The Writer's Almanac: Sunday, 18 November, 2007

The Writer's Almanac: Sunday, 18 November, 2007

Poem: "Ticket" by Charles O. Hartman, from Island. © Ahsahta Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, (books by this author) born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939), who as far as anyone can tell, has had an extremely happy life, a happy childhood, a happy marriage, but who has written a series of very disturbing books, including The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who stops eating after her boyfriend proposes marriage; The Handmaid's Tale (1985), about an imaginary America where most women have lost the ability to have babies, and the few fertile women left are forced to become surrogate mothers for the upper class; and Cat's Eye (1988), about an artist whose retrospective forces her to return to her hometown and relive the memories of being tortured by her closest childhood friend, Cordelia.

Critics started calling Atwood "the high priestess of pain," but Atwood said, "All that means is that I'm good at describing certain kinds of emotions. ... I'm also good at writing fake newspaper reports. [I could be the] high priestess of fake newspaper reports." She also said, "Women see me as living proof that you don't have to come to a sticky end — put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children — to be a good and serious writer." Her most recent book is The Tent (2006), a collection of stories and poems.

It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup, (books by this author) born in Jefferson, Iowa (1901). He was a student at the University of Iowa when he conducted his first poll for the Daily Iowan, to find the prettiest girl on campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married. In 1935, he set up the American Institute of Public Opinion at Princeton University and became the first person to show that small samples of the populace could accurately predict general attitudes. He became famous when he predicted the margin by which Franklin D. Roosevelt would beat Alf Landon in 1936. About 200 newspapers began publishing his reports, and he only made one major mistake, predicting that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman in 1948. George Gallup said, "Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense."

It's the birthday of playwright and humorist W.S. (William Schwenk) Gilbert, (books by this author) of Gilbert and Sullivan, born in London (1836). He was a writer of humorous verse when he met composer Arthur Sullivan in 1870, and they went on to write 14 comic operas in the 25-year period from 1871 to 1896, including H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). W.S. Gilbert, who wrote, "Life's a pudding full of plums; / Care's a canker that benumbs, / Wherefore waste our elocution / On impossible solution? / Life's a pleasant institution, / Let us take it as it comes."

It's the birthday of the man who helped invent the art of photography, Louis Daguerre, born just outside of Paris, France (1789), who started out as a theater designer, using hand-painted translucent screens and elaborate lighting effects to create the illusion of a sunrise or a sudden storm onstage. But in 1829, he learned about a new technology that made it possible to use light to capture an image on a metal plate, though the quality of the image was poor. Daguerre set out to improve the process, and he came up with a combination of copper plate coated with silver salts that could be developed with the application of mercury vapor and table salt.

He first used this process to capture a series of images of Paris, including pictures of the Louvre and Notre Dame. The camera needed about 15 minutes exposure time to capture an image, so most of Dagurre's early pictures don't show any people. The one exception is a picture of a boulevard that shows a man in the foreground who has stopped to shine his shoes. He was the first human being ever caught on film. Daguerre announced his invention in 1839, and the images he produced became known as daguerreotypes.

"To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan

A Writer's Almanac

---

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

"Seven Stanzas at Easter" by John Updike

By Common Consent

---

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

"Jack + Judy" by Doreen Fitzgerald

The Writer's Almanac

---

Jack + Judy

She was stuck on him like a three-cent stamp
on a postcard showing a roadside diner
shaped like a hat;
stuck like a stool on a chrome stem
waiting to swivel a customer,
or the naked thigh on a summer day
clinging to the vinyl seat.

He could read her like a two-bit cook
reads a scribbled order
jammed on a spike,
fluttering under the greasy fan;
like egg on a fork between the tines,
or a hot beef sandwich between the teeth.

Together, they're waiting on the night,
halfway between Peoria and Baton Rouge,
where the word OPEN, in red block letters,
hangs under the words, EAT HERE,
spelled out in perfect blue.

"'Night Below Zero' by Kenneth Rexroth

The Writer's Almanac

Night Below Zero

3 AM, the night is absolutely still;
Snow squeals beneath my skis, plumes on the turns.
I stop at the canyon's edge, stand looking out
Over the Great Valley, over the millions %u2014
In bed, drunk, loving, tending mills, furnaces,
Alone, wakeful, as the world rolls in chaos.
The quarter moon rises in the black heavens %u2014
Over the sharp constellations of the cities
The cold lies, crystalline and silent,
Locked between the mountains.

