Good Morning!

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“… freedom cannot be legislated into existence,
so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be
censored into existence.”
― Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953
– 34^th U.S. President

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“Words are sacred. They deserve respect.
If you get the right ones, in the right order,
you can nudge the world a little.”
― Tom Stoppard,
Czech-born UK playwright

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“A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to
point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments,
shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie, Indian-born UK novelist,
target of an Islamic fatwah (death order) after
his book The Satanic Verses was published

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13 Poets born this week,
some touch the past,
some speak of now
and some cry out for our
beautiful troubled Earth

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June 16

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1884 – Ogiwara Seisensui born in Shinmei (now Hamamatsuchō district), Shiba (ward), Tokyo, as Ogiwara Tokichi; Japanese pioneer of free-form haiku. Ogiwara was expelled from Seisoku Junior High School after publishing a student newspaper criticizing the school’s educational methods and administration. After he quit drinking and smoking, he became a serious student, graduated from Azabu Junior High School, and was admitted to Tokyo Imperial University, where he studied linguistics, and started writing haiku. He left school in 1894 to study with modern haiku master Shuki Masaoka. In 1911, Seisensui co-founded with Kawahigashi Hekigotō the influential avant-garde literary magazine Sōun (Layered Clouds). Seisensui’s body of work includes haiku collections, essays, travelogues, and commentaries on works by Matsuo Bashō. Ogiwara Seisensui died at age 91 in May 1976.

Two Haiku by Ogiwara Seisensui

Walking the sky
a clear moon
all alone

dandelion dandelion
on the sandy beach
spring opens its eyes

translation by Alex Fyffe, March 2012

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1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born in Lockport, New York; prolific American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, and editor. Among her many awards and honors, she was the recipient of two  O. Henry Awards (1967 and 1973), the 1970 National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize. She graduated from Syracuse University as valedictorian with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960. Vanguard Press published Oates’ first book, a short-story collection, By the North Gate, in 1963. After getting her M.A, she became a Ph.D. student at Rice University, but left to become a full-time writer.  As of 2021, she had published a dozen poetry collections, including Women In Love and Other Poems; Angel Fire; Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982; and American Melancholy: Poems.

Waiting on Elvis, 1956

by Joyce Carol Oats

This place up in Charlotte called Chuck’s where I
used to waitress and who came in one night
but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert
at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still
waiting tables and we got to joking around like you
do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip
where it showed below my hemline and I hadn’t even
seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You
sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but
he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in
his mouth.

Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.

“Waiting on Elvis, 1956” © 1987 by Joyce Carol Oates appeared in Poetry magazine ‘s October/November 1987 issue

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1950 – Kalli Dakos born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; prolific Canadian children’s poet, elementary school teacher, and reading specialist. She earned BAH and Bed degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston. The popularity of her children’s poems led to her success as a visiting poet and poetry workshop leader in schools across North America. Her poetry collections include: If You’re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand; Don’t Read This Book, Whatever You Do!; “I Heard You Twice the First Time”; and Why Am I Blue? 

The Pencil and Eraser Were in a Horrid Fight

by Kalli Dakos

The pencil and eraser
Were in a horrid fight,
It went on through the day
And well into the night.

The pencil wrote a poem
About erasers that can’t write,
The eraser erased the poem,
And he did it with delight.

The pencil wrote a sign,
Keep erasers out of sight,
The eraser erased the sign,
And he did it out of spite.

The pencil wrote a note,
“You’re just a parasite!”
The eraser erased the note,
Not a word was left in sight.

The pencil and eraser
Fought all through the night,
And when the morning came,
They had disappeared from sight.

“The Pencil and Eraser Were in a Horrid Fight” © 2023 by Kalli Dakos

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1981 – Ronelda Kamfer in Blackheath, Cape Town, South Africa;  South African Kaaps (Black African dialect of Afrikaans) speaker who writes poetry and  novels in Afrikaans. From ages three to nine, she lived with her grandparents, farm workers in the Western Cape province. She then returned to her parents, who were living in Eerste River, a suburb of Cape Town with a predominately Black and Colored area with social problems like gang activity – the change profoundly affected her life and writing.  In 2011, she earned an Honours degree in Afrikaans and Dutch languages at the University of the Western Cape, in 2019, a Master’s degree in Creative writing at Rhodes University. Her early poems were published in South African and Dutch magazines and anthologies, while she earned a living as a waitress and office worker.  She was published four poetry collections in Afrikaans, and some of her work appears in the 2014 English language anthology In a burning sea : contemporary Afrikaans poetry in translation.

