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“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the
Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and
persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall
welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges…”
President George Washington,
in a letter to Joshua Holmes in December 1783
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“I believe in an America where everyone is treated with
dignity, no matter who you are or where you come from …
We are a country where people of all backgrounds, all
nations of origin, all languages, all religions, all races,
can make a home. America was built by immigrants …”
Hillary Rodham Clinton,
from a presidential campaign speech in 2016
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13 poets born in August,
travelers, misfits, rebels,
activists and philosophers —
some famous, and some
forgotten who deserve
to be remembered.
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August 10
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1881 – Witter Bynner born in New York City as Harold Witter Bynner; American poet, translator, anthologist, and playwright. His mother separated from his alcoholic father in 1881, moved with Witter and his brother to Connecticut, then they moved to Brookline, Massachusetts in 1892. Witter went to Harvard, where he worked on The Harvard Advocate and The Harvard Monthly. Bynner greatly admired his professor George Santayana, and supported the suffrage movement. After graduating with honors from Harvard in 1902, he went to Europe, before going to work for McClure’s Magazine in New York. He was friendly with Kalil Gibran, and introduced him to publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who would publish The Prophet in 1923. Bynner traveled with friends in Asia in 1917, then taught Oral English at UC Berkeley to student who were conscientious objectors in 1918-1919. There he met Kiang Kanghu, a Chinese language professor, and they collaborated on translating Tang dynasty poetry. Bynner spent 1920-1921 in China, learning Chinese. In 1922, he was on a lecture tour when he arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ill and exhausted. He canceled the rest of his tour, and became a longtime resident of Santa Fe – recruiting his former student Walter ‘Spud’ Johnson to be his secretary and companion. Mabel Dodgr Luhan, patron of the Taos art colony, introduced them to D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Lawrence based two characters in his novel, The Plumed Serpent, on Bynner and Johnson. After a breakup with Johnson, Bynner met Robert Hunt, and their relationship lasted until Hunt’s death in 1964. They divided their time between Sant Fe and a second home in Chapala, Mexico. In January 1965, Bynner has a severe stroke which made him an invalid. He died at age 86 in June 1968. His poetry collections include: Grenstone Poems; A Canticle of Praise; Wistaria; and Against the Cold.
Sands
by Witter Bynner
.
I lay on a dune and slept,
Sharp grasses by my head:
While armies far-off warred and wept,
I joined the earth instead. . .
Until I moved my hand
And was awake again
And shook myself out of the sand
To the cold wind of men.
.
“Sands” from A Canticle of Pan, by Witter Brynner – published in 1920 by Alfred A. Knoff
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1938 – Momoko Kuroda born in Tokyo, Japan; Japanese haiku poet and essayist. When she was six years old, her family moved Tochigi Prefecture to escape the WWI B-29 bombing raids of Tokyo. Her mother was a member of a haiku group, and encouraged her to write. Kuroda later returned to attend Tokyo’s Woman’s Christian University, majoring in psychology. After graduation, she was hired by Hakuhodo, an advertising firm where she worked until retirement at age 60, rising to a senior management position. In 1968, she began making haiku pilgrimages along Japan’s major pilgrimage routes. Her first haiku collection, ki no isu (The Wooden Chair) published in 1981, and won the Haiku Poets Association Best New Talent Award. She would publish four other haiku collections. In 1990, she started AOI, a nationwide haiku organization, and Aoi, its magazine. Abigail Friedman, a U.S. diplomat based in Tokyo who attended Kuroda's haiku groups, wrote a book about her experience, The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan (2006), and later translated into English and published I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda. Momoko Kuroda died of a brain hemorrhage at age 84 in March 2023.
.
an early rising
woman pilgrim –
so that’s who I am
.
at this temple
by the edge of the lake
I wait for the moon
.
Both haiku are from I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, © 2014 by Momoko Kuroda, and translation © 2014 by Abigail Friedman – Stone Bridge Press
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1976 – Rebecca Gayle Howell born in Lexington, Kentucky; American poet, writer, anthologist, librettist, assistant professor of poetry and translation for the University of Arkansas’s MFA program and longtime poetry editor at the Oxford American. In addition to co-editing What Things Cost: an anthology for the people, Howell has published two climate change novels-in-verse: Render/An Apocalypse and American Purgatory.
