(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Morning Open Thread: A New Year – Laughter that Cold and Blizzards Could Not Kill [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-09 “You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” — Charlie Brown, 'Peanuts' “Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness” — William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor: Act 1, Scene 1 . 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 is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule. . So grab your cuppa , and join in. ____________________________ Twelve poets born this week. ____________________________ January 9 1728– Thomas Warton (the Younger) born, English poet, literary historian, and critic; appointed as Poet Laureate of the UK (1785-1790); author of The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century; best known for his book-length poem “The Pleasures of Melancholy.” from The Pleasures of Melancholy by Thomas Warton . Her fav'rite midnight haunts. The laughing scenes Of purple Spring, where all the wanton train Of Smiles and Graces seem to lead the dance In sportive round, while from their hands they show'r Ambrosial blooms and flow'rs, no longer charm; Tempe, no more I court thy balmy breeze, Adieu green vales! embroider'd meads adieu! . Beneath yon' ruin'd Abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of Eve, Where thro' some western window the pale moon Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone Screech-owl's note, whose bow'r is built Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp, And the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves. ____________________________ . 1942 – Judy Malloy born in Boston, American poet and innovator of online interactive and collaborative fiction and poetry websites; beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in Social Media Poetics and Electronic Literature (2013-2014). Other works include Its name was Penelope; The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator; and Revelations of Secret Surveillance. The Fabric of Everyday Life by Judy Malloy . winter hats in many colors reside in a basket in the hall in the gaps of the Internet of things a pile of clean laundry on the bed in the one-story house where we live . a blue bowl fills with apples from the farm You deactivated the lights that controlled when we went to bed a blue bowl fills with apples from the farm in the studio, there is a bookcase that ignores my requests a never empty six-pack of spring water resides in the refrigerator At midnight, hand-painted deer run around in a circle on the Austrian jug who reads the words that you write with wireless chalk? your black gloves return home when you ask two blue goblets suggest a long ago party one by one the boats on the shower curtain sail out of the harbor a never empty six-pack of spring water resides in the refrigerator the puddles that our never-worn boots leave in the hall . where is the sound of the modem? . two blue goblets suggest a long ago party white wildflowers from the meadow who reads the words that you write with wireless chalk? the bluegreen dress that I wore to a wedding “The Fabric of Everyday Life” from (un)continuity: ELO 2020 Virtual Exhibition https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Malloy/malloy.html ____________________________ January 10 1814 – Aubrey Thomas de Vere born in Curragh Chase, in County Limerick; Irish poet, essayist, and critic. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, where the astronomer Sir William Rowan Hamilton introduced him to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through his older brother and a cousin, he was introduced to members of the Apostles Club at Cambridge, including Alfred Tennyson. De Vere’s first poetry collection, The Waldenses and other poems, was published in 1842. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851. De Vere never married. In 1854, he was appointed professor of political and social science at Trinity College, but a bout of scarlatina prevented him from fulfilling his duties, so he resigned the post in 1858. In 1897, de Vere published Recollections. He died January 21, 1902, at the age of 88. Love's Spite by Aubrey Thomas de Vere . You take a town you cannot keep; And, forced in turn to fly, O'er ruins you have made shall leap Your deadliest enemy! Her love is yours--and be it so-- But can you keep it? No, no, no! . Upon her brow we gazed with awe, And loved, and wished to love, in vain, But when the snow begins to thaw We shun with scorn the miry plain. Women with grace may yield: but she Appeared some Virgin Deity. . Bright was her soul as Dian's crest Whitening on Vesta's fane its sheen: Cold looked she as the waveless breast Of some stone Diana at thirteen. Men loved: but hope they deemed to be A sweet impossibility! . ____________________________ . 