(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Morning Open Thread: But We Shall Ride the Lightning [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-11
“Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song.”
― Alfred Noyes
________________________
Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.
So grab your cuppa, and join in.
__________________________
13 poets born this week,
Children of Autumn’s
talking leaves.
___________________________
September 10
______________________
1886 – H.D. born as Hilda Dolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; American poet, novelist, essayist, and memoirist. Ezra Pound coined the term “imagist” to describe her early poems, and those of Amy Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Hulme, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, but the imagist label quickly went out of fashion. She was the literary editor of The Egoist journal (1915-1918). H.D. frequently used Greek mythology and insights from psychoanalysis in her work. After her death in 1961, her work was on the way to obscurity until rediscovered by feminist scholars. H.D. is now an icon for feminists and the LGBTQ Community. Her poetry collections include Sea Garden; Hymen; Hippolytus Temporizes; The Wall Do Not Fall; and Helen in Eqypt.
Heat
by H.D
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air –
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat –
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
“Heat” © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle
______________________
1935 – Mary Oliver born in Maple Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio; prolific American poet who won the 1992 National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive. She died of lymphoma at age 83 in 2019. Among her many poetry collections are Sleeping in the Forest; Why I Wake Early; Blue Iris; Dog Songs; and Blue Horses.
Song for Autumn
by Mary Oliver
Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the fires that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
“Song for Autumn” © 2005 by Mary Oliver appeared in Poetry magazine’s May 2005 issue
___________________________
September 11
______________________
1885 – D.H. Lawrence born in Eastwood, a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire; English novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist; his novels were called pornographic by many readers of his day, but are now regarded as classics of English literature. His best known books are Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When he died in 1930 at age 44 from tuberculosis, he was still widely regarded as a pornographer, but novelist E.M. Forster wrote in an obituary notice that Lawrence was “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation,” which began the reevaluation of his work. The 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books for printing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover made headlines across the world, and the jury’s ‘not guilty’ verdict made it widely available for the first time.
Piano
by D.H. Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
“Piano” from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence – Wordsworth Editions, 1994
___________________________
September 12
______________________
1902 – Marya Zaturenska born in Kyiv, Ukraine; her family emigtated to the U.S. when she was 8. She worked in a clothing factory by day while attending night classes to complete high school. She was an outstanding student, and won a scholarship to Valparaiso University; then transferred to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned a degree in library science. In 1925, she married fellow poet Horace Gregory. Her poetry collection Cold Morning Sky won the 138 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her eight volumes of poetry also include Threshold and Heart, The Golden Mirror, and The Hidden Waterfall. She died of heart failure at age 79 in 1982.
Memories
(Lower New York City at noon hour)
by Marya Zaturenska
There is a noise, and then the crowded herd
Of noon-time workers flows into the street.
My soul, bewildered and without retreat,
Closes its wings and shrinks, a frightened bird.
Oh, I have known a peace, once I have known
The joy that could have touched a heart of stone--
The heart of holy Russia beating still,
Over a snow-cold steppe and on a hill:
One day in Kiev I heard a great church-bell
Crying a strange farewell.
And once in a great field, the reapers sowing
Barley and wheat, I saw a great light growing
Over the weary bowed heads of the reapers;
As growing sweeter, stranger, ever deeper,
From the long waters sorrowfully strong,
Came the last echoes of the River Song.
Here in this alien crowd I walk apart,
Clasping remembered beauty to my heart!
“Memories (Lower New York City at noon hour)” from
Collected Poems, © 1965 by Marya Zaturenska – Viking Press
______________________
1934 – Nellie Wong born in Oakland, California; daughter of Chinese immigrants; American poet, community activist feminist, against racism, and pro-labor. Founding member of the writers’ collective Unbound Feet. Her poems have been install at public sites in the Bay area. Co-author with Merle Woo and Mitsuye Yamada of 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism Her poetry collections include Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park; The Death of Long Steam Lady; Stolen Moments; and Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner.
