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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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I don’t know about you, but I’m still trying to adjust to “the new reality” – the struggle to get to a post-Covid19 world. Because the pandemic isn’t over, although a lot of people are trying to pretend that it is.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019 ) was a prolific American poet who was born in Ohio, and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The New York Times called her “America’s best-selling poet.”
Unfortunately, too many Americans think they don’t like poetry. They probably had bad experiences with poetry in school. I had a bad experience with e. e. cummings because of a truly awful English teacher in high school, and I didn’t give him another chance until a several years later, when a friend of mine coaxed me into reading some of her favorite e. e. cummings poems.
If ever there was a poet who could overcome the traumas suffered in bad English classes, it’s Mary Oliver. Her poems are clear and direct, deceptively simple. She connects us with the natural world with a child’s sense of wonder, and the wisdom of a real grown-up.
And I think this particular poem of hers also has something to say about our transitional “new reality.”
To read Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Heavy’ click:
Shark Awareness Day falls on July 14th annually.
Sharks are one of the oldest species on the planet, with fossil records showing they were cruising our oceans at least 420 million years ago. Modern-day sharks have been around for about 100 million years. By contrast, human beings only evolved about 200,000 years ago.
There are over 500 species of shark, ranging from the tiny dwarf lantern shark, able to fit into the palm of your hand, to the gigantic whale shark (strictly a filter feeder), which can clock in at up to 10 meters (over 32 feet). However, this is nothing compared to the megalodon, a now extinct relation of the modern-day great white, which may have reached sizes of a whopping 20 meters (66 feet)!
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) British-born American poet, 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 she 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.
Richard James O’Connell (1928 – ) American poet, English literature professor, and translator; served in the U.S. Navy (1948-1952); director of the Walt Whitman Poetry Center (1975-1984)
To read “The Sharks” by Denise Levertov, and “Shoal of Sharks” by Richard O’Connell, click:
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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.
______________________________
June Jordan (1936-2002) was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents. She was a poet, essayist, teacher, feminist, civil rights activist, and self-identified Bisexual. While the students at most of the schools she attended were predominately White, at Barnard College, “No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force . . . Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.” She left without graduating, but returned later. Her first book, Who Look at Me, a collection of poems for children, was published in 1969. She wrote 27 more books, the last three published posthumously. Jordan was the librettist for the musical Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. She taught at several colleges and at SUNY at Stony Brook, then founded the Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley in 1991. She died of breast cancer at age 65 in 2002.
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), American civil rights leader, women’s rights activist, community organizer, and spiritual singer. While having surgery in 1961 to remove a tumor, 44-year-old Hamer was also given a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent by a white doctor; this was a frequent occurrence under Mississippi’s compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state. Hamer is credited with coining the phrase “Mississippi appendectomy” as a euphemism for the involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women, common in the South in the 1960s. Hamer was an organizer of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while trying to register and exercise her right to vote. She later helped and encouraged thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters and helped hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971. In 1970, Hamer led the legal action against the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi for continued illegal segregation. She died of complications of hypertension and breast cancer on March 14, 1977, at age 59.
To read June Jordan’s poem, “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer” click:
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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.
______________________________
Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952 – ) was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of Apache and Chicano ancestry. 
Abandoned by his parents, he ran away at 13 from the orphanage where his grandmother had placed him. Baca was convicted on drug charges in 1973, and spent five years in prison, where he learned to read, and began writing poetry.
His semiautobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), received the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. He has also published over a dozen books of poetry. Social justice, addiction, the disenfranchised, and the barrios of the American Southwest are common themes in his work. In a Callaloo interview, Baca said, “I approach language as if it will contain who I am as a person.”
To read Jimmy Baca’s poem “Immigrants in Our Own Land” click:
June 30, 1966 – National Organization for Women Day: the largest U.S feminist organization is launched, and begins organizing immediately. Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Pauli Murray, and Gloria Steinem were among its first leaders. They were attending the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, which had a theme of “Targets for Action.”
Betty Friedan – Shirley Chisholm – Pauli Murray – Gloria Steinem
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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.
______________________________
June 27, 1905 – The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members were nicknamed the ‘Wobblies,’ was founded in Chicago, Illinois. The IWW was the first union in the U.S. open to women and men of all races. Some of the union’s better-known founders were “Big Bill” Haywood, James Connolly, Eugene V. Debs, Daniel De Leon, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Thomas Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, William Trautmann, Frank Bohn, “Mother” Jones, Vincent Saint John, and Ralph Chaplin
Organizing is the true story of America. The myths of the “Great Man” and the “Lone Wolf” are not the real story of change for the better. Whether it was a farming community getting to together to help a neighbor build a barn – or the movements for the abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, and civil rights – or factory workers demanding safer working conditions and a living wage – getting organized was what pushed us forward, and set an example for the world – one we’ve often failed to live up to, but that’s never stopped some of ‘We the People’ from trying to make those ideals reality.
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 