Good Morning!

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“Time is what we want most, 
but what we use worst.”
– William Penn

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
– Charles Dickens,
opening of A Tale of Two Cities

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“Whether it’s the best of times
or the worst of times, it’s
the only time we’ve got.”
– Art Buchwald,
columnist and humorist

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13 poets born in November,
touching on the earthly
and the celestial, the
domestic and the global,
on all that makes us of
the spirit and the flesh.

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November 10

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1879 – Vachel Lindsay born in Illinois, American poet; he was known for “The Congo” but its reputation has been tarnished by the racist stereotypes it contains. He is also known for his writings about Abraham Lincoln, and noted for what he called “singing poetry” – poems that were meant to be sung or chanted. Vachel Lindsay, in financial difficulties and failing health, committed suicide at age 52 in December 1931.

What The Moon Saw

by Vachel Lindsay

Two statesmen met by moonlight.
Their ease was partly feigned.
They glanced about the prairie.
Their faces were constrained.
In various ways aforetime
They had misled the state,
Yet did it so politely
Their henchmen thought them great.
They sat beneath a hedge and spake
No word, but had a smoke.
A satchel passed from hand to hand.
Next day, the deadlock broke.

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November 11

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1889 – Mantarō Kubota born in the Akakusa district of Tokyo to a clothing merchant family; Japanese writer, playwright, novelist, and poet. His grandmother took him to the theatre as a child, and provided financial support which enabled him to attend Keio University. In 1911, he made his literary debut with the novella Asagao (Morning Glory) and a stage play Yugi (Game).  He became friends with novelist Takitarō Minakami (pen name Abe Shōzō), and was published in the literary magazine Hototogisu. Kubota began teaching literature courses at Keio University in 1919, while writing novels and plays. In the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, his home burned down. In 1926, he went to work at the Tokyo Central Broadcasting Station in their drama and music department, then became head of the station’s literary department (1931-1938). Kubota’s wife committed suicide in 1935, and Kubota struggled to raise his son. He also started doing some assignments for Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (Tokyo Daily News) in 1936. Kubota was a co-creator of the Bungakusa Theatre Company in 1937. He was editor of the haiku magazine Shunto, and published several collections of his own haiku. He was awarded the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize for literary achievement in 1942. Kubota had to move again in 1945 after an air raid destroyed his home. In the 1950s, he was chair of the Japan Writers’ Association, joined UNESCO, and became a professor at Kyoritsu Women’s University. He was awarded the Order of Culture and appointed as a Person of Cultural Merit. Mantarō Kubota died of food poisoning at age 73 in May 1963, and was posthumously awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasures.

This haiku by Mantarō Kubota was inspired by watching his 3-year-old son, who was playing alone:

this feeling of loneliness –
he plays with his building blocks
as the snow heaps up

– translator not credited

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1937 – Alicia Suskin Ostriker born in Brooklyn NY; American Jewish feminist poet and scholar; professor of English at Rutgers University (1972-2004); noted for her poetry collections: Once More Out of Darkness, which featured poems about pregnancy and childbirth; A Dream of Springtime; and the feminist classic The Mother-Child Papers, inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War, just weeks after the Kent State shootings. Her collection, The Imaginary Lover, won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her non-fiction work includes Writing Like a Woman, which explores the poetry of contemporary poets like Anne Sexton, May Swenson and Adrienne Rich; and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Vision and Revisions, which takes a look at the Torah, which was followed by For the Love of God.   She was the New York State Poet (2018-2020).

The Encounter with the Goddess

by Alicia Ostriker

     There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling
          —Robert Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

That one story worth your telling
Is the ancient tale of the encounter
With the goddess
Declares the poet Robert Graves

You can come and see
A sublime bronze avatar of the goddess
Standing in the harbor holding a book and lifting a torch
Among us her name is Liberty

She has many names and she is everywhere
You can also find her easily
Inside yourself—
Don’t be afraid—

Just do whatever she tells you to do

“The Encounter with the Goddess” © 2020 by Alicia Ostriker – poem commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative.

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1946 – Wing Tek Lum born in Honolulu, Hawaii; American poet, realtor, and former social worker. In the late 1960s, while studying engineering and art at Brown University, he joined the protests against the Vietnam War, and was arrested at the Pentagon during a march on Washington. After graduating from Brown, he attended the Union Theological Seminary, and graduated with a Masters in Divinity in 1973, then spent three years as a social worker in New York City’s Chinatown. In 1976, he moved back to Honolulu, where he and his brother run his family’s real estate company, and he is also the business manager for Bamboo Ridge Publishing, which has published his poetry books Expounding the Doubtful Points, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems, which was inspired by Iris Chang’s non-fiction book The Rape of Nanking. Lum was honored with an American Book Award in 1988, and an Elliot Cades Award for Literature in 2013.

But It Was

by Wing Tek Lum

We were in the old house in the kitchen.
I was sitting at the dining table
and they were cooking by the stoves.

And somehow it was me, the cupid,
who reminded them
that it was their anniversary.

