Good Morning!

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“We live and breathe words …. It was books that made
 me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone.
They could be honest with me, and I with them …”
– Cassandra Claire, ‘Clockwork Prince’
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“Read, read, read. Read everything —
trash, classics, good and bad, and
see how they do it. Just like a carpenter
who works as an apprentice and studies
the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out.
If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

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13 poets born this week
some familiar, some unknown,
some once-famed now forgotten,
and England’s poet ‘not for an age’

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April 21

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1907 – Sanora Babb born in Otoe territory (now Red Rock Oklahoma), but neither of her parents were of Otoe heritage; American novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary editor. Her father was a professional gambler, but she, her sister, and their mother lived in a one-room dugout on a broomcorm (sorghum) farm near Lamar, Colorado. She didn’t go to school until she was 11, but graduated from high school as valedictorian. Her novel The Lost Traveler, her memoir An Owl on Every Post, and a short story collection, Cry of the Tinamou, are all based on her childhood. After a year at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, lack of money caused her to transfer to Garden City Community College near Dodge City. She worked as a reporter for the Garden City Herald, then moved to Los Angeles in 1929, but a job offer from the Los Angeles Times fell through because of the stock market crash, and she was sometimes homeless until finding work as a secretary at Warner Brothers and as a radio script writer. She joined the Communist Party and visited the Soviet Union in 1936. In 1938, Babb went to work for the Farm Security Administration, making detailed notes on the Dust Bowl migrant tent camps in California. Without her knowledge, her supervisor shared her notes with John Steinbeck. The novel she wrote based on her notes, Whose Names Are Unknown, was shelved by Random House when Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, and won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her novel was finally published in 2004. In the 1940s, she worked as West Coast secretary of the League of American Writers, and edited a literary magazine, one of the first to publish stories by Ray Bradbury. She also ran a Chinese restaurant owned by cinematographer James Wong Howe. She and Howe had married in 1937 in Paris, but he was not allowed to become a U.S. citizen until the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, and their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until the law banning interracial marriage was abolished in 1948, so they had in separate apartments in the same building. When Babb was blacklisted during the HUAC hearings, she moved to Mexico City to protect Howe, who was “graylisted.” Many of her poems appeared in literary magazines before her collection, Told in the Seed, was published in 1998. Sanora Babb died at age 98 in December 2005.

Told in the Seed

 by Sanora Babb

Tonight I hear the first crickets on the hillside,
A big brown spider sits on my dictionary,
The moon is full, o, moon pulling at my tides.
I know the bees are cold tonight, the spring is uncertain
But flowers are waiting; they have come up
From their secret seeds, no seed confused in its image
No matter how I mix them in the earth,
The worm’s fragrant home.
We are strung on the same breath, and this is the secret.
We have not made the deep connection.
This acacia tree with a composition of night birds
Whispers its being, its covenant, and what cannot be said,
Told in the seed; persuaded by sun, sod, the rain and wind,
The lightning and thunder.
I hear crickets making a song upon the hills.

“Told in the Seed” from Told in the Seed: Poems, © 1998 by Sanora Babb – Muse Ink Press

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1971 – Selina Tusitala Marsh born in Auckland, New Zealand; New Zealand poet, academic, illustrator, and editor; New Zealand Poet Laureate (2017-2019).  Her mother is of Samoan and Tuvaluan (Pacific island of Tuvalu) ancestry. She earned a doctorate from the University of Auckland in 2004 after completing her thesis titled “Ancient banyans, flying foxes and white ginger”: five Pacific women writers. Marsh is a Professor at the University of Auckland where she teaches Creative Writing, and Pacific Literature. She has edited the Pasifika poetry section of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. In 2015, Marsh won the Literary Death Match for poets at the Australia and New Zealand Literary Festival in London. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her poetry collections include: Fast Talking PI; Tightrope; and Dark Sparring. She also wrote and illustrated Mophead: How Your Difference Makes a Difference, a memoir in graphic novel form, which won the 2020 top prize at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Salt

by Selina Tusitala Marsh

as if God spilt salt
on his midnight tablecloth

as if Gibran’s Ugly
had flung Beauty’s cloak
across the waters –
its soft light muted
in repentance

as if star by blue star
remembered the loss of each mother
and lit her face for a thousand years

as if matariki
leapt off calendar pages
turning in my veins
down through my fingers
bending to pluck
a purple orchid.

* In Māori culture, Matariki is the Pleiades star cluster. Its rising marks the beginning of the new year in the Māori lunar calendar.

“Salt” from Dark Sparring: Poems, © 2014 by Selina Tusitala Marsh – Auckland University Press

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April 22

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1943 – Louise Glück born in New York City and grew up on Long Island; American poet and essayist; winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Wild Iris; Library of Congress Special Bicentennial Consultant (2000-2002); Poet Laureate (2003-2004); won 2014’s National Book Award (Poetry) for Faithful and Virtuous Night; and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who helped invent and market the X-Acto Knife. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University without earning a degree. In her mid-twenties, she published her poetry collection Firstborn to mixed reviews. Glück has since published over a dozen collections.

