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“We are not free unless the men who frame
and execute the laws represent the interests
of the lives of the people and no other interest.”
— Hellen Keller,
speech at Carnegie Hall - January 5, 1916
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“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember
how you made it through, how you managed to survive.
You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over.
But one thing is certain. When you come out of the
storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami,
Kafka on the Shore
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Thirteen poets born in October,
sharing thoughts and lives with
ink and paper, entering them
into the ledgers of Time
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October 5
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1900 – Bing Xin born as Xie Wanying in Fuzhou, Fuijan Province, China; prolific Chinese poet, novelist, translator, and a pioneer in children’s literature in modern China. Her pen name Bing Xin literally translates as “ice heart,” meaning a morally pure heart. In 1919, while she was a university student, the May 4th Movement had a profound impact on her. In 1919, she published her first work under her pen name, then in 1923, she published two different poetry collections, A Maze of Stars and Spring Water, before going to the U.S. to study literature and library research for three years. Her letters about her travels were later published as Letters to My Little Readers. Upon her return, she taught at several colleges and universities in China, and at Tokyo University. The Photograph is an English language translation of her novel, about an American music teacher at a missionary school who adopts an 8-year-old Chinese girl. Her many poetry collections include: Two Families; Loneliness; Leisure; Superhuman; and Ode to Sakura. She died at age 98 in February 1999.
39
Water flows to the East
And the moon sets to the West-
Poet,
Will your heart pull them back?
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50
Why need to compose?
The poet herself
Is poetry!
Poems by Bing Xin from A Maze of Stars and Spring Water, © 2014 by Bing Xin – Simon & Schuster
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1945 – Judith Kerman born in Bayside, Queens, New York; American poet, musician, translator, editor, anthologist, and publisher. She earned a BA from the University of Rochester, then an MA and a PhD from the University of Buffalo. In 1978, she founded Mayapple Press. In 2002, Kerman was a Fulbright senior scholar to the Dominican Republic. She has published ten books of poetry, including Trauma and Recovery; Three Marbles; Aleph, Broken; Mothering; and definitions.
In Tornado Weather
by Judith Kerman
.
wet-ash light
blows across the road
I’m driving with my foot to the floor
sixty miles over flat midwestern highway
driving to hear poetry
the sky ready
to boil over, a lid clamped on
the pressure drops
flattens the landscape further
I watch the horizon for state troopers
think of the wind:
one hundred miles to the west it has
sliced the top off a hospital
smashed two miles of Kalamazoo
nothing anyone will read tonight
is wild enough
.
© 2019 by Judith Kerman
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1950 – Edward Hirsch born in Chicago; American poet, critic, anthologist; essayist, “Poet’s Choice” columnist for the Washington Post (2002-2005), author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. He taught creative writing at the University of Houston (1985-2002). His many poetry collections include: Wild Gratitude; Earthly Measures; The Night Parade; The Living Fire; and Stranger By Night.
Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work
(1934-1935)
by Edward Hirsch
.
A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
.
She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:
.
The irreducible slavery of workers. “To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work.”
.
She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
.
In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
.
Ten hours per day. She doesn’t eat.
She doesn’t sleep. She almost doesn’t think
.
Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
.
That the furnace has labeled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave’s.
.
Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
.
Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins from the flames.
.
Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted
.
Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
.
Proposition: “Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
.
Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed.”
.
We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit
.
To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,
.
To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
.
She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .
.
Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.
.
Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
.
Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
.
“Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)” from For the Sleepwalkers, © 1981 by Edward Hirsch - Alfred A. Knopf
NOTE: Simone Weil (1909-1943), was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and political activist. Disregarding her frail health, Weil worked for a year in factories to better understand the working people she was trying to help as a trade unionist. She was described by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our times.”
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October 6
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1951 – Anne-Marie Oomen born, American author, playwright, memoirist, poet, Creative Writing chair at Interlochen Arts Academy, and editor of Dunes Review. Noted for books Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, her play Northern Belles, and the poetry collections Seasons of the Sleeping Bear and Uncoded Woman, the story of a woman told in poems..
My Radio Direction Finder is Inoperative
by Anne-Marie Oomen
.
For a while, running away blooms yellow as cucumber
with that scent that cleans like rain,
.
but in the end all you’re doing is getting lost
all over, and for all those miles and road meals.
.
it doesn’t stop the wish like a hard kiss
to know why the screen door slammed,
.
why the bruise of Mama’s hands never hurt me,
why the mast of Daddy’s limbs always did,
.
or why I am named Beatrice.
.
It’s like this: Just when I think memory is tucked
into some shotgun with the safety on,
.
that delicate odor of cucumber goes tacking
on the wind; then there’s the forced kiss
.
of remembering, a cracked-ice click just
before all the guns go off at once.