And he uttered a surprise
and embraced her
with a smooch right on her lips.

And she pushed him away
flustered and complaining about his stubble
and how this was no big deal.

But it was.
It was the only time
I ever did see them kiss.

“But It Was” from Expounding the Doubtful Points, © 1988 by Wing Tek Lum –Bamboo Ridge Press

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November 12

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1945 – Judith Roitman born in and raised in New York City; American mathematician specializing in set theory, topology, and Boolean algebra; has run workshops for elementary and high school teachers on teaching mathematics; served in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics writing group which produced Principles and Standards for School Mathematics; received the Louise Hay Award in recognition of her work as a math educator. Roitman is also a poet. Her poetry collections include Slippage, No Face, and Roswell.

As a Leaf

by Judith Roitman

Copy to copy as a leaf falls transformer to transformed
light on glass moving as hands denied & flight

suspended from wings but without looking
all things against blue the blue room blue house

we find it this way every so often turning the wrong corner
the right one filling up all gone against blue

covered within light the heart the sign of it steady
the wire angling up into vision

things ready to fall
& others spinning up suspended wasp motion

within derelict acts & clarity of motion
stillness within motion & so on.

“As a Leaf” © 2008 by Judith Roitman

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November 13

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1943 – Lola Haskins born in New York City, but raised in northern California; American poet, author, and computer science instructor at the University of Florida. She was also on the faculty of the Rainier Writer’s Workshop (2004-2015) in Washington state. Her poetry collections include: Planting the Children; Desire Lines; how small, confronting morning; Still, the Mountain; and Hunger. Her new book Homelight won the Southern Literary Review 2024 Poetry Book of the Year.

To Play Pianissimo

by Lola Haskins

Does not mean silence,
the absence of moon in the day sky
for example

Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child’s whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother’s right ear.

To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

“To Play Pianissimo” from Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano, © 1990 by Lola Haskins – University of Central Florida Press

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1946 – Wanda Coleman born as Wanda Evans in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; Black American poet, short story, and soap opera script writer. Her poetry began to be published in a local newspaper when she was 13. By age 20, she was married and had two children, but went to writing workshops on the weekends. By 1969, she was divorced, and supporting her children by waiting tables and doing typing jobs. Her first published poetry volume was a chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, in 1977, but her first full-length book of poetry, published two years later, was Mad Dog Black Lady.  Her other collections include Heavy Daughter Blues and African Sleeping Sickness, both mixes of poetry and short stories; Ostinato Vamps; Bathwater Wine; and Mercurochrome.  She died in November 2013, just before her 67^th birthday. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems was published in 2020.

American Sonnet 51

by Wanda Coleman

in my last incarnation i inoculated myself
with oodles of dago red and stumbled into fame
without falling. i worshipped in the temple of Lady Day
and took Coltrane as my wizard. i always wore my mink coat
to the Laundromat and drank pale champagne with my

soft-boiled eggs. i believed King Kong got a raw deal.
i believe great and prolonged sex cured cancer. i believed
in the afterdeath. i was liberator of cough-and-gaggers
from the cages of their spew. i scavenged rusted auto parts,
built a niggah machine, loaded it with atomic amour and

wiped out all purveyors of poverty. . . swapped my pink
pearl for a black sapphire. and then one quincentennial
i rose from the magnificent effluvium of my jazz
to discover my children did not know me

“American Sonnet 51” from Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, © 2020 by The Estate of Wanda Coleman – Black Sparrow Press

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1961 – Eli Coppola born as JoAnn Elizabeth Coppola; American poet who grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, and graduated from Connecticut College in 1983, the same year she won the Nancy Rockmaker Memorial Prize for Poetry. Coppola was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her early 20s, and moved to San Francisco in 1985. She was a popular member of the “Poetic Outlaws” who were part of the spoken word poetry scene at Café Babar, and was an assistant to June Jordan at the UC Berkeley Women’s Studies Program. Coppola published five poetry chapbooks: Animals We Keep in the City; Invisible Men’s Voices; As Luck Would Have It; no straight lines between no two points; and Anyway. In April 2000, Eli Coppola died of a heart attack at age 38.

It’s Not A House, It’s A Woman

by Eli Coppola

I can get used
to not having
you here.
I do have blankets.
I’ve been trying to forgive myself
for 27 years now
and the outcome is still
anybody’s guess.
Forgiving you
will have to wait.
Until the moon’s
too full of itself
to hold water.

I’ll walk the dog every day.
Offer martinis to my nightmares.
Like you did, chuckling.
I’ll invent new ways
to make fire, always trying to get
the body temperature right.
I will not take my clothes off
when I sleep.
I will not sleep
when I take my clothes off.
I will wait, patiently, for everything,
eating regularly,
which will probably
kill me.

If you’re not here.

But I must say,
you’ll need more than cabfare
to outdistance my love static
on your radio.
You’ll need
gunpowder in your next drink
to blast me out of your bloodstream.
You’ll need a hundred thousand tomorrows
just to get through today.

Lotsa coyotes out there
howling for the moon, baby,
but I never yet heard
the moon howl
back.

