Good Morning!

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Poetry has never been the language of barriers,
it’s always been the language of bridges.
– Amanda Gorman

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“Once a government is committed to the principle
of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one
way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly
repressive measures, until it becomes a source of
terror to all its citizens and creates a country
where everyone lives in fear.”
– Harry S. Truman,
  33^rd U.S. President

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13 poets born this week
some battled just to live,
some fought for their art –
some lost, some triumphed

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April 7

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1866 – Annie Vivanti Chartres born Anna Emilia Vivanti in London; British-born Italian novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her parents were an Italian Jewish follower of Mazzini in political exile, and a German mother who was also a writer. In 1890, her poetry collection Lirica appeared. In 1892, she married John Smith Chartres, an Anglo-Irish journalist, lawyer, and Sinn Fein member, and she became a supporter of Irish Independence. They lived in England and the U.S., and she wrote in English. Her novel, The Devourers, was published in 1910, followed by Circe in 1912. After WWI, she supported Mussolini, and began writing in Italian, contributing to Italian nationalist newspapers. After her husband’s death in 1927, she made her home in Turin. But in 1941, with anti-British and anti-Semitic feeling running high, she was placed under house arrest while visiting Arezzo, and her books were banned in Italy. Mussolini’s direct intervention freed her, and she was allowed to return to Turin, where she died at age 75 in February 1942.

This is a “found Poem” – a passage from a novel by Annie Viviante Chartres that reads like a poem.

In the arms of an instrument

by Annie Vivanti Chartres

Now she is at rest,
her coffin shut solemnly
like her old violin-case,
hidden by flowers
as magnificent as the variations
she could play;
she was the violin
holding the key of the strings
holding the key to locked doors
that opened as you listened,
beckoned you in
and lifted you up to die in this
single
treasured
moment.

The finder of this poem is Irish poet Jennifer Liston – the words are from the novel Maria Tarnowska, by Annie Viviante Chartres, originally published in 1915

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1889 – Gabriela Mistral, pen name of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, who was born in Vicuña, Chile, but grew up in the Andean village of Montegrande; Chilean poet, journalist, diplomat, and teacher. She was a schoolteacher for many years. Her poems were first published in local newspapers. Her first lover committed suicide in 1909, and her second lover married someone else, so her first poetry collections, Sonnets de la muerte (Sonnets on Death – 1914), and Desolación (Desolation – 1922) reflected these losses. Because of a shortage of teachers in Chile, she advanced to teaching secondary school, even though her formal education ended very early, and she was tutored by her sister after that. She became an advocate for greater access to education, and was invited to Mexico in 1922 by its Minister of Education to contribute to a national plan to reform libraries and establish a national education system. She addressed the Pan American Union at a conference in Washington DC in 1924. Beginning in 1932, she was appointed as a consul, serving in many Chilean consulates, including Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, and Los Angeles. Her collection Nubes Blancas (White Clouds) came out in 1934, followed by Tala (Harvesting) in 1938, and Antología: Selección de Gabriela Mistral (Anthology: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral) in 1941.  In 1945, Mistral became the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suffering from diabetes and related heart problems, she traveled very little in her last years, and died of pancreatic cancer at age 67 in January 1957.

If You’ll Just Go To Sleep

by Gabriela Mistral

The blood red rose
I gathered yesterday,
And the fire and cinnamon
Of the carnation,

Bread baked with
Anise seed and honey,
And a fish in a bowl
That makes a glow:

All this is yours,
Baby born of woman,
If you’ll just
Go to sleep.

A rose, I say!
I say a carnation!
Fruit, I say!
And I say honey!

A fish that glitters!
And more, I say –
If you will only
Sleep till day.

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, © by Gabriela Mistral, and translation © 1956 by Langston Hughes – Indiana University Press

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April 8

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1955 – Barbara Kingsolver born in Annapolis, Maryland, but raised in rural Kentucky; American novelist, essayist, and poet; known for The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, and Pigs in Heaven; awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction for The Lacuna. Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid-1980s as a science writer for the University of Arizona at Tucson, then branched out into articles and cover stories for the Tucson Weekly. She started publishing fiction after winning a short story contest in a Phoenix newspaper. In the late 1990s Kingsolver, who had considered a career as a pianist, became a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band made up of writers, including. Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King. They played together for one week during the year. She now lives in the Appalachian region of the U.S. Kingsolver published her first book of poetry, Another America, in 1992, followed by How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) in 2020.

