Good Morning!

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“Be fond of the man who jests at his
scars, if you like; but never believe
he is being on the level with you.”
– Pamela Hansford Johnson,
 English novelist – author of
The Unspeakable Skipton

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Children show scars like medals.
Lovers use them as secrets to reveal.
A scar is what happens when
the word is made flesh.
– Leonard Cohen

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My mission in life is not merely
to survive, but to thrive; and to do so
with some passion, some compassion,
some humor, and some style.
– Maya Angelou

13 Poets born in October.
They turn their memories
and the scars they bare
into messages
f0r all of us

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October 20

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1933 – Alice Friman born in New York City; American poet, editor, academic; professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. She now lives in Georgia, where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College. Winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, she is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is featured in Best American Poetry. Her poetry collections include: Inverted Fire; Reporting from Corinth; Vinculum; and Blood Weather.

Adrienne Rich
              1929-2012

by Alice Friman

She came to read her poems—
those straight-talk towers 
of brick and mortar—and to speak 
of the cracked earth and seething
rock beneath them. Each poem, 
a requiem for the rubble she stood in:
the twentieth century that cast her 
and cost her. A serious woman
who spent her life spending every

thing she had.
                       Outside the room, 
winter maples organized themselves
against the sky, and sparrows 
pecked at what they could find
as they had always done. And we, 
of the chicken salad and buttered roll, 
folded our linen napkins, laid 
down our silver, and hushed— 
waiting for gold.                                                
                           But as soon as 
she mounted the stage and leaned 
to the microphone, we leaned back 
and away in our chairs. You could 
barely discern it, but yes, back away 
is what we did, for in her voice 
and in the match strike of her eyes, 
she flared fire, and I saw again 
the ghost of the old refinery, the one
off Township Line Road, its towers 
lighting the night sky, each burning off 
in one pure flame the impurities we were. 
You see, she spoke true. She spoke witness. 
And we knew it.​

​“Adrienne Rich” © 2012 by Alice Friman – published in The Southern Review

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1939 – Nhã Ca, pen name of Trần Thị Thu Vân, born in Hué, Vietnam; Vietnamese-American poet, novelist, and non-fiction author. After studying at Đồng Khánh College in Hué, she moved to Saigon in 1960, married poet Trần Dạ Từ, and they had seven children. She wrote over twenty books as Nhã Ca (“little anthem”), and founded the Thương Yêu Political publishing house.  Returning to Hué for her father’s funeral in January 1968, she was stranded there during the Tet Offensive. Nhã Ca published her account in 1969 of the Battle of Hué in Giai Khăn Sô cho Huế (Mourning headband for Hue), which was banned after Vietnam’s reunification in 1975. She and her husband were both blacklisted as “cultural guerrillas.” She was jailed for two years, but he was imprisoned for 12 years. After his release in 1989, they (and several of their children) sought asylum in Sweden. They settled in California in 1992, where they founded Việt Báo, which would become a daily newspaper, and sponsors an annual writing contest. Most of her books have not yet been translated into English.

Scar

 by Nhã Ca

The little girl came into existence with a lonely scar

During a time of no hunger no fullness no smell no taste

I live freely in my body and

Listen to the scar growing slowly, taking roots
Infancy flashed to adolescence
O my head hand feet from a childish time

Attuned in time to the smell and taste of love

In one step I left behind my girlhood
The little girl came into existence despite doubts

I alone exist in my deep dark scar

Empty body in which fragments travel

My scar my wound hidden by reeds
No speech no vision nothing at all

I’ve lived with my predicament through the years

All those years I’ve looked at life–a stranger

The war within me continues coldly

“Scar” © 2007 by Nhã Ca, translated by Đinh Từ Bích Thúy – posted at Dàmau: Literature Without Borders

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1981 – Mai Der Vang born in Fresno, CA, daughter of Hmong refugees fleeing Laos; Hmong-American poet. She earned a BS in English from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in creative writing-poetry from Columbia. Her poetry collection, Afterland, won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award in 2016, and her second book, Yellow Rain, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Yellow Rain is myotoxin trichothecene, which was dropped on the Hmong, who were fighting against the Communists, after the U.S withdrawal.

