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If man does find the solution for world
peace it will be the most revolutionary
reversal of his record we have ever known.
― George C. Marshall,
whose ‘Marshall Plan’ helped restore
Europe, including Germany, after WWII
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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.
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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 Poets born this week, from
many cultural traditions, but all
Muses of the Human Condition.
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May 19
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701 – Li Bai born in the coastal province of Shandong during the Tang Dynasty, Chinese poet, calligrapher, and translator. He is acclaimed as a brilliant and innovative poet, one of the most prominent figures in the Tang “Golden Age of Poetry.” Around 1000 poems attributed to Li Bai are still extant, because they were collected and complied in 753 by Yin Fan. The Tang’s “golden age” was abruptly shattered by a rebellion in late 755 led by General An Lushan. His reign as Emperor lasted only 11 months, from February 756 to January 757. He was then killed by his son An Qingxu, whose own reign lasted from 757 to 759, when he was executed by General Shi Siming. These years of war caused devastation and famine, and Li Bai was at one point captured and sentenced to death, but was pardoned. He is one of the few poets of his time whose work has survived up to the present day substantially intact. He died around age 61 in 762. In the 18th century, translations of his poetry began to appear in Europe. “Quiet Night Thoughts” is one of his poems still taught to Chinese schoolchildren.
The Solitude of Night
by Li Bai
.
It was at a wine party—
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.
.
“The Solitude of Night” from The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet – translated by Shigeyoshi Obata – E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921
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1963 – Kristin Dimitrova born in Sofia, Bulgaria; Bulgarian writer, poet, editor, and translator; Graduated in English and American Studies from the Sofia University, where she works in the university’s Department of Foreign Languages. Dimitrova was editor (2004-2006) of Art Trud, a weekly arts and culture supplement of the Trud Daily, and a columnist (2007-2008) for Klasa Daily. She is the widow of fellow poet and literary critic Vladimir Trendafilov. Author of 11 poetry books, which include: A Face Under the Ice; Faces with Twisted Tongues; Talisman Repairs; The People with the Lanterns; and My Life in Squares.
Beliefs
by Kristin Dimitrova
.
Old people say that whenever
someone lights a cigarette from a candle
a sailor dies.
.
Among sailors, I suppose,
there is a belief that when they shave
in an odd direction, an academic dies.
.
And they try not to shave.
The point is that we think
about each other.
.
“Beliefs” from A Visit to the Clockmaker, © 2005 by Kristin Dimitrova – translated by Gregory O’Donoghue – Smokestack Books
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May 20
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1911 – Annie N.G. Schmidt born as Anna Maria Geertruida Schmidt in Kapelle, Netherlands; Dutch children’s author, lyricist, poet, playwright, and radio-TV scriptwriter. She was honored with the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her lasting contribution to children’s literature, and posthumously included in the Canon van Nederland (Canon of the Netherlands), a chronology of Dutch history which includes cultural icons like Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. She died at age 84 in May 1995.
The Furniture
by Annie N.G. Schmidt
.
“Would you like to come out walking?” said the table to the chair,
“I’ve been standing here forever, and I’d like to take the air.”
.
“Now you mention it, I’d love to come,” the chair at once replied.
“Why, we both have legs beneath us that we’ve never even tried.”
.
“May I keep you company?” the oaken sideboard then inquired.
“Though I am a little heavy and I fear I may get tired.
With these cups and plates and glasses in my chest,
I sometimes wheeze.
.
Would you care to join us, bookcase?” And the bookcase said,
“Yes, please.”
.
So the furniture went strolling for an hour on the shore.
.
But the clock and lamp weren’t able and remained there as before.
In the empty house they grumble that the others shouldn’t roam.
But they know that life is like that: those who don’t have legs stay home..