No One Was Born Here
by Rebecca Gayle Howell
.
Across the white highway, dogs drift unmoored
Silver-tipped seagrass, but no cactus. An offing
of shopping plazas, their harsh light and low roofs.
That's the way with drought; first dissent,
a worm belief that one place could be another.
I bet it feels good to twist a head of cotton
clean from the stem's fat and browning boll.
I bet it feels good to stand in irrigated rows.
.
Most people smile around town. Big, too.
We're so pleased to meet you. But we met last week.
Days, gone with a handshake. The thing about dogs is
they actually need us. Otherwise they're half animals,
scabbed raw with mange, scared of the noonday sun.
As for me, I came here to keep my mouth shut.
Did I mention the dust?
.
“No One Was Born Here” from American Purgatory, © 2017 by Rebecca Gayle Howell – Eyewear Publishing
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1986 – Kristiana Rae Colón born in Chicago; American poet, playwright, actor, and educator. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-founder/director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. Cólon won the 2013 Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize for her chapbook promised instruments, and her play Octagon won the 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award.
a remix for remembrance
by Kristiana Rae Colón
.
For my students
.
This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement,
who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement,
the girls whose names are ancient, ancestry is sacred,
the Aztec and the Mayan gods abuela used to pray with
.
This is for the dangerous words hiding in the pages
of composition notes, holy books, and Sanskrit
This is for the patients who wait for medication,
for the mothers microwaving beans and rice at day’s end
.
This is for the marching bands and girls at quinceañeras,
the skaters and the writers whose moms are eloteras,
laughing “Cops don’t scare us, we sag so elders fear us
We will rewrite our textbooks in our own language if you dare us”
.
This is for the Sarahs, the Angelicas, and Shawns,
the Beatrices, Paolas, Danielas, and the dawns
we scribble sunlight in the margins of horizons with our songs,
for all the voices tangled with the silence on our tongues
.
Rivals in the parks, fireworks at dark,
tired shirts that sweat your scent on hangers in the closet
For the boys who fix the faucet while their sister fixes coffee
’cause mommy had to leave for work at 6 AM and laundry
isn’t folded yet: you don’t have to hold your breath
.
You don’t have to behave: stage your own rebellion,
paint canvases with rage and religion and prayers for pilgrims
sleeping in the train cars at the border and their children
Filibust the Senate and bust markers on the Pink Line,
stain the prosecution’s case and force the judge to resign,
force the crowd the rewind the lyrics you invented
.
Speak away the limits to heights of your existence
Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph
Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets
Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished
The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play
Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say
are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven
Let your throat throttle the rhythms of all your fallen brethren
Your legacy is present, your history is now
You are the tenth degree of sound
You are the nephews of the sky
You are the bass line and the hi-hat and the snare drum and the cry
of red Septembers. You’re the architects of winter
You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t
remember You are
the builders of the roads
that you’re told
you don’t remember You are the builders
of the roads that you’re told you don’t
remember
.
Cast poems in the river and tell them you remember
Skate City Hall to splinters and tell them you remember
Send diamonds to your islands and tell them you remember
Find your God inside your mirror and tell Her you remember
.
“a remix for remembrance” © 2015 by Kristiana Rae Colón, appeared in Poetry magazine’s April 2015 issue
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August 11
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1897 – Louise Bogan born in Livermore Falls, Maine; notable American poet and critic. She was the daughter of a millworker and unhappy mother whose series of affairs caused a scandal that isolated Louise from other children, so she put her energy into her schoolwork, which led to a benefactor helping her to attend the Girls’ Latin School in Boston. After her first year at Boston University, she won a scholarship to Radcliffe, but she had already married her first husband, a soldier, at age 19, so she turned down Radcliffe to move with him to New York City. Their daughter was born in 1917. A second move brought them to Panama. Then Bogan and her husband separated, after just three years of marriage, in 1919. He died of pneumonia in 1920. Leaving her daughter, Maidie Alexander, behind in the care of her parents, she lived in Vienna (1920-1923), then moved to New York, where she worked in a bookstore, before going to work for anthropologist Margaret Mead. She published her first volume of poetry, Body of This Death, in 1923. From 1931 until just before her death, she was the poetry reviewer for The New Yorker magazine. Bogan died of a heart attack at age 72 in February 1970. Her other collections include Dark Summer; Sleeping Fury; Poems and New Poems. Her last collection was The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968.
