Trees

Joyce Kilmer

Here are the guidelines to enter a poem:

I remember standing just beyond the steps of the Capitol building on January 20, 1993, the crowd amped up and excited for the inauguration of President Clinton.  I’m sure his speech was terrific, but I doubt many remember.  What we all can recall with a note of reverence is Maya Angelou reciting On the Pulse of Morning.  There have been a couple of times in my life when secular events have taken on the hue of the sacred and this was one of them.  She and her poem overshadowed the entire ceremony.  However, On the Pulse of Morning isn’t my favorite Angelou poem, the one I truly love is Still I Rise.  In celebration of her well deserved award, here is the poem and a video of her reciting it.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

photo by woodley wonderworks

In celebration of the numerically whimsical date.

First:  The most influential list of ten in the history of humanity:

The Ten Commandments

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

Second:  Other than the Bible (which I already gave the top spot), the all time top bestsellers according to Wikipedia:

1.  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859, English)

2.  The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954, English)

3.  The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937, English)

4.  Dream of the  Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1759-1791, Chinese)

5.  On the Three Representations by Jiang Zemin (2001, Chinese)

6.  And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939, English)

7.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950, English)

8.  She by H. Rider Haggard (1887, English)

9.  Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943, French)

10.  The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003, English) [Okay, at the risk of looking like a literary snob, this kills me a little bit.]

Third:  From the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 10:

For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lovest is most evident;
For thou art so possess’d with murderous hate
That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire.
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

Would love to hear what literary 10s you come up with.  Better yet, what literary 11s since 11-11-11 will be here before we know it.

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him.  Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the see of Europe, one by one.

Taking the Biblical story  of Abraham and Issac  and twisting the ending gives the poem a powerful ending on the theme of the horror of war.  Owen’s use of Abram vs. Abraham (God had ‘renamed’ Abram by the time of the sacrifice) is an early indicator of the tragic ending of the poem.  Under the name Abram, he doubted God and his promise and had a son with Hagar, his wife’s slave.  His life as Abram signified the time when he was not a righteous man.  When God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, it signals his righteousness and obedience to God.  Owen’s use of Abram signals that the correct action will be shunned for the sake of pride and instead a great evil is committed.

For those who are like me and would rather hear poetry than read it, few are better than Kenneth Branagh:

Owen Wilfred died a week before the end of World War I.  His mother received the telegram notifying her of his death as the church bells were ringing for the Armistice.

Mount Olive Baptist Church
Hopkins, SC

Hopkins, SC doesn’t have a library anywhere in sight let alone a bookstore (the closest is 26 miles away, I know because I looked it up on IndieBound).  To fill a need, the members of Mount Olive Baptist Church combed garage sales, bought books and asked state libraries for donations and created their own children’s library.  Each child has a chance to talk about what she is reading.  The National Book Foundation described the church as “wonderfully supportive of this secular activity.”  Amen!

Cellpoems
Brooklyn, NY

This may be this year’s readergirlz for me, it’s a poetry literary journal “published” via text messages.  A couple of poems are published each week, so I won’t be swamped with messages (that was my twitter experience until I figured out who to follow with  my devices on).  The writers are established poets (or so the National Book Foundation says, and they should know, I don’t really have any idea) and ” by publishing poems of just 140 characters or less, Cellpoems does not aim to decrease readers’ attention spans; rather, it adds focused, distilled work to a grand tradition of short poems, from the tanka and haiku to the monosonnet, and aims to present poetry to as many readers as possible by making it easily accessible to digitally-minded readers.”  You can sign up via the website or by texting JOIN to 317.426.POEM.

826 Valencia
San Francisco, CA

Let me just start by saying that I’m jealous that 826 Valencia got the award and not 826LA.  The 826 programs, regardless of where they are located, work with students aged 6 to 18 with their writing skills and to foster a passion for writing reading.  In Valencia, the 826 program holds after-school tutoring programs five days a week where students work with tutors and then spend 20 minutes reading books in the 826 Valencia library.  After homework, the students can work on a variety of extra-curricular writing programs.

Look to see if you have an 826 program in your area.  In Los Angeles there are a variety of programs, not all of them based on tutoring.  My daughter attended a writing workshop at the Hammer Museum a couple of years ago.  It was led by an author and focused on mystery writing, she came home so excited about writing stories, now she chose a writing camp for the summer (not that the two are necessarily connected, but who knows).

Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop

Washington, DC

One of last year’s winners, Father’s Bridging the Miles, helped incarcerated men read with their children.  This year the National Book Foundation continues to impact incarcerated men by awarding a grant to Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop.  This program uses books and creative writing to help rehabilitate teenage boys who are incarcerated as adults in DC jails.  The young men are 16 and 17 years old, but read, on average, at a fifth-grade level.  Before joining the book club, most have never finished a book.  The goal is to introduce the young men to the “life-changing power of books” while also connecting them with the services they need to transition back into the public.

United Through Reading

San Diego, CA

Similar to last year’s Father’s Bridging the Miles, United Through Reading connects parents separated from their children through recorded reading.  The parent reads the book while being recorded on DVD and the DVD is sent to the child.  It’s a method used to connect soldiers around the world, from Navy ships, to Iraq, to Afghanistan to USO bases, with their children.  There is a program for incarcerated parents and new pilot program for grandparents who live far away from their grandchildren.

I love this award, it’s fascinating each year to see how people and organizations are using books to improve lives.  Congratulations to all of the winners!

From “Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer” by Ted Kooser

4.  THE VETERAN IN A NEW FIELD

A lone man scything wheat

His back is turned to us, his white shirt

the brightest thing in the painting.

Old trousers, leather army suspenders.

Before him the red wheat bends,

the sky is cloudless, smokeless, and blue.

