Good Morning!

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“Banning things gives them more power and mystique than they
had previously. Tell someone they can’t see something, and you
can be sure as soon as you do they will be far more motivated to
seek it out and find out about it than they ever were before.”
– Neil Gaiman

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“Books and ideas are the most effective
weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”
– Lyndon Johnson, 36^th U.S. President

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13 poets born this week,
with names from A to Z

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March 3

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1903 – Rabbe Enckell born in Tammela, a village in southern Finland; Finnish poet, essayist, linguistic theorist, and painter. His family moved to Helsinki after his father became a professor at the University of Finland. In 1941, Enckell was arrested and briefly confined in a mental hospital after he stabbed a man who was having an affair with his wife. The man never pressed charges, and the marriage ended. Enckell became known for his “matchstick poems” – brief poems somewhat like Japanese Haiku. Enckell died of cancer at age 71 in June, 1974. His last collection, Flyende spegel (Floating mirror), appeared posthumously.

Melody

by Rabbe Enckell

A bird’s warble flies
like a swivel-bait cast over waves.
A splash of the morning light’s gold leaf
around giddying rotation
spun out
into the very fibre of disappearance.

“Melody” – this translation, © 2011 by David McDuff, appeared in the January 2011 post of Nordic Voices in Print

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1943 – Aeronwy Thomas born in London; daughter of poet Dylan Thomas and memoirist Caitlin Macnamara; UK poet, writer, and translator of Italian poetry. After her father’s death in 1953, she and her mother moved to Italy, where she learned Italian and became a translator of Italian poetry. Thomas was also an ambassador for her father’s work, and president of the Alliance of Literary Societies, founded in 1973 as an umbrella organization for UK literary societies. Her poetry collections include Later than Laugharne; Poems and Memories; Rooks and Poems; and Shadows and Shades. She died of cancer at age 66 in July 2009.

Peacocks

by Aeronwy Thomas

A flowering of peacocks: blue
turquoise, electric, royal,
pale and dark, greeny blue.
Until I saw a peacock,
I thought blue was only
one colour.

“Peacocks” from Rooks and Poems, © 2004 by Aeronwy Thomas – Poetry Monthly Press

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1946 – James Norcliffe born in Kaiata, on the South Island of New Zealand, but his famly later moved to Christchurch; New Zealand poet, novelist, short story writer, and Young Adult fantasy fiction author. He is also an editor, a former secondary school English teacher, and has taught Foundation Studies at New Zealand’s Lincoln University, and at Iowa’s International Writing Program. Norcliffe has published eleven poetry collections, including The Sportsman; A Kind of Kingdom; Rat Tickling; Villon in Millerton; Shadow Play; Dark Days in the Oxygen Café; and Letter to ‘Oumuamua.

the attack on Baghdad

by James Norcliffe

in the evening a rising wind
knocked the black peaches
from the laden branches

one by one they dropped
and some fell into the roses
where thorns tore at their flesh

and some fell onto the bank
and rolled down towards the river
gathering dust and bruises

the dark sand was stained
black with peach blood
and when wasps arrived
and were excited

the air crackled with their lust

“the attack on Baghdad,” © 2005 by James Norcliffe, was first published in the HAZMAT REVIEW (USA)

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March 4

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1819 – Narcyza Żmichowska born in Warsaw, Poland; Polish novelist, poet, educator, and proto-feminist who sometimes used the pen name Gabryella. The 10^th child of an impoverished nobleman, she became a governess. In 1838, she went with her employers’ family to Paris, where she was reunited with her brother Erazm, exiled after Poland’s unsuccessful 1830 anti-Tsarist November Uprising. She enrolled at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where she greatly expanded her knowledge, became an advocate for women’s equality, and for more education for girls, creating a curricula which included science and home economics. Upon her return to Poland, she wrote articles and poems for Polish literary magazines, which were under Russian censorship. Her novel Poganka (The Pagan) was published in 1846. Żmichowska was a founding member of a group of suffragists in Warsaw, and took part in anti-Tsarist activities, which led to her arrest in 1849, and a three-year prison sentence, later extended to three additional years under house arrest, during which she began giving talks to small groups of girls about scientific and literary topics. Narcyza Żmichowska died at age 57 in December 1876.

