Good Morning!

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It is easier to oppose evil from
the beginning than at the end.
—Leonardo da Vinci

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“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are
not proving him a liar, you’re only telling
the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, 
A Clash of Kings

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13 poets born this week
witnesses to Nature’s beauty,
the ironies of Life, and
the cruelty of endless Wars

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April 14

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1905 – Inger Hagerup born as Inger Johanne Halsør in Bergen, Norway; Norwegian writer, playwright, and considered one of the greatest Norwegian poets of the 20^th century. Her father died when she was five, and the family moved around until they settled in Volda on Norway’s western coast. In 1931, she married Anders Askevold Hagerup, a teacher and children’s book author.  She published her first poetry collection in 1939.  Both she and her husband participated in resistance activities during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany and in 1943 they fled to Sweden. Among the many anti-Nazi poems she wrote, her best-known is “Aust Vågøy” about Nazi retaliation against locals after a successful 1941 British raid in the Lofoten Islands. Some of her lyric poetry has been set to music. Among her many honors, the Swedish Academy awarded her the Dobloug Prize in 1962. Inger Hagerup died at age 79 in February 1985.

Oh, These Violet Hours of the Morning

by Inger Hagerup

Oh, these violet hours of the morning
when time is still a wakeful dream
and happiness runs large in shining swarms
gleaming in currents of the mind.

With earth and sky a single translucent
proof of your own breathing being,
all is good, and nothing is important
bar shiny things you want to do

with this unborn something resting in you
and calmly longing to be used,
wings of baby birds that carry with them
their summer sky and blissful soaring flight

— translated by May-Britt Akerholt

“Oh, These Violet Hours of the Morning” from Strofe med vinden (Stanza with the Wind), H. Aschehoug & Co, Oslo 1958 edition

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1914 – Hamo Sahyan born in Lor, Armenia; Armenian poet and translator who graduated from Baku Pedagogical Institute in 1939, and joined the Soviet Navy during WWII. He worked on newspapers, and was an editor of Grakan tert, the Writers Union paper. His first poetry collection was published in 1945. He was awarded the State Prize of Armenia for his 1972 book, Sezam, batsvir. Hamo Sahyan died at age 79 in July 1993.

 Oh to walk my way

by Hamo Sahyan

Oh to walk my way with kindness,
And not betray my life to a cloud of suspicions―
How I wish that someone would believe me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.

To triumph in an unequal battle,
To embrace with love both small and big,
How I wish that someone would beIieve me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.

Let the silence burst forth with fury,
And the eternal noise die down for good.
How I wish that someone would believe me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.

– translator not credited

“Oh to walk my way” from K’are patarag (Where are you?) by Hamo Sahyan – Nairi, 1999 edition

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1935 – James Baker Hall born in Lexington, Kentucky; American poet, novelist, photographer, and academic. His mother committed suicide when he was 8 years old, a scandal which was hushed up. Baker Hall finally wrote about its impact on him in his memoir The Missing Body of the Fox, published posthumously by his wife, writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall in 2022. At age 11, he learned photography from a cousin who was a commercial photographer. Hall graduated from the University of Kentucky with a B.A. in English, then received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1960. Hall was a contributing editor for the quarterly photography magazine Aperture, and taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky from 1973 until he became professor emeritus in 2003. He was Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (2001-2002). He combined his photographs with poems in Pleasure. Baker Hall died at age 74 in June 2009.

Spring

by James Baker Hall

I was all up in the eyes
when the sun fell upon me
shutting me down in the pupils
Light and dark became my sudden work
I’d been there before
among the names
of several things
I took the closest
new firepole of air
and spun downwards
When I reached stability
again the crocuses
had arrived
Were moving
Some one color
Others another

“Spring” from The Total Light Process: New & Selected Poems, © 2004 by James Baker Hall – University Press of Kentucky

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1982 – Rachel Swirsky born in San Jose, California into a Jewish family; prolific American speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, essayist, editor, and reviewer. She is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  In 2008, she was the founding editor of the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle. Her fiction works have been honored with two Nebula Awards, and nominated several times for Hugo Awards. Swirsky’s poetry has appeared in the Canadian quarterly Ideomancer, the speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede, and the fantastical poetry quarterly Goblin Fruit. Ger collection Through the Drowsly Dark: Short Fiction and Poetry was published in 2010. Swirsky lives in Portland, Oregon.

Luna

by Rachel Swirsky

Alone
with no one to call
no man, no lady, no rabbit
only footprints of men
who won’t return.