“The Furniture” from A Pond Full of Ink, © 2014 by Annie N.G. Schmidt and translator Davis Colmer – Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
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1949 – Michèle Roberts born to a French mother and an English father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England, and holds dual UK-French citizenship. She is a writer, novelist, poet, memoirist, and librarian. Roberts was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith. She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian, and worked as a librarian (1973-1974) for the British Council in Bangkok, Thailand. Active in socialist and feminist politics since the 1970s, she formed a writers' collective with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor, and Zoe Fairbairns. Roberts was the Poetry editor (1975-1977) at the feminist magazine Spare Rib and at the weekly City Limits (1981-1983). Her first novel, A Piece of the Night, was published in 1978. Her 1992 novel Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the 1993 W.H. Smith Literary Award. Her memoir Paper Houses was published in 2007, and her Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving came out in 2020. She teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her poetry collections include: The Mirror of the Mother; Psyche and the Hurricane; and All the Selves I Was.
Odd Hats in Art History
by Michèle Roberts
.
The Queen of Naples, painted by Ingres
looks perfectly dingue
wearing a hat shaped like a well-risen black soufflé or black meringue.
.
Decoding the painting feels like some sort of a test:
is that a funeral lamp or a Kleinian Breast
dangling above her? I'm also impressed
.
by the way she appears coolly not to mind
the erupting volcano- seen through the window behind
her. It and her hat are certainly two of a kind.
.
Does such uprush of mountains and millinery represent
the hope of resurrection? Passion not yet spent?
I'm not exactly certain what Ingres meant.
.
“Odd Hats in Art History” from her Poems & Recipes online page, © by Michèle Roberts
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May 21
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1923 – Dorothy Hewitt born, Australian poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and lesbian. While working under pen names for the Communist paper, The Tribune, she also worked in a clothing factory, so her first novel, Bobbin Up, is semi-autobiographical; she became disillusioned with the Communist Party in the 1960s, and renounced her membership after the Soviet Army’s brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. She died at age 79 in August 2002. Her collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, was published in 1975, and Virago Press published her autobiography, Wild Card, in 1990.
To the Literary Ladies
by Dorothy Hewitt
.
Here they come the clever ladies
in their detachable Peter Pan collars
their fringes their sober mein
hiding such anger such
subtle vices dizzying torments
how do they manage to keep it intact
that demeanour? Is it something they’ve learned?
Not from George rough-hewn or Emily
choking her mastiff down on the moors.
No it’s Jane with her simpering smile
her malice her maidenly virtues
rustling through the 20th Century seminars
sitting on platforms discussing
manner and style how to instruct
& parry impertinent questions.
.
“To the Literary Ladies” from Selected Poems, © 1991 by Dorothy Hewitt – Fremantle Arts Centre Press
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1967 – Lemn Sissay born in Wigan, Lancaster, UK, after his mother arrived in Britain from Ethiopia, pregnant with her son, and was sent to a home for unwed mothers. Sissay is a UK poet, dramatist, broadcaster, children’s author, and nonfiction writer. He was put in foster care by a social worker, supposedly just while his mother finished her studies, but the worker told the foster parents to regard it as a placement for adoption. They renamed him Mark and gave him their last name, Greenwood. By the time he was 12, they had three children of their own, and placed him in a children’s home, telling him they would never contact him again. When he aged out of the system, he was finally given his birth certificate and a letter his mother had written pleading to get her son back. He took back his birth name, and started searching for his mother. He used his unemployment benefit to publish his first poetry pamphlet, Perceptions of the Pen, and sold it to striking miners. At age 21, he finally found his mother, who was working for the UN in Gambia. Since age 24, Sissay has been a full time writer. He was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, and was awarded the 2019 PEN Pinter Prize. His poetry collections include Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist; Rebel Without Applause; Listener; and Let the Light Pour In.
Let There Be Peace
by Lemn Sissay
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Let there be peace
So frowns fly away like albatross
And skeletons foxtrot from cupboards,
So war correspondants become travel show presenters
And magpies bring back lost property,
Children, engagement rings, broken things.
.
Let there be peace
So storms can go out to sea to be
Angry and return to me calm,
So the broken can rise up and dance in the hospitals.
Let the aged Ethiopian man in the grey block of flats
Peer through his window and see Addis before him,
So his thrilled outstretched arms become frames
For his dreams.
.