Longing

by Narcyza Żmichowska

I yearn in winter for the flowers to blow,
And when they give me greeting in spring,
I long for the while bind-weeds blossoming,
And with its blossoming a flake of snow.

For brotherly companionship I yearn,
When with my brother – then for you I long.
With you the yearning for my God grows strong
With him my longings for the world return.

The good and evil that constrains my soul
hate’er I long for – whatsoe’er I fear,
My thoughts and impulses from year to year,
As my own life, are but a longing whole!

“Longing” – translation by Paul Soboleski, from Poets and Poetry of Poland: A Collection of Polish Verse – Knight & Leonard, 1881 edition

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1928 – Alan Sillitoe born in Nottingham, in the UK’s Midlands; prolific English novelist, short story writer, poet, travel writer, essayist, playwright, and children’s author. Considered one of the UK’s “angry young men” of the 1950s (a label he detested), Sillitoe is best known for the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and his short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He married author and poet Ruth Fainlight in 1959.There are over 18 collections of his poetry, including Without Beer or Bread; The Rats and Other Poems; Falling Out of Love; Storm; Somme; Snow on the North Side of Lucifer; and Tides and Stone Walls. Alan Sillitoe died of cancer at age 82 in April 2010.

Car Fights Cat

by Alan Sillitoe

In a London crescent curving vast
A cat sat –
Between two rows of molar houses,
Birdsky in each grinning gap.

Cat small – coal and snow
Road wide – a zone of tar set hard and fast
Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash
For it
From time to time.

King Cat stalked warily midstream
As if silence were no warning on this empty road
Where even a man would certainly have crossed
With hands in pockets and been whistling.

Cat heard, but royalty and indolence
Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots
Held it from the dragon’s-teeth of safety first and last,
Until a Daimler scurrying from work
Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –
Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.

Maybe a deaf malevolence descended
And cat thought car would pass in front,
So spun and walked all fur and confidence
Into the dreadful tyre-treads …
A wheel caught hold of it and
FEARSOME THUDS
Sounded from the night-time of black axles in
UNEQUAL FIGHT
That stopped the heart to hear it.

But cat shot out with limbs still solid,
Bolted, spitting fire and gravel
At unjust God who built such massive
Catproof motorcars in his graven image,

Its mind made up to lose and therefore learn,
By winging towards
The wisdom toothgaps of the canyon houses
LEGS AND BRAIN INTACT.

“Car Fights Cat” from Alan Sillitoe: Selected Poems © 2016 by Ruth Fainlight Sillitoe – Open Road Media

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March 5

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1948 – Leslie Marmon Silko born in Albuquerque, New Mexico; American novelist, poet, and essayist. She is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and Anglo-American heritage, which have all influenced her work, but most often draws on Laguna myths and story-telling. After attending school on the Laguna reservation until the 5th grade, she was transferred to Catholic school in Albuquerque, away from her family and the familiar Keresan language of the Laguna, which she was forbidden to speak at the new school. In 1969, she received a BA from the University of New Mexico, and her first short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” was published.  She pursued writing while teaching at the University of Arizona–Tucson. Her first book of poetry, Laguna Woman, was published in 1974. A MacArthur “Genius” Award allowed her to quit teaching. Although better known for her novels, especially Ceremony, a unique work that incorporates poetry and mythology, Marmon Silko has also published four collections of poems, including Voices Under One Sky and Love Poem: Slim Man Canyon. Her book Storyteller is a collection of stories and poems. She is also the editor of A Circle of Nations: Voices and Visions of American Indians (The Earthsong Collection).

Lullaby

by Leslie Marmon Silko

The earth is your mother,
she holds you.
The sky is your father,
he protects you.
Sleep,
sleep.
Rainbow is your sister,
she loves you.
The winds are your brothers,
they sing to you.
Sleep,
sleep.
We are together always
We are together always
There never was a time
when this
was not so.

