Good Morning!

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“The only valid censorship of ideas
is the right of people not to listen.”
― Tommy Smothers

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“Few people have to watch their country die. I have had that
dubious privilege, and I can tell you that it comes not as a
rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious
as anything I’ve ever seen. It can start as rumblings about an
unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will
threaten your family, your children. It can deepen with each
disdainful remark about science and art and literature in a pub
on a Friday night. It comes cloaked in patriotism and love
of country, and uses that as armor against any criticism.”
― Brianna Labuskes, from 
The Librarian of Burned Books

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13 poets born this week
covering the unexpected trials
of life, the ordinary jobs of a
bright day, and everything
in between

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March 17

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1925 – Ennis Rees born as Ennis Samuel Rees, Jr. in Newport News, Virginia; American poet, academic, and translator. He earned a BA from the College of William & Mary, and an MA and PhD from Harward. He taught at Duke University (1949-1952), Princeton (1952-1954) and then at the University of South Carolina (1954-1988). Rees became South Carolina’s third Poet Laureate in 1984. Most of his poetry was written for children, including: Riddles, Riddles Everywhere; Tiny Tall Tales; Gillygaloos and Gollywhoppers; and Fast Freddie Frog and other tongue-twister rhymes. He also published poetry collections for children which were retellings of fables by Aesop, Brer Rabbit stories, and the Paul Bunyan legend. His poetry for adults was published in Selected Poems. In the 1960s, he translated The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer. Ennis Rees died at age 84 in March 2009.

The Cat and the Fox

by Ennis Rees

A fox was bragging one day to a cat
About how smart he was and all that,
Especially at getting out of a fix.
He said, “Why I know a thousand tricks
For escaping the dogs, while you, poor kitty,
Know only one, and that’s a pity.
A very smart fox with the dogs – that’s me,
But all you can do is climb a tree.”
Just then came the hounds with barking and yelping,
And the poor cat truly needed no helping
To climb a tree all the way to the top,
And none of the dogs decided to stop
As after the fox they swiftly ran.
But though he knew a thousand tricks,
None of them got him out of that fix.
They caught the smart fellow where none was his friend,
And that, I’m afraid, of him was the end.
But the cat’s one simple tree-climbing plan
Worked as well as any plan can.

“The Cat and the Fox” from Fables from Aesop, © 1966 by Ennis Rees – Oxford University Press

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March 18

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1893 – Wilfred Owen born in Shropshire, near the Welsh border; English poet and WWI soldier. He suffered shell shock after being caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell, lying unconscious on an embankment among the grisly remains of a fellow officer for days. He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. While there, Owen met poet Siegfried Sassoon, who became his friend and mentor as a poet. After further recuperation on light duty in North Yorkshire, he returned to active service in France in July, 1918, and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership during an attack in October. He was killed in action at age 25, on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice. Only five of his poems were published before his death. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, contained 23 poems, but Edmund Blunden edited an edition in 1931 with 19 more poems. In 1963, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by C. Day Lewis, contained 80 poems.

Happiness

by Wilfred Owen

Ever again to breathe pure happiness,
So happy that we gave away our toy?
We smiled at nothings, needing no caress?
Have we not laughed too often since with Joy?
Have we not stolen too strange and sorrowful wrongs
For her hands’ pardoning? The sun may cleanse,
And time, and starlight. Life will sing great songs,
And gods will show us pleasures more than men’s.

Yet heaven looks smaller than the old doll’s-home,
No nestling place is left in bluebell bloom,
And the wide arms of trees have lost their scope.
The former happiness is unreturning:
Boys’ griefs are not so grievous as our yearning,
Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

“Happiness” from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen – New Directions 1965 edition

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1921 – Claire Pratt born as Mildred Claire Pratt in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Canadian artist, printmaker, poet, and editor. She contracted polio when she was four years old, and later developed osteomyelitis, an inflammatory bone disease. Pratt earned degrees in English and Philosophy from Victoria College, University of Toronto, then studied international relations at Columbia University, and art at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. She was an editor for Macmillan Canada, the University of Toronto Press, then a senior editor at McClelland & Stewart (1956-1965), but retired because of her increasing health problems. As an artist, she made woodcuts, and her interest in Japanese graphics led to her writing haiku, which she often illustrated with her artwork. Claire Pratt died at age 74 in 1995.

