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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
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April 29, 1982 – International Dance Day was launched by the Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute (ITI).
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) America’s best-known woman poet and one of the nation’s greatest and most original authors, lived the life of a recluse in Amherst Massachusetts. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, ignoring the traditional poetic forms prevailing among most of the other poets of her day. The extent of her work wasn’t known until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered her cache of poems.
To read Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes” click:
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Carol Ann Duffy (1955 –) — Scottish poet and playwright, became the first woman, first Scot, and first openly LGBT person appointed as Britain’s Poet Laureate (2009-2019). Her 1985 poetry collection, Standing Female Nude, won the first of her three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. Mean Time (1993) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She also won the 1995 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and many other honors. In Duffy’s The World’s Wife, she gives us a collection of modern versions of the old tales, with an unsettling feminist twist.
To read Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Tea” click:
Yesterday, a member of the Michigan state senate gave a speech which struck right at the hate-filled heart of right-wing extremism and deception.
Her name is Mallory McMorrow – it’s a name worth remembering, because I’m hoping she will soon be running for the U.S. Congress. Voices like hers are so needed in Washington DC.
To see and hear her speech click:
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“Silence is like a river of grace inviting us to leap unafraid into its beckoning depths. It is dark and mysterious in the waters of grace. Yet in the silent darkness, we are given new eyes.”
– Macrina Wiederkehr
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Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) pen name of the Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, who was born in Odessa, to a Ukrainian naval engineer and a mother descended from Russian nobility. She married poet Niklay Gumilev in 1910, but divorced him in 1918. In 1911, she was a co-founder of the Guild of Poets. The guild published her book of verse, Vecher (Evening), in 1912. The book sold out, and secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer. When her second collection, Chetki (Beads, or The Rosary), appeared in 1914, thousands of Russian girls wrote poems in imitation of her style, and she was dubbed “Soul of the Silver Age.” But in February 1917, the revolution started in Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. In a city without electricity or sewage service, with little water or food, the people faced starvation and sickness. Some of Akhmatova’s friends died, while others left for Europe and America. Her poems during the years of the world war, revolution, and totalitarian repression in Russia were described as “grim, spare, and laconic.” In 1921, her former husband, Nikolay Gumilev, was named as a conspirator in a monarchist anti-Bolshevik plot, and he was shot along with 61 others. Akhmatova and her son Lev, fathered by Gumilev, were stigmatized. Lev’s later arrest during the purges and terrors of the 1930s was based on being his father’s son. Akhmatova’s poetry was now denounced as “bourgeois,” reflecting only trivial “female” preoccupations. She was attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends, and seen as an anachronism. During what she termed “The Vegetarian Years,” Akhmatova’s work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she didn’t stop writing poetry. She earned a bare living translating works by Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and writing scholarly works on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. Many USSR and foreign critics and readers concluded she had died. Her son Lev was denied access to study at academic institutions because of his parents’ alleged anti-state activities. Lev was imprisoned repeatedly by the Stalinist regime, accused of counter-revolutionary activity. She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf. Her poetry cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time.
by Anna Akhmatova, Odessa 1939
“For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I’ve thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever –
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.”
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 