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Morning Open Thread: What Wind Now in the Long Hot Summer Morning Stirs [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-31
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
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I found over 40 poets born this week – Luckily for you,
I didn’t have enough time to research all of them!
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13 poets this week:
breathing, intruder, gone
forever, warnings and war,
harvest and hats, love wronged,
memories, and city sounds
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July 31
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1949 ― Mark O’Brien, American poet, journalist, and advocate for the disabled, was born in Boston, and raised in Sacramento, California. He contracted polio when he was six years old, and was left paralyzed from the neck down, needing an iron lung to breathe. He earned a BA and an MA from the University of California-Berkeley. As an advocate of independent living for disabled people, O’Brien was a frequent contributor to newspapers, writing columns on such topics as sports, religion, and disability issues. In 1997, he co-founded Lemonade Factory, a press that publishes work by people who have disabilities. He died in 1999 at age 49.
Breathing
by Mark O’Brien
Grasping for straws is easier;
You can see the straws.
“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,”
Presses down upon me
At fifteen pounds per square inch,
A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,
Supporting the weight of condors
That swim its churning currents.
All I get is a thin stream of it,
A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life
As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.
Water wouldn’t be so circumspect;
Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,
But air is prissy and genteel,
Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.
The vast, circumambient atmosphere
Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters
Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.
I inhale it anyway,
Knowing that it will hurt
In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.
— July, 1988
“Breathing” from The Man in the Iron Lung. © 1997 by Mark O’Brien – Lemonade Factory Press
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1954 ― Kim Addonizio born in Bethesda, Maryland; American poet, short story writer, and novelist; recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a 2004 Mississippi Review Fiction Prize; a 2000 Pushcart Prize for Aliens, and a 1994 San Francisco Club Poetry Medal. Her poetry collections include My Black Angel; Lucifer at the Starlite; and What is This Thing Called Love. Her fiction works include In the box called pleasure: stories; Little Beauties; and My Dreams Out in the Street.
Aquarium
by Kim Addonizio
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank
between the green reeds, lit by a white glow
that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank
glass that holds them in displays their slow
progress from end to end, familiar rocks
set into the gravel, murmuring rows
of filters, a universe the flying fox
and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose
pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet
the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping
occasionally, as if they can't quite let
alone a possibility—of wings,
maybe, once they reach the air? They die
on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.
“Aquarium” from The Philosopher's Club, © 1994 by Kim Addonizio – BOA Editions, Ltd.
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August 1
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1888 ― Aline Murray Kilmer born in Norfolk, Virginia; American poet, children’s book author, essayist, and from 1908 until his death in 1918, she was the wife of Joyce Kilmer, a poet mainly remembered for his poem “Trees,” and for dying young in WWII. She bore five children, but their oldest daughter was stricken with infantile paralysis and died at age four in 1917, shortly before her husband was deployed to France. He was killed in 1918 at age 31 by a sniper’s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne. Though some of her poems had been published in magazines before her husband’s death, Aline Murray Kilmer began writing children’s books and publishing her poetry in earnest to support her four remaining children. Her second son, Michael, died at age 11 in 1927. Her poetry collections include Candles That Burn, Vigils, and Selected Poems. In her final three years, she was in terrible pain from an undisclosed illness, and died at age 52 in October 1941.
To An Intruder
by Aline Murray Kilmer
Because I show a guarded face
To all the world but one or two,
And in my heart's most secret place
Consider lilies, why should you
Whose roses grow in common ground
Profane the cloister I have found?
“To An Intruder” from Vigils, by Aline Kilmer – originally published in 1923 – Kessinger Publishing 2010 reprint
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1947 ― Lorna Goodison Jamaican poet, writer, and painter; she was born in Kingston on the first day of August, which is Emancipation Day in Jamaica. “I don’t think it is an accident that I was born on the first of August, and I don’t think it was an accident that I was given the gift of poetry, so I take that to mean that I am to write about those people and their condition, and I will carry a burden about what they endured and how they prevailed until the day I die.” Goodison was the first woman to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017-2021). She has been honored with the 1999 Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for literary contributions, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry, and the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; her poetry collections include I Am Becoming My Mother; Oracabessa; and Supplying Salt and Light. Goodison is also a talented painter, and the covers of her books are usually illustrated with her artwork.