Anniversary

by Louise Glück

 I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean
your cold feet all over my dick.

Someone should teach you how to act in bed.
What I think is you should
keep your extremities to yourself.

Look what you did—
you made the cat move.

But I didn’t want your hand there.
I wanted your hand here.

You should pay attention to my feet.
You should picture them
the next time you see a hot fifteen year old.
Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.

“Anniversary” from Meadowlands, © 1996 by Louise Glück – HarperCollins Publishers

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1951 – Andrew Hudgins born in Killeen, Texas, but raised in Alabama; American poet and essayist He earned degrees from Huntingdon College, the University of Alabama, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Hudgins is married to novelist Erin McGraw, and he is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. His poetry collections include: After the Lost War: a Narrative, a speculative biography in verse of Southern poet Sidney Lanier; The Never-Ending;  Ecstatic in the Poison; American Rendering; and A Clown at Midnight.

Air View of an Industrial Scene

by Andrew Hudgins

There is a train at the ramp, unloading people
who stumble from the cars and toward the gate.
The buildings’ shadows tilt across the ground
and from each shadow juts a longer one
and from that shadow crawls as shadow of smoke
black as just-plowed earth. Inside the gate
is a small garden and someone on his knees.
Perhaps he’s fingering the yellow blooms
to see which ones have set and will soon wither,
clinging to a green tomato as it swells.
The people hold back, but are forced to the open gate,
and when they enter they will see the garden
and some, gardeners themselves, will yearn
to fall to their knees there, untangling vines,
plucking at weeds, cooling their hands in damp earth.
They’re going to die soon, a matter of minutes.
Even from our height, we see in the photograph
the shadow of the plane stamped dark and large
on Birkenau, one black wing shading the garden.
We can’t tell which are guards, which prisoners.
We’re watchers. But if we had bombs we’d drop them.

“Air View of an Industrial Scene” from Saints & Strangers, © 1985 by Andrew Hudgins – Houghton Mifflin Co

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April 23

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1564 (traditional date, based on his April 26 baptism) – William Shakespeare born in Stratford-Upon-Avon; English playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, and the world’s greatest dramatist. His poetry output includes the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, but he is best known as a poet for his Sonnets, published in 1609. He died at age 52 on April 23, 1616.

Sonnet XCVIII

by William Shakespeare

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

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1852 – Edwin Markham born Charles Edwin Markham in Oregon when it was still a territory. His parents divorced, and his mother brought up Markham and his siblings on a farm in central California. Disliking farm labor, and frustrated by his mother’s refusal to buy him books, or pay for his education, he left home at 15 until his mother agreed to pay for college. He earned a teacher’s certificate, and taught while taking Classics courses at Christian College in Santa Rosa, then was school superintendent in Placerville, a California gold rush town. Markham sold his first poem in 1880, then regularly contributed poems to Harper’s, Century, and Scribner’s. Markham wrote The Man With a Hoe, first published in the San Francisco Examiner in January, 1899. It was republished in newspapers across the country. With his new-found celebrity, Markham went on tour doing readings and lectures. Though he remained popular with readers, as his style never evolved, critics began calling him “old-fashioned.” On his 80th birthday, there was a celebration at Carnegie Hall, attended by President Hoover. In 1936, Markham suffered a debilitating stroke from which he never fully recovered. He died at age 87 in his home on Staten Island, New York, in March, 1940.

Poetry

by Edwin Markham

She comes as hush and beauty of the night,
And sees too deep for laughter;
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.

“Poetry” from The Gates of Paradise, © 1928 by Edwin Markham – Forgotten Books 2016 reprint

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April 24

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1936 – Vera Rich born as Faith Elizabeth Rich in London; British poet, journalist; historian, and translator.  She studied at St Hilda’s College of the University of Oxford and Bedford College, London. In 1959, her poetry attracted the attention of the editors of John O’London’s Weekly. Her first collection of verse, Outlines, was privately published in 1960 to favourable reviews, selling out within six months. She was a notable translator of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, and Like Water, Like Fire – the first anthology of Belarusian poetry translated into a western European language. She founded Manifold, a “magazine of new poetry” in 1962. Her other poetry collections, which often include her translations as well as her own work, include: Portents and Images; The images swarm free; and Poems on Liberty. Vera Rich died at age 73 in December 2009.

Haiku

by Vera Rich

Two mountains afar,
One sun-gilt, one snow-shower clad –
Here, it is raining.

“Haiku” from Portents and Images, © 1963 by Vera Rich – Mitre P

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1943 – Maureen Scott Harris born in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, but grew up in Winnipeg; Canadian poet  She has a BA and a Library Degree from the University of Toronto, and worked until 1993 as a rare books cataloguer and in other capacities at the University of Toronto Library. She has since been  an author, editor, reviewer, freelancer; and has worked in a bookstore, and as a manager at Brick Books, one of the few poetry-only publishers. In 2005 she won the Trillium Book Award for poetry for Drowning Lessons. In 2009, Scott Harris was the first non-Australian awarded the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. Her poetry collections include: A Possile Landscape; Drowning Lessons; Slow Curve Out; and the bilingual Whispers from the Water / Sussurri dall’acqua.