"Interlude" by Linda Pastan

The Writer's Almanac

---

Interlude

We are waiting for snow
the way we might wait for a train
to arrive with its cold cargo—
it is late already, but surely
it will come.

We are waiting for snow
the way we might wait
for permission
to breathe again.

For only the snow
will release us, only the snow
will be a letting go, a blind falling
towards the body of earth
and towards each other.

And while we wait at this window
whose sheer transparency
is clouded already
with our mutual breath,

it is as if our whole lives depended
on the freezing color
of the sky, on the white
soon to be fractured
gaze of winter.

'To A Sad Daughter' by Michael Ondaatje

PoetryConnection.net

---

To A Sad Daughter

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say 'like'
I mean of course 'love'
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're 'sweet sixteen' you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with loss
--but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
--all those possible worlds!--
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

"The Writer" by Richard Wilbur

The Academy of American Poets

---

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

"'The Rider' by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Writer's Almanac

---

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

"'In the Yellow Head of a Tulip' by Malena Morling

The Writer's Almanac :.

---

In the Yellow Head of a Tulip

In the yellow head of a tulip
in the sound of the wind entangled in the forest
in the haphazard combination of things
for sale on the sidewalk
an iron next to a nail-clipper next to a can of soup
next to a starling's feather
in the silence inside of stone
in tea in music in desire in butter in torture
in space that flings itself out in the universe
in every direction at once without end
despite walls despite grates and ceilings
and bulletproof glass
the sun falls though without refracting
in the wind hanging out its own sheets
on all the empty clotheslines
in the bowels of rats
in their tiny moving architectures
in a world that is always moving
in those who are unable to speak but know how to listen
in your mother who is afraid of her own thoughts
in her fear in her death
in her own derelict loneliness
in the garden late at night
between the alder tree and the ash
she rocks herself to sleep in the hammock
a little drunk and wayward
in everything she is that you are not
in the well of the skull
in the fish that you touch
in the copper water
in its breath of water
in your breath, the single bubble rising
that could be you
that could be me
that could be nothing

"Finland" by Robert Graves

Bartleby.com

---

Finland

Feet and faces tingle
In that frore land:
Legs wobble and go wingle,
You scarce can stand.

The skies are jewelled all around,
The ploughshare snaps in the iron ground,
The Finn with face like paper
And eyes like a lighted taper
Hurls his rough rune
At the wintry moon
And stamps to mark the tune.

"You Go to School to Learn" by Thomas Lux

The Writer's Almanac

---

You Go to School to Learn

You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It—money—makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
There's no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working—for it.
It's sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you're taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That's nice, dear,
but there's no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It's true,
and so, every morning—it's still dark!—
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.

"Ten Degrees" by Tom Chandler

Writer's Almanac

---

Ten Degrees

How beautiful the sun as it skims
across the air in the hush of ten degrees,
disc of palest yellow hope along a sky

of circumstance; how beautifully we watch it fall,
the random tern, forgotten mole,
the infant tree inside rough winter bark.

How beautiful this frost, female fingers
tracing down the glass, how beautiful
this world too cold to criticize itself;

how beautiful Earth's creatures are, happy
and forever safe from the only perfect tragedy,
which is of course to never have been born.

"Children in a Field" by Angela Shaw

American Life In Poetry

---

"Children in a Field"

They don't wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

"Lucinda Matlock" by Edgar Lee Masters

The Writer's Almanac

---

Lucinda Matlock
I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed--
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you--
It takes life to love Life.

"Any Human to Another" by Countee Cullen

selection of poetry
Any Human to Another

The ills I sorrow at
Not me alone
Like an arrow,
Pierce to the marrow,
Through the fat,
And past the bone.

Your grief and mine
Must intertwine
Like sea and river,
Be fused and mingle,
Diverse yet single,
Forever and forever.

Let no man be so proud
And confident,
To think he is allowed
A little tent
Pitched in a meadow
Of sun and shadow
All his little own.

Joy may be shy, unique,
Friendly to a few,
Sorrow never scorned to speak
To any who
Were false or true.

Your every grief
Like a blade
Shining and unsheathed
Must strike me down.
Of bitter aloes wreathed,
My sorrow must be laid
On your head like a crown.

"Of Politics & Art" by Norman Dubie

Poetry 180

---

Of Politics & Art

for Allen

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, 'And why not?'
The first responded, 'Because there are
No women in his one novel.'

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.

