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Morning Open Thread: No Question is Ever Settled Until It is Settled Right [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-06
“I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks
and I still believe that they are better than the
alternative … I believe that the greatest poets
of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don
Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and
that thousands of years ago in a former life
I was a one-armed Siberian shaman ...”
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
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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.
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13 poets born the first 11 days of
November – poems on newspapers,
night sky, racism and dislocation,
fearing lizards, and all the rest
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November 1
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1871 – Stephen Crane born in Newark NJ; American poet, novelist, short story writer, and war correspondent. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. Regarded as one of the most innovative writers of his generation, today he is remembered for The Red Badge of Courage. He was plagued by financial difficulties and ill health, and died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium in Germany at age 28 in July 1900.
A Newspaper is a Collection of Half-Injustices
by Stephen Crane
A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads its curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is feckless life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.
“A Newspaper is a Collection of Half-Injustices” from The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane – Cornell University Press, 1972 edition
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November 2
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1911 – Odysseus Elytis born as Odysseas Alepoudellis in Heraklion, Republic of Crete; Greek poet, essayist, and translator, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature. His father moved the family soap factory to Piraeus, then died of pneumonia in 1925. When Odysseas was 16, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Bed-ridden for a year, he read Greek poetry voraciously, and discovered the work of C.P. Cavafy. He passed the difficult entrance exams for law school at the University of Athens, but became friends with poet George Seferis and psychoanalyst Andreas Embiricos, who gave Odysseas access to his extensive library. In 1935, his first poem published under his pen name Elytis in the influential journal Νέα Γράμματα (New Letters). He saw combat as a second lieutenant during WWII, until he contracted typhus abdominalis, and was near death when the German Army was advancing toward the hospital. He risked being moved, and eventually reached Athens. He wrote essays and poetry, and became programme director for the Greek National Radio Foundation. 1960 was a year of change: his brother, sister, and mother died, but he won the Greek First National Prize for poetry for his work Axion Esti. He traveled in Europe and the United States, but went into exile in Paris while the Greek military junta was in power. He returned to Greece after the junta’s fall, wrote essays and poetry collections, including The Sovereign Sun, Diary of an Invisible April, The Little Mariner, and West of Sadness. He died at age 84 in March 1996.
Poem
by Odysseus Elytis
I know the night no longer, the terrible anonymity of death.
A fleet of stars moors in the haven of my heart.
O Hesperus, sentinel, because you shine by the side
Of a skyblue breeze on an island which dreams of me
Proclaiming the dawn from its rocky heights,
My two eyes set you sailing embraced, by the side
Of my true heart’s star: I know the night no longer.
I know the names no longer of a world that disavows me.
I read seashells, leaves, and the stars clearly.
I have no need of hatred on the roads of the sky
Unless the dream is that which watches me again
As I walk by the sea of immortality in tears.
Oh Hesperus, under the arc of your golden flame
I know the night no longer that is a night only.
“Poem” by Odysseus Elytis appeared in Poetry magazine’s June 1951 issue
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November 3
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1920 – Oodgeroo Noonuccal born in Minjerribah (aka North Stradbroke Island), Queensland, Australia, and given the name Kathleen Ruska; Aboriginal Australian poet, political activist, artist, children’s author, and nonfiction writer. She later used her married name Kath Walker, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a poetry collection, We Are Going, which sold out several editions. Yet some critics questioned whether an Aboriginal person could really have written the poems, while others dismissed them as propaganda instead of poetry. In the 1960s, Walker was Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), and a key figure in the campaign to win full citizenship for Aboriginal people. In December 1987, she announced she would return her Member of the British Empire (MBE) award in protest over the Australian Government's plans for the Australian Bicentenary which she described as "200 years of sheer unadulterated humiliation" of Aboriginal people. She also announced changing her first name to Oodgeroo, meaning "paperbark tree" and her last name to Noonuccal, her people's name. Oodgeroo Noonuccal died from cancer at age 72 in September 1993. Among her many books of poetry are The Dawn is at Hand; My People; The Colour Bar; and Let Us Not Be Bitter.
We Are Going
by Oodgeroo
They came in to the little town
A semi-naked band subdued and silent
All that remained of their tribe.
They came here to the place of their old bora ground
Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.
Notice of the estate agent reads: 'Rubbish May Be Tipped Here'.
Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.
'We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers.
We belong here, we are of the old ways.
We are the corroboree and the bora ground,
We are the old ceremonies, the laws of the elders.