To Be Sung on the Water
by Louise Bogan
.
Beautiful, my delight
Pass, as we pass the wave.
Pass, as the mottled night
Leaves what it cannot save,
Scattering dark and bright.
.
Beautiful, pass and be
Less than the guiltless shade
To which our vows were said;
Less than the sound of the oar
To which our vows were made, –
Less than the sound of its blade
Dipping the stream once more.
.
“To Be Sung on the Water” from The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968, © 1968 by Louise Bogan - Farrar, Straus
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1962 – Laura Hershey born in Littleton, Colorado; American disability rights activist, feminist, poet, essayist, and journalist. Spinal muscular atrophy confined her to a wheelchair, but she never let that slow her down. She earned a BA in history at Colorado College, where the school had to move some of her classes from non-accessible buildings to accommodate her. She served on Denver’s Commission for People with Disabilities, wrote a column for the Denver Post, led workshops, and campaigned for social justice as well as disability rights. She attended international UN conferences on women’s rights, and wrote the book Survival Strategies for Going Abroad: A Guide for People with Disabilities. Laura Hershey died in November 2010 at age 48. The Laura Hershey Memorial Disability Benefits Support Program was created in 2011 by the Colorado State Legislature to “provide education, direct assistance and advocacy for people with disabilities eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income and Long-Term Medicaid.”
Flights
by Laura Hershey
.
Stairs have ceased to be poetic.
A tight doorway, a curb, a broken elevator,
the lack of a ramp --
for me, these hurdles quicken no creativity,
no bursts of verse.
Flights of stairs no longer launch
flights of my imagination.
.
Ten years ago these obstructions
awakened our voices,
drew us forward into battle,
forged our unity.
In Nairobi we gathered, one by one,
from our villages, cities, homes, farms, schools, nations.
Women with disabilities, separated from our sisters
by walls and risers,
found our own sisterhood.
Barriers pushed us into margins where we met:
outside the meeting rooms,
at the foot of the stairs,
on the lawn.
.
Denied our rightful place,
we transformed the obstacles
into a concrete image of our oppression;
a border linking our lives;
a symbol of our connection;
a stage for our angry words.
.
We gathered to protest our exclusion,
found we had much more to share: our nuanced lives
as workers, as mothers, as daughters, as fighters
.
But that was ten years ago.
Stairs are no longer poetic.
Barriers drain strength from our arms and hearts,
animate neither verse nor dance.
We are tired of the fight.
Banishment still sets our anger in motion
but no longer makes us sing.
.
“Flights” from Flights: Poems from the Beijing Women’s Conference, © 1995 by Laura Hershey
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August 12
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1880 – Radclyffe Hall born in Bournemouth, Dorset, England; English author and poet. She is best known for her novel, The Well of Loneliness, a ground-breaking work of lesbian literature, but she also wrote short stories and several volumes of poetry, including Twixt Earth and Stars, A Sheaf of Verses, The Forgotten Island, and Rhymes and Rhythms. She dropped her first name Marguerite, and frequently wore men’s trousers and hats, and a monocle. Her novel Adams’ Breed won both the 1926 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and the 1927 Prix Femina–Vie Heureuse. In 1930, she received the Gold Medal of the Eichelbergher Humane Award. In 1943, she was diagnosed with cancer, and she died that year at age 63.
A Fragment
by Radclyffe Hall
.
The clustering grapes of purple vine
Are crushed to make the crimson wine.
.
The poppies in the grasses deep
Are crushed to brew the draught of sleep.
.
The roses, when their glories bloom
Are crushed to yield their soul’s perfume.
.
And hearts, perchance of these the least,
Are crushed for nectar at Love’s feast!
.