Many Native Women Missing
by Lorna Goodison
At first it seemed
it was just
the cedar tree
extending a limb
to one or two
disembodied
red dresses.
But now the forest
is redolent
with wind-sock
frocks twisting
from branches
of firs, pines
and arbutus.
The shadow
of a black mother
bear climbs up
unto warning posters,
tears at the hems
of empty dresses.
Scores of native
women missing.
“Many Native Women Missing” from Collected Poems, © 2017 by Lorna Goodison – Carcanet Press
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August 2
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1934 ― Stephen Sandy born in Minneapolis, MN; American poet, academic, and translator, who published eleven books of poetry, including Weathers Permitting; Black Box; Netsuke Days; and Overlook. After earning his Ph.D. at Boston University, he became an English instructor at Harvard (1963-1967). In 1967, he went to Japan on a Fulbright Visiting Lectureship. In 1968, he began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. He died at age 82 in November, 2016.
Earth Day Story
by Stephen Sandy
I remember the dusty floorboards of wood in the streetcar
Of the Minneapolis Street Railway Company
And the varnished yellow banquettes of tight-knit rattan
Worn smooth by decades of passengers
The worn gleaming brass grips at the corners of the seats
And the motorman’s little bell
Windows trembling in their casings as we crossed the avenue
Liberty dimes falling softly into the steel-rimmed hour glass
The gnarled hand of the motorman near.
My grandmother arranged herself against the seat
Her back as straight as a soldier’s beside me
Her navy hat with velvet band
And net veil down making her head seem distant,
Her dreaming smile and the patient Roman nose,
A repose so deep; from my place
I watched her when we rode like princes
Rattling past traffic stopped on the granite cobbles
Riding downtown together, my hands in hers;
All that so much
That I love yet but feel no sadness for, that
Time crossed out like the trolley tracks taken up
Or entombed under the pliant blacktop of the modernized.
“Earth Day Story” from The Thread, © 1998 by Stephen Sandy – Louisiana State University Press
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1949 ― Bei Dao is the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai, born in Beijing, China; Chinese-American poet, short fiction author, essayist, and memoirist. He was a member of the Young Pioneers of China, and joined the Red Guards, but became disillusioned by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He co-founded the literary journal Jintian (Today), and protesters at Tiananmen Square carried banners with lines of his poetry. He was on a lecture tour outside the country at the time of the Tiananmen protests, and he was banned from returning to China. Jintian was also officially banned. He was a stateless exile for the next 10 years. In 1990, he was honored with PEN/America’s Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. Eventually he settled in America, and became a U.S. citizen in 2009. His poetry collections include The August Sleepwalker; Old Snow; and The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems.
Sower
by Bei Dao
a sower walks into the great hall
it's war out there, he says
and you awash in emptiness
you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm
I've come in the name of fields
it's war out there
I walk out from that great hall
all four directions a boundless harvest scene
I start planning for war
rehearsing death
and the crops I burn
send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires
but something haunts me furiously:
he's sowing seed across marble floors
– translated by David Hinton
"Sower" from Forms of Distance, © 1993 by Zhao Zhenkai – New Directions Publishing
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August 3
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1887 ― Rupert Brooke born in Rugby, Warwicksire, England; English poet, who enlisted at the outbreak of WWI in August 1914. In March of 1915, his poems “The Dead’ and “The Soldier” were published in The Times Literary Supplement. He was a Naval sub-lieutenant with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force when he died at age 27 on April 23, 1915, in Greece, of septicaemia from an infected mosquito bite. His collection of five wartime sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was published posthumously in May 1915.