Where I Stand

by Ronelda Kamfer

Now I sit round the table with the enemies of my ancestors
I nod and greet considerately
but
somewhere deep down
I know where I stand

My heart and head are open
and like well-educated people
we laugh and eat together
but
somewhere deep down
I know where I stand

“Where I Stand” © 2013 by Ronelda Kamfer and Robert Dorsman (translator) – from In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 – Deep South Publishers

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June 17

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1871 – James Weldon Johnson born in Jacksonville, Florida; African American writer, anthologist, and civil rights activist, married to civil rights activist and feminist Grace Nail Johnson. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration appointed him as consul of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he was transferred to Corinto, Nicaragua. He wrote substantial portions of his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and his poetry collection, Fifty Years, during this period. The novel was published anonymously to avoid controversy during his diplomatic career. However, when Johnson returned to the U.S., he abandoned diplomacy to become part of an anti-lynching campaign (1917-1920). As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first Black executive secretary (1920-1930), he helped increase membership and extended the NAACP’s reach by organizing many new chapters in the South. During the 1920s, he and his wife promoted the Harlem Renaissance, encouraging young Black writers, and helping them get published. He also collaborated with his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, on many songs, including “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” His poetry collections include Fifty Years and Other Poems; God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse; and Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems. He was killed at age 67 in an auto accident. His wife, who was driving, was seriously injured but survived the crash.

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing

by James Weldon Johnson 

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” from James Weldon Johnson: Complete Poems – © 2000 by Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Literary Executor of the Estate of James Weldon Johnson – Penguin Group (USA)

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June 18

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1920 – Rosemary Dobson born in Sydney, Australia to English-born parents; Australian poet, illustrator, editor, and anthologist. Her father died when she was five years old. Her mother became a housemistress at the Frensham School, a boarding school for girls, and Rosemary was educated there. She began writing poetry at age seven. After completing her studies, she stayed on as an apprentice teacher of art and  art history. At 21, she became a non-degree student at the University of Sydney, studied design with artist Thea Proctor, and worked as a reader and editor for publisher Angus and Robertson. She married publisher Alec Bolton in 1926, and expanded her acquaintance with members of the Sydney artistic scene. The Boltons lived in London (1966-1971) and traveled extensively in Europe. In 1971, they returned to Australia, so he could set up the Publications area of the National Library of Australia in Canberra.  She  published 14 collections of poetry, including: In a Convex Mirror; Cock Crow; Greek Coins: A sequence of poems; The Three Fates and Other Poems, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Literary  Award; and Poems to Hold or Let Go. Rosemary Dobson died at age 92 in June 2012.

The Three Fates 

by Rosemary Dobson

At the instant of drowning he invoked the three sisters. 
It was a mistake, an aberration, to cry out for
Life everlasting. 

He came up like a cork and back to the river-bank,
Put on his clothes in reverse order,
Returned to the house.
^.
He suffered the enormous agonies of passion
Writing poems from the end backwards,
Brushing away tears that had not yet fallen.
^.
Loving her wildly as the day regressed towards morning
He watched her swinging in the garden, growing younger,
Bare-foot, straw-hatted.
^.
And when she was gone and the house and the swing and daylight

There was an instant’s pause before it began all over,
The reels unrolling backwards towards the river.