“Luna” © 2022 by Rachel Swirsky

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April 15

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1958 – Benjamin Zephaniah born as Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah to a Barbadian father and a Jamaican mother in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK.  He was a British spoken word and print poet, novelist, actor, musician, professor of poetry and creative writing, and an anti-racism activist. He began creating dub poetry, a Jamaican form of oral poetry at age 11, and quickly became known for his poetry in the local Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities of the Handsworth district of Birmingham. He was given an old manual typewriter and began to put his poems on paper. He spent time in borstal (youth detention centre) then in his late teens went to prison for burglary. After his release, at age 22 he went to London, and his first book, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980. He published 13 poetry collections, many of them for children, six novels, five children’s books, and wrote eight plays. He also acted on television, notably as Jeremiah Jesus, in the period crime drama Peaky Blinders.  Benjamin Zephaniah was diagnosed with a brain tumour just weeks before he died at age 65 in December 2023.

 Who’s Who

 by Benjamin Zephaniah

 I used to think nurses
Were women,
I used to think police
Were men,
I used to think poets
Were boring,
Until I became one of them.

“Who’s Who” from Talking Turkeys, © 2014 by Benjamin Zephaniah – Puffin Poetry

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1931 – Tomas Tranströmer born in Stockholm, Sweden; acclaimed and influential Swedish poet, psychologist, novelist, and translator. He was honored with the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, but continued to write and publish poetry. One of his last volumes of original poems, Den stora gåtan,  published in 2004, was translated into English in 2006 as The Great Enigma. Tranströmer died at age 83 in March 2015.  Among his 13 collections of poetry are The Half-Finished Heaven, Seeing in the Dark, The Truthbarrier, and The Sorrow Gondola.

After Someone’s Death

by Tomas Tranströmer

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, pale, shimmering comet’s tail.
It shelters us. It makes the TV images fuzzy.
It settles in cold droplets on the power lines.

You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun
through groves where last year’s leaves hang on.
Like pages torn from old telephone books—
all of the names swallowed up by the cold.

It’s still pleasant to feel the heart beating.
But the shadow often seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

“After Someone’s Death” from The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, © 2011 by Tomas Tranströmer – translation © 2023 by Patty Crane – Copper Canyon Press 

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1958 – Anne Michaels born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Canadian poet and novelist. She attended the University of Toronto, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English. .Her first poetry collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Her other poetry collections include: Miner’s Pond; Railtracks; Correspondences; and All We Saw. Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces won 12 awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.

Women on a Beach

by Anne Michaels

Light chooses white sails, the bellies of gulls.

Far away in a boat, someone wears a red shirt,
a tiny stab in the pale sky.

Your three bodies form a curving shoreline,
pink and brown sweaters, bare legs.

The beach glows grainy under the sun’s copper pressure,
air the colour of tangerines.
One of you is sleeping, the wind’s finger
on your cheek like a tendril of hair.

Night exhales its long held breath.
Stars puncture through.

At dusk you are a small soft heap, a kind of moss.
In the moonlight, a boulder of women.

“Women on a Beach” from The Weight of Oranges, © 1986 by Anne Michaels – McClelland & Stewart

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April 16

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1935 – Sarah Kirsch born as Ingrid Kirsch in Prussian Saxony, but changed her name to Sarah in protest of her father’s anti-Semitism; prominent German post-WWII poet and author. After she protested East Germany’s expulsion of poet and dissident Wolf Biermann in 1976, she was excluded from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In 1977 she moved to West Germany, but remained critical of both East and West Germany. She died at age 78 in 2013.

Cat lives

by Sarah Kirsch

Poets love cats of course
The gentle free who cannot be controlled
Who sleep and dream November rain away
On silk chairs or in rags speak back
Without saying a word shake themselves
And get on with their lives
Behind the hunter’s fence
While his possessed neighbours
Are still noting down licence plates
The one being observed in his four walls
Has long left the borders behind

“Cat lives” from Ice Roses: Selected Poems, © 2013 by Sarah Kirsch, translated by Anne Stokes –
 Carcanet Press

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1972 – Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts but raised in Northern California; African American poet and member of the Harvard English and African American studies faculties since 2021. She was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book, Life on Mars. Her other books of poetry include The Body’s Question, Duende, and Wade in the Water. Her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

  [The will to see oneself as fragile]

by Tracy K. Smith 

 The will to see oneself as 
fragile, fallible, 
liable to fail. 

To consider a stranger and 
hear, in the mind’s ear, 
one’s true voice

insisting: I must change.
Ordinary people do this
Patient urgent work

alone and together
day upon day upon day.
Like my mother, once,

leading her ailing mother 
back through the maze 
of our suburban scrawl,

past ache, past haze, 
past confusion and rage
toward a neat room

where waited prayer,
fear, forgiveness, 
grief, grace. This

is a poem about kin 
and neighbors and nations 
adrift, in error, under siege. 

This is a ceasefire poem. 