“Lullaby” from Storyteller, © 1981 by Leslie Marmon Silko – Seaver Books

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March 6

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1931 – Cor van den Heuvel born in Biddeford, Maine, just south of Portland ME; American Haiku poet, editor, and archivist. He was in San Francisco in 1958 when he discovered haiku. Returning to the East Coast in 1959, he became the house poet of a Boston coffee house, reciting haiku and other poetry to jazz musical accompaniment. In 1971 he joined the Haiku Society of America and became its president in 1978. In addition to editing three haiku anthologies, he has published several collections of his own, including the window washer’s pail and Past Time: Baseball Haiku. He worked at Newsweek magazine in the layout department until he retired in 1988. Van den Heuvel was honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library at Sacramento (1999-2000). He now lives on Long Island NY. At the World Haiku Festival held in London and Oxford in 2000, he received a World Haiku Achievement Award. In 2002, he was awarded The Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards in Matsuyama, for his writing and editing of haiku books.

starting to rise

by Cor van den Heuvel

starting to rise
to the top of the wave
the duck dives into it

“starting to rise” from Splashes, ©2023 by Cor van den Heuvel – House of Haiku

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1969 – Tsering Wangmo Dhompa born in Chennai (formerly Madras) India; Tibetan poet, memoirist, and academic, the first Tibetan woman poet to be published in English. She earned an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently an assistant professor in Villanova University’s English Department. Her poetry collection Rules of the House, published in 2002, was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards. Her other collections include My Rice Tastes Like the Lake; In the Absent Everyday; and Recurring Gestures. Her memoir, A Home in Tibet, was published in 2013.

She Is

by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about
renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood.

M’s wisdom. Still reliable.

There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion.
Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet.
I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway.

Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.

When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this.

Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.

Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed
a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread
from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the
dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where
the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound.

Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

“She is” from Rules of the House. © 2003 by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa – Apogee Press

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1990 – Dylan Krieger born in South Bend, Indiana; American poet and writer; she was home-schooled by her mother for religious reasons and gave her first reading at age 16 after winning a contest. She earned a BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, then an MFA in creative writing at Louisiana State University. Her first poetry collection, Giving Godhead, was published in 2017. She has been involved in the Delta Mouth Literary Festival in Baton Rouge and the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Her other poetry collections include: dreamland trash; The Mother Wart; Metamortuary; Hideous Compass; and Predators Welcome.

smiling here to erie

by Dylan Krieger

too bad there isn’t such a thing as
conservation of grief

the chemicals only spread
the ache only keeps opening its hands

take this—until you’re ash and then
regenerate tenderness again again

supplies are endless spinal addendums
to what my pestilence once called

church, a chiming arrest of the cardiac
a frank i see you moon to moon

in the howling house the black bears
share with our particular

feral carelessness i met you
on the steps

and don’t pretend you don’t remember
what happened next

“smiling here to erie” © 2018 by Dylan Krieger – first appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, Spring 2018 issue

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March 7

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1945 – Ira Sadoff born in Brooklyn, New York; American poet, academic, critic, essayist, and short story writer. He earned a BA from Cornell University in industrial and labor relations and an MFA from the University of Oregon. He has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and is the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. In addition to his essay collection History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture, Sadoff has published eight volumes of poetry, including: Palm Reading in Winter; Emotional Traffic; Barter; True Faith; and Country, Living.

Biographical Sketch

by Ira Sadoff

I’ve been a soft touch, a rough ride, I took shots
at congressmen, left an outrageous tip
for a waif whose hand was shaking

as she poured my tea. I made the sound of a wolf
in Naomi’s bedroom, was shabby
at her wedding, sulking

while pinning an amorous note
to her gown. I refused to cross a picket line
then bought a handsome silk shirt

sewn in the most downtrodden district in China.
This when I was learning how to be a person,
which right now’s an unfinished symphony.