All This Is Ended
by Rupert Brooke
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colors of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
“All This Is Ended” from Rupert Brooke: Collected Poems – The Oleander Press, 2013 edition
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1905 ― Frances M. Frost (no relation to Robert Frost) was born in St. Albans, Vermont; American novelist, poet, and children’s author. She married William Blackburn in 1926, but they would divorce in 1930. Her book Hemlock Wall was published in 1929 as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Frost earned a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Vermont in 1931. After graduation, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York, and briefly married a second time. Her novel Yoke of Stars, published in 1939, was a bestseller. Frost’s son Paul Blackburn was also a poet. She died of cancer at age 54 in February 1959.
Grass Harvest
by Frances M. Frost
What wind now in the long hot summer morning
Sends the pine boughs plunging down and stirs
The tall, sky-reaching firs
To slow designs of darkness?
What wind now
Is a foam and a surge of silver over the grass
While the mowers pause to let the coolness pass
Against their dripping shoulders, through their hair?
With the sun a brazen gong struck in the noon
And the bright hills reared golden in the air,
Will the wind harvest clouds to throw a shadow
Of purple coolness over the burning hills?
Will it be wind that fills
The meadows with a long sweet wash of sound,
Or will a throat,
Hot with sun, glad of the windy ground,
Glad of the rhythmic arms and the swinging blade,
Sing in the noon, in the wind, of the day-moon rising
And of men bringing death to grass no man has made?
“Grass Harvest” from Blue Harvest, © 1931 by Frances M. Frost – Houghton Mifflin
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1937 ― Marvin Bell, American poet, academic, and critic, born in New York City to a Jewish immigrant family from Ukraine, and grew up on rural Long Island. He was a longtime faculty member of the University of Iowa’s Writers' Workshop, and was Iowa’s first poet laureate in 2000. Among the more than 20 volumes of poetry he published are Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems; Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems; Mars Being Red; Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See; and Rampant. He died at age 83 in December 2020.
– from How to Everything
by Marvin Bell
2.
Summer came home to hang some straw
on the hatrack. These days,
I take it down, when no one’s around,
and give it a reckless fit. Its big smile, banded
inside and out, is mostly empty space
for outdoor thoughts. It’s been a while since
they appeared outdoors. Wearing it,
I can tell you, changes a man. If you’re not
in a rush, and if you haven’t found your wish,
you might try on something of straw
while the grass is quiet.
“How to Everything” © 1990 by Marvin Bell, appeared in Poetry magazine’s March 1990 issue
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1937 ― Diane Wakoski born in Whittier, California; American poet and essayist. At the University of California, Berkeley, she was took part in Thom Gunn’s poetry workshops and studied with Josephine Miles. She lived in New York (1960-1973), then moved to Michigan. Her many poetry collections include The Magellanic Clouds; The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems; Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, which won the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award; The Butcher’s Apron; and Bay of Angels.
from Love Letter Postmarked Van Beethoven
by Diane Wakoski
for the man I love
more than I should,
intemperance being something
a poet cannot afford
I am too angry to sleep beside you,
you big loud symphony who fell asleep drunk;
I try to count sheep and instead
find myself counting the times I would like to shoot you in the back,
your large body
with its mustaches that substitute for love
and its knowledge of motorcycle mechanics that substitutes for loving me;
why aren’t you interested in
my beautiful little engine?
It needs a tune-up tonight, dirty with the sludge of
anger, resentment,
and the pistons are all sticky, the valves
afraid of the lapping you might do,
the way you would clean me out of your life…..