“It’s Not a House, It’s a Woman” from Some Angeles Wear Black: Selected Poems, © 2005 by the family of Eli Coppola – Manic D Press

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November 14

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1910 – Norman Alexander MacCaig born in Edinburgh; Scottish lyric poet and primary-school teacher. He was a lifelong pacifist and during World War II served a term in prison for his beliefs. He eventually left teaching and was appointed Edinburgh University’s first Writer-in-Residence in 1967. MacCaig won the Cholmondeley Medal in 1975 and in 1985 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.  He was made an OBE in 1979. Among his poetry collections are Riding Lights; A Common Grace; Rings on a Tree; The White Bird; and A World of Difference. He died at age 85 on January 1996. His poems were published posthumously by his son in 2005.

MacCaig’s poem “Stars and Planets” was reproduced on a postcard for National Poetry Day in 2012. That year’s theme was “Stars.” Eight poetry postcards are published each year by the Scottish Poetry Library to celebrate National Poetry Day and are distributed throughout Scotland to schools, libraries, and other venues.

Stars and Planets

by Norman MacCaig

Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkle-still, but they never cease
Inventing new spaces and huge explosions
And migrating in mathematical tribes over
The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It’s hard to think that the earth is one –
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

“Stars and Planets” from The Poems of Norman MacCaig, © 2005 by Ewen McCaig, editor – Polygon Publishing

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1969 – Noelle Kocot born in Brooklyn, New York; Kocot graduated from Oberlin College, and teaches creative writing at The New School in New York. They were married to composer Damon Tomblin, whose death from a drug overdose inspired Kocot’s collection Sunny Wednesday. They are the author of 9 poetry collections including: Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems; Phantom Pains of Madness; The Raving Fortune; and Ascent of the Mothers.

They

by Noelle Kocot

Pathetic bright-dark, crawling with history.
Leave it to the angels to judge me.  Gunfire
In the distance, I keep my houselights on
During the day.  No absence of memory,

Please, I am only just getting started.  It
Is precisely the moment to which you “adhere,”
Drawing the wounds on a faded photograph.
You say your deepest powers only come

Once in a lifetime, you say that we blink
Over ourselves. The limit of anywhere is
To forgive, and the classic metaphor for
Effort stumbles at a grave.  I am looking for you

Always.  This is the very moment of stepping
Outside and being thrown into a glare of light.

“They” © 2017 by Noelle Kocot

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November 15

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1887 – Marianne Moore born in Kirkwood, Missouri; influential American poet, critic, editor, and translator. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1909, and taught for four years at the Carlisle Indian School. Moore moved to New York in 1918, and her first book, Poems, was published in 1921. Moore was acting editor of The Dial literary magazine (1925-1929). Her book Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Her many poetry collections include The Pangolin and Other Verse, What Are Years, and O to Be a Dragon. She died at age 84 in February 1972, after a series of strokes.

Silence

by Marianne Moore

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.

“Silence” from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, © 1967 by Marianne Moore –
Macmillan/Viking Press

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1900 (some sources say 1903) – Tatsuko Hoshino born in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of novelist and poet Takahama Kyoshi, who encouraged her to write; Japanese Haiku poet, editor, columnist, and anthologist, known for her poems on the beauty of nature and the changing seasons. In 1930, she founded Tamano, a magazine exclusively for women’s haiku. Tatsuko Hishino, Nakamura Teijo, Hashimoto Takako, and Mitsuhashi Takajo were the leading women haiku poets of Japan’s Shōwa period. Hoshino published her first haiku anthology in 1937. She became the poetry editor of Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and also wrote columns on haiku for the paper and other publications. Tatsuko Hoshino died at age 84 in March of 1984. Only some of her poems have been translated into English.

Two Haiku by Tatsuko Hoshino:

Crisp, rustling leaves fall
Nature’s ballet in motion
Autumn’s quiet hush

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Through the dense fog
A distant bell tolls—
Autumn evening.

– translator not credited

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November 16

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1930 – Chinua Achebe born in Ogidi, British Nigeria; Nigerian novelist, poet, critic, and academic. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is the most widely read book in modern African literature; he won the Man Booker International Prize for his literary career in 2007. Nadine Gordimer called him “the father of modern African literature.” His other novels include No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and A Man of the People.  Influenced by the Igbo oral tradition and culture, he was fiercely critical of how European literature depicted Africa. He wrote in and defended the use of English, describing it as a means to reach a broad audience, particularly readers of colonial nations. He taught at U.S. universities in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. after a 1990 automobile accident left him partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair. He became a professor at Bard College in New York state. In 2013, he died after a short illness at age 82 in Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry collections include Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems, and Christmas in Biafra. 

Air Raid

by Chinua Achebe

It comes so quickly
the bird of death
from evil forests of Soviet technology

A man crossing the road
to greet a friend
is much too slow.
His friend cut in halves
has other worries now
than a friendly handshake
at noon.

“Air Raid” from Collected Poems, © 2004 by Chinua Achebe – Anchor Books

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