Good Morning!

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“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”
– Johann Georg Hamann
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“Lock up your libraries if you like; but
there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you
can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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13 poets this week:
bestiality, robots,
racism, silence, and
war – with a side trip
to Inner Mongolia
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July 2

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1923 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet, essayist, editor, and translator, born in Prowent (now Kórnik), Poland. She won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1995 Herder Prize, and the 1991 Goethe Prize; called the woman “the Mozart of poetry … who mixed elegance of language with something of the fury of Beethoven.” She died at age 88 in February 2012.

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

by Wisława Szymborska

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

“In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself” from Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska/English translations © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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July 3

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1900 – Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, Japanese film critic and poet born as Tadahiko Taguro, in Otsu, on the island of Honshu, but grew up in China because of his father’s work on the South Manchurian Railway, taken over by Japan after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). He began publishing his poetry in 1924, and was recognized as a leading poet of the Japanese modernist poetry movement. As a film critic, he was a proponent of the “sanbun eiga” (more realistic “prose” cinema). He died in April 1990 at age 89.

 War

 by Fuyuhiko Kitagawa

Even if they set a diamond in your glass eye, would it matter?
Would it matter if they hung a metal on mossy ribs? 

We must crush the huge heads dangling sausages.
Huge heads dangling sausages must be crushed. 

When will its ashes blow from our hands like dandelions?

– translation © 1991 by Dean Brink
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1939 – Anthony Piccione, American poet born in Sheffield, Alabama, but raised on Long Island. In 2000, he founded Upright Hall, a residence retreat for poets on his farm in the hills near Prattsburgh, New York. He was one of the first poets to support the Poets For Peace readings organized by poet Larry Jaffe and others. He died at age 62 from cancer in November 2001. He published four poetry collections: Anchor Dragging; Seeing It Was So; For the Kingdom; and Guests at the Gate.

 Night Train Through Inner Mongolia

by Anthony Piccione

Now the child is a runny-nosed stranger
you’ve finally decided to share your seat with,
and the whole thing keeps heaving into the dark.

The child sleeps unsweetly hunched against you,
your side is slowly stinging, he has wet himself,
so you do not move at all. I know you.

You sit awake, baffling about a quirky faith,
and do not shift until morning. This is why
you are blessed, I think, and usually chosen.

“Night Train Through Inner Mongolia” from The Guests at the Gate, © 2002 by the estate of Anthony Piccione – BOA Editions, Ltd.
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1948 – Wadih Sa’adeh, Lebanese Australian poet and journalist born in a village in northern Lebanon as Wadih Amine Stephan; in 1973 he wrote out copies by hand of his first poetry book, Laysa Lil Massa’ Ikhwah (Evening Has No Brothers), and sold it in the streets of Beirut. He spent time in Australia and France before working as a journalist in Lebanon. Laysa Lil Massa’ Ikhwah was printed in 1981 by Almouassah Aljamiah, which brought Sa’adeh attention in the Arab-speaking world. In 1988, he emigrated to Australia, where he became a writer and editor with the Lebanese newspaper Annahar in Sydney. Among his other poetry collections are Bisabas Ghaymah ’Alal-Arjah (Most Likely Because a Cloud), Nass Al-Ghiyab (Text of Absence), Ghubar (Dust), and Man Akhatha an-Nazra Allati Taraktuha Amama l Bab? (Who Took The Gaze I Left Behind The Door?).

 Lower Your Voice

 by Wadih Sa’adeh

Lower your voice please!
I want to hear what silence is saying
Perhaps it is saying: come!
And I want to follow it 

– translated by Sinan Antoon

“Lower Your Voice” from Man Akhatha an-Nazra Allati Taraktuha Amama l Bab? (Who Took the Gaze I Left Behind the Door?), © 2011 by Wadih Sa’adeh

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July 4

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1940 – Jon Anderson born in Somerville, Massachusetts; American poet and assistant professor of creative writing at several Midwestern universities before teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson (1978-2005).  His first book, Looking for Jonathan, was an inaugural selection of the Pitt Poetry Series in 1967. Death & Friends (1970) was nominated for the National Book Award. Anderson died at age 67 in October 2007. His poetry collections include In Sepia, Cypresses, and Day Moon.

The Robots, the City of Paradise

by Jon Anderson

Out of the knowledge you mysteriously left
came oil, steel, art,
ways to duplicate ourselves.

Year-of-Our Makers-X, world without nations
wherein we walk, fearless, under the dead lamps,
hardly bothering to care. Our shadows
cross your dark shop displays; our purposes
slowly forgettable, though faithful to your plan.

Your aluminum police, our angels, soar . . .
Everywhere the new pattern
is ourselves, believing in necessity, as you
in our memories did not.