We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told.
We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games, the wandering camp fires.
We are the lightning bolt over Gaphembah Hill
Quick and terrible,
And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.
We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low.
We are nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.'
“We Are Going” from My People, © 2021 by Estate of Oodgeroo – John Wiley & Sons Australia , Ltd
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November 4
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1928 – Hannah Weiner born as Hannah Finegold in Providence Rhode Island; American poet. She organized and took part in a number of 1960s “happenings” in New York, and is considered one of the Language poets of the 70s and 80s. In the 1970s, she began writing journals about her experiments with automatic writing and her struggles with schizophrenia. She died in September 1997 at age 68. Among her many works are The Code Poems, from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations; Little Books/Indians; We Speak Silent; and Hannah Weiner’s Open House, a posthumous collection featuring many previously unpublished work.
CSQ Where Am I (Or, Are We?)
by Hannah Weiner
CSQ Where am I (or, are we?)
WJV Somewhere
CST Where are they?
DQR Anywhere
CSR Where are (or, is)?
MJC Everywhere
SI Where are you bound?
EQS Anywhere else
SH Where are you bound?
LVS Elsewhere
CSR Where is?
CSP Whereabouts
“CSQ Where Am I (Or, Are We?)” from The CODE Poems, from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations, © 1982 by Hannah Weiner – Open Book Publications
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November 5
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1850 – Ella Wheeler Wilcox born on a farm in Johnstown, Wisconsin; prolific American poet and author. She began writing poetry at age 8, and her poetry began being published when she was 13. “Solitude” is probably her best-remembered poem, for its opening lines, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone./ For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth / But has trouble enough of its own.” She was influenced by the movements of her time: New Thought, Theosophy, and Spiritualism. After her husband’s death in 1916, she attempted to communicate with him, but never received an answer from “the other side.” She was an animal rights advocate and a vegetarian. Ella Wheeler Wilcox died of cancer at age 69 on October 30, 1919. Her poetry collections include Poems of Passion, Poems of Reflection, and Poems of Peace.
Settle the Question Right
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
However the battle is ended,
Though proudly the victor comes,
With flaunting flags and neighing nags
And echoing roll of drums;
Still truth proclaims this motto
In letters of living light,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.
Though the heel of the strong oppressor
May grind the weak in the dust,
And the voices of fame with one acclaim
May call him great and just;
Let those who applaud take warning
And keep this motto in sight,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.
Let those who have failed take courage,
Though the enemy seem to have won;
If he be in the wrong, though his ranks are strong,
The battle is not yet done.
For sure as the morning follows
The darkest hour of night,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.
O men, bowed down with labour,
O women, young yet old,
O heart, oppressed in the toiler’s breast
And crushed by the power of gold,
Keep on with your weary battle
Against triumphant might;
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.
“Settle the Question Right” is in the public domain.
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November 6
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1929 – Jack Micheline born in the Bronx NY as Harold Martin Silver; American poet, short story writer, and painter. He took his pen name from Jack London and his mother’s maiden name. Micheline lived in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Troubadour Press published his first book, River of Red Wine, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Dorothy Park reviewed it in Esquire. In the early 1960s, Micheline moved to San Francisco. He published over twenty books, some of them mimeographs and chapbooks. Though regarded as a Beat poet, he thought the Beat movement was a media hustle, and hated being categorized with the Beats. He was arrested in 1968 for obscenity, though not convicted, for using the word “fuck” in his short story “Skinny Dynamite” published in the Los Angeles alternate newspaper Open City. Jack Micheline died of a heart attack at age 68 while riding a BART subway train from San Francisco to Orinda in February 1998. His published work includes Last House in America; North of Manhattan; Ragged Lion; and One of a Kind.
poem
by jack micheline
crooked streets
curve into the night sky
Drag Queens whistle
we’re ready
as jets rumble on
and the voices
pour out of the bars and cafes
cash registers
and wheels
all over a nation
action is life
bright colors of clothing
always that voice and moans
at the Flea Bag Hotel off Market
Thirty years kicking death in the Ass
The fool is never ready for recognition
He is
“poem” from Sixty-Seven Poems For Downtrodden Saints, © 1997 by Jack Micheline – FMSBW Press
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November 7
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1872 – Leonora Speyer born as Leonora von Stosch in Washington DC; American poet, violinist, and translator. She played violin professionally before her first marriage, which ended in divorce, then became Lady Speyer when she married her second husband, Sir Edgar Speyer, a British banker. In 1915, they moved to the U.S. She won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Fiddler’s Farewell. Her other poetry collections include A Canopic Jar; Naked Heel; and Slow Wall. Leonora Speyer died in February 1956 at age 83.