Kitchcn all aglow

by Claire Pratt

Kitchen all aglow
not yet, not yet—frosty stars,
angels in the snow.

“Kitchen all aglow” from HAIKU, © 1965 by Claire Pratt – self-published

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March 19

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1868 – Gretchen Osgood Warren born into the prominent Osgood family of Boston; American singer and poet (she was also listed as an actress, but I could find no evidence of her performing). She had perfect pitch as a singer, and was a writer from an early age. She studied at Oxford, where women were allowed to attend lectures and sit for examinations, but were not awarded degrees until 1920. She married Frederick Fiske Warren, a successful manufacturer and patron of the arts, in 1891. A portrait of Mrs. Fiske Warren with her daughter Rachel was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1903. Her poems appeared Poetry magazine, the quarterly magazine Poet Lore, and The New Poetry anthology. She died at age 93 in September 1961.

The Wild Bird

by Gretchen Osgood Warren

Like silence of a starlit sky,
Like wild birds rising into night,
Such was her dying, such her flight
Into eternity.
But I, who dwell with memory,
Dream in my grief that she may soar
Too high, and needing love no more
Come nevermore to me.

“The Wild Bird” by Gretchen Osgood Warren from The New Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Monroe – 1917 edition

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1809 – Gogol born Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol-Ianovskii in the village of Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, now Ukraine, into a “petty gentry” Ukrainian family; Ukrainian-Russian short story writer, playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist. The family spoke Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian. His father was an amateur poet and playwright who wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian, whose plays were performed in a home theatre. Gogol attended a school of higher art from 1820 to 1828. His father died in 1824, when Gogol was 15 years old. Gogol was painfully self-conscious and secretive. His fellow students dubbed him a “mysterious dwarf.” When he left school, he went to Saint Petersburg, where he simplified his name to Gogol. He published short stories in Russian, but often used Ukrainian idioms when the stories were about Ukraine. In 1936, his satiric play, The Government Inspector, was a success after Tsar Nicholas I said that “there is nothing sinister in the comedy, as it is only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials.” Gogol traveled (1836-1837) through Germany and Switzerland, then spent time in Paris, before settling in Rome until 1848, where he wrote Dead Souls, The Portrait, Marriage, and his most famous short story, “The Overcoat.”  After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he returned to Russia. By February 1852, he fell into a deep depression, burned some of his manuscripts on February 24, then took to his bed, refusing all food, and died at age 42, just nine days later. His play The Gamblers premiered after his death.

Stop Loving You

by Nikolai Gogol

You will hurt me
and I will hurt you,
this way our life will continue.
When everything will be forgotten
I will stop loving you.

The sun will still rise in the east
and the people will admire its view.
The day when the winds will change their path,
I will stop loving you.

With all these stupid fights
between us two.
When the heart will not accept what’s true,
I will stop loving you.

The rainbow in a sunny sky.
Oh! It’s beautiful ‘cause of its hue.
The day when I will wake up with a teary eye,
Yes, I will stop loving you.

― translator not credited

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1894 – Lilith Lorraine born as Mary Maude Dunn in Corpus Christi, Texas; American science fiction and pulp fiction author, poet, journalist, editor, and teacher. The daughter of a Texas Ranger, she earned a teaching certificate at age 16, and taught in a rural Texas school. Her feminist socialist utopia novelette, The Brain of the Planet, was published as a chapbook in 1929. Her science fiction stories appeared in magazines like Astounding Stories, but she often wrote under male pen-names, so the list of her stories is incomplete. Lorraine was an editor for poetry magazines and fan zines from the 1930s through the 1950s. She wrote a textbook for writers, Character against Chaos, and Wine of Wonder, published in 1952, which may have been the first science fiction poetry collection. She died at age 73 in November 1967.

