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Morning Open Thread – Dark Mornings Show Thy Mask [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-10-30
“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song
that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words.
Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot
do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too
honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
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13 poets born the day
before, or on Halloween,
making their world view
just a little bit spooky
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October 30
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1871 – Paul Valery born in Sète on the Mediterranean coast of France, but raised in nearby Montpellier; French poet, essayist, philosopher, and public speaker. He lived in Paris most of life. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, science, and current events. Valéry was to the Académie Française in 1925, and later represented France on cultural matters at the League of Nations. During WWII, the Vichy regime stripped him of some distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation. Valéry died at age 73 in Paris in July 1945, and given a state funeral in the newly liberated city. His poetry is available in English translation in Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 1: Poems and The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry, a bilingual edition published in 2020.
The footsteps
by Paul Valery
Your steps, children of my silence,
Holy, slowly placed,
Towards the bed of my vigilance
Proceed mute and frozen.
Pure person, divine shadow,
How sweet are your steps held back!
Gods!...all the gifts I guess
Come to me on these bare feet!
If, from your protruding lips,
You prepare to appease him,
To the inhabitant of my thoughts
The food of a kiss,
Do not hasten this tender act,
Sweetness of being and not being,
Because I lived to wait for you,
And my heart was only your steps.
– translator not credited
1881 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts born in Perryville, Kentucky; American poet and author; known for her novels, which were mainly set in rural Kentucky. Most notable are The Time of Man, The Great Meadow, A Buried Treasure, and Black Is My Truelove’s Hair. She was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin’s disease in 1936, and died at age 59 in 1941.
Babes In The Woods
by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
The two little children that died long ago
Away in the woods on the top of a hill--
And a good little robin that knew all about it
Came with strawberry leaves in her bill,
To cover them up, and she kept very quiet
And brought the leaves one at a time, I think.
And some of the leaves would have little holes in them,
And some would be red and pink.
And these little Babes-in-the-Woods that were dead
Must have lain very still, and they heard all the talk
That the bees would be saying to more little bees,
And maybe they even could hear the ants walk.
And they could look out through a crack in the leaves
And see little bushes and some of the sky.
They could see robin coming with leaves in her mouth,
And they watched for her when she went by.
“Babes in the Woods” from Under the Tree, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts — originally published in 1922
1885 – Ezra Pound born in Hailey, Idaho Territory; expat American modernist movement poet, essayist, and critic. In the late 1930s and 1940s, he wrote anti-semitic screeds and was a collaborator in fascist Italy. He was arrested for treason when the Americans took over, then arraigned back in the U.S. in 1945, and sent to a series of psychiatric wards before being discharged in May 1958, when he returned to Italy. He was mired in depression, and in 1966, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. On November 1972, he died at age 87 of an intestinal blockage. His positive legacy lies in his advancement of between 1910 and the mid-1920s of writers like T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, H.D., E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore, among many other others. His reputation is unlikely to recover from his pro-fascist activities during WWII.
The Choice
by Ezra Pound
It is true that you say the gods are more use to you than fairies,
But for all that I have seen you on a high, white, noble horse,
Like some strange queen in a story.
It is odd that you should be covered with long robes and
trailing tendrils and flowers;
It is odd that you should be changing your face and
resembling some other woman to plague me;
It is odd that you should be hiding yourself in the cloud
of beautiful women, who do not concern me.
And I, who follow every seed-leaf upon the wind!
They will say that I deserve this.
“The Choice” by Ezra Pound appeared in Poetry magazine’s November 1913 issue
1886 – Zoe Akins born in Humansville, near Springfield, Missouri; playwright, author, and poet. In 1919, she had her first Broadway hit, the play Déclassée, starring Ethel Barrymore. Atkins won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid, but also wrote several screenplays and film adaptations, including Anybody’s Woman and Working Girls, both directed by Dorothy Arzner, as well as Christopher Strong starring Katharine Hepburn, Camille starring Greta Garbo, and The Old Maid starring Bette Davis. Her comedy The Greeks Have a Word for It was first filmed in 1932, then became the 1953 hit movie How to Marry a Millionaire. Her poetry collections are Interpretations: A Book of First Poems, and The Hills Grow Smaller. Zoe Akins died in her sleep of cancer on the eve of her 72nd birthday, in October 1958.
The Tragedienne
by Zoe Atkins
A storm is riding on the tide;
Grey is the day and grey the tide,
Far-off the sea-gulls wheel and cry-
A storm draws near upon the tide.
A city lifts its minarets
To winds that from the desert sweep;
And prisoned Arab women weep
Below the domes and minarets.
Upon a hill in Thessaly
Stand broken columns in a line
About a cold forgoten shrine,
Beneath a moon in Thessaly
But in the world there is no place
So desolate as your tragic face.