Possession

by Barbara Kingsolver

The things I wish for are:
A color. A forest.
The devil and ice in my mouth.
Everything
that can’t be owned.
A leopard, a life, a kiss.
You
Never let me down.
To know that you have wanted me too
is as good as the deed
of trust.

“Posession” from Another America/Otra América © 1998, 2022 by Barbara Kingsolver, and Spanish translations by Rebecca Cartes – Seal Press

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April 9

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1891 – Lesbia Harford bon as Lesbia Venner Keogh in Brighton, Victoria, Australia; Australian poet, novelist and political activist. Her health was fragile because she was born with defective heart valves. Her family was well-off until her father’s real estate business failed, and he left the family around 1900. Her mother took in boarders,  sometimes begging for handouts from Keogh relations. Lesbia Keogh was one of the first women to study law at the University of Melbourne, and graduated LL.B. in 1916. She opposed Australia taking part in WWI, and campaigned against conscription. An agitator for workers’ rights, she supported some jailed union workers, and worked in factories to gain first-hand knowledge of the harsh conditions, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and became state vice-president of the Federated Clothing and Allied Trades Union. Harford, an advocate for free love, had sexual relationships with both men and women. One of her lovers was Guido Baracchi, a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia, but she never joined the party. In 1920, she married artist Patrick John O’Flaghartie Fingal Harford, a fellow I.W.W. member. Already suffering from her heart condition, she also contracted tuberculosis. Harford wrote poetry in notebooks, and included poems in letters to friends. Her poems were first published in the May 1921 issue of Birth, the Melbourne Literary Club’s journal. The entire issue was devoted to her poetry. Her poems provoked much interest, but she mistrusted publishers, explaining that she was ‘in no hurry to be read’.  Lesbia Harford died at age 36 in July 1927. Some poems featured in Birth were included posthumously in 1927’s An Australasian Anthology. In 1941, a Harford poetry collection, edited by Nettie Palmer, was published with Commonwealth Literary Fund assistance. No complete collection exists. On her death, her father took custody of her notebooks, but they were lost when his shack was destroyed by fire.

Closing Time: Public Library

by Lesbia Harford

At ten o’clock the great gong sounds its dread
Prelude to splendour. I push back my chair,
And all the people leave their books. We flock,
Still acquiescent, down the marble stair
Into the dark where we can’t read. And thought
Swoops down insatiate through the starry air.

“Closing Time: Public Library” from Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford, edited by Oliver Dennis in August 2014, published by UWA Publishing

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1955 – Joolz Denby born as Julianne Mumford in Colchester, England; British spoken-word artist, poet, novelist and tattoo artist; former punk scene bouncer; she organized Poetry in Motion, a local poetry out loud group, and originally gained attention as a touring punk performance poet. Among her published collections are Emotional Terrorism, The Pride of Lions, and Errors of the Spirit.

 Free

by Joolz Denby

The herd of mares broke their hobbles
And bolted through the open field gate
Of the common ground, frayed manes
Whipping the cold and their colts stilting
Leggy on the ice iron turf, the steam of
Their racing blood as they wheeled onto
The main road a frost spume, and the
White bolus of the wild winter moon
Shone in their round, black, rolling eyes
As they wove through the braking slew of
Cars and ran for freedom and the distant moorland;
City horses shaggy as Christmas tinsel
Crazy with the thin, cold air and hope.

© 2020 by Joolz Denby

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April 10

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1937 – Bella Akhmadulina born in Moscow, USSR; Russian New Wave poet, author, short story writer, and translator. She was called the “voice of the epoch. In 1977, she became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Russian Academy of Sciences honored her with the 1994 Pushkin Prize. She is known for Samya Moi Stikhi (My Own Verses), Izbrannoye (Selected Verse), and Larets i Kliutch  (Casket and Key). She died at age 73 in November 2010 in Peredelkino near Moscow.

Something Else

by Bella Akhmadulina

 “What’s happened? For the past year I haven’t been able
to write a poem―no longer seem to know how―
have lost the knack―possess nothing tangible
but a heavy dumbness that fills my mouth.”

You’ll say, “But look, now you have a stanza,
Four lines, a quatrain, part of a whole prepared―”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s second nature
For me to slap lines together, word after word.”

“The hand’s the one in charge of such arrangements.
No, that’s not what I’m talking about at all.
I menat, before, when it wasn’t just verse that happened
But something else. What was it? I can’t recall.