"Walking Away" by C. Day Lewis

Soul Searching

---

Walking Away

for Sean

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines newly-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go, drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals, which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show -
That selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver

Wondering Minstrels

---

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

"Wilderness" by Carl Sandburg

American Poems

---

There is a wolf in me …fangs pointed for tearing gashes …a red tongue for raw meat …and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me …a silver-gray fox …I sniff and guess …I pick things out of the wind and air …I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers …I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me …a snout and a belly …a machinery for eating and grunting …a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me …I know I came from saltblue water-gates …I scurried with shoals of herring …I blew waterspouts with porpoises …before land was …before the water went down …before Noah …before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me …clambering-clawed …dog-faced …yawping a galoot’s hunger …hairy under the armpits …here are the hawk-eyed hankering men …here are the blond and blue-eyed women …here they hide curled asleep waiting …ready to snarl and kill …ready to sing and give milk …waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird …and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want …and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

"The Meadow Mouse" by Theodore Roethke

Wondering Minstrels

---

The Meadow Mouse

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

'An Observation' by May Sarton

The Writer's Almanac: 'An Observation' by May Sarton from A Private Mythology. © W.W. Norton & Co. Reprinted with permission.

---

An Observation

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

Wisdom by Sara Teasdale

Wondering Minstrels:

---

Wisdom

When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I have looked Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange -- my youth.

"Fix" by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The Writer's Almanac
Poem: "Fix" by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from No Heaven. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

---

Fix

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling—
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex—cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
—Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud—

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

'Shakespearean Sonnet' by R. S. Gwynn

The Writer's Almanac: 'Shakespearean Sonnet' by R. S. Gwynn. Used with permission of the poet.

---

Shakespearean Sonnet

    With a first line taken from the tv listings

A man is haunted by his father's ghost.
Boy meets girl while feuding families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who block his way.
A ruler's rivals plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.

"What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know" by Alicia Suskin Astriker

The Writer's Almanac"What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know" by Alicia Suskin Astriker, from No Heaven. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

---

What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know
    -for Abigail

When you were two you used to say
I can do it all by myself, then when you were three
You had tantrums, essentially
Because you wanted to go back and be a baby like before,
And also to be a grownup.
It was perplexing,
It was a mini-rehearsal
For adolescence, which lurks inside your body
Now that you are almost nine,
Like a duplicate baby, an angel
Or alien, we don't know which,
Forceful and intelligent and weird,
Playing with the controls.
Fetal eyes blinking, non-negotiable demands
Like Coke bubbles overflowing a glass,
It strengthens and grows.
When you read it stares through your eyes,
It vibrates when you practice piano,
The cotton dresses hang in your closet
Like conspirators, wavering in its breeze.
We watch you turn inward, your hair
Falls over your face like a veil that hides whatever
You would rather others don't know,
You lean your head listening
For its keen highstrung melancholy voice.
Here comes the gypsy caravan,
Ding-a-ling, the icecream man,
Plenty of glee and woe up the road.
We would do anything for you,
Sweetie, but we can do nothing—
You have to do it all by yourself.

if everything happens that can't be done (LIV) -- e. e. cummings

The Wondering Minstrels: if everything happens that can't be done (LIV) -- e. e. cummings

---

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we go who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a leaf is a tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now i love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're everything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one

"Entirely" by Louis MacNeice

Clock v2.0: "Entirely - Louis MacNeice

---

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of spring nor the city's
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of love entirely.

And if the world were black and white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be meremy
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

'The Blue Blanket' by Sue Ellen Thompson

The Writer's Almanac: "Poem: 'The Blue Blanket' by Sue Ellen Thompson. Reprinted with permission.

---

The Blue Blanket

Toward the end, my father argued
with my mother over everything: He wanted
her to eat again. He wanted her to take

her medicine. He wanted her
to live. He argued with her in their bed
at naptime. He was cold, he said,

tugging at the blanket tangled
in my mother's wasted limbs. From the hall
outside their room I listened

as love, caught and fettered, howled
at its captors, gnawing at its own flesh
in its frenzy to escape. Then I entered

without knocking, freed the blanket
trapped between my mother's knees and shook
it out once, high above

their bodies' cursive. It floated
for a moment, blue as the Italian sky
into which my father flew his bombs

in 1943, blue as the hat I'd bought her
for the winter she would never live
to see. My father's agitation eased,

my mother smiled up at me, her face
lucent with gratitude, as the blanket
sifted down on them like earth."

'Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet,' by Tony Hoagland

Writers Almanac: 'Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet,' by Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press).