.
For short, they call me Bead –
A thing so small it should be forgotten.
.
“My Radio Direction Finder is Inoperative” from Uncoded Woman, © 2006 by Anne-Marie Oomen – Milkweed Editions
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1989 – Jamila Woods born in Chicago; American singer-songwriter, rapper; poet, and Black feminist. Woods is a graduate of St. Ignatius College Prep and Brown University, where she received a BA in Africana Studies and Theater & Performance Studies. She has made three studio albums: HEAVN; Legacy! Legacy!; and Water Made Us. In 2012, Jamila Woods published her first chapbook, entitled The Truth About Dolls. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies.
on naming yourself (a cento)
by Jamila Woods
.
i caught my breath & called that life
i cannot be comprehended
it is better to write
.
spit out words into small cans
prepare knives for the cutting
of orange peels and doorways
.
i arrive at a space that no longer needs
autumn or spring, this forest
of telling each other the truth
.
where they suck the bones of the alphabet
over a floor of rubble & gravel & ashes
.
mouths wide open, we drank
we became the forest
drunk with sky
.
we felt awful after parting
from ourselves
played hide-and-seek
begging to be liked
among the leaves
.
i turned myself into myself
and was clean water, prayer
love colored with iron and lace
.
i wrote my name upon the water
i stood proudly at the helm
the names of things
hadn’t had time to stick
another face going under the waves
.
if you don’t know
who you are
your story cannot be pronounced
.
i have much to learn
from my errors
day by day i am a student
i step deeper into myself
.
this is a large voice
when you rise through the dead leaves
we will remember you
.
© 2022 by Jamilla Woods
NOTE: A cento (Latin for patchwork) is a collage poem, made up entirely of lines from poems by other poets. This cento is composed of text from 11 poems by the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners: Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Patti Smith, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhabuti, Sandra Cisneros, Arthur Sze, C.A. Conrad, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, and Juan Felipe Herrera.
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October 7
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1879 – Joe Hill born as Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, the third child in a family of nine. When his father, a railway conductor, died at age 41, the family was plunged into poverty. Joel fell seriously ill with glandular tuberculosis, and went through extensive treatment in Stockholm. In 1902, he and his brother Paul emigrated to America. He became an itinerant laborer, moving west from New York City, and was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake. He worked on the docks in San Pedro, and in 1910, joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He Americanized his name to Joe Hill, and became a union organizer, enlivening his speeches with his political songs and satiric poems. He hopped freight trains, taking jobs as a laborer as he traveled. In 1913, he began working at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah. In January 1914, John A. Morrison, a former police officer, and his son were shot and killed in their grocery store by two armed men, but nothing was stolen. Joe Hill was shot that night, in what he said was an argument over a woman, whom he refused to name, and he resolutely denied any involvement in the killing of the Morrisons. There were four other people treated for bullet wounds that night, and the bullet holes in Hill’s clothes matched his story that he had his hands raised over his head when he was shot, but feeling against union “troublemakers” was running high, and the prosecution produced over a dozen “eyewitnesses” who said Hill resembled one of the killers, including another Morrison son who said when he first saw Hill “That’s not him at all” but later identified Hill as the one who pulled the trigger. The jury took just a few hours to find him guilty. There were national headlines, and Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, and the Swedish ambassador all appealed for clemency, but Hill’s appeal to the Utah Supreme Court failed, and he was executed in November 1915 at age 36. Among the many new lyrics he wrote for popular tunes of the day are “The Preacher and the Slave,” “The Tramp,” and “There is Power in a Union.”
The Rebel Girl
by Joe Hill
.
There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as everyone knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes
There are blue blooded queens and princesses
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl;
But the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.
.
CHORUS:
To the working class she’s a precious pearl.
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy.
We’ve had girls before, but we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
For it’s great to fight for freedom
With a Rebel Girl.
.
Yes, her hands may be hardened from labor,
And her dress may not be very fine;
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
And the grafters in terror are trembling
When her spite and defiance she’ll hurl;
For the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl
.
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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. He died at age 79 from complications after surgery in January 2014.
Incident
by Amiri Baraka
.
He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came
back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the
shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt.
.
At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there
after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face
and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light.
.
Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit
sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than
his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying
.
down the stairs.
.
We have no word
.
on the killer, except he came back, from somewhere
to do what he did. And shot only once into his victim’s
stare, and left him quickly when the blood ran out. We know
.
the killer was skillful, quick, and silent, and that the victim
probably knew him. Other than that, aside from the caked sourness
of the dead man’s expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture
.
of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.