If These Endure

by Lilith Lorraine

If these endure when all the old world crashes,
If these stars shine above the last gun’s roll:
Strength to raise brave new towers on sacred ashes,
Courage to build new mansions for the soul;
Faith to point loftier spires to kindlier heavens,
Wisdom to soar above the fear of fear;
Beauty to feed the earth with nobler leavens,
And rear the Holy City now and here;
Peace that shall yield no more to greed’s dictation,
Freedom from want and loneliness and pain,
Love like a white flag over every nation —
If these endure we have not fought in vain.

“If These Endure” from Wine of Wonder, © 1952 by Lilith Lorraine – Bookcraft

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1947 – Kate Braid born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Canadian poet, non-fiction writer, and construction worker, who grew up in Montreal, Quebec, and graduated from Mount Allison University. In 1977, Braid got her first job in construction as a labourer on an island off the coast of British Columbia. She hadn’t planned to be a construction worker, but was desperate to stay on the island and had run out of money. Turning Left to the Ladies, a mix of prose and poetry, is about the 15 years she worked as a labourer, then apprentice and journey carpenter. She was the first woman member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters, and the first full-time woman teaching trades at the BC Institute of Technology. In 1992, she won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets, for her collection, Covering Rough Ground. Her other poetry books include: To This Cedar Fountain; Small Songs; and A Woman’s Fingerprint. She has also written poetry about an imagined friendship between artists Georgia O’Keefe and Emily Carr, and a collection of short stories, The Fish Come in Dancing.

Spy

by Kate Braid

I parachute into man’s country,
hoist my beer in the bar as if native.

Cool, I talk shop, stand as they stand,
not quite sure
of the cocky swing of hips,
lift of the glass in a loud bass,
confidence laughing.

This is the world of the knowing.
It’s only a small slip into a minor key
when I turn left to go to the Ladies.

“Spy” from Turning Left to the Ladies, © 2009 by Kate Braid – Palimpsest Press

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1955 – John Burnside born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland; Scottish poet, writer, and memoirist. Burnside is one of only three poets (with Ted Hughes and Sean O’Brien) to win both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book – his collection Black Cat Bone. He studied English and European thought and literature at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology before working as a computer software engineer. He has been a freelance writer since 1996, and is now a Professor of creative writing at St. Andrews University. His first poetry collection, The Hoop (1988), won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. He has since published over two dozen poetry collections, including Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also written several novels, two short stories collections, several biographies, and Aurochs and Auks: Essays on morality and extinction. In 2023, he was honored with the David Cohen Prize for his body of work.

Wild

by John Burnside

Today,
on our journey home,
we saw

a buzzard
making a kill
on the roadside verge.

It glided across
our windscreen
and hunkered down

on something –
we couldn’t see
what it was – as the wings

folded around
what Lucas called
‘the prey’.

He wanted to know
if buzzards took children,
or cats;

then,
as we slowed to look,
he chose to admire

the plumage
and the fierce light
of its eye.

“Wild” © 2006 by John Burnside, from The Thing that Mattered Most: Scottish poems for children, an anthology edited by Julie Johnstone – B&W Publishing

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March 20

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1899 – Muriel Stuart born on Norbury, South London, UK, as Muriel Stuart Irwin, daughter of a Scottish barrister. She wrote poetry about WWII, sexual politics, and gardening, published in five collections. Her first marriage was very brief. In 1922, she married publisher Alfred William Board. She gave up writing poetry in the 1930s, after the births of their son and daughter, to write books about gardening, including the best-seller Fool’s Garden, as well as Gardener’s Choice and Gardener’s Nightcap. She died at age 82 in December 1967.

The Seed-Shop

by Muriel Stuart

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry –
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century’s streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

“The Seed Shop” from Poems, © 1922 by Muriel Stuart – University of California Libraries

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March 21

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1841 – Mathilde Blind born as Mathilda Cohen in Mannheim, Germany; English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist, critic, and pioneering feminist ‘New Woman’ author. Her mother and stepfather moved the family to London in 1852, and Mathilda changed her first name to Mathilde, and took her stepfather’s surname. Blind’s political views were shaped by the foreign refugees who frequented her stepfather’s house, including Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and Louis Blanc. She attended the Ladies’ Institute, St John’s Wood, but was expelled for her radical thinking, and went to Switzerland. Women were barred from attending lectures at the University of Zürich, but she took private lessons from scholar Kuno Fischer, author of History of Modern Philosophy. She wrote sexually subversive poems, an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry, and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In 1886, she lectured on “Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin’s.”Her poetry collections include Poems (1867 – originally published under the pen name Claude Lake); The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems (1881); The Ascent of Man (1889); and Songs and Sonnets (1893). Mathilde Blind died at age 55 in November 1896, bequeathing to Newnham College, Cambridge, the greater part of her property.