“A Fragment” from The Poetry of Radclyffe Hall, Volume 2 – Portable Poetry, 2015 edition
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August 13
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1939 – Carole Satyamurthi born Carole Methvin in Bromley, Kent UK; British sociologist, poet, and translator. She spent time in America, Singapore and Uganda, before settling in London, where she taught at the University of East London and the Tavistock Clinic. She was married to Indian political scientist T.V. Sathyamurthy, but used the alternate spelling of the name. She later spent semesters as a writer-in-residence at the University of Sussex and the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Satyamurti also vice president of the Ver Poets group. She died on her 80th birthday in August 2019. Her poetry collections include: Broken Moon; Changing the Subject; Stitching the Dark; Countdown; and The Hopeful Hat, published posthumously in 2023.
I Shall Paint My Nails Red
by Carole Satyamurti
.
Because a bit of colour is a public service.
Because I am proud of my hands.
Because it will remind me I'm a woman.
Because I will look like a survivor.
Because I can admire them in traffic jams.
Because my daughter will say ugh.
Because my lover will be surprised.
Because it is quicker than dyeing my hair.
Because it is a ten-minute moratorium.
Because it is reversible.
.
“I Shall Paint My Nails Red” from Selected Poems, © 1999 by Carole Satyamurti – Oxford University Press
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August 14
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1943 – Alfred Corn born in Bainbridge, Georgia, as Alfred DeWitt Corn III; American poet, essayist, academic, and translator. After earning an M.A. in French literature at Columbia University in 1967, he spent two years in Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has taught in Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program, and held visiting posts at several other universities, including UCLA, Ohio State University, and Yale. His poetry collections include All Roads at Once; The Various Light; The West Door; Present; Tables; and Unions. He also published The Metamorphoses of Metaphor, a collection of essays, a translation of Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, and The Bamboo Pavillion, translations of classic Chinese poetry in collaboration with Joanne Wang.
Having Words
by Alfred Corn
.
They’d started meeting by night at the only local,
A seething crowd drawn from among the loudest
Words, swearing, conspiring, over tankards of ale.
In sour chiaroscuro their clenched faces by moments
Looked too grievance or was it expressive for comfort.
.
Rage drowns out background sounds such as summer
Crickets, the result, that one of them, in humid
Darkness, stops rasping his metal comb. It’s clear
That the rally of Words will turn demonic,
That before night ends they’ll be up in arms.
.
Even the rawest learner can in a clock tick
Become aware of the name it’s called by. Which
He tries on Cricket Cricket till he thinks: Your name
Amounts to a sound, nothing more. Trundling on
Towards the defiant Words, he says, No. No, I Am Deuce.
.
“Having Words,” © 2013 by Alfred Corn, appeared Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2015
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1947 – Wang Ping born in Shanghai, China but grew up on an island in the East China Sea; Chinese-American poet, novelist, short story writer, and multimedia artist. She spent three years farming in a mountain village during the Cultural Revolution, and taught herself enough to be accepted at Peking (now Beijing) University, where she earned a degree in English literature. She left China in 1985 to earn a master’s in English Literature, then a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (1999-2020) until her retirement. Her poetry collections include Flames; Of Flesh & Spirit; The Magic Whip; and My Name Is Immigrant.
Things We Carry on the Sea
by Wang Ping
.
We carry tears in our eyes: good-bye father, good-bye mother
We carry soil in small bags: may home never fade in our hearts
We carry names, stories, memories of our villages, fields, boats
We carry scars from proxy wars of greed
We carry carnage of mining, droughts, floods, genocides
We carry dust of our families and neighbors incinerated in mushroom clouds
.
We carry our islands sinking under the sea
.
We carry our hands, feet, bones, hearts and best minds for a new life
.
We carry diplomas: medicine, engineer, nurse,
education, math, poetry, even if they mean nothing
to the other shore
.
We carry railroads, plantations, laundromats, bodegas,
taco trucks, farms, factories, nursing homes,
hospitals, schools, temples…built on our ancestors’ backs
.
We carry old homes along the spine, new dreams in our chests
.
We carry yesterday, today and tomorrow
.
We’re orphans of the wars forced upon us
.
We’re refugees of the sea rising from industrial wastes
.
And we carry our mother tongues
爱(ai)，حب (hubb), ליבע (libe), amor, love
平安 (ping’an), سلام ( salaam), shalom, paz, peace
希望 (xi’wang), أمل (’amal), hofenung, esperanza, hope, hope, hope
.
As we drift…in our rubber boats…from shore…to shore…to shore…
.