Be the River

by Maureen Scott Harris

Be the river then, straight or crooked,
its hidden energy pulling it ever down
at a speed that’s barely visible. Be
its red clay trough, be the way it wears
its own being-in-motion into place there,
the polished and runnelled banks which
curve and hold, be both flow and bank
and then the rising above. Be the air above
which pushes against its surface smoothing
or ruffling, snatching for something.
Be the tangle of small willows crowding
the bank, leaning over their reflections,
growing dizzy watching the clouds drift among the fish beneath them. Be willows
and be too the stones in the gravel bank
whose slight movements mirror the way
water meets air, who bask in weather
and are patient. Be the silt washing in from the rain, and the muskrat swirling at
the bank, be the splash and trickle of sounds without identity, half-formed words
surfacing, do you hear? Be the swallows who skim along the water’s surface twisting
their narrow wings to rise and dart and
dip down again. Be all these and more,
whatever falls into the water and through its skin to find its robust and hidden depths,
tumbling towards its wide mouth, singing.

“Be the River,” © 2001 by Maureen Scott Harris, appeared in Arc, winter 2002 issue

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April 25

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1873 – Walter de la Mare born in Kent, in southern England, prolific English poet, and fiction author, the son of a Bank of England official. His mother was related to Robert Browning. Educated in London at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, he worked for Anglo-American Oil Company (1890-1908) in London as a statistic clerk. His first published story Kismet appeared in 1895 under a pen name. In 1908, he was awarded a yearly government pension of £100, and devoted himself entirely to writing He won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for children’s books, and published 13 collections of poetry. He died at age 83 in June 1956.

The Listeners

by Walter de la Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

“The Listeners” from Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, by Walter del al Mare (1923) – Alfred A. Knopf 1957 reprint

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1939 – Ted Kooser born in Ames, Iowa. He worked for insurance companies for over 35 years, writing seven books of poetry in his spare time. U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (2004-2006). He used his time as laureate to further the cause of poetry with American readers. Partnering with the Poetry Foundation, he began the “American Life in Poetry” program, which offers a free weekly poem to newspapers across the United States, aiming to raise the visibility of poetry. He has been honored with four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Delights & Shadows.

Abandoned Farmhouse

by Ted Kooser

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

Abandoned Farmhouse’ from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, © 1980 by Ted Kooser, University of Pittsburgh Press

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April 26

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1946 – Marilyn Nelson born in Cleveland, Ohio, into a military family, and spent most of her childhood on a series of military bases – her father was one of the Tuskegee Airmen; American poet, translator, educator, and children’s author. She earned a PhD from the University of Minnesota, and is now professor emerita at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She was also Poet Laureate of Connecticut (2001-2006).  In 2004, Nelson founded the Soul Mountain Retreat for writers. She won the 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction for The Homeplace; the 2001 Flora Stieglitz Straus Award for Carver: a Life in Poems; the 2012 Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement;and the 2019 Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for her body of work. Nelson is also a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for The Homeplace, The Fields of Praise, and Carver: A Life in Poems.

 How I Discovered Poetry

by Marilyn Nelson

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.

“How I Discovered Poetry” from The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems, © 1997 by Marilyn Nelson – Louisiana State University Press

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1966 – Natasha Trethewey born in Gulfport, Mississippi, American poet and academic. She came to national attention in 1999, when her poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural Cave Canem Prize, an award for the best first collection of poems by an African American poet. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard. She was the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (2012-2014). Her many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Miscegenation

by Natasha Trethewey

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

“Miscegenation” from Native Guard, © 2007 by Natasha Trethewey, Houghton Mifflin

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April 27

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1920 – Edwin Morgan born in Glasgow, but grew up in nearby Rutherglen, Scotland; Scottish poet, translator, and essayist – considered part of the Scottish Renaissance and one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20^th century. He was Glasgow’s first poet laureate. Morgan’s studies of French and Russian at the University of Glasgow were interrupted by his WWII service as a non-combatant conscientious objector with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He did graduate in 1947, was a lecturer at the university, then a full professor until his retirement in 1980. His love poems were never gendered, as he wanted them to be universal, but he identified himself as a gay man in his 1990 work, Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections on his Work and Life. His poetry collections include: Instamatic Poems; Newspoems; and Virtual and Other Realities, for which he won the 1998 Stakis Prize for the Scottish Writer of the Year. He was also a highly respected translator, and was honored with the 2001 Weidenfeld Prize for Translation. He died at age 90 in August 2010.

Kiss Me

by Edwin Morgan

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes,
come on, let us sway together,
under the trees, and to hell with thunder.

– written for the Scottish Poetry Library’s 2004 Valentine’s Day text poem project, © 2004 by Edwin Morgan

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