For the Nefarious

by Mai Der Vang

From a recessed hollow
Rumble, I unearth as a creature

Conceived to be relentless.
Depend on me to hunt you

Until you find yourself
Counting all the uncorked

Nightmares you digested.
I will let you know the burning

Endorsed by the effort of
Matches. And you will claw

Yourself inward, toward a
Conference of heat as the steam

Within you surrenders, caves
You into a cardboard scar.

Even what will wreck you
Are your mother’s chapped lips.

Even to drip your confession
Of empty rooms. I know about

Your recipe of rain, your apiary
Ways. Trust me to be painful.

“For the Nefarious” © 2017 by Mai Der Vang appeared in Poetry magazine’s 2017 July/August issue

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October 21

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1907 – Nikos Engonopoulos born just north of Athens, Greece; prolific Greek writer, poet, painter, and translator. His family visited Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the summer of 1914, then stayed there through WWI. He began studying in Paris, but was called up for national military service in 1927-1928. He then spent two years in Athens working during the day, and going to school at night. Engonopoulos worked as a designer at the Ministry of Public Works (1930-1936) while studying painting. His father died in Constantinople in 1937.  In 1938, three of his poems were published in the journal O Kyklos, and he published his first poetry collection, Do Not Distract the Driver. He worked as a set and costume designer at a theatre, published a second volume of poetry, and his paintings were part of a group exhibition. In 1941, he was called up to the Albanian Front. By 1942, his paintings are being shown in several exhibitions, and his reputation is established. In 1945, he begins teaching design and drawing at the National Technical University, but also continues to write both prose and poetry. In 1973, he is named Professor Emeritus, and retires. He was awarded the Cross of the Commander of the Phoenix, and won the State Prize for Poetry twice. He died at age 78 in October 1985. In 2007, a retrospective of his art and poetry was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth..

Poetry 1948

by Nikos Engonopoulos

this age
of civil strife
is no age
for poetry
and such like:
when something is about
to
be written
it’s
as if
it were being written
on the other side
of death announcements

which is why
my poems
are so bitter
(and when – in any case – were they not?)
and are
– above all –
also
so
few

“Poetry 1948” from Selected Poems by Nikos Engonopoulos, translated by David Connolly – Harvard Department of the Classics, 2018 Bilingual edition

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1929 – Ursula K. Le Guin born as Ursula Krober in Berkeley, CA; American novelist, author of short stories and children’s books, mainly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, essayist, and poet. She is known for her Earthsea series, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. A pioneer in feminist science fiction, she was the first woman to win both awards for the same book. Her poetry collections include Out Here; Sixty Odd; Going out with Peacocks; and Wild Angels. She died at age 88 of heart-related causes in January 2018.

Doggerel for a Cat

by Ursula K. Le Guin

His paws are white, his ears are black.
When he isn’t around I feel the lack.
His purr is loud, his fur is soft.
He always carries his tail aloft.
His gait is easy, his gaze intense.
He wears a tuxedo to all events.
His toes are prickly, his nose is pink.
I like to watch him sit and think.
His breed is Alley, his name is Pard.
Life without him would be hard.

“Doggerel for a Cat” from Cat Dreams, © 2009 by Ursula K. Le Guin – Scholastic Inc

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1947 – Ai was born as Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas but spent her impoverished early years in Tucson, Arizona; American poet and educator; her book Vice: New and Selected Poems, won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry. She describes herself as ½ Japanese, ⅛ Choctaw-Chickasaw, ¼ Black, as well as Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche. She attended the University of Arizona and the M.F.A. program at UC Irvine. After being a visiting professor at several colleges, she taught at Oklahoma State University until her death at age 62 from breast cancer in March 2010.   Her poetry collections include: Killing Floor, the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection; Sin, winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Vice, which won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry; and No Surrender, published posthumously in September 2010.

Woman to Man

by Ai

Lightning hits the roof,
shoves the knife, darkness,
deep in the walls.
They bleed light all over us
and your face, the fan, folds up,
so I won’t see how afraid
to be with me you are.
We don’t mix, even in bed,
where we keep ending up.
There’s no need to hide it:
you’re snow, I’m coal,
I’ve got the scars to prove it.
But open your mouth,
I’ll give you a taste of black
you won’t forget.
For a while, I’ll let it make you strong,
make your heart lion,
then I’ll take it back.