Let there be peace
Let tears evaporate to form clouds, cleanse themselves
And fall into reservoirs of drinking water.
Let harsh memories burst into fireworks that melt
In the dark pupils of a child’s eyes
And disappear like shoals of silver darting fish,
And let the waves reach the shore with a
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
.
“Let There Be Peace” from Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems, © 2016 by Lemn Sissay – Canongate Book Ltd.
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May 22
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1956 – Lucie Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, American poet who published four collections of poetry; winner of the 1996 Witter-Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She died of cancer at age 61 in March 2018. Her poetry collections include The Master Letters: Poems; A Hunger; Trouble in Mind; and Soul Keeping Company.
A Girl Ago
by Lucie Brock-Broido
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No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
"A Girl Ago" from Stay, Illusion - © 2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido –Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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May 23
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1906 – Sheila Wingfield born in Hampshire in southeast England as Sheila Beddington; Anglo-Irish poet and memoirist from a Northern Irish protestant family, although her father’s family had originally been Jewish. In 1932, she married Mervyn Patrick Wingfield, who later became Viscount Powerscourt. Her poems were first published in The Dublin Magazine in 1937. Although initially supportive, her husband later asked her not to be involved in Ireland’s literary circle, so she was little-known in Ireland in spite of writing three memoirs of Irish life, and eight collections of poetry. She was never comfortable in the formality of upperclass British life, and began taking drugs during her debut season in London, which led to alcohol, morphine, and cocaine addictions. During WWII, her husband was captured by the Germans, and came home in poor health and suffering from shell shock. He never fully recovered, and they were separated in 1963. She lived mostly in hotels until her death at age 85 in 1992 in Ireland.
The London Square
by Sheila Wingfield
.
Come, Autumn, blow the sounds about
Of footsteps and of leaves,
For it is time we did without
The languor that deceives
Events with wishes, facts with doubt,
In the long summer eves;
Come, bring your blustering to rout
What softens or aggrieves.
Let a lad's whistle, scream of train,
Be carried on a gust
Of thought which snatches up the skein
Of what is hard and just;
Let pavements hiss in the night rain,
And tugboats hoot and thrust
Into our sleep, till we regain
Those dreams, for dream we must.
.
“The London Square” from Collected Poems: 1938-1983, © 1983 by Sheila Wingfield –Enitharmon Press
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1939 – Stanley Plumly born in Barnesville, Ohio, son of a lumberjack and a home maker; American poet and academic. Beginning in 2009, he was director of the CollegePark creative writing program of the University of Maryland. He died of multiple myeloma at age 79 in April 2019. His poetry collections include: In the outer dark; Out-of-Body Travel; Summer Celestial; The Marriage in the Trees; Old Heart; and Middle Distance, which was published posthumously.
The Winter Beach at Sanderling
by Stanley Plumly
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The “wolves in the waves” driving or being driven
inside the rain, which is one sort of day to be alone
in, then again the beach mile either way disappearing
into the thinness of the air, dead detail of the gone world
from the night before—probably an eaten-out barrel
or two, traps and lines of netting, lumber and almost
carcasses and scored horseshoe shells—brought home
from who knows where, then someone with a dog
making a single shadow out of an idea of sun: each
day rising and thinking I died for some kind of beauty,
standing in the morning on the height of my deck,
trying to wake up, nothing but my eyes to go by—
how dark down does the water go before the tide—
I the god of starfish fallen, the flounder’s whiter bones.
.
“The Winter Beach at Sanderling” © 2019 by Stanley Plumly appeared in Poetry magazine’s September 2019 issue
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1947 – Jane Kenyon born in Ann Arbor, Michigan; American poet and translator; she won the 1994 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, for her body of work. While at the University of Michigan, student Jane Kenyon had met professor and poet Donald Hall. In 1972, they married. From 1974 on, they lived at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire. She created five poetry collections. The final one, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was published posthumously in 1996, a year after her death from leukemia at age 47.
Heavy Summer Rain
by Jane Kenyon
.
The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day
.
turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.
.
Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.
.
