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Morning Open Thread: Are You a Visitor? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-27
__________________________ “A poem once read is the first note of a symphony, a toe dipped in the water, the first mouthful after a fast ― necessary experiences all, with joys of their own, but still preludes. A poem comes into being by means of our repeated encounters with it, and each of these encounters must stay slow. It is hard to stay slow enough to keep pace with a poem.” ─ Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read
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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 as the last leaf
tumbles and the first snow falls
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November 26
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1978 – Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz born in Philadelphia PA; American nonfiction writer and poet. In 1998, at age 19, she founded the NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam series, and she is a two-time winner of the National Poetry Slam. She was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania (2010-2011). Her poetry collections include: The Year of No Mistakes; Everything is Everything; Oh Terrible Youth; and Working Class Represent.
Midtown
by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
When I lived in New York City,
I’d sometimes walk behind beautiful women
just to watch how men would stare at them.
Afterwards, I’d try to catch the men’s eyes,
let them know I saw them, see if they’d be
embarrassed. Most of the time they’d look
right past me. Sometimes I’d work so late
the office lights would shut off around me,
the motion sensors not sensitive enough
to detect the dumb tapping of my keyboard.
So I’d stand up, wave my arms around, jump,
just so the system would know I existed,
Other times, I was happy to stay in the dark.
In Texas, no one walks. It’s too hot, Plus,
There are things called cars. Still, I walk.
For months, I walk. The only person I see
is my shadow, this darkness trailing behind me
that I’m unable to shake, Or, depending
on the time of day, and where I find myself
going, an emptiness in front of me
I’m always chasing but can never catch.
“Midtown” from How to Love the Empty Air, © 2018 – Write Bloody Publishing
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1985 – Saeed Jones born in Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in Lewisville, Texas; American writer and poet. His debut collection Prelude to Bruise was named a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His second book, the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. He worked for Buzzfeed as its first LGBTQ editor, and co-hosted BuzzFeed News' morning show AM to DM (2017-2019). His second poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World, was published in 2022.
Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown
by Saeed Jones
In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades. I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.
Sir who is no one, sir who is yet to come, I need you
to undo this zipped back, trace the chiffon
body I’ve borrowed. See how I switch my hips
for you, dry grass cracking under my pretend
high heels? Call me and I’m at your side,
one wildflower behind my ear. Ask me
and I’ll slip out of this softness, the dress
a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.
“Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown” from Prelude to Bruise, © 2014 by Saeed Jones – Coffee House Press
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1963 – Heid E. Erdrich born in Breckenridge, Minnesota and raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota; an Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain, she is a poet, editor, anthologist, and author. Novelist and poet Louise Erdrich is her sister. Heid Erdrich earned a Ph.D. in Arts and Sciences in Native American Literature and Writing from Union Institute in Los Angeles. She edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations, and is a guest editor at Yellow Medicine Review. She also curates art exhibits. Her poetry collections include Fishing for Myth; The Mother’s Tongue; Cell Traffic; and Little Big Bully.
Truth Myth
by Heid E. Erdrich
Tell a child she is composed of parts
(her Ojibway quarters, her German half-heart)
she'll find the existence of harpies easy
to swallow. Storybook children never come close
to her mix, but manticores make great uncles,
Sphinx a cousin she'll allow, centaurs better to love
than boys—the horse part, at least, she can ride.
With a bestiary for a family album she's proud.
Her heap of blankets, her garbage grin, prove
she's descended of bears, her totem, it's true.
And that German witch with the candy roof,
that was her ancestor too. If swans can rain
white rape from heaven, then what is a girl to do?
Believe her Indian eyes, her sly French smile,
her breast with its veins skim milk blue—
She is the myth that is true.
"True Myth" from Fishing for Myth, © 1997 by Heid E. Erdrich – New Rivers Press
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November 27
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1909 – James Agee born in Knoxville, Tennessee; American novelist, poet, journalist, screenwriter, and influential film critic for The Nation (1942-1948); noted for film scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), the novel A Death in the Family, which posthumously won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration with American photographer Walker Evans, which documented the lives of three poor tenant farmer families during the Great Depression. Agee, who struggled with alcoholism and was a chain smoker, died of a heart attack at age 45 in May 1955.
Home Again Blues
by James Agee
Now we are home with Mom and Dad
And huckleberry pie,
In fact the Things We Fought For:
And now we wonder why.
For Mom is just a garter-belt
And Dad is just a bore,
And as for good home cooking
We had too much before.
And that, we guess, is what means
To be a U.S. Veteran.
We'll never fight another war.
Until they start a better one.
“Home Again Blues” from The Collected Poems of James Agee – Houghton Mifflin, 1968 Edition
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1924 – Nina Cassian born as Renée Annie Cassian-Mătăsaru to a Jewish family in Galați, Kingdom of Romania; Romanian poet, children’s author, translator, journalist, and film critic. Her family moved to Bucharest in 1935. She was multi-lingual, but wrote her first poetry collection and several children’s stories in Romanian, which were translated into English after she came to the U.S. in 1985 as a visiting professor. While she was in America, a friend of hers was arrested and beaten to death. Several of her poems were in his diary, which the Communist regime deemed inflammatory, so she was granted asylum, and later became a U.S. citizen. She began writing her poems in English, which were published in magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Her English-language poems have been collected in Life Sentence and Take My Word for It. She died at of a heart attack at age 92 in April 2014.