“Things we Carry on The Sea” was originally published in New American Poetry, © 2018 by Wang Ping
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August 15
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1954 – Mary Jo Salter born in Grand Rapids, Michigan; American poet, editor, essayist, children’s author, playwright, and lyricist. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, she has been a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. She wrote the lyrics for Fred Hersch’s song cycle Rooms of Light, which debuted at the Lincoln Center in 2007. Her poetry collections include Unfinished Painting, A Kiss in Space, Open Shutters, Nothing by Design, and The Surveyors.
The Buttonhook
by Mary Jo Salter
.
President Roosevelt, touring Ellis Island
in 1906, watched the people from steerage
line up for their six-second physical.
.
Might not, he wondered aloud, the ungloved handling
of aliens who were ill infect the healthy?
Yet for years more it was done. I imagine
.
my grandmother, a girl in that Great Hall’s
polyglot, reverberating vault
more terrible than church, dazed by the stars
.
and stripes in the vast banner up in front
where the blessed ones had passed through. Then she did too,
to a room like a little chapel, where her mother
.
might take Communion. A man in a blue cap
and a blue uniform—a doctor? a policeman?
(Papa would have known, but he had sailed
.
all alone before them and was waiting
now in New York; yet wasn’t this New York?)—
a man in a blue cap reached for her mother.
.
Without a word (didn’t he speak Italian?)
he stuck one finger into her mother’s eye,
then turned its lid up with a buttonhook,
.
the long, curved thing for doing up your boots
when buttons were too many or too small.
You couldn’t be American if you were blind
.
or going to be blind. That much she understood.
She’d go to school, she’d learn to read and write
and teach her parents. The eye man reached to touch
.
her own face next; she figured she was ready.
She felt big, like that woman in the sea
holding up not a buttonhook but a torch.
.
“The Buttonhook” from The Surveyors: Poems, © 2017 by Mary Jo Slater – Borzoi Book/Alfred A. Knopf
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August 16
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1920 – Charles Bukowski born in the then Free State of Prussia in the Weimar Republic as Heinrich Karl Bukowski; German-American poet, novelist and short story writer whose father was an American serving in Germany after WWI. His family moved to the U.S. in 1923, and settled in Los Angeles, California. He was bullied at school for his heavy German accent, and his father frequently beat him, so he became a heavy drinker while still in his early teens. Bukowski didn’t become a full-time writer until he almost 50, when he accepted an offer from John Martin at Black Sparrow Press. Among his many poetry collections are Love Is a Dog from Hell; War All the Time; You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense; and The Roominghouse Madrigals. He died of leukemia at age 73 in 1994.
My Cats
by Charles Bukowski
.
I know. I know.
they are limited, have different
needs and
concerns.
.
but I watch and learn from them.
I like the little they know,
which is so
much.
.
they complain but never
worry,
they walk with a surprising dignity.
they sleep with a direct simplicity that
humans just can’t
understand.
.
their eyes are more
beautiful than our eyes.
and they can sleep 20 hours
a day
without
hesitation or
remorse.
.
when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.
.
I study these
creatures.
.
they are my
teachers.
.
“My Cats” from Bukowski On Cats, © 2015 by Linda Lee Bukowski – Harper Collins
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1949 – Debora Greger born in Walsenburg, Colorado; American poet and visual artist. Raised in Richland, Washington, she graduated from the University of Washington, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and taught creative writing and English at the University of Florida in Gainesville until she retired. Greger is now Poet in Residence at the Harn Museum of Art in the university’s campus. Among her poetry collections are Moveable Islands; Cartography; Desert Fathers; Men, Women, and Ghosts; and In Darwin’s Room.
Station 40, Chiriu:
the Poet Ariwara no Narihira at Eight Bridges
by Debora Greger
.
What is sky but water, more water,
crossed by eight bridges?
Is the ancient poet in a rush to reach land?
.
No, he’s already one of the Six Immortals.
How long before the papery iris-petals
he admires wrinkle? They barely grow beards.
.
In a thousand years, pilgrims will come.
They will stand where he stood. Where, they will ask,
are the flowers that empurpled his poem?
.
“Station 40, Chiriu: the Poet Ariwara no Narihira at Eight Bridges,” © 2014 by Debora Greger, appeared in Poem-a-Day on June 30, 2014
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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