“Heavy Summer Rain” from Collected Poems, © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon – Graywolf Press
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May 24
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1940 – Joseph Brodsky born as Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky to a Jewish family in Leningrad, Russia; American poet and essayist. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship’s boiler room, and on a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish. His poems were full of ironic wit and independent thinking. In 1963, his poetry was denounced by a newspaper as “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” He was tried in 1964 for “parasitism,” condemned to a Soviet mental institution, and later sentenced to five years at Arkhangelsk, an Arctic labor camp. He served 18 months of that sentence, before an international outcry over his imprisonment helped secure his early release, but his poetry was banned in the U.S.S.R. He was prevented from marrying the woman he loved, and had to leave her and their son behind when he was exiled in 1972, and came to the U.S. He described an exiled writer as one “who survives like a fish in the sand.” His Less Than One, an essay collection, won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though invited back after the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Brodsky never returned to his homeland. His son came to see him in New York, and they were able to develop a relationship. His poetry collections include A Part of Speech, and To Urania. Brodsky was Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992). He died at age 55 of a heart attack in January of 1996.
Summer Music
by Joseph Brodsky
Aria cats
Our cheeks are hairy.
Our backs are striped,
Like notes.
Paws are a miracle of beauty!
.
Beauty is unusual,
The tail is bent like a violin key.
We are dusting it.
And in silence, it sounds.
.
“Summer Music” from Collected Poems in English, © 2000 by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky – Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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May 25
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1925 – Rosario Castellanos born in Mexico City; Mexican poet, author, diplomat, and feminist; her work deals with cultural and gender oppression; one of Mexico’s most important 20th century literary figures. She was cared for by a Mayan woman, in whose Tzotzil prayers and legends she discovered the joy of language. Her family was wealthy, until land reform and a peasant emancipation policy stripped them of most of their land holdings. In 1948, both her parents died, her mother from cancer, and her father from a heart attack. Castellanos was 23 years old, shy and introverted, but she read extensively and began writing. She studied philosophy and literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Castellanos wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Excélsior. She married in 1958, but she suffered from depression after several miscarriages before her son was born in 1961. The marriage ended in divorce in 1971. She became an advocate for women’s rights, and a symbol of Latin American feminism. Catellanos was appointed as Mexico’s Envoy to Israel in 1971. She learned to speak Hebrew, performed her ambassadorial duties capably – Prime Minister Golda Mier called her “one of the most brilliant minds I have ever met.” She died in August 1974 at age 49 in Tel Aviv, from electric shock caused by a malfunctioning table lamp.
Passport
by Rosario Castellanos
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Woman of ideas? No, I’ve never had one.
I never repeated others (out of modesty or faulty memory).
Woman of action? No, not that either.
It’s enough to look at the shape of my feet and hands.
.
Woman, well, of word. No, not of word.
But, yes, of words–
many, contradictory, oh, insignificant,
pure sound, sifted empty of arabesques,
a salon game, gossip, foam, oblivion.
.
But if a definition is necessary
for the identification card, note
that I am a woman of good intentions,
and that I have paved
a direct and simple route to hell.
.
“Passport” from A Rosario Castellanos Reader, translations © 1988 by Maureen Ahern, Diane E. Martling and Betty Tyree Osiek – Texas Pan American series, first edition
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1938 – Raymond Carver born in Clatskanie Oregon; American short story author and poet; noted for award-winning stories like “A Small, Good Thing” and “Where I’m Calling From.” He started drinking heavily as his first marriage failed, but began his “second life” when he stopped drinking on June 2, 1977. In November 1977, he met poet Tess Gallagher at a writers’ conference, and by 1979, they were living together. They influenced each other’s work: he began writing some poetry and she wrote some short stories. In 1988, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. They were married six week prior to his death at age 50 in August 1988, and Gallagher manages his literary estate.
Twenty-Second Year
by Raymond Carver
.
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.
.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,
and don’t even know the places to fish?
.
“Twenty-Second Year” from All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver – © 1996 by Tess Gallagher – Vintage 1996 reprint edition
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Photo: Chinese Shiwan-style ceramic — man sleeping on clay pot