“The Three Fates” from Collected Poems, © 1991 by Rosemary Dobson
​​​​​​​ — Angus & Robertson

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June 19

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1918 – Mary TallMountain born as Mary Demonski in Nulato Alaska; American poet and storyteller of mixed Koyukon (an Alaskan Abthabscan people), Russian, and Scots-Irish heritage. Her mother, suffering from tuberculosis, gave her up for adoption to the white Randles family, who then moved to Oregon, cutting her off from everything she knew. She wasn’t allowed to speak her native tongue, her adoptive father abused and molested her, and she was bullied by white children at school. The 1930s Great Depression impoverished the family, then the father died of a heart attack. She married at 19, but her husband died three years later. She moved to Reno, Nevada, to train and work as a legal secretary, but also developed an alcohol addiction. After she quit drinking, she started a stenography business, but lost it after being diagnosed with cancer. She moved to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and began keeping a journal. After qualifying for a disability pension, she was able to pursue writing, adopting the name TallMountain, and began publishing her poetry. An Alaskan poet discovered her work, and arranged a grant for her to travel and teach. She went into remission, but the cancer came back, then went into remission again. In 1987, she was a co-founder of the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop. A stroke in 1992 left her unable to do readings or workshops, but she kept writing until her death at age 76 in September 1994..Her poetry collections include: Nine Poems; Continuum; There Is No Word for Goodbye; The Light on the Tent Wall; and A Quick Brush of Wings.

 The Last Wolf

by Mary TallMountain

The last wolf hurried toward me
through the ruined city
and I heard his baying echoes
down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past
the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing
their lighted elevators useless

Passing the flicking red and green
of traffic signals
baying his way eastward
in the mystery of his wild loping gait
closer the sounds in the deadly night
through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks
I hear his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched

He trotted across the floor
he laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered

Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.

“The Last Wolf” from Listen to the Night: Poems for the Animal Spirits of Mother Earth,  by Mary TallMountain, edited by Ben Clarke – published posthumously in 1995 by Freedom Voices Publications

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1941 – Wesley McNair born Newport, New Hampshire; American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and professor. He earned a B.A. in English from Keene State College, then an M.A.  and an M.Litt from the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College. He was Poet Laureate of Maine (2011-2016)  In 2015, he was honored with the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry for The Lost Child: Ozark Poems. By 2018, he was professor emeritus and writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Farmington. Among his many poetry collections are: The Town of No; My Brother Running; Fire; Lovers of the Lost; and Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems.

 The Poem

by Wesley McNair

In the apparent
vacancy beyond
each line, you might
sense the poem

waiting to think
itself. Imagine
the surface of a twilight
pond in wind,

shifting and changing
the sky, then
going still
as a concentrating mind,

the far trees
deepening
in its reflection.
Like the poem

the pond’s alive—
its beauty (the sudden
scintillation of a hundred
thousand wavelets)

and music (the percussion
of a beaver’s tail)
arising from what is.
And when the pond

accumulates
the darkness,
which it loves,
it challenges your eyes

to find the light
that without darkness
you could not see.
Wild campsites

you never noticed
now appear
along the far shore.
It’s not only itself

the poem waits for
moving line by line
into its own dark.
It waits for you.

 “The Poem” from The Unfastening, © 2017 by Wesley McNair –  David R. Godine Publisher

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1950 – Marianne Boruch born in Chicago,  American poet, essayist, memoirist, and academic; raised Catholic, she was educated in parish schools, and spent many summers with her grandparents in the small rural Illinois town of Tuscola. She graduated from the University of Illinois, earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan and the University of Maine at Farmington. In 1967, she developed and directed the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, where she now continues as professor emeritus. She has run workshops and lectured at several summer writer’s conferences. Her essay collections include Poetry’s Old Air and The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays Toward Poetry.  Among her dozen published poetry collections are: View from the Gazebo; Moss Burning; Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; The Anti-Grief; and Bestiary Dark.

 Little Wife

 by Marianne Boruch

      At the Oriental Institute, Chicago

They redid King Tut splendid,
once stone-huge as this
yet his wife’s feet
tiny, the only thing of her now
low, next to him. A few toes, some of the rest,
a bit of ankle, that’s it
in the shade of her husband’s looming, massive
looking straight ahead into the future
where we live and can’t
eye-to-eye, where to stare at him
is to suffer warbler neck, head back and up
à la the high just-leafing-out trees as bright bits
wing their blink
and hide. Little wife,
such small feet, the thought
dwarfs the king
as ache, as what is
ever left of us
and oh, I like her better.