Ordeal
by Nina Cassian
I promise to make you more alive than you've ever been.
For the first time you'll see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you'll hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor.
For the first time, you'll note gravity's prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt
from the imperative of wings.
I promise to make you so alive
that the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you'll feel your eyebrows like two
wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.
– translated by Michael Impey and Brian Swann
“Ordeal” © 1986 by Nina Cassian – from The Penguin Book of Women Poets – Penguin Books, 1986 edition
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November 28
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1757 – William Blake born in Soho, London, UK; major and prolific English poet, mystic, visual artist, and printmaker; best known for Songs of Innocence and Experience. Although his formal schooling ended when he was 10 years old, he was an avid reader. Blake was apprenticed to an engraver at age 15 in 1772, and was a professional engraver by age 21. During his apprenticeship, he was sent to Gothic churches in London to copy images, and spent many hours in Westminster Abbey, where he claimed to have experienced visions of Christ and his Apostles, and a procession of chanting monks. In 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy, but disliked the prevailing painting style of the period, preferring the classical style of Michelangelo and Raphael. He married Catherine Boucher in 1782, taught her to read and write, and trained her as an engraver. She helped to color his illuminated works. In 1783, he published Poetical Sketches, and in 1784, he and another engraver opened a print shop. Radical publisher Joseph Johnson, whose authors included Joseph Priestly, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of their frequent customers. Blake illustrated Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life. Blake himself was a radical thinker, believing in racial and sexual equality, and abhorring slavery. By 1788, he was experimenting with relief etching as a faster means of producing his illuminated books. He died at age 69 in August 1827. Among his poetry collections are: Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The Book of Thel; The French Revolution; and A Song of Liberty.
The Chimney Sweeper:
A little black thing among the snow
by William Blake
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
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1894 – Genevieve Taggard born in Waitsburg, Washington, but raised in Hawaii; American poet, critic, anthologist, and short story writer; co-founder and editor of The Measure: a Journal of Verse. She taught at Mount Holyoke College (1929-1930), became a professor at Bennington College (1932-1934), and then at Sarah Lawrence (1934-1947). She was a socialist, whose radical political and civil rights views were often reflected in her poetry. Taggard died of complications from high blood pressure just before her 54th birthday in November 1948. Her poetry collections include: For Eager Lovers; Words for the Chisel; Not Mine to Finish; Slow Music; and Origin: Hawaii. She also wrote the biography The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson.
Ode in Time of Crisis
by Genevieve Taggard
Now in the fright of change when bombed towns vanish
In fountains of debris
We say to the stranger coming across the sea
Not here, not here, go elsewhere!
Here we keep
Bars up. Wall out the danger, tightly seal
The ports, the intake from the alien world we fear.
It is a time of many errors now.
And this the error of children when they feel
But cannot say their terror. To shut off the stream
In which we moved and still move, if we move.
The alien is the nation, nothing more nor less.
How set ourselves at variance to prove
The alien is not the nation. And so end the dream.
Forbid our deep resource from whence we came,
And the very seed of greatness.
This is to do
Something like suicide; to choose
Sterility—forget the secret of our past
Which like a magnet drew
A wealth of men and women hopeward. And now to lose
In ignorant blindness what we might hold fast.
The fright of change, not readiness. Instead
Inside our wall we will today pursue
The man we call the alien, take his print,
Give him a taste of the thing from which he fled,
Suspicion him. And again we fail.
How shall we release his virtue, his good-will
If by such pressure we hold his life in jail?
The alien is the nation, nothing more nor less.
And so we fail and so we jail ourselves.
Landlocked, the stagnant stream.
So ends the dream.
O countrymen, are we working to undo
Our lusty strength, our once proud victory?
Yes, if by this fright we break our strength in tow.
If we make of every man we fail the enemy.
If we make ourselves the jailer locked in jail.
Our laboring will, our brave, too brave to fail
Remember this nation by millions believed to be
Great and of mighty forces born, and resolve to be free,
To continue and renew.