The Locust
by Leonora Speyer
Your hot voice sizzles from some cool tree near-by:
You seem to burn your way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound,
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sun-beams!
“The Locust” from Slow Wall, © 1946 by Lenora Speyer – Alfred A. Knopf
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1961 – Kim Roberts born in Charlotte, North Carolina; American poet, editor, anthologist, and literary historian. She has published five books of poetry, including The Wishbone Galaxy; Kimnana; Animal Magnetism, which won the 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize; and The Scientific Method. She also wrote By Broad Potomac’s Shore; Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital, and A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston. In 2000, Roberts founded the literary journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and was its editor until 2020.
Great Smoky Mountains
by Kim Roberts
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, created in the mid-1920s, was the first National Park to be formed completely from privately-owned land, which included over 6,000 small farm
Most families took the money and dispersed.
No one fights the government and wins.
In darkened kitchens, women sit and curse
their narrowed view, their ever-thinning purse
and Sunday shape-notes silenced. Was it sin
to take the government money? They dispersed,
leaving fields and barns, leaving worse:
a church-yard seeded with their sacred kin.
In darkened kitchens, women sit and nurse
smokehouse, corncrib, barn, and sorghum works,
the sulphured apples white, shorn of their skins,
and all the families packed up and dispersed.
Who cares how bad the odds? When all they’re worth’s
caught up in land they let slip. They gave in.
In darkened kitchens, women sit and curse:
they took the government money. Hands outstretched.
“Great Smoky Mountains” © 2013 by Kim Roberts, appeared in The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review, Issue 2, February 2013
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November 8
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1867 – Sadakichi Hartmann born on Dejima island off Nagasaki, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a German father; American poet, art critic and scholar, playwright, and anarchist. He grew up in Germany, then moved to Philadelphia in 1882, and became an American citizen in 1894. He wrote some of the earliest English language haiku and tanka. He was also a pioneer in writing about photography as an art form. In his later years, he moved to California. In 1942, because of his age and poor health, he was one of the very few Japanese Americans who was not interned, although he was under frequent investigation by the FBI and local officials. He died in November 1944 at age 77. His poetry collections include Drifting Flowers of the Sea; My Rubaiyat; and Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms.
Tanka IX
by Sadakichi Hartmann
Were we able to tell
When old age would come our way,
We would muffle the bell,
Lock the door and go away—
Let him call some other day.
“Tanka IX” from Collected Poems 1886-1944, by Sadakichi Hartmann – Little Island Press, 2017 edition
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November 9
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1818 – Ivan Turgenev born in Oryol (modern-day Oryol Oblast in western Russia, to an aristocratic family; Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and translator. Best known for his novel Fathers and Sons and his play A Month in the Country. Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol, which the censor of Saint Petersburg banned from publication, although the Moscow censor allowed it to be published. Turgenev was imprisoned for a month, then exiled to his country estate for nearly two years. Fathers and Sons, now regarded as Turgenev’s masterwork, was a critical failure when it published in 1862. His next two novels were also received less than enthusiastically, and he turned to novellas and poetry. He died in France at age 64 of metastatic liposarcoma in September 1883.
A Rule of Life
by Ivan Turgenev
'If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,' said a
crafty old knave to me, 'you reproach him with the very defect or vice you
are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him!
'To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
'In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn
to account the pricks of your own conscience.
If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your opponent with having no convictions!
'If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell him reproachfully that he is
slavish ... the slave of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!'
'One might even say, the slave of anti-slavishness,' I suggested.
'You might even do that,' assented the cunning knave.
— translator not credited
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November 10
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1913 – Karl Shapiro born in Baltimore, Maryland; American poet, literary critic, and essayist who spent part of his childhood in Chicago. His first volume of poetry was published by a family friend in 1935. He majored in piano performance at the Peabody Institute before attending Johns Hopkins University, then enrolled in a library science school associated with Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, where he worked. During WWII, he was a U.S. Army company clerk in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while stationed in New Guinea, won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He succeeded Louise Bogan as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1946-1947). He edited the Prairie Schooner literary magazine (1956-1966). He was a co-winner with John Berryman of the 1969 Bollingen Prize for poetry. Shapiro died in hospice at age 86 in May 2000. His poetry collections include Person, Place, and Thing; Poems of a Jew; Adult Bookstore; and The Wild Card.