“I wonder if it felt a sense of fear
Back when it had my voice boldly misbehaving
And it laughed like laughter on my open lips
And wept like weeping anytime it wanted?”

“Something Else” from The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose, by Bella Akhmadulina, translated by F.D. Reeve © 1990 – Henry Holt & Co

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April 11

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1722 – Christopher Smart born in Shipbourne, Kent, England; English actor, editor, poet, playwright, and translator. He was a frequent contributor to the popular magazines The Midwife and The Student, and sometimes used the pen names Mrs Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle. In 1757, he was locked away at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London at the instigation of his wife’s stepfather, John Newbery, who was also his publisher, for ‘religious mania’ and a compulsion to pray in public places like the middle of a road. He spent the next six years confined to mental asylums, which greatly damaged his reputation. Arrested for debt in 1770, he was sent to King’s Bench Prison, where he died at age 49 in May 1771. He is now best known for his poems A Song to David and Jubilate Agno.

On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at Her Lover

by Christopher Smart

When, wanton fair, the snowy orb you throw,
I feel a fire before unknown in snow.
E’en coldest snow I find has pow’r to warm
My breast, when flung by Julia’s lovely arm.
T’elude love’s pow’rful arts I strive in vain,
If ice and snow can latent fires contain.
These frolics leave: the force of beauty prove,
With equal passion cool my ardent love.

“On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at Her Lover” from The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart – edited by Norman Callan and published in 1949 by Routledge and Kegan Paul LTD

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1903 – Misuzu Kaneko born as Teru in Nagato on Honshu Island; Japanese children’s poet and songwriter; her widowed mother ran a bookstore and insisted on her daughter continuing her education even though most girls at that time left school after sixth grade. Five of Mizusu’s poems were published in a children’s magazine in 1923, which continued to publish her poems over the next 5 years. Her marriage to a clerk in her mother’s store was a disaster. He was unfaithful, contracted venereal disease which he passed on to her, and he forced her to stop writing. When she finally divorced him, Japanese law automatically gave indisputable custody of their daughter to the father. Misuzu sank into despair. After writing a letter to her former husband begging him to let her mother raise the daughter, she committed suicide just before her 27th birthday in 1930. Ultimately, Misuzu’s mother did raise Misuzu’s daughter. Her work fell into obscurity. In 1966, Setsuo Yazaki, an aspiring poet, found her poem ‘Big Catch’ in an out-of-print book, and spent the next 16 years trying to track down the poet. In 1982, he finally got in touch with Misuzu’s younger brother, who still had the diaries in which she had written her poems. The entire collection was published in a six volume anthology. In 2016, an English-language translation of selected poems, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, was published.

 Wonder

by Misuzu Kaneko

I wonder why
the rain that falls from black clouds
shines like silver.

I wonder why
the silkworm that eats green mulberry leaves
is so white.

I wonder why
the moonflower that no one tends
blooms on its own.

I wonder why
everyone I ask
about these things
laughs and says, “That’s just how it is.”

“Wonder” from Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko – Chin Music Press, 2016 edition

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1949 – Dorothy Allison born in Greenville, South Carolina; American novelist, poet, short story writer, editor, essayist, and teacher. She is also feminist, a lesbian, and writes about class struggle, sexual abuse, and child abuse. She was sexually abused by her stepfather until she told a family member, who told her mother. Though her mother confronted her husband, she did not divorce him. The abuse continued, and Allison contracted gonorrhea, which wasn’t diagnosed and treated until she was in her 20s, leaving her sterile. After the family moved to Florida, she concentrated on school, and became the first person in her family to graduate from high school, and the first to go to college – on a National Merit scholarship. She went on to earn an MA in urban anthropology in 1981 from the New School for Social Research in New York. She then worked in Tallahassee as the editor of the feminist magazine Amazing Grace, and was a founding member of Herstore Feminist Bookstore, but also worked jobs as a maid, a nanny, a substitute teacher, at a child-care center, and at a rape crisis center. At night, she wrote on yellow legal pads about her life experiences and her desire for women. Her first book of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, originally published in 1983, was followed in 1988 by her short story collection, Trash. In 1992, her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, became a controversial best-seller because of its graphic content. It was a finalist for the 1992 Nation Book Award for fiction, but in 1997, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a State Board of Education decision to ban the book in public high schools. In 2007, Allison was honored with the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. Her other work includes the essay collection Skin; the novel Cavedweller; the story Jason Who will be Famous; and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.