 I Planted a Rose Tree

by Mathilde Blind

I planted a rose tree in my garden,
In early days when the year was young;
I thought it would bear me roses, roses,
While nights were dewy and days were long.

It bore me once, and a white rose only–
A lovely rose with petals of light;
Like the moon in heaven, supreme and lonely;
And the lightning struck it one summer night.

“I Planted a Rose Tree” from Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons – 1900

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March 22

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1926 – Alastair Reid born in Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, the son of a clergyman; Scottish poet, scholar, children’s author, and translator of South American literature, including poetry by Pablo Neruda. During WWII, he served in the Royal Navy decoding ciphers, then studied Classics at the University of St Andrews and briefly taught at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. In the mid-1950s he travelled to Mallorca, and worked for a time as secretary to author Robert Graves. In the 1980s and 90s, he spent much of his time in the Dominican Republic. Reid published over 40 books of translation, travel writing, and poetry. His poetry collections include: Weathering; Legacies; and Barefoot: The Collected Poems. He died at age 88 in September 2014 of complications from pneumonia.

Scotland

by Alastair Reid

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

“Scotland” from Inside Out – Selected Poetry and Translations, © 2008 by Alastair Reid – Polygon

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1935 – Kathleen Fraser born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; American poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and champion of women writers. She graduated from Occidental College in Southern California, then taught creative writing at San Francisco State University (1972-1992), where she also directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives. Fraser was co-founder and co-editor (1983-1991), with Beverly Dahlen and Frances Jaffer, of the feminist poetics newsletter (HOW)ever. Her books include: New Shoes; When New Time Folds Up; Movable Tyype; and Collected Poems (published posthumously). Kathleen Fraser died at age 83 in February 2019.

Poem Wondering If I’m Pregnant

by Kathleen Fraser

Is it you? Are you there,
thief I can’t see,
drinking energy
leaving me gasping
for oxygen.
New mystery floating up my left arm,
clinging to the curtain.
Uncontrollable.
Eyes on stalks, full of pollen,
stem juice, petals making ready to unfold,
to be set in a white window,
or an empty courtyard.
Fingers fresh. And cranium,
a clean architecture
with

doors that swing open …
is it you small face?
Is it you?

“Poem Wondering If I’m Pregnant” from What I Want, © 1974 by Kathleen Fraser – Harper & Row

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March 23

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1965 – Gary Whitehead born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; American poet and teacher. He teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. Whitehead has been a featured poet at many poetry festivals, and has won awards and fellowships ranging from the Anne Halley Poetry Prize to a New York Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, and the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. He is also a constructor of crossword puzzles. His four published poetry collections are: The Velocity of Dust; Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps; A Glossary of Chickens; and Strange What Rises.

Pretend It Was Just the Wind

by Gary Whitehead

Water crept into our furnished home,
the one in the flood zone but zoned
anyway, and anyway our home,

though we spent so little time there.
And now that we’ve moved on,
I think of the outlets sparking out

and my guitar rising against the wall
until it fell and became a boat
that drifted from room to room,

knocking into legs of tables and chairs.
I think of the books the water took
from the shelves and opened

at its leisure as it snaked and rose,
the rain still rapping at the roof
and at the swollen windows.

And of all the items of our life—
our braided rugs, the dog’s bed
and bowls, the sofa with its pillows,

the lamps, the photos, the figurines—
all of them out of their element and into another,
which held them and rocked them gently.

​

“Pretend It Was Just the Wind,” © 2019 by Gary Whitehead, was published in
The New Yorker, January 7, 2019

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Visual: ‘The Cat’ by J. J. Grandville