.
“Incident” from Black Magic, © 1969 by Amri Baraka – Bobbs-Merrill Company
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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.
Autumn Song
by Hilda Conkling
.
I made a ring of leaves
on the autumn grass:
I was a fairy queen all day.
Inside the ring, the wind wore sandals
not to make a noise of going.
The caterpillars, like little snow men,
had wound themselves in their winter coats.
The hands of the trees were bare
and their fingers fluttered.
I was a queen of yellow leaves and brown,
and the redness of my fairy ring
kept me warm.
For the wind blew near,
though he made no noise of going,
and I hadn't a close-made wrap
like the caterpillars.
Even a queen of fairies can be cold
when summer has forgotten and gone!
keep me warm, red leaves;
Don't let the frost tiptoe into my ring
on the magic grass!
.
“Autumn Song” from Poems By a Little Girl, by Hilda Conkling – originally published in September 1920 by G.G. Harrap & Co
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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.
Hunger Moon
by Jane Cooper
.
The last full moon of February
stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position
.
until now, in the small hours, across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me, not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun of silence.
.
I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.
.
Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.
.
"Hunger Moon" from The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed, © 2000 by Jane Cooper - W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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October 10
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1916 – David Gascoyne born in the London Borough of Harrow, UK; English Surrealist poet and novelist. His early work was published in 1930s and 40s, beginning with Roman Balcony and Other Poems (1932). But it was his collection Man's Life is This Meat and Poems 1937-1942, a mix of his own poems and poems he had translated into English which made his reputation. During WWI, he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, France. In the 1930s, He participated in anti-fascist protests, and broadcast some radio talks from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Just before WWII, he was in Paris, where he became friends with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and André Breton. Gascoyne left France when war broke out, but returned to France after the war ended, In the 1960s, he suffered a mental breakdown, and spent some time at a mental health facility on the Isle of Wight. His later work, including his1965 collection, Sun at Midnight, was more metaphysical. Gaascoyne died at age 85 in November 2001.
Snow in Europe
by David Gascoyne
.
Out of their slumber Europeans spun
Dense dreams: appeasements, miracle, glimpsed flash
Of a new golden era; but could not restrain
The vertical white weight that fell last night
And made their continent a blank.
.
Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and Jura now rejoin
The furthest Arctic's desolation. All is one;
Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:
Contours and boundaries no longer show.
.
The warring flags hang colourless a while;
Now midnight's icy zero feigns a truce
Between the signs and seasons, and fades out
All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,
How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!
.
“Snow in Europe” from Poems 1937-1942 © 1943 by David Gascoyne - Nicholson and Watson
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1942 – Roy Akira Miki born in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, Canada, on a sugar beet farm, where his family had been forcibly relocated in Western Canada and interned during WWII; third-generation Japanese- Canadian poet, scholar, and editor. After the war, the family moved to Winnipeg. He earned his BA from the University of Manitoba, an MA from the Simon Fraser University, and a PhD . from the University of British Columbia He taught contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University before retiring and held the title of professor emeritus. He lived in Vancouver. In the 1980s, Miki was campaigned for redress from the Canadian government for the internment of Japanese-Canadians. In 2002, Miki's book of poetry, Surrender, won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. In 2006, Miki was made a Member of the Order of Canada and received the 20th annual Gandhi Peace Award for the truth, justice, human rights, and non-violence exemplified in his redress work. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His poetry collections include: Saving Face; Random Access File; and Mannequin Rising. Roy Miki died at age 82 in October 2024.
Some Place
by Roy Miki
.
as a kid the ghost town
was some place
you came from
not you but anyone
with baggage & gifts
.
& the letters
everyone listening
the room suddenly circular
.
& always the ghost town
many many names
but always the the
.
so and so’s cousin or aunt or brother
or daughter or second cousin by marriage
to the son of a grandfather
.
the whole web
of intricate family ties
spun off with no beginning or end
more than the matter of a theme
.
“you should see
them towns with nobody in them
the buildings fronted
like sets of an old movie
no one any longer wants to see
& all of them just there
you should see them for yourselves”
.
the slender voices
crowd into the narrow
margin of the page
.
“Some Place” from Flow: Poems Collected and New © 2018 by Roy Miki – Talonbooks
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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.
Protest
by Joseph Auslander
.
I will not make a sonnet from
Each little private martyrdom:
Nor out of love left dead with time
Construe a stanza or a rime.
.
We do not suffer to afford
The searched for and the subtle word:
There is too much that may not be
At the caprice of prosody.
.
“Protest” from Cyclops’ Eye, © 1926 by Joseph Auslander – Harper & brothers
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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