---

Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it, wanting
to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?
"

"Snowbanks North of the House" by Robert Bly

The Writer's Almanac - FEBRUARY 21 - 27, 2005: "Snowbanks North of the House" by Robert Bly, from Selected Poems. © Harper Collins. Reprinted with permission.

---

Snowbanks North of the House

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet
     from the house...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more
     bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
     and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving
     the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing,
     and are safe.

And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
     room where the coffin stands;
he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on
     through the unattached heavens alone.
And the toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust...
The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the
     hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and
     did not climb the hill.

'Ode to My 1977 Toyota' by Barbara Hamby

The Writer's Almanac - MARCH 7 - 13, 2005: "'Ode to My 1977 Toyota' by Barbara Hamby, from Babel. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

Ode to My 1977 Toyota

Engine like a Singer sewing machine, where have you
     not carried me-to dance class, grocery shopping,
into the heart of darkness and back again? O the fruit
     you've transported-cherries, peaches, blueberries,
watermelons, thousands of Fuji apples-books,
     and all my dark thoughts, the giddy ones, too,
like bottles of champagne popped at the wedding of two people
     who will pass each other on the street as strangers
in twenty years. Ronald Reagan was president when I walked
     into Big Chief Motors and saw you glimmering
on the lot like a slice of broiled mahi mahi or sushi
     without its topknot of tuna. Remember the months
I drove you to work singing 'Some Enchanted Evening'?
     Those were scary times. All I thought about
was getting on I-10 with you and not stopping. Would you
     have made it to New Orleans? What would our life
have been like there? I'd forgotten about poetry. Thank God,
     I remembered her. She saved us both. We were young
together. Now we're not. College boys stop us at traffic lights
     and tell me how cool you are. Like an ice cube, I say,
though you've never had air conditioning. Who needed it?
     I would have missed so many smells without you—
confederate jasmine, magnolia blossoms, the briny sigh
     of the Gulf of Mexico, rotting 'possums scattered
along 319 between Sopchoppy and Panacea. How many holes
     are there in the ballet shoes in your back seat?
How did that pair of men's white loafers end up in your trunk?
     Why do I have so many questions, and why
are the answers like the animals that dart in front of your headlights
     as we drive home from the coast, the Milky Way
strung across the black velvet bowl of the sky like the tiara
     of some impossibly fat empress who rules the universe
but doesn't know if tomorrow is December or Tuesday or June first.
"

'To Brooklyn Bridge' by Hart Crane

The Academy of American Poets

---

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God."

"Vex Me" by Barbara Hamby

The Writer's Almanac

"Vex Me" by Barbara Hamby, from Babel. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

---

Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle

of rhythm and blues. Call out your archers, chain me
to a wall, let the stone fortress of my body fall

like a rabid fox before an army of dogs. Rebuke me,
rip out my larynx like a lazy snake and feed it to the voiceless

throng. For I am midnight's girl, scouring unlit streets
like Persephone stalking her swarthy lord. Anoint me

with oil, make me greasy as a fast-food fry. Deliver me
like a pizza to the snapping crack-house hours between

one and four. Build me an ark, fill it with prairie moths,
split-winged fritillaries, blue-bottle flies. Stitch

me a gown of taffeta and quinine, starlight and nightsoil,
and when the clock tocks two, I'll be the belle of the malaria ball.

The Writer's Almanac: Tuesday, 1 February, 2005

The Writer's Almanac: Tuesday, 1 February, 2005

---

Poem: "The Sow Piglet's Escapes" by Galway Kinnell, from Three Books. © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.

The Sow Piglet's Escapes

When the little sow piglet squirmed free,
Gus and I ran her all the way down to the swamp
and lunged and floundered and fell full-length
on our bellies stretching for her, and got her,
and lay there, all three shining with swamp slime,
she yelping, I laughing, Gus gasping and gasping.
It was then I knew he would die soon.
She made her second escape on the one day
when she was big enough to dig an escape hole
and still small enough to squeeze through it.
Every day I took a bucket of meal up to her plot
of rooted-up ground in the woods, until
one day there she stood, waiting for me,
the wild beast evidently all mealed out of her.
She trotted over and let me stroke her back
and, dribbling corn down her chin, put up her little worried face
as if to remind me not to forget to recapture her,
though, really, a pig's special alertness to death
ought to have told her: in Sheffield the dolce vita
leads to the Lyndonville butcher. When I seized her
she wriggled hard and cried oui oui oui all the way home.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). He says he realized the music in language early on through listening to the rhythm of his mother's Irish accent. His Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He received letters, phone calls, and telegrams from people all over the world congratulating him, most of them from people he had never met. He was so moved by a letter from the widow of his best friend from childhood that he carried the letter around with him in his wallet.