“Love Letter Postmarked Van Beethoven” from The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems, © 1971 by Diane Wakoski – Touchstone
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August 4
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1913 ― Robert Hayden born in Detroit, Michigan; American poet, essayist, and educator. He was raised by adoptive parents who changed his name from Asa Bundy Sheffy to Robert Hayden. His eyesight was so near-blind it prevented him from playing outside with other children. His adoptive mother had to fight for his right to attend classes for the partially sighted, but poverty limited the resources available. He learned to read holding books inches from his face. At age 23, he went to work (1936-1940) for the Federal Writers Project, researching black American history and folk life, which became recurring themes in his poetry. In 1940, he married Erma Morris, and converted to his wife’s religion — the Baha’i faith, another influence on his work. 1940 was also the year he published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust. His other poetry books include Words in a Mourning Time; Angle of Ascent; and American Journal. Hayden was the first African American to serve as Consultant in Poetry (1976-1978) to the Library of Congress (appointment renamed ‘U.S. Poet Laureate’ in 1986)
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
“Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, © 1966 by Robert Hayden – Liveright Publishing
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1950 ― Sapphire born as Ramona Lofton in Fort Ord, Calfornia; American author and performance poet. Her parents separated, and she and her siblings moved with their abusive father to California. She dropped out of high school, and moved to San Francisco in the 1960s, earned a GED, took some classes at City College of San Francisco, and then became a hippie. In 1977, she moved to New York City, joined United Lesbians of Color for Change (she identifies as a bisexual), and became part of the Slam Poetry movement. She took the name “Saffire” because it had been at one time a term for “belligerent black woman.” She self-published her first poetry collection Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987, followed by American Dreams, published by High Risk Books in 1994. Her first novel Push became a bestseller in 1996, and was the basis for the 2009 film Precious.
from Breaking Karma #7
by Saffire
You disappear down the hall
& reappear with a booklet
of fallopian tubes & belts
You are thin with sorrow
with a shock of black hair,
43 years old.
I am 13,
beginning to bleed;
for 30 years
the ovum will drop
down the tube
blood like passion staining
everything—drawers,
the toilet’s flush
bathroom
light bulbs
air between my legs
the fat cells
of my thighs
sucking
30 years
red opening
like a fish’s eye.
I’m the age
you were when
you handed me that box ...
“Breaking Karma #7” from Black Wings & Blind Angels, © 1999 by Saffire – Vintage Contemporaries
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1958 ― Allison Hedge Coke American poet and editor born in Texas, raised in North Carolina and Canada, of mixed Native American and European heritage. She dropped out of high school to be a field worker and sharecropper in North Carolina, but earned her GED, and took some classes at North Carolina State University, before fleeing from domestic violence to California. She later earned an AFAW in creative writing at the old Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and an MFA from Vermont College. Her poetry collections include Dog Road Woman, winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, Off-Season City Pipe, and Blood Run. She has worked as a mentor and teacher on reservations, in urban areas, in juvenile facilities, mental institutions, in prisons, with migrant workers and at-risk youth. Hedge Coke also founded and directed youth and labor outreach programs in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Street Confetti
for Stephanie
by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Right across Turk Street, south side intersection Hyde,
in the tenement where 911 won’t summon up a blue,
a man beats his woman,
the twentieth time or more, their kids bawling.
Over here, in this flat up on the third,
above blazing red neon signs highlighting
the Triple Deuce Club low below, I listen while
wired white hippies move furniture across checkered tiles
other side my sister’s arched plaster ceiling till way past 3 a.m.
Shuffling with a sofa as if rearranging the heavens in my mind.
Me, I sleep. Or try to. Nothing else I can do.
Each day I slip off and out looking for work, gliding into the
Streets of San Francisco
winding, curving, like turbulence.
Daybreak brings sweet Cambodian street children out
into a Feinstein-era playground,
still filled with hypes, winos, yellow-green from the night before,
still smelling like piss and lizard.
These kids though, they climb atop steel swing-set bars,
fifteen, twenty feet high,
as if they’re walking joint lines in concrete.
Easy balance, Mohawk grace.
Their sisters provoke a paper war in the street,
closed-off block party.
Paper flying by, I
catch a piece, fold it origamically, create
a mock financial pyramid, toss it back,
watch little girls with black shiny ponytails make confetti
for this ongoing ticker-tape parade,
right across Turk Street, intersection Hyde.
“Street Confetti” from Off-Season City Pipe, © 2005 by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke – Coffee House Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Minneapolis streetcar: the city’s streetcars, at first drawn by
horses, ran from 1872 to 1954, when the system was demolished
[END]
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