“The Tragedienne” from The Hills Grow Smaller, © 1937 by Zoe Atkins – Harpers & Brothers
1914 – James Laughlin born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy steel manufacturing family; American poet and publisher who founded New Direction Publishing – about which he wrote, "… none of this would have been possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down to Pittsburgh, where they built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath." He attended the Choate School, and went to Harvard in 1933. He traveled to France in 1934, where he became friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He started New Direction while still at Harvard, running it out of dorm room. His first publication was an anthology of poems by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. His many collections of his own poetry include In Another Country; The Owl of Minerva: The Bird of Endless Time; The Man in the Wall; and The Secret Room. Laughlin also wrote a memoir, Byways. Laughlin died of complications from a stroke at age 83 in November 1997.
Anima Mea
by James Laughlin
After we had made love
a girl with big eyes and
warm breath started to
talk about my soul hush
I said hush and beware
if I have a soul it’s
only a box of vanities
tied with frightened
pieces of string
“Anima Mea,” © 1995 by James Laughline, appeared in Poetry magazine’s January 1995 issue.
1960 – Kathleen Flenniken born in Richland, Washington, at the time inside the Hanford Nuclear Reservation; American poet, writer, editor, and educator. Flenniken earned a BS and a Master of Science in Civil Engineering. She began writing poetry in her 30s, and earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Flenniken was Washington state’s Poet Laureate (2012- 2014). Her poetry collections are Famous, which won the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry; Plume, a finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award; and Post-Romantic. She also edited Pontoon: an anthology of Washington State Poets for Floating Bridge Press.
Again I Am Asked If I Glow in the Dark
by Kathleen Flenniken
What glowed in childhood
was streetlight, moonlight,
the crack under my bedroom door, my
eyes, squeezed tight for a fireworks show.
Four houses up the street,
Carolyn’s mother could never sleep.
The blue flicker of Johnny Carson.
The bright light of her sewing machine.
Occasional headlights crawling across
my shelf of dolls. Their nonchalance.
The face in my poster of Neuschwanstein.
The face on the clock.
I revisit those nights at night, and the night
beyond me—the river, the trains, the dust—
revising my past. Enlightened.
So yes.
“Again I Am Asked If I Glow in the Dark” from Hanford Songs, © 2013 by Kathleen Flenniken
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation surrounded the federal nuclear production complex which housed the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. Carolyn was Kathleen’s closest childhood friend, and both their fathers worked at Hanford. Carolyn’s father later died of a radiation-induced illness. So the “glow in the dark” question has been asked of Flenniken when people find out where she grew up.
1961 – Leo Yankevich born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Farrell, a steel town in western Pennsylvania, American ex-pat poet, translator, and editor of The New Formalist (2001-2010). He studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, receiving a BA in 1984. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he settled permanently in Gliwice, an industrial city in Upper Silesia in southern Poland. He died at age 57 in December 2018.
At a Suicide’s Grave (1869-1897)
by Leo Yankevich
Here where this graveyard comes to a sudden end
you lie forgotten beside a crumbling wall,
yet sometimes at night a nova calls you friend,
and the moon itself recalls your rise and fall.
“At a Suicide’s Grave (1869-1897)” from The Unfinished Crusade: New and Selected Poems, © 2000 by Leo Yankevich – The Mandrake Press
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October 31
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1795 – John Keats born in Moorgate, London; one of England’s best-loved poets of the late Romantic period, though most of his works were not well received when they were first published. His fame and reputation grew rapidly after his death from tuberculosis at age 25 in February 1821. Among his best-know poems are “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and this one:
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
by John Keats
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” from John Keats: Selected Poems – Penguin Classics: Poetry, 1988 edition
1852 – Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman born in Randolph, Massachusetts; prolific American feminist novelist, poet, and short story and children’s writer. She was a constant reader, and hated domestic chores. She wrote stories and verses from her early teens, then earned money from their publication in magazines to help her family after their dry goods business failed. Her mother died when she was 24, and her father died when she was 31, so she moved in with her friend Mary Wales, and earned a living writing. Her stories challenged the conventional restraints on women, featuring strong independent female characters, and themes like the struggles of rural women. At age 49, she married Dr. Charles M. Freeman, a prosperous man seven years her junior, but he was addicted to alcohol and sleeping powders, and they were soon legally separated. He died in the New Jersey State Hospital in 1923, leaving her only a dollar in his will. In April 1926, Wilkins Freeman was the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died at age 77 of a heart attack in March, 1930, and is now best known for her short stories, especially her tales of the supernatural. Her poems were published individually in popular magazines of the time.
In Frosty Weather
by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Now Jack Frost rides, and his icicle locks
Tinkle and ring in the wind as he goes,
And he bends from his saddle, and kisses so hard
A dear little lad, on his cheek like a rose,
That he cries and flies home to his mamma; and Jack
Stops out by the frame where the roses have been,
And paints some white flowers on the cold window-pane,
But never he ventures to follow him in.