Americans Are Afraid of Lizards
by Karl Shapiro
My American host in Madras in his moist air-conditioned apartment
Spotted a lizard and yelled for a servant to kill it, kill it!
And a beautifully turbaned, silent and grinning Hindu, beautifully
barefooted, beautifully servant,
Rushed in with a towel and pretending to smack it to death
Impounded it gently and carried it off to the gorgeous and sweating garden
To let it go.
In earlier years, on my first trip to the tropics,
I screamed at a lizard on my pillow,
And the fat Tahitian lady stuffed it in her hand
And grinned toothlessly and pointed to the ceiling
Frescoed with twenty or thirty of the pretty beasts
All vividly flicking their tongues at mosquitoes,
Or playing at making designs.
“Americans Are Afraid of Lizards,” © 1961 by Karl Shapiro, appeared in the April 1961 issue of Poetry magazine
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November 11
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1937 – Alicia Ostriker born in Brooklyn NY; American Jewish feminist poet and scholar; English professor at Rutgers University (1972-2004); noted for her poetry collections Once More Out of Darkness, which about pregnancy and childbirth; A Dream of Springtime; Waiting for the Light; and the feminist classic The Mother-Child Papers, inspired by her son’s birth during the Vietnam War, just weeks after the Kent State shootings. Her collection, The Imaginary Lover, won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her non-fiction work includes Writing Like a Woman, which explores the poetry of contemporary poets like Anne Sexton, May Swenson and Adrienne Rich; and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Vision and Revisions, which takes a look at the Torah, which was followed by For the Love of God. She was New York State Poet Laureate from 2018 to 2021.
The History of America
by Alicia Ostriker
—for Paul Metcalf
A linear projection: a route. It crosses
The ocean in many ships. Arriving in the new
Land, it cuts through and down forests and it
Keeps moving. Terrain: Rock, weaponry.
Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth,
Reproachful. Fox, bear, coon, wildcat
Prowl gloomily, it kills them, it skins them,
Its language alters, no account varmint, its
Teeth set, nothing defeats its obsession, it becomes
A snake in the reedy river. Spits and prays,
Keeps moving. Behind it, a steel track. Cold,
Permanent. Not permanent. It will decay. This
Does not matter, it does not actually care,
Murdering the buffalo, driving the laggard regiments,
The caring was a necessary myth, an eagle like
A speck in heaven dives. The line believes
That the entire wrinkled mountain range is the
Eagle’s nest, and everything tumbles in place.
It buries its balls at Wounded Knee, it rushes
Gold, it gambles. It buys plastics. Another
Ocean stops it. Soon, soon, up by its roots,
Severed, irrecoverably torn, that does not matter,
It decides, perpendicular from here: escape.
A prior circle: a mouth. It is nowhere,
Everywhere, swollen, warm. Expanding and contracting
It absorbs and projects children, jungles,
Black shoes, pennies, blood. It speaks
Too many dark, suffering languages. Reaching a hand
Toward its throat, you disappear entirely. No
Wonder you fear this bleeding pulse, no wonder.
“The History of America” from The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998, t © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker – University of Pittsburgh Press
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1946 – Wing Tek Lum born in Honolulu, Hawaii; American poet and engineer of Chinese heritage who also manages a family-owned real estate company with his brother. He majored in engineering at Brown University, where he also edited the school’s literary magazine. Lum then attended Union Theological Seminary, where he earned a master’s in divinity. He worked as a social worker, then moved to Hong Kong in 1973 to learn Cantonese. Lum was honored with a 1988 American Book Award for Expounding the Doubtful Points. He co-wrote What the Kite Thinks: A Linked Poem with Makoto Ooka, Joseph Stanton, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama. His most recent collection is The Nanjing Massacres: Poems, for which he was awarded the 2013 Hawai’i Literary Arts Council Elliot Cades Award.
Minority Poem
by Wing Tek Lum
For George Lee
Why
we’re just as American
as apple pie—
that is, if you count
the leftover peelings
lying on the kitchen counter
which the cook has forgotten about
or doesn’t know
quite what to do with
except hope that the maid
when she cleans off the chopping block
will chuck them away
into a garbage can she’ll take out
on leaving for the night.
“Minority Poem” from Expounding the Doubtful Points, © 1988 by Wing Tek Lum – Bamboos Ridge Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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