith Sitwell born in Scarborough on England’s North Sea Coast, into a wealthy, upper-crust family; English poet, critic and editor. Her health problems included a spinal deformity, and she was put into an iron frame. Her parents, particularly her mother, a noted beauty of the day, abandoned her almost entirely. Sitwell became an eccentric, often cruelly mocked for her tall thin appearance, a large and distinctive nose, and her outrageous, flamboyant style of dress. She is best remembered for Façade, an “entertainment” – a recitation of poems with an instrumental accompaniment composed by William Walton, first performed in 1923. She championed Wilfred Owen, whose poetry she edited, and helped to publish after his death. In the 1950s, Marfan syndrome, which inhibits the body’s ability to produce the protein that makes up connective tissue, led to her becoming wheelchair bound. In 1962, she published her final poetry book, The Outcasts, and gave her last poetry reading. She died of cerebral haemorrhage in December, 1964, at age 77. She was cruelly labeled by critic Julian Symons, while she lay dying, as “wearing other people’s bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve.” That her personal suffering was cloaked and masked, all while she wore her off-putting nose like a badge of honor, seems never to have occurred to him.
Poetry
by Edith Sitwell
.
Enobles the heart and the eyes,
and unveils the meaning of all things
upon which the heart and the eyes dwell.
It discovers the secret rays of the universe,
and restores to us forgotten paradises.
.
“Poetry” from Collected Poems, © 1954 by Edith Sitwell –
Vanguard Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Photo: Ellen Willmott Hybrid Tea Roses