He said, "What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come." He also said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."


It is the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). He was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance and he wrote over 50 books in his lifetime. He was also a journalist. His first assignment came in 1937, when he worked as the Madrid correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish Civil War.

Hughes went on to write a witty column for the black weekly Chicago Defender from 1942 until 1965, which took what he called a "laugh to keep from crying" approach to looking at racial intolerance. Hughes said, "Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."


It's the birthday of novelist, critic and BBC Radio personality Stephen Potter, born in London, England (1900). He wrote several humorous books about how to outwit other people, including the book The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating (1947).

He said, "My first novel, The Young Man, had no plot, no characters, and no action (all this seemed O.K. in 1928)." He wrote while pacing up and down, and he claimed to have invented the word "gamesmanship" and the term "Eng Lit," defining it as "the racket, the flummery, the techniques and the gambits of English Literature teaching." He said, "If you have nothing to say, or, rather, something extremely stupid and obvious, say it, but in a 'plonking' tone of voice—roundly, but hollowly and dogmatically."


It's the birthday of novelist Muriel Spark, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1918). She's best known for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which was later turned into a play. She began writing stories as a child, and she wrote love letters to herself, signing them with fake men's names and hiding them in the family couch for her mother to find. When she was a teenager, if she came home after 10 o'clock, her dad would wait for her at the front door dressed as a ghost and making spooky noises to scare her.

She said, "I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work." She also said, "When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."


It's the birthday of aviator and novelist Charles Nordhoff, born in London, England (1887) to American parents. He served as an ambulance driver in France during World War I, and later as a pilot in the French Air Service. He wrote about his experience in France during the war in articles for the Atlantic.

Nordhoff wrote only three novels on his own during the mid-1920s. Most of his writing was done in collaboration with his friend and fellow pilot James Norman Hall. The two men co-authored a book about their flying unit right after the war, and then they both moved to Tahiti with an advance from Harper's to write travel articles about the South Pacific. Together they wrote their most successful work, a three-volume piece about the late 18th century mutiny aboard the H.M.S. Bounty. The trilogy sold millions of copies, and the books were made into films in 1935, 1962, and 1984. The best-known book from the trilogy is Mutiny on the Bounty (1932).

Nordhoff and Hall worked very closely when they wrote. They usually tackled separate chapters, but would often write single paragraphs together. They wrote three more historical and adventure novels after the success of the Bounty trilogy before Nordhoff left Tahiti in 1941.

He said, "Anthropology interests me more than anything else; if I had my life to live over, I should do the necessary groundwork and become a professional anthropologist." Nordhoff committed suicide in 1947. At the time of his death he was working on another collaborative novel with Tod Ford.


It's the birthday of humorist S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman, born in Brooklyn, New York (1904). He's best known for his collaboration with the Marx Brothers on the film comedies Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), and for his Academy Award™-winning screenplay, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). He also wrote for the New Yorker.

Perelman was raised in Rhode Island and attended Brown University in 1921. He had a hard time fitting in with the school's fraternity scene because he was disliked for being Jewish and from a lower-middle-class background. He ended up becoming close friends with another literary-minded student who would later come to be known as the novelist Nathanael West. West became Perelman's brother-in-law when he married West's sister, Laura, in 1929.

Perelman loved playing with words. He was greatly influenced by James Joyce. Perelman often parodied Joyce's steam of consciousness style, and he had a habit of mixing in obscure words and references. Perelman's last piece for the New Yorker was even titled "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat's Paw" (1979). He wrote his own introduction for his book The Best of S. J. Perelman (1947) under the pseudonym Sidney Namlerep (Perelman backwards).

The names of Perelman's characters and titles of his pieces came from what he called his "lifetime devotion to puns." He carried clippings that he tore out from newspapers in his pockets, his favorite being articles with people that had funny or complicated names. He had an airmail subscription to the London Times and read it every day, because he thought the names in that paper were more unusual than those in American papers.

Perelman wrote in Hollywood for 11 years, but he was happier with his career writing for the New Yorker, and his pieces were collected in books like Strictly from Hunger (1937).

After his wife died in 1970, he traveled and wrote, lived for a time in London, and finally came back to Manhattan, living at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He always wore a pair of oval, steel-rimmed glasses that he found in Paris in 1927. He said, "I'm highly irritable and my senses bruise easily, and when they are bruised I write."