To The Bone

by Dorothy Allison

That summer I did not go crazy,
spoke instead to my mama who insisted
our people do not go crazy.
We make instead that sudden evening
silence that follows the shotgun blast.
We stand up alone twenty years after
like a scarecrow in a field
pie-eyed, toothless, naming
our enemies and outliving them.
That summer I talked to death
like an old friend, a husky voice
whispering up from my cunt, echoing
around my knees, laughing.
That summer I did not go crazy
but I wore
very close
very close
to the bone.

“To the Bone” from The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry 1980-1990, ©1991 by Dorothy Allison – Firebrand Books

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April 12

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1907 – Zawgyi (also spelled Zawgee) born as Thein Han in Pyapon, Burma (Myanmar); leading Burmese poet, author, playwright and literary historian. With Theippan Maung Wa, Nwe Soe and Min Thu Wun, he was a leader of the Hkit san (Testing the Times) literary movement in Burma, which searched for new style and content in the years before the WWII. Best remembered for his play Maha hsan gyinthu, an adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and the poem Beida Lan (The Hyacinth’s Way). Zawgyi died at age 83 in September 1990.

 The Way of the Hyacinth

by Zawgyi

Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
Bowing to the tide
Hyacinth rises and falls

Falling but not felled
By flotsam, twigs, leaves
She ducks, bobs and weaves.

Ducks, ducks by the score
Jolting, quacking and more
She spins through—

Spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
She rises, resolute
Still crowned by petals.

– translated by Lyn Aye, © 1988 by Zawgyi

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1941 – Toi Derricotte born as Toinette Webster in Hamtramck, Michigan, near Detroit; American poet and literary memoirist who taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her first poetry collection, The Empress of the Death House, was published in 1978, and five more collections have been published, including: Natural Birth; Captivity; The Undertaker’s Daughter, which won the Pen/Voelker Award ; and “I”: New and Selected Poems. In 2020, she was honored with the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, An Interior Journey, is a record of her family’s experiences as one of the first Black families to move into Upper Montclair, New Jersey. In 1996, Derricotte was a co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, which supports the professional growth of African-American poets.

The blue nightgown

    Can a simple dress become a coping mechanism?
— NPR August 18, 2020

 So many years of misguided self-reflection,
examining every curve in the mirror! Alone,
locked down, I buy online three ice blue
nightgowns I discover I can live in. I glide
through living room, dining room, hall, off the floor
slightly; like the great opera stars of the 20th century,
I’m dressed for singing! My kitchen becomes the stage
of the Met. Cutting the garlic, my hand floats, my
large self floats; I breathe in & out, completely;
the blue nightgown floating around my ankles.

“The Blue Nightgown” was first published in Poem-a-Day on February 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets – © 2021 by Toi Derricotte

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April 13

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1903 – Lincoln Fitzell born in San Francisco; American poet and short story writer. He graduated from Harvard and UC Berkeley. Fitzell joined the Poetry Guild, and became friends with Robert Penn Warren, but made his living as a longshoreman. In 1938, he won the Shelley Memorial Award given by the Poetry Society of America. His poetry collections include: In Plato’s Garden 1929-1939; Morning Rise; and Selected Poems. Fitzell died at age 55 in September 1958.

Fragment

by Lincoln Fitzell

He nodded stonily a-drowse,
Until the coal grew old and thin,
There seemed no one within the house
But sleep that flickered over him.

Seen, relaxed, an endless drift
Of clothing drooped upon a chair,
Or breath, that barely stooped to lift
Deep Weariness into the air.

“Fragment” from Selected Poems, © 1955 by Lincoln Fitzell – Alan Swallow, publisher

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1939 – Seamus Heaney born in Northern Ireland, but lived much of his life in Dublin; prolific and influential major Irish poet, playwright, and translator, notably of Beowolf. Considered one of the major poets of the 20^th century, Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. He taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994).  He published over 20 poetry collections which include Death of a Naturalist; North; Wintering Out; Seeing Things; Electric Light; and Human Chain. Seamus Heaney died at age 74 in August 2013.

Fosterling

by Seamus Heaney

     ‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’
(John Montague)

At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.
The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can’t remember never having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

“Fostering” from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 – © 1998 by Seamus Heaney – Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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