Typewriter Keys Pantoum
by Nellie Wong
Typewriter keys dance to human fingers
Attached to hands searching for love
Amid a chorus of harmonious singers
Digging underground for a treasure trove
Attached to hands searching for love
Perfume of stargazers captivates the body whole
Digging underground for a treasure trove
Villages and cities alight in rapturous glow
Perfume of stargazers captivates the body whole
Moving in concert with the forces of labor
Villages and cities alight in rapturous glow
Workers' councils gather neighbor to neighbor
Moving in concert with the forces of labor
Solving problems with cooperation and care
Workers' councils gather neighbor to neighbor
With food and water and dwellings to share
Solving problems with cooperation and care
Indigenous people no longer asunder
With food and water and dwellings to share
Mountains and rivers but two of nature's wonder
Indigenous people no longer asunder
Earth's inhabitants strive to live side by side
Mountains and rivers but two of nature's wonder
Expropriating property far and wide
Earth's inhabitants strive to live side by side
Playing bamboo flutes both young and old
Expropriating property far and wide
Free to nourish children, humanity's gold
Playing bamboo flutes both young and old
Amid a chorus of harmonious singers
Free to nourish children, humanity's gold
Typewriter keys dance to human fingers
© 2003 by Nellie Wong
______________________
1942 – Michael Ondaatje born in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Canadian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and filmmaker. He emigrated to England in 1954, and attended Dulwich College, then moved to Montreal Canada, and later earned an M.A. from Queen’s University at Kingston. He is best-known for his novel The English Patient, and critics have also favored his other six novels, but Ondaatje has also published 13 collections of poetry, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems, a novel in verse, edited several anthologies, and written plays and screenplays.
Bearhug
by Michael Ondaatje
Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.
Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.
How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?
“Bearhug” from The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, © 1997 by Michael Ondaatje – Vintage Books
______________________
1946 – Minnie Bruce Pratt born in Selma, Alabama; American poet, author, essayist, lesbian and feminist activist, and educator. In 1966, she married, and gave birth to two sons, but when she came out as a lesbian in 1975, her ex-husband got custody of their children. In her book Crimes Against Nature, she wrote in a poem cycle about losing custody because of her sexual orientation. In 1977, she was a founding member of WomanWrites, and in 1984 a co-founder in 1984 of LIPS, a Washington DC-based lesbian activist group. LIPs was the first group arrested during the 1987 DC protests of the Bowers v. Harwick sodomy law decision. Her memoir, S/HE was published in 1995. Pratt’s poetry collections include The Money Machine; We Say We Love Each Other; Walking Back Up Depot Street; and Magnified. Pratt died of cancer at age 76 in July 2023.
Learning to Talk
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
On Magnolia Avenue there are no magnolias. Someone bought
the house of the one survivor. All morning I heard the chainsaw
sever its limbs from root to bud. No more scattered flowers, star city.
No pink galaxy. Now the yard is a parking space, one Jeep SUV,
one older car. Next door a woman comes out, late afternoon,
a child in her arms. She speaks low, as if there’s just the two of them.
She says to him, Listen to the little birdies, and he listens to
the common sparrows talking in the hedge. He listens as they argue
back and forth, their dialect of nature, as the street clatters with commuters
taking a shortcut home. She says: Listen. And he turns his head to follow
the fugitive motion, the small streaked wings unfolding, folding,
the relentless chirp from a tiny blunt beak, the sound almost within reach.
“Learning to Talk” from The Dirt She Ate: New and Selected Poems, © 2003 by Minnie Bruce Pratt – University of Pittsburgh Press
___________________________
September 13
______________________
1876 – Sherwood Anderson born in Camden, Ohio; American short story writer, novelist, non-fiction author, poet, and newspaper editor. Best known for his short stories, especially his collection Winesburg, Ohio, which has twice been adapted as a play, by Christopher Sergel in 1958, and by Eric Rosen in 2002. His two poetry collections are Mid-American Chants and A New Testament. He died at age 64 from peritonitis in March 1941.
A Visit
by Sherwood Anderson
Westward the field of the cloth of gold. It is fall. See the
corn. How it aches.
Lay the golden cloth upon me. It is night and I come
through the streets to your window.
The dust and the words are all gone, brushed away. Let
me sleep.
“A Visit” appeared in Poetry magazine’s September 1917 issue
___________________________
September 14
______________________
1860 – Hamlin Garland born in West Salem, Wisconsin; prolific American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He also wrote poetry, and campaigned for the economic ideas of Henry George: that individuals should own the value they produce, but land and natural resources should belong collectively to all members of society. He is best-known for his realistic fictional accounts of the lives of hard-working Midwestern farmers, even though he lived most of his adult life in Boston, Chicago, and Hollywood. He won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for A Daughter of the Middle Border, the sequel to his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. He died at age 79, at his home in Hollywood, in 1940.