Woman to Man” from Cruelty, © 1973 by Ai – Houghton Mifflin Company

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October 22

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1929 – Stanley Cooperman born in New York City, who became a Canadian citizen in 1972; American-Canadian poet, literary critic, and academic. He earned a BA and an MA from New University, and a PhD from Indiana University. Cooperman taught at the University of Tehran through a Fulbright Award, and at several U.S. Universities. He committed suicide at age 46 in April 1976. His poetry collections include: The Owl Behind the Door; Cappelbaum’s Dance; Canadian Gothic and Other Poems; and Greco’s Last Book: Selected Poems, published posthumously.

Mitla Pass: The Sinai

by Stanley Cooperman

I remember the landscape as a place
where machines flake
but never rot,
and the occasional shin-bone,
unfired shell shoe
chamber-pot
town newspaper
(the print flowing in that liquid script
no wind can cure)
rest heavily on sand,
set
in some thick and perfect lens.

I remember the landscape as a place
where all laughter
is accidental, and a question
could break your foot;
I remember birds
attacking each other on a wall,
dust-devils
near a few stray palms
arranged
like paraplegics against the sky ….

this is no country for boasting.

“Mitla Pass: The Sinai” from The Jerusalem Poems, © 1975 by Stanley Cooperman, which appeared in the August 2014 issue of The Ontario Review

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1934 – Gerald Vizenor born in Minneapolis, MN, as an enrolled member  of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation; prolific American novelist, nonfiction writer, essayist, poet, and scholar of the Native American Renaissance. His father was murdered when Gerald was less than two years old, and the case was never solved. Raised by his Swedish-American mother and his Anishinaabe grandmother and uncles, Vizenor served in the U.S. Army in Post-WWII Japan. There, he learned about haiku, and later wrote the “kabuki novel” Hiroshima Bugi. Funded by the G.I. Bill, he completed his undergraduate degree at New York University, then did postgraduate study at Harvard and the University of Minnesota. In the 1960s, he was director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, then became a staff reporter and contributor at the Minneapolis Tribune. He taught at Lake Forest College in Illinois, then the University of Minnesota before moving to California. He was Director of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, and also taught at the University of New Mexico. Vizenor was honored in 2001 with the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award, and won the 2011 American Book Award for his novel Shrouds of White Earth. His poetry collections include Water Striders; Raising the Moon Vines; Empty Swings; and Almost Ashore.

Three Haiku

by Gerald Vizenor

those stubborn flies
square dance across the grapefruit
honor your partner

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From the wind
Along with the scented cat
Spring the anemones.

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cocksure squirrels
break the ice at the window
raid the bird feeder

– © by George Vizenor, featured at Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

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October 23

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1844 – Robert Seymour Bridges born in Walmer, Kent in the UK; British physician and poet who was England’s Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. He wrote and published poetry while practicing medicine, before Lung disease forced him to retire in 1885. He then devoted himself to writing and literary research. In addition to poetry, he also wrote hymns, verse drama, and studies of Milton, Keats, and Gerald Manley Hopkins, as well as essays, and an anthology of French and English philosophers and poets. He died of cancer at age 85 in April 1930.

The Evening Darkens Over

by Robert Seymour Bridges

The evening darkens over
After a day so bright,
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.

The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.

There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under,
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.

“The Evening Darkens Over” from The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges – hansebooks 2017 edition

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October 24

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1923 – Denise Levertov born in Ilford in east London; British-American poet. She married an American in 1947, and moved to the U.S. in 1948. Known for her anti-Vietnam war poems in the 1960s and 1970s, which also included themes of destruction by greed, racism, and sexism. Her later poetry reflects her conversion to Catholicism. No matter the subject, she was always an acute observer, and wrote with a rare combination of economy and grace. Levertov was the author of 24 books of poetry, as well as non-fiction, and served as poetry editor of The Nation and Mother Jones. She was honored with the Robert Frost Medal in 1990, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1993. In 1997, Levertov died from complications of lymphoma at age 74.

The Cat As Cat

by Denise Levertov

The cat on my bosom
sleeping and purring
―fur-petalled chrysanthemum,
squirrel-killer―

is a metaphor only if I
force him to be one,
looking too long in his pale, fond,
dilating, contracting eyes

that reject mirrors, refuse
to observe what bides
stockstill.
          Likewise

flex and reflex of claws
gently pricking through sweater to skin
gently sustains their own tune
not mine. I-Thou, cat, I-Thou.