City of Paradise: commitment to a powerful,
abandoning instruction. We stand
like citizens, like lambs without banners,
under the best of all lives,
liking it, yours.

“The Robots, the City of Paradise” © 1969 by Jon Anderson, appeared in the December 1969 issue of Poetry magazine

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July 5

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1889 – Jean Cocteau born in Maisons-Laffitte in northern France; French filmmaker, poet, playwright, novelist, designer, visual artist, and critic. He was one of the foremost figures in the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and influential in early 20th-century art. Known as a filmmaker for The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus, and as a novelist for the semi-auto biographical Le Livre blanc and Les Enfants Terribles, which was made into a film co-directed by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville. Cocteau died of a heart attack at age 74 in October 1963.  His many poetry collections include Le Prince frivole (The Frivolous Prince); Mythologie; and Le Requiem.

Awakening

by Jean Cocteau

Grave mouths of lions
Sinuous smiling of young crocodiles
Along the river’s water conveying millions
Isles of spice
How lovely he is, the son
Of the widowed queen
And the sailor
The handsome sailor abandons a siren,
Her widow’s lament at the south of the islet
It’s Diana of the barracks yard
Too short a dream
Dawn and lanterns barely extinguished
We are awakening
A tattered fanfare

– translator not credited – © 1954 by Jean Cocteau

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1923 – Mitsuye Yamada born as Mitsuye Yasutake in Fukuoka, Japan; Japanese-American activist, feminist, fiction author, poet, essayist, editor and professor of English. Her father worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the family lived in Seattle. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, her father was wrongfully arrested by the FBI for espionage, so her family was interned at Mindoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. She was only allowed to attend the University of Cincinnati after she renounced loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. Her first book, Camp Notes and Other Poems, was written during the war, but not published until 1976. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955, five years after her marriage to Yoshikasu Yamada, who was born in Hawaii, and had served as a medic and a translator in the U.S. Army during WWII.  Her other works include Lighthouse, her essay “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster,” and Full Circle: New and Selected Poems.

 Cincinnati

by Mitsuye Yamada

Freedom at last
in this town aimless
I walked against the rush
hour traffic
My first day
in a real city
where

no one knew me.

No one except one
hissing voice that said
dirty jap
warm spittle on my right check.
I turned and faced
the shop window
and my spittle face
spilled onto a hill
of books.
Words on display.

“Cincinnati” from Camp Notes and Other Writings, © 1998 by Mitsuye Yamada – Rutgers University Press

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July 6

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1947 – Floyd Skloot born in Brooklyn, New York; American poet, non-fiction writer, memoirist, and novelist. Skloot was disabled in 1988 by neurological damage caused by a virus, and has written a series of memoirs about reconstructing his life and his work, starting with In the Shadow of Memory, through his most recent Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir. He has also published ten poetry collections, including The Fiddler’s Trance; The End of Dreams; Close Reading; and Far West.

 Silent Music

by Floyd Skloot

My wife wears headphones as she plays
Chopin etudes in the winter light.
Singing random notes, she sways
in and out of shadow while night
settles. The keys she presses make a soft
clack, the bench creaks when her weight shifts,
golden cotton fabric ripples across
her shoulders, and the sustain pedal clicks.
This is the hidden melody I know
so well, her body finding harmony in
the give and take of motion, her lyric
grace of gesture measured against a slow
fall of darkness. Now stillness descends
to signal the end of her silent music.

“Silent Music” © 2006 by Floyd Skloot, appeared in Prairie Schooner, Summer 2006 issue

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July 7

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1906 – Helene Johnson born in Boston, Massachusetts, African-American poet, short story writer; granddaughter of former slaves, she was raised by her mother, her maternal grandfather, and her aunts. The writer Dorothy West was her cousin, and they moved to New York together in 1927, becoming part of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson’s poetry was frequently published in Black magazines, like the National Urban League’s Opportunity, the NAACP’s The Crisis, and Challenge: A Literary Quarterly, published by the Negro Universities Press. Her poem “Bottled” was published in the May 1927 issue of Vanity Fair. Johnson died on her 89^th birthday in 1995. Her poems were not published as a collection until This Waiting for Love was published in December 2000.

A Southern Road

by Helene Johnson

Yolk-colored tongue
Parched beneath a burning sky,
A lazy little tune
Hummed up the crest of some
Soft sloping hill.
One streaming line of beauty
Flowering by a forest
Pregnant with tears.
A hidden nest for beauty
Idly flung my God
In one lonely lingering hour
Before the Sabbath.
A blue-fruited black gum,
Like a tall predella,
Bears a dangling figure,—
Sacrificial dower to the raff, Swinging alone,
A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.