© 2023 by Tracy K. Smith 

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April 17

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1586 – John Ford born at Bagtor, his family’s estate in Devonshire; notable English playwright, who also wrote poetry, during the reign of Charles I. There are few details of his life known from 1600, when he first arrived in London, to 1606, when he completed his first literary works Fame’s Memorial and Honour Triumphant. In 1601, he was residing at the Middle Temple, a complex of buildings which is one of the Inns of Court, the four associations of the barristers of England and Wales, but it is not known if Ford was studying for the bar, or was a just gentleman boarder. Financial difficulties got him expelled from the Middle Temple between 1606 and 1608, when he was readmitted. From 1620 onward, he concentrated on writing plays, and is best known for his 1633 tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a family drama with brother-sister incest. Ford’s date of death is unknown, but is believed to have been in 1639.

Dawn

by John Ford

Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
Watchful sorrows charm’d in sleep!
Tho’ the eyes be overtaken,
Yet the heart doth ever waken
Thoughts chain’d up in busy snares
Of continual woes and cares;
Love and griefs are so exprest
As they rather sigh than rest.
             Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
             Watchful sorrows charm’d in sleep!

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April 18

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1925 – Bob Kaufman born as Robert Garnell Kaufman in New Orleans, Louisiana; American Beat poet, jazz performance artist, and satirist. His father’s family were German Jews, and his mother was from a Black Catholic New Orleans family. Kaufman joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at age 18, then in the early 1940s, he briefly studied literature at New York City’s New School for Social Research. He moved to San Francisco’s North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. In 1959, along with poet Allen Ginsberg and others, he was a co-founder and one of the editors of Beatitude poetry magazine. He was primarily a spoken word poet, and many of his poems would have been lost if his second wife Eileen Singe had not gathered up the scraps of paper he often used, or written them down as he worked them out aloud. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He finally broke his silence by reciting his poem “All Those Ships that Never Sailed.” After some of his poetry was published in French translation, he was hailed in France as the Black American Rimbaud. He died of emphysema at age 60 in January 1986. His poetry collections include: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness; The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978; and two published posthumously – Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems, and Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. 

Lorca

by Bob Kaufman

   Split ears of morning earth green now,
Love and death twisted in tree arms,
   Come love, throw out your nipple
to the teeth of a passing clown.

Spit olive pits at my Lorca,
Give Harlem’s king one spoon,
At four in the never noon.
Scoop out the croaker eyes
   of rose flavored Gypsies
Singing García,
In lost Spain’s
Darkened noon.

“Lorca” from The Ancient Rain, © 1981 by Bob Kaufman –  New Directions Publishing

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April 19

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1931 – Etheridge Knight born in Corinth Mississippi; African-American poet; after his family moved to Paducah , Kentucky, he became a frequent runaway, and though a bright student, he left school at 16, working as a shoe shiner but hanging out in juke joints, and playing pool and poker. He was exposed to “toasts” a form of oral story-telling poetry. He served as a medical technician during the Korean War (1947-1950), where he was seriously wounded and began using morphine. Discharged from the army, he went to Indianapolis, and became a thief and drug dealer to support his opiate addiction. In 1960, he was arrested for armed robbery, and sent to prison. He began to read, started writing for prison publications, then submitted poetry to Negro Digest in 1965.  Broadside Press published his first book, Poems from Prison. In 1968, he was released. Knight was briefly married to poet Sonia Sanchez, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh, but his ongoing drug addiction caused the marriage to fail. In 1977, he received Methadone treatments which finally broke his addiction. He earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University in 1990, and taught the University of Pittsburgh and other schools before his death from lung cancer at age 59 in March 1991. His other poetry collections include: Belly Song and Other Poems, which was nominated was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Born of a Woman; and The Lost Etheridge, edited by Norman Minnick, and published posthumously in 2022.

Haiku

by Etheridge Knight

Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.

― from The Essential Etheridge Knight, © 1986 by Etheridge Knight – University of Pittsburgh Press

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April 20

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1950 – Michael Davitt born in Cork, in the province of Munster, Ireland; Irish reporter, a Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) presenter-producer-director and poet. A key figure in the Irish language poetry movement, he wrote most of his poems in the Irish language. In 1970, he co-founded Innti, an Irish language literary journal. In 1994, he was awarded the Butler Prize for Literature by the Irish American cultural Institute. Some of his dual-language collections include Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta and The Oomph of Quicksilver. He died unexpectedly at age 55 in June 2005. 

O My Two Palestinians

by Michael Davitt

 (18/9/82, having watched a news report on the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut )

I pushed open the door
enough to let light from the landing
on them:

blankets kicked off
they lay askew
as they had fallen:

her nightgown tossed above her buttocks
blood on her lace knickers,
from a gap in the back of her head

her chicken brain retched on the pillow,
intestines slithered from his belly
like seaweed off a rock.

liver-soiled sheets,
one raised bloodsmeared hand.
O my two Palestinians rotting in the central heat.

© 1982 by Michael Davitt

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