“The Cat As Cat” from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, © 2013 by The Denise Levertov Literary Trust – New Directions first edition

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1930 – Elaine Feinstein born to Jewish parents in Bootle, Lancashire, in the UK, but grew up in Leicester, in the East Midlands. Feinstein is a novelist, poet, translator, short story writer, teleplay writer, and biographer. After WWII, she was horrified by the revelations of the Holocaust. “In that year I became Jewish for the first time.”  She explored her Russian Jewish heritage, and Russian poetry. After attending Newnham College, Cambridge, she became a lecturer at the University of Essex. She went to Russia in the early 2000s to do research for her biography of poet Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias. Feinstein has written 15 novels, and an equal number of poetry collections, including At the Edge; City Music; Daylight; Talking to the Dead; and The Clinic.

Urban Lyric 

by Elaine Feinstein

The gaunt lady of the service wash
stands on the threshold and blinks in the sunlight.

Her face is yellow in its frizz of hair
and yet she smiles as if she were fortunate.

She listens to the hum of cars passing
as if she were on a country lane in summer,

or as if the tall trees edging this
busy street scattered blessings on her.

Last month they cut a cancer out of her throat.
This morning she tastes sunshine in the dusty air.

And she is made alert to the day’s beauty,
as if her terror had wakened poetry.

“Urban Lyric” from Collected Poems and Translations, © 2002 by Elaine Feinstein – Carcanet Press

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October 25

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1973 – Suheir Hammad born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees; her family came to the U.S. when she was five, and she grew up in Brooklyn. Hammad is an American poet, author, playwright, film narrator and performer, and political activist. Hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons signed her for HBO’s Def Poetry Jam because of her poem “First Writing Since” – her reaction to the September 11 attacks. She recited original works on the Def Poetry Jam tour (2002-2003). In 2007, she was cast in her first fiction role in cinema, the Palestinian film Salt of this Sea by Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, which debuted as an official selection in the Un Certain Regard competition of the Cannes Film Festival. She has written a memoir, Drops of This Story, and several plays, including Blood Trinity
and Libretto. Her poetry collections are Born Palestinian, Born Black/ The Gaza Suite and Zaatar Diva.

Of Woman Torn

by Suheir Hammad

palestine’s daughter
love making can be as dangerous
as curfews broken
guerillas hidden

you join now those who won’t leave
the earth haunt my
sleep who watch my
back whenever i lay
the forced suicides the
dowry deaths and

nora
decapitated by
her father on her forbidden
honeymoon he paraded
her head through
cairo to prove his
manhood this is 1997

and i can only hope
you had a special song a
poem memorized a secret
that made you smile

this is a love
poem cause i love
you now woman
who lived tried to
love in this world of
machetes and sin

i smell your ashes
of zaatar and almonds
under my skin
i carry your bones

“Of  Woman Torn” © 2001 by Suheir Hammad, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal – Interlink Books, 2001 edition

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October 26

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1955 – Michelle Boisseau born in Cincinnati, Ohio; American poet and academic. She taught in the MFA program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and was a contributing editor of New Letters. She won the 1995 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for Understory. Boisseau wrote Writing Poems, considered the gold standard in how-to-write-poetry textbooks, now in its 8^th edition. Her five poetry collections are: No Private Life; Understory; Trembling Air; A Sunday in God-Years; and Among the Gorgons. She died of lung cancer at age 62 in November 2017.

Time Done is Dark

      —Archibald MacLeish

by Michelle Boisseau

           Childhood is a nicked black trunk
you move when you move, from attics
to basements, storage sheds, crawl space,
walk-in closet. When they were in

their sixties and their mother in
her eighties, they said to her, We
are miserable, our childhoods
were miserable. And their mother?

Oldest of seventeen, four years
of school, Nothing Soup—raw milk, salt,
pepper, flour—spring snow sparkling
through the wallboards, her first child

at fifteen. Childhood is a nicked
trunk you don’t have to look inside
to remember. Blasted lining,
the smell of nickels. Childhood, let

it be long ago, like glaciers.

“Time Done is Dark,” © 2005 by Michelle Boisseau, appeared in the November 2005 issue of Poetry magazine

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