1887 – Robinson Jeffers born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; American poet, playwright, philosopher, pacifist, and conservationist. In 1914, he and his new wife Una first came to Carmel-by-the-Sea in Northern California. He was 26 years old, and he had found his place in the world. They bought land there in 1919. Jeffers reached the height of his popularity in the early 1930s. In the 1940s, his “free adaptation” of the play Medea by Euripedes was a hit on Broadway, even as his star began to wane because he spoke out against America’s imperial ambitions and against the nation’s involvement in WWII. Embittered, he espoused a philosophy of ‘inhumanity’ – that people were detrimental to the Earth and, spurned by an uncaring God, they would eventually become extinct, leaving the planet to heal in a return to Nature. This was not popular in the 1950s. His work was re-discovered in the late 1960s by budding environmentalists, who rallied in the 1970s to save his home and writer’s retreat, his beloved Tor House and Hawk Tower, from developers. The property is now affiliated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Carmel Point by Robinson Jeffers . The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses– How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads– Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.–As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from. . “Carmel Point” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Three Volumes, edited by Tim Hunt, © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University – Stanford University Press ____________________________ . 1928 – Philip Levine born Detroit, American poet and teacher; U.S. Poet Laureate (2011-2012). He was the second of three sons born to Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when he was five years old, and at age 14, he was already working nights in auto factories when a teacher told him, “You write like an angel. Why don't you think about becoming a writer?” Levin earned an A.B. at Wayne University, then monitored classes at the University of Iowa taught by Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Levine got a mail-order master’s degree in 1954 with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence,” then earned an MFA at the University of Iowa in 1957. He taught for over 30 years in the English department of California State University, Fresno. Most of his best-known poems are about the working-class in Detroit. Levine served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States (2011–2012). He died of pancreatic cancer in February 2015 at age 87. Among Children by Philip Levine . I walk among the rows of bowed heads-- the children are sleeping through fourth grade so as to be ready for what is ahead, the monumental boredom of junior high and the rush forward tearing their wings loose and turning their eyes forever inward. These are the children of Flint, their fathers work at the spark plug factory or truck bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs to the widows of the suburbs. You can see already how their backs have thickened, how their small hands, soiled by pig iron, leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like to sit down among them and read slowly from The Book of Job until the windows pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea of industrial scum, her gowns streaming with light, her foolish words transformed into song, I would like to arm each one with a quiver of arrows so that they might rush like wind there where no battle rages shouting among the trumpets, Hal Ha! How dear the gift of laughter in the face of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings without coffee and oranges, the long lines of mothers in old coats waiting silently where the gates have closed. Ten years ago I went among these same children, just born, in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned down to hear their breaths delivered that day, burning with joy. There was such wonder in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes dosed against autumn, in their damp heads blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one turned against me or the light, not one said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home, not one complained or drifted alone, unloved, on the hardest day of their lives. Eleven years from now they will become the men and women of Flint or Paradise, the majors of a minor town, and I will be gone into smoke or memory, so I bow to them here and whisper all I know, all I will never know. . . “Among Children” appeared in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic – © 1990 by Philip Levine ____________________________ . 1952 – Dorianne Laux born in Augusta, Maine, American poet. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid, before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988, when she was 36 years old. Her first published poetry collection, Awake, appeared two years later. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her second husband, fellow poet Joseph Millar. She is a professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University, and often travels with her husband team-teaching poetry workshops. Laux’s work has won awards, including the Paterson Prize for The Book of Men, and the Oregon Book Award for Facts About the Moon. Her book What We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected, which came out in 2019, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other poetry collections include The Book of Women and Smoke. Democracy . by Dorianne Laux . When you’re cold—November, the streets icy and everyone you pass homeless, Goodwill coats and Hefty bags torn up to make ponchos— someone is always at the pay phone, hunched over the receiver . spewing winter’s germs, swollen lipped, face chapped, making the last tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought . of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched . to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down. So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade, . familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up. . You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled on the steps of the church. If it weren’t for them you could believe in god, . in freedom, the bus would appear and open its doors, the driver dressed in his tan uniform, pants legs creased, dapper hat: Hello Miss, watch your step now. But you’re not a Republican. You’re only tired, hungry, . you want out of the cold. So you give up, walk back, step into line behind the grubby vet who hides a bag of wine under his pea coat, holds out his grimy 85 cents, takes each step slow as he pleases, releases his coins . into the box and waits as they chink down the chute, stakes out a seat in the back and eases his body into the stained vinyl to dream as the chips of shrapnel in his knee warm up and his good leg . flops into the aisle. And you’ll doze off, too, in a while, next to the girl who can’t sit still, who listens to her Walkman and taps her boots to a rhythm you can’t hear, but you can see it—when she bops . her head and her hands do a jive in the air—you can feel it as the bus rolls on, stopping at each red light in a long wheeze, jerking and idling, rumbling up and lurching off again. . “Democracy” from Facts About The Moon, © 2007 by Dorianne Laux – W.W. Norton ____________________________ January 11 1825 – Bayard Taylor born as John Bayard Taylor in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania to a Quaker family of farmers; American author, poet, translator, literary critic, and diplomat. He entered the printing business as an apprentice, and published his first book of poems Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena when he was 19. His work as a journalist for the New York Tribune and other publications led to extensive global travel, and publication in 1846 of Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff, the first of his numerous travel books. Taylor died in Berlin in 1878 at age 53. Storm Song by Bayard Taylor . The clouds are scudding across the moon; A misty light is on the sea; The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune, And the foam is flying free. . Brothers, a night of terror and gloom Speaks in the cloud and gathering roar; Thank God, He has given us broad sea-room, A thousand miles from shore. . Down with the hatches on those who sleep! The wild and whistling deck have we; Good watch, my brothers, to-night we'll keep, While the tempest is on the sea! . Though the rigging shriek in his terrible grip, And the naked spars be snapped away, Lashed to the helm, we'll drive our ship In the teeth of the whelming spray! . Hark! how the surges o'erleap the deck! Hark! how the pitiless tempest raves! Ah, daylight will look upon many a wreck Drifting over the desert waves. . Yet, courage, brothers! we trust the wave, With God above us, our guiding chart. So, whether to harbor or ocean-grave, Be it still with a cheery heart! ____________________________ January 12 1871 – Eugéne Nielen Marais born, South African journalist, lawyer, naturalist, essayist, and poet in Afrikaans; publisher-editor of the Afrikaner newspaper, Land en Volk; he studied law in England, and nature in the Waterberg Mountains in Pretoria, including termites, puff adders, spitting cobras, and baboons, and wrote his findings in Afrikaans. He was the first person to study the behavior of wild primates. Several of his books on nature have been translated into English, including The Soul of the White Ant: the First Book of Ethology and The Soul of the Ape. He discovered the Waterberg cycad, aptly named Encephalartos eugene-maraisii. The Dance of the Rain by Eugéne Nielen Marais . Oh, the dance of our Sister! First, over the hilltop she peeps stealthily and her eyes are shy and she laughs softly From afar she begs with her one hand her wrist-bands shimmering and her bead-work sparkling softly she calls She tells the wind about the dance and she invites it, because the yard is spacious and the wedding large The big game rush about the plains they gather on the hilltop their nostrils flared-up and they swallow the wind and they crouch to see her tracks in the sand The small game, deep down under the floor, hear the rhythm of her feet and they creep, come closer and sing softly "Our Sister! Our Sister! You've come! You've come!" and her bead-work shake, and her copper wrist-bands shine in the disappearance of the sun On her forehead, rests the eagle's plume She decends down from the hilltop She spreads her ashened cloak with both arms the breath of the wind disappears Oh, the dance of our Sister! . “The Dance of the Rain” from Gedigte – Poems, translated by Anthony Emerson Thorpe – 1956 edition, published by van Schaik ____________________________ . 