“In Frosty Weather” from Wide Awake, Vol. 26 No. 1. (January, 1888)
1876 – Natalie Clifford Barney born in Dayton, Ohio; American playwright, novelist and poet; lived openly as a lesbian in Paris for 60 years, and wrote in both French and English. She formed a “Women’s Academy” (L’Académie des Femmes). Barney was a feminist, a pacifist, and a free love advocate; her weekly Salon brought together expat writers and artists, with their French counterparts, from modernists to members of the Académie Française. Her poetry in English was published in the bilingual collection Poems & Poèmes: Autres Alliances.
More Night!
by Natalie Clifford Barney
Moon-love, star-love, the love of silver water.
The weeping face of love touched in the dark,
And murdered joy, lost souls of joy that caught her
A glow-worm's warmth and spark.
Birds of prey, invisible, now hover
About her midnights hammocked in unrest—
A moving shadow, faithless as a lover,
Is all her arms have pressed—
Too luminous the dreaming of the sleeper
Whose tears are prophecies and second-sight.
Has death no under-sea, no darkness deeper,
In which to satiate our need of night?
“More Night” from Poems & Poèmes: Autres Alliances by Natalie Clifford Barney – Forgotten Books, 2018 edition
1935 – Colleen J. McElroy born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a military family that moved often; African American author of short stories, plays, television scripts, poetry, and nonfiction. She earned a PhD in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington. McElroy was director of speech and hearing services at Western Washington University before becoming a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Washington. Her poetry collections include Sleeping with the Moon, which won the 2008 PEN Oakland National Literary Award; Travelling Music; Queen of the Ebony Isles; and Winters without Snow.
Out Here Even Crows Commit Suicide
by Colleen J. McElroy
In a world where all the heroes
are pilots with voices like God
he brought her a strand of some woman’s
hair to wear on her wing.
She looked sideways at the ground
silent behind the cloudy film covering
her eyes knowing she would be his
forever. They cruised the city nights
each one spiralling away from the other
but always coming home to gather stories.
Dark streets bright tavern lights drunks
filled with beer in the gutters.
The flicker of stars shaped like a hunter’s
arrow bent stars that twinkled like babies’
eyes. No babies for them. She was an outcast.
He a loner. A perfect pair.
Winters had made him wise
and he avoided the single nests of summer.
He told her about things she could see.
How the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes
and the ground aches like an old woman’s knee.
How wood rots against the tide
good for hunting grub.
How to fade and fall back into the wind.
He translated her pulse
into near-language. Their poetry so personal
even Peterson’s Field Guide could not tap it.
Only a stray hunter saw it.
Shook his head once thinking it a trick
of wind and wing then turned his eyes north
to search for the simple flight
of Brant or Canadian. Those patterns
he could easily understand.
That last night they drank from the river.
Sucked its delicate cusps of mold
sang anti social songs as if they were humans.
When he flicked his handsome head
to catch the drift of wind
she even managed a single tear.
She waited through days and nights
of grief. Circled the city less
then settled on the wires.
The metallic conductor captured her eyes.
She remembered how he proudly sang her name
as he pranced from pole-top to KV line.
One last fluff of feathers. One sigh
for all the unnested summers.
One single scratch
one electrical surge of power of love.
Then she fell smiling.
A trick he had taught her.
“Out Here Even Crows Commit Suicide” from What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988, © 1990 by Colleen J. McElroy – Wesleyan University Press
1956 – Annie Finch born in New Rochelle, NY; American critic, editor, playwright, translator and a central figure in contemporary American poetry, she has published over eighteen books, which include her own poetry, literary essays, and criticism, as well as editing several anthologies. Her works include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells; Spells: New and Selected Poems; The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self; A Poet’s Craft; Calendars; and Among the Goddesses. Finch edited Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and co-edited Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. Finch’s mother was the poet Margaret Rockwell Finch.
Samhain
by Annie Finch
(The Celtic Halloween)
In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.
Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.
I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings
arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.
“Samhain” from Eve, © 1997 by Annie Finch – Carnegie Mellon University Press
1971 – Joshua Beckman born in New Haven, Connecticut; American poet, translator, editor at Wave Books. His first poetry collection, Things Are Happening, won the APR/Honickman First Book Award. Beckman’s other collections include: Something I Expected to Be Different; Your Time Has Come; Shake; and Take It.
[Dark mornings shown thy mask]
by Joshua Beckman
Dark mornings shown thy mask
made well thy visage and voice
rolling over and hearing some perfect
sweetness that one broad soul poured forth
again in happy countenance and ancient word
my city cold
for me, my nature
lost
come back
sallow soft and colorless
thy dreams repent
as:
The whole family
each with his own
“Now, sweet child, we must
kiss winter goodbye, and so too
your furs.”
She clutched the puppy to her breast.
“Not little Bobby, father.”
“Yes, my darling, little Bobby as well.”
And this, as she ought, was how Gretel
remembered summer – a constant giving up
of things and people.
“[Dark mornings shown thy mask]” from Take It, © 2009 by Joshua Beckman –
Wave Books
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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