On The Mississippi
by Hamlin Garland
Through wild and tangled forests
The broad, unhasting river flows—
Spotted with rain-drops, gray with night;
Upon its curving breast there goes
A lonely steamboat's larboard light,
A blood-red star against the shadowy oaks;
Noiseless as a ghost, through greenish gleam
Of fire-flies, before the boat's wild scream—
A heron flaps away
Like silence taking flight.
“On The Mississippi” from Hamlin Garland: Complete Works – Delphi Classics, 2021 edition
___________________________
September 15
______________________
1890 – Claude McKay born in Jamaica as Festus Claudius McKay; Jamaican-American poet, author, essayist, and social activist; prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. McKay is best known for his novel, Home to Harlem, which won the 1928 Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He came to the U.S. in 1914 to go to college, but moved to New York City two years later, working as a waiter on the railways, then in a factory, and as an editor of The Liberator. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and became involved with a group of black radicals. McKay wrote one of his best-known poems, “If We Must Die,” in 1919, in response to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings after WWI. He published four collections of poetry, five novels, a novella, short stories, and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica. He became disillusioned by communism, and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1944, just four years before his death from a heart attack at age 57 in 1948.
Harlem Shadows
by Claude McKay
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire’s call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.
“Harlem Shadows” from Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay, a 2018 reprint of the 1922 edition
______________________
1958 – Brenda Coultas born in Owensboro, Kentucky; American poet, blogger, and academic. She graduated from the University of Southern Indiana, and earned an MFA from Naropa University. Coultas teaches at Touro University in New York. Her poetry collections include A Handmade Museum; The Marvelous Bones of Time; The Tatters; and The Writing of a Hour.
A Horseless Carriage
by Brenda Coultas
“Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horse Heads
Were toward Eternity”
— Emily Dickinson, from #712
We traded some hay and got a pony.
But we were horseless
We got a good deal on a horse
We were full with the horse
The horse was an asshole
We sold the horse
We bought a car
But we were horseless.
“A Horseless Carriage” from A Handmade Museum, © 2003 by Brenda Coultas – Coffee House Press
___________________________
September 16
______________________
1880 – Alfred Noyes born in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands of England; an extraordinarily prolific and popular English poet, short story writer, and playwright. His father had been unable to go to college, but studied on his own, and passed on to his son his knowledge of Latin and Greek, and a love of the written word. Though Alfred Noyes wrote in the 20th century, at heart he was really a 19th century poet, despising the modernist movement, and continuing to write traditional rhymed verse. As modernist poetry grew in popularity, critics became increasingly harsh in their reviews of his work, but Noyes remained beloved by “ordinary” readers. Noyes wrote his last poem, “Ballade of the Breaking Shell,” in May 1958, one month before his death. He died at age 77, and is still well-remembered for his poem “The Highwayman.”
Immortal Sails
by Alfred Noyes
Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,
And ransack heaven before our moment fails.
Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,
We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.
It is not time that makes eternity.
Love and an hour may quite out-span the years,
And give us more to hear and more to see
Than life can wash away with all its tears.
Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky
Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this;
But we shall ride the lightning ere we die
And seize our brief infinitude of bliss,
With time to spare for all that heaven can tell,
While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.
“Immortal Sails” from Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes – Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1913 edition
______________________
1938 – Betty Adcock was born in Texas, and grew up in San Augustine, a farming community about 85 miles south of Longview; American poet and writer-in-residence. Adcock has published six poetry collections, including The Difficult Wheel; Intervale; Widow Poems; and Rough Fugue. She was a writer-in-residence at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina (1986-2006).
Louisiana Line
by Betty Adcock
The wooden scent of wagons,
the sweat of animals—these places
keep everything—breath of the cotton gin,
black damp floors of the icehouse.
Shadows the color of a mirror’s back
break across faces. The luck
is always bad. This light is brittle,
old pale hair kept in a letter.
The wheeze of porch swings and lopped gates
seeps from new mortar.
Wind from an axe that struck wood
a hundred years ago
lifts the thin flags of the town.
“Louisiana Line” from Walking Out, © 1975 by Betty Adcock - Louisiana State University Press
___________________________
G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/11/2192598/-Morning-Open-Thread-But-We-Shall-Ride-the-Lightning
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