1915 – Margaret Danner born in Kentucky, but grew up in Chicago’s South Side; American poet, editor, and African-American cultural activist. In 1951, she was the first Black woman on the staff of Poetry magazine. She lived for many years in Detroit, where she co-founded Boone House, a cultural center for black writers, artists and musicians. In the 1960s, she joined the Baháʼí Faith, and toured as a poet and writer sponsored by the Baháʼí Teaching Committee. Danner died at age 68 on January 1, 1984, in Chicago. A retrospective of her work, These Blazing Forms: the Life and Work of Margaret Danner, was published in the March 2022 issue of Poetry magazine. . This poem is Danner’s tribute to Bushman, a Western Lowland Gorilla from Cameroon, the first gorilla at the Lincoln Park Zoo, who died in captivity on January 1, 1951. Best Loved of Africa by Margaret Danner . It is New Year’s day. The blasé people rise. They face a sleet-like ray Of light. The low slung skies Send shadows down. It’s dark. . The earth is treacherous to the tread. And deep in the upstairs bedroom Of his terraced suite in Lincoln Park Lies Bushman, best loved of Africa, huge And beautifully black as he ever was, but dead. . “Best Loved of Africa” appeared in the October 1956 issue of Poetry magazine – © 1951 by Margaret Danner ____________________________ January 13 1921 – ‘Dachine Rainer’ born as Sylvia Newman to Polish Jewish immigrants in New York, American-English writer of prose and nonfiction, poet, and anarchopacifist; best known for A Room at the Inn; Outside Time; Rise and Fall; Prison Etiquette: The convict's compendium of useful information; and Giornale Di Venezia. . “Ich lebe mein Leben in waschsenden Ringen” – Rilke (“I live my life in growing circles”) in the search for a center by Dachine Rainer . in the search for a center, there is only the speeding train and the distance transpired and ahead, only the smoke shadows that fall on and snow like clouds of formless birds; and the petrified river, stiff like a mud frozen soldier . suck the green out of stems and spit a white foam back at them like spring throwing its promise into the midst of red sedge on shore with hint of tufted grasses uselessly cleansing the air . “in the search for a center” appeared in Retort: an anarchist review in 1947 ____________________________ . 1957 – Claudia Emerson born in Chatham, Virginia; American poet; 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife; Poet Laureate of Virginia (2008-2010). Her poetry collections include Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion: An Elegy; Figure Studies; and Late Wife, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Lifeguard by Claudia Emerson . She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistle dangling, on her suit a dutiful, . faded red cross. Mine her only life to guard, she does for a while watch . the middle-aged woman who has nothing better to do than swim laps in the Y's indoor pool . on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow, though, boring, length after predictable . length of breaststroke or the duller lap of elementary backstroke perfectly . executed within the taut confines of the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me . to study split-ends, hangnail, wristwatch, until—the body of the whistle cupped . loosely in her palm—her head nods toward shallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, . making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible to reenter my own wake, reverse it. . "Lifeguard" from Secure the Shadow, © 2012 by Claudia Emerson – Louisiana State University Press ____________________________ January 14 1914 – Dudley Randall born in Washington DC; African-American poet and poetry publisher. From age nine, he grew up in Detroit, where his first poems were published in the Detroit Free Press. He worked in Ford’ River Foundry before serving in the South Pacific during WWII. Randall earned a BA in English from Wayne University and a MA in library science from the University of Michigan, and became the reference librarian for Wayne County. He was fluent in Russian; visited Europe, Africa, and Russia; and later translated many Russian poems into English. Between 1965 and 1977, he was the founder, editor, and publisher of Broadside Press, which became a forum for almost every major Black poet who began their careers during those years, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, and Margaret Walker. His own poems appeared in collections which included Poem Counterpoem; Cities Burning; More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades; and After the Killing. He died at age 86 in August 2000. Laughter in the Slums by Dudley Randall . In crippled streets where happiness seems buried under the sooty snow of northern winter, sudden as bells at twilight, bright as the moon, full as the sun, there blossoms in southern throats rich flower of flush fields hot with the furnace sun of Georgia Junes, laughter that cold and blizzards could not kill. . “Laughter in the Slums” from Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall, © 2009 by Dudley Randall, edited by Melba J. 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