But when I think of Mozart on his deathbed,
penning his own requiem, I can’t abide my irony.
Nobody warned me about the solemn passages,

when we know no one, when we could die
far from home with our bungled furies and crushes
yammering beside us: Not yet, not yet.

“Biographical Sketch” © 2018 by Ira Sadoff – first appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of Tin House

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March 8

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1859 – Helen Gray Cone born in New York City; American poet, short story writer, critic, anthologist, and professor of English literature. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Normal College of New York in 1876. Her first poetry collection, Oberon and Puck: Verses Grave and Gay, was published in 1885, followed by The Ride to the Lady in 1891. She co-edited Pen-Portraits of Literary Women with Jeanette L. Gilder in 1887, provided notes for Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside editions of several Shakespeare plays, and her history of American literature appeared in 1890. In 1899, she was elected as the first woman professor at Normal College, which became Hunter College in 1914. Her other poetry collections are: Soldiers of the Light (1910); A Chant of Love for England (1910); and The Coat Without a Seam (1919). She retired from teaching in 1926, and died at age 74 in January 1934. Hunter College has awarded the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship annually since 1927.

Summer Hours

by Helen Gray Cone

Hours aimless-drifting as the milkweed’s down
In seeming, still a seed of joy ye bear
That steals into the soul when unaware,
And springs up Memory in the stony town.

“Summer Hours” from The Ride to the Lady, by Helen Gray Cone – published in 1891

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March 9

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1947 – Keri Hulme born in Christchurch, New Zealand; New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer who also used the pen name Kai Tainui. The eldest of six children, her family heritage included “Māori, Orkney Islanders, Lancashire folk, Faroese and Norwegian migrants.” Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize, in 1985 for The Bone People. She was also the first author to win the Booker for a debut novel. Her father died when she was 11 years old, and she began writing poetry and short stories after that. The family spent their holidays with her mother’s parents at Moeraki, a fishing village on New Zealand’s South Island, which she called her turangawaewae-ngakau (standing-place of my heart). After high school, she worked as a tobacco picker, spent four terms at the University of Canterbury in Chirstchurch, but left because she felt out of place, and went back to the tobacco fields. She kept writing, taking nine months off to write full-time in 1972. Returning to earning a living, her jobs included fish-and-chips cook, a winder at a woollen mill, mail deliverer, pharmacist’s assistant, proofreader, newspaper journalist, and assistant director on documentary and children’s TV shows. Some of her writing was published in journals and magazines, sometimes as Kai Tainui. She became a writer-in-residence at the University of Otago in 1978, and a visiting poet at Hawaii’s East-West Center in 1979. She submitted her manuscript of The Bone People to publishers for 12 years before it was accepted by the Spiral Collective, a New Zealand feminist literary and arts collective. It won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction before being honored with the Booker Prize. Her poetry collections include The silences between (Moeraki Conversations); Lost Possessions; Strands; and Stonefish, a mix of poetry and short stories. She suffered from dementia toward the end, and died at a care home at age 74 in December 2021.

Trust

by Keri Hulme

Here,
where we live
by the rubbling sea
we know our tides and
why we should be
constantly crunched
crouched and sluiced
and rearranged and
hoping – o hoping
for a new moon
to be free

“Trust” was used as a poster by the Phantom Billsticker series for National Poetry Day, © 2012 by Keri Hulme

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1964 – Mohan Rana born in Delhi, India; Hindi language poet who is a graduate of Delhi University, and has published ten poetry collections in Hindi, two of which have been translated into English: Poems and The Cartographer, while With Eyes Closed was published in a bilingual Hindi-English edition. He now lives in Bath, England.

Another Word for It

by Mohan Rana

Different blues
in sky and waves.
The cloud hums a dream
of eyes open.
So what will this day be like,
this garment of moments?
The ball of thread
that knits time
taps the sleepy stones.

There may be a better way
to say this
some other day.

“Another Word for It” from With Eyes Closed, bilingual edition © 2008 by Mohan Rana and Lucy Rosenstein (for English translation)

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Cat photo by Ignat Kushanrev