Little Wife © 2011 by Marianne Boruch appeared in Poetry magazine’s November 2011 issue

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June 20

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1952 – Vikram Seth born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India; Indian poet, novelist, and translator, who has published eight books of poetry, three novels, two children’s books, a travel book, and four connected libretti set to music by Alec Roth. He divides his time between the United Kingdom, where he bought and renovated the former home of the Anglican poet George Herbert near Salisbury, and his home in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Seth’s poetry collections include Mappings, All You Who Sleep Tonight, and  Summer Requiem.

Mistaken

by Vikram Seth

I smiled at you because I thought that you
Were someone else; you smiled back; and there grew
Between two strangers in a library
Something that seems like love; but you loved me
(If that’s the word) because you thought that I
Was other than I was. And by and by
We found we’d been mistaken all the while
From that first glance, that first mistaken smile.

“Mistaken” from The Collected Poems, © 1999 by Vikram Seth – Penguin Books

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June 21

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1925 – Stanley Moss born in the Woodhaven neighborhood of Queens NY; American  poet, writer, publisher, and art dealer. His father was a high school principal. When he was eight years old, a tour of Southern Europe and the Middle East awakened his interest in European painting and Levantine culture. In 1949, he was hired as an editorial assistant at New Directions Publishing. His poetry collections include: The Wrong Angel: The Skull of Adam; The Intelligence of Clouds; A History of Color; It’s About Time;  Almost Complete Poems, which won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award; and Abandoned Poems.

 Bright Day

 by Stanley Moss

 I sing this morning: Hello, hello.
I proclaim the bright day of the soul.
The sun is a good fellow,
the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know.
I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die.
In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio
painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow
cured a cripple, gave him back his sight.
I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight.
In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply.
I know the dark night of the soul
does not need God’s eye,
as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.

“Bright Day” from God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike, © 2011 by Stanley Moss –
Seven Stories Press

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June 22

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1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey; American writer; pilot; poet, and diarist. She graduated from Smith College in 1928, and married Charles Lindbergh in 1929. In 1930 she became the first woman awarded a U.S. glider pilot license. In the early 1930s, she was her husband’s radio operator and copilot on multiple exploratory flights and aerial surveys. But after the kidnapping and murder of their 20-month-old son, they moved to Europe in 1935. When they returned to the U.S., they supported the isolationist America First Committee, whose most prominent speakers tended to be pro-fascist. The Committee was dissolved on December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Lindberghs expressed public support for the U.S. war effort. She moved away from politics and wrote poetry and nonfiction, which helped the Lindberghs regain their reputations. Her 1955 book Gift from the Sea became a top nonfiction best-seller in the U.S. that year. After suffering a series of strokes in the 1990s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh died at age 94 in February 2001.

 Interior Tree

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Burning tree upon the hill
and burning tree within my heart,
what kinship stands between the two,
what cord I cannot tear apart?

The passionate gust that sets one free,
– a flock of leaves in sudden flight –
shatters the bright interior tree
into a shower of splintered light.

Fused moments of felicity,
when flame and I and heart unite,
come they from earth, or can they be
the swallows of eternity?

“Interior Tree” from The Unicorn and Other Poems, 1935-1955,  © 1993 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Pantheon

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1951 – Rosario Murillo born in Managua; Nicaraguan poet, revolutionary, and politician. She was Secretary General of the Sandinista Cultural Workers and Director of Ventana Barricada Cultural, the cultural weekly newspaper of the FSLN. Her husband is Daniel Ortega, so she has been the First Lady of Nicaragua since 2007, and Nicaragua’s Vice President since 2017.

My Friends the Street Noises

by Rosario Murillo

I have new friends that can not be postponed.
A blackbird that sings mornings, a flag floating
over the door across the way, a woman
quickening her step. That boy’s eyes make me
remember the shimmer of the rainbow in the
mirror of the pond. His feet in pure slime.
The market open to the morning, to life.
A bag that tires the back out. A slogan on
the wall. I feel the letters incising my womb.
They are the friends of today. They are trying
out the setting up exercises of the dawn.

“My Friends the Street Noises” © 1984 by Rosario Murillo – appeared in BOMB  magazine, Spring 1984

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