“A Southern Road” from This Waiting for Love (collected poems and letters of Helene Johnson), edited by Verner D. Mitchell – University of Massachusetts Press, 2006 edition

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1915 – Margaret Walker, African-American poet and novelist, born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a Methodist minister, and a mother who was a musician,  teacher,  and granddaughter of a former slave. The family moved to New Orleans when Margaret was a small child. She met Langston Hughes when he gave a lecture recital at New Orleans University in 1932. He encouraged her to keep writing poetry, and one of her poems was published in The Crisis in 1934. Walker’s first collection of poetry, For My People, won the 1942 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She was the first black woman to win the prestigious award. Her first novel, Jubilee (1966), is regarded as the first work by a black author to advocate for the liberation of black women. During the Depression, she worked for the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project. She taught literature at Jackson State University (1949-1979).Her poetry collections include Prophets for a New Day; October Journey; and This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Walker died at age 83 of breast cancer in Chicago in 1998.

For Malcolm X

by Margaret Walker

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?

“For Malcolm X” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, © 1989 by Margaret Walker – University of Georgia Press
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1948 – Stephen Ratcliffe born in Boston, Massachusetts, but has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since age four; American poet and author of three books of criticism. He has also been an instructor in creative writing, Renaissance poetry, and Shakespeare at Mills College in Oakland, California for over 25 years. His poetry collections include Distance; Cloud / Ridge; and Selected Days: The Selected Poetry of Stephen Ratcliffe.

Domestic

 Audubon Canyon Ranch

 by Stephen Ratcliffe

Somewhere the sandhill cranes are flying,
With a long sweep of neck test
The rushes, swanpgrass, marsh, and drying
Shoreline for food, a place to rest;
Are circling down, down-throated, crying
Louder, round and around the nest—
The fish in the belly of the great
Grey fisher, flesh for the proud mate.

“Domestic” © 1976 by Stephen Ratcliffe, from Poetry magazine’s January 1976 issue

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July 8

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1621 – Jean de La Fontaine, French poet and fabulist, born in Château-Thierry, northeast of Paris into a bourgeois family. In 1647, he married Marie Héricart, an heiress, but they separated in 1658. He inherited from his father the office of inspector of forests and waterways, which he held from 1652 to 1671, while making regular forays to Paris. By 1657, he was a protégé of Nicolas Fouquet, the wealthy superintendent of the nation’s finance. From 1664 to 1672 he served as gentleman-in-waiting to the dowager duchess of Orléans in Luxembourg. For 20 years, from 1673, he was a member of the household of Mme de La Sablière, whose salon was a celebrated meeting place of scholars, philosophers, and writers. In 1683 he was elected to the French Academy in spite of some opposition by the king because of his unconventional and irreligious character. He is now known primarily for his Fables, based on traditional stories from Aesop and East Asian storytellers, but enhanced by his wit, humor, and eye for detail. He died at age 73 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just west of Paris, in 1695.

 Epitaph of La Fontaine Made By Himself

by Jean de La Fontaine

 Jean, as he came, so went away,
Consuming capital and pay,
Holding superfluous riches cheap;
The trick of spending time he knew,
Dividing it in portions two,
For idling one, and one for sleep.

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1892 – Richard Aldington, English Imagist poet, novelist, biographer, and critic; born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast, as the son of a solicitor, but both his parents were published authors, and there was a large library in his home.  He spent much of his youth reading, collecting butterflies, and learning languages, including French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. His father died of heart problems at age 56, leaving the family in reduced financial circumstances, so Richard was unable to complete his university education. He worked as a sports journalist, published poetry in British literary journals, and became part of a London circle of writers that included William Butler Years and Walter de la Mare. Aldington was an editor of The Egoist in 1912, when he met American poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Dolittle (known by the pen name H.D.).  He and Hilda married in 1913. She gave birth to a stillborn child in 1915, and he joined the British army and went to war in 1916.  H.D. took over his position at The Egoist, while he was assigned to digging graves, living with lice, cold, mud, and lack of sanitation at the Front. He would be affected by his experiences and the German’s use of poisonous gas for the rest of his life, and after the war, wrote much less poetry, concentrating instead on literary criticism, and writing biographies and novels. He and H.D. both had affairs, and their marriage failed. He published Images of War, a collection of poems, in 1919. Aldington suffered a breakdown in 1925. In 1928, he went into self-imposed exile in Paris until 1958, when he moved to Sury-en-Vaux in the Loire Valley. He died there in July 1962, shortly after his 70^th birthday.

Bombardment

by Richard Aldington

Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.

The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.

The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue.

“Bombardment” from The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington, © 1948 by Richard Aldington – Allan Wingate Publishers

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