“Ode in Time of Crisis” from To Test the Joy: Selected Poetry and Prose, by Genevieve Taggard – Boiler House Press, 2023 edition
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1924 – Dennis Brutus aka John Bruin born in Harare, Zimbabwe; South African poet, professor, anti-apartheid activist, and journalist; classified as “coloured” under South Africa’s racial code, because some of his heritage was Khoi and Malaysian. Co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), which campaigned from 1964 through 1992 for banning South Africa from the Olympics. The South African regime said they would field ‘multi-racial’ teams, but the teams would have been chosen under segregated conditions. For his SANROC activities, Brutus was banned from meeting with more than two people outside his family, then arrested in 1963 for breaking the terms of his banning by trying to meet with an IOC official, and sentenced to 18 months in jail. While still on bail, he attempted to go to an IOC meeting, but was arrested by the Portuguese secret police in Mozambique. Back in South Africa, he was shot in the back while trying to escape, then sent to Robben Island for 16 months, five of them in solitary. His cell was next door to Nelson Mandela’s. Brutus was forbidden to teach, write, or publish in South Africa. His first book of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. Released from prison in 1965, he left South Africa on an exit visa, banned from returning, and went into exile, first in Britain, and then in 1967 in the U.S. In 1983, he was granted political refugee status after a lengthy legal battle. He was “unbanned” by the South African government in 1990. In 1991 he became one of the sponsors of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and returned to South Africa. He died at age 85 in 2009.
I must conjure from my past
by Dennis Brutus
I must conjure from my past
the dim and unavowed
spectre of a slave,
of a bound woman,
whose bound figure
pleads silently
and whose blood I must acknowledge in my own
fanciful wraith? Imagining?
Yet how else can I reconcile my rebel blood and protest
but by acknowledgement
of that spectre's mute rebellious blood.
“I must conjure from my past” from A Simple Lust: Selected Poems by Dennis Brutus, © 1973 by Dennis Brutus – Heinemann
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November 29
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1818 – William Ellery Channing born in Newport, Rhode Island; American Unitarian minister and liberal theologian, known for his impassioned sermons and public speeches. He inspired the Transcendentalists, but found many of their views too extreme. His childhood caregiver was Duchess Quamino, a formerly enslaved woman, leading him to speak out for abolishing slavery. He graduated from Harvard College in 1789. He was elected by fellow students to give the commencement address, but forbidden by the faculty to mention any political subjects. In 1803, he began his ministry at the Federal Street Church in Boston, becoming the primary spokesperson and interpreter of Unitarianism in the U.S. He died of typhus at age 62 in October 1842.
My Symphony
by William Ellery Channing
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony. .
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November 30
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1915 – Robert Lax born in Olean, in southeast New York state; American mystic, “minimalist” poet, writer, and circus juggler. He was the unofficial resident poet of the Greek island of Patmos from 1962 to 2000. He went back to his hometown in September 2000, and died in his sleep at age 84 shortly after his return. His poetry collections include Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry; Circus Days and Nights; and A Thing That Is.
[Are you a visitor?]
by Robert Lax
”are you a visitor?” asked the dog.
”yes,” i answered.
”only a visitor?” asked the dog.
”yes,” i answered.
”take me with you,” said the dog.
untitled poem [Are you a visitor?] from Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry, © 1996 by Robert Lax – Grove Press
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1972? – Celia Lisset Alvarez born in Spain to Cuban parents while they were waiting for their American visas to come through. She grew up in Miami. Her poetry collections include Shapeshifting, winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award; The Stones; and Multiverses. She is also editor of the journal Prospectus: A Literary Offering, and was the creator and director of the St. Thomas University Writing Center.
Lost
by Celia Lisset Alvarez
Worry didn’t let me love you,
my sweet babe.
I focused so much
on keeping the formula inside you,
on making sure your heart was beating,
on counting your wet diapers,
that I failed to notice
the first time you slid your chubby elbows back
and lifted your head,
or the first time you sat up.
I was so focused on the growth chart,
I failed to see you grow.
You never learned how to crawl.
One day you just grabbed the furniture
and started cruising,
and one day you let go.
“Lost” from Multiverses, © 2021 by Celia Lisset Alvarez – Finishing Line Press
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December 1
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1968 – Susan Hutton born in New York City; American poet who held a two-year Wallace Stegner fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, and was director of development at Autumn House Press in Pittsburgh. Her collection On the Vanishing of Large Creatures, won Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis first book prize. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
All and Not Enough
by Susan Hutton
Last night, another great snow,
and now the sky is white as paper.
The snow burns with an inner blue.
Upstairs my daughter softly moves
across the floor as she rises to wash her face
and dress. At thirteen, she is apart from us,
gathering her strength, like a monarch
fixed to milkweed. The wind keens
into powdery clouds and when it stops
the air is exact. Is this the strange clarity
that draws the soprano to her note,
or the upset in the electric field
that leads the shark to its prey?
“All and Not Enough” from On the Vanishing of Large Creatures, © 2007 by Susan Hutton – Carnegie Mellon University Press
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December 2
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1947 – Bob Perelman born in Youngstown, Ohio; American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He originally intended to major in music, but changed to classical literature, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before earning a Master of Arts in Greek and Latin. His PhD is from University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at several American Universities, and at King’s College, London. He published The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History, and over 15 volumes of poetry, including Primer; Face Value; Virtual Reality; and The Future of Memory.
Art Tip
from Dante
by Bob Perelman
I hear the music of the spheres
sounds really great
.
if you have
a good seat.
“Art Tip” from Ten to One: Selected Poems, © 1999 by Bob Perelman – Wesleyan University Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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“A Dog” by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
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