Where he has passed, the hot stalks spread

in streaks, like a shell exploding, but that is

behind him.  With stiff, bony shoulders

he mows his way into the colors of summer.

I love this painting.  For me it is the essence of painting and maybe even America.  So simple at first glance, just a man in a field and yet the more time I stare at it, the more it says.  The weapons are cast aside, the Civil War is over and there is an aura of peace about the scene.  Yet, the scythe  reminds me of the grim reaper and the way is it just mowing down the stalks causes me to wonder about the machine guns that just decimated the soldiers and mowed them down as it was turned from side to side.  Homer specifically tells us this is a new field, that the death and destruction is behind the soldier giving the viewer a sense of hope.

In approximately 60 words, Ted Kooser eloquently relays more than I blathered on about in the entire previous paragraph.  That is what I love about poetry, to concise relay thoughts and meaning.  I’m a Kooser groupie and to find that he was written about one of my favorite American paintings was cause for celebration during National Poetry Month.

Here are some avenues for you to discover poetry meaningful to you this  month:

• Sign up to receive a poem-a-day during National Poetry Month
• My favorite poets are Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver and my favorite poetry collection is Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor
• Personally, I generally like poetry better aloud than reading it.  Diesel, a Bookstore is posted a poetry reading everyday this month on Chatter, the bookstore blog.  Here’s the link to the archeive and here’s an example
• Another source for listening to poetry is to sign up for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, he gives a bit of literary history each day and ends the podcast with a poem.  It is by far my favorite podcast.
• For the Angeleno art lovers, “The Veteran in a New Field” is visiting LACMA until May 23rd, drop by to see it before it returns to the Met.
• New addition: Serena at Savvy Verse & Wit (one of my favorite blogs) is organizing a National Poetry Month blog tour, it’s a great chance to discover several different poets.

My mother can still recite secctions of Green Eggs and Ham because she read it to me so many times when I was young.  I don’t remember that as much, but the phrase “I don’t like green eggs and ham” was a constant refrain in my childhood. Someone in the family said in response to something unpleasant.  Brussel sprouts comes to mind.  As an adult, attending a fancy dinner party when someone turned up his nose at the latest, fancy food concoction, I reacted with “I don’t like green eggs and ham.”  The response was smile, we all understand Sam-I-am.

A lawyer down the hall from me during my early law associate years collected Dr. Seuss books.  Without having any children of his own, he signed up for the monthly mailing of two new book and had them delivered to the office.  I loved them.  More than once after a long day when it felt like everyone in the world was already home, I snuck into his office, pulled a brightly colored book off of his shelf, and rhymed my way through a personal pity party.  It’s hard to mope when The Cat in the Hat is your companion.

When my son was born, I signed up for the requisite monthly delivery.  I had no idea there were so many Dr. Seuss books!  And who was P.D. Eastman anyway?  When reading to a toddler,The Cat in the Hat is the longest book imaginable.  The whole time I’m wondering why the mother left the kids alone, a thought that never once occurred to me before having my own child.  We spent lots of time with The Foot Book (perfect for playing with babies), Hop on Pop, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (Keith even has the tie), but the family favorite is Go Dog Go. We love the dog party at the end.  Added to our family-isms is “do you like my hat?”  Believe me, now that we have a teenage fashionista in the house, we have lots of opportunities to say it.

Dr. Seuss didn’t leave me in the lurch now that I’m a full fledged adult.  In honor of his 82nd birthday, many years ago, he wrote You’re Only Old Once!, a book to accompany me through and help me laugh at my adult years.

Not too long ago, I would have known today was Dr. Seuss’s birthday far in advance.  My kids’ elementary school would have sent out a notice that today was crazy hat day in honor of Theodore Geisel’s special day.  We’d arrive at school and many of the teachers would be wearing Cat in the Hat hats.  No so much for middle school and high school.  For the next two or three decades, I’ll hear about Dr.  Seuss’s birthday on the likes of twitter and I’ll smile.  But when my kids have kids, I can’t wait to arrive at the hospital with The Foot Book in one hand and my grandchild in another and start the cycle all over again.

Lending Out Books

by Hal Sirowitz

You’re always giving, my therapist said.

You have to learn how to take.  Whenever

you meet a woman, the first thing you do

is lend her your books.  You think she’ll

have to see you again in order to return them.

But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time

to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again

you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will

want to lend her even more.  So she

cancels the date.  You end up losing

a lot of books.  You should borrow hers.

In an effort to put 2009 to bed, I thought I’d hash out my literary thoughts and discoveries for 2009:

Throughout the year, I made a concentrated effort to read more essays, short stories and poems.  I discovered as much about myself reading them as I did from the content of the piece.  The experience confirmed what I suspected in 2008, I’m an essay groupie.  My favorite essays are those that notice something mundane and then spin thoughts out into a beautifully connected web.  My own thinking will notice something ordinary and then spin out, but more like a tangled ball of yarn.  George Orwell, Anne Fadimen and E.B. White stood out.  Nick Hornby’s ”Believer” essays are cozy and warm, I can’t wait to read the rest of them.  I enjoyed the Essay Reading Challenge and joined again for this year (check out the Essay Challenge page to see what I’m reading.)

How I read a short story significantly effects my reaction to it.  My goal was to read a short story a day for the second third of the year.  I failed, but I am 53 stories into 100 Shots of Short.  As I look back at the list of what I read, the ones that were not part of a collection by the same author were far more meaningful to me.  I have a terrible tendency to novelize a collection of short stories.  My favorites were by the O’Connor’s:  Frank’s “First Confession,” and Flannery’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”  Some labeled 2009 the Year of the Short Story, and while that wouldn’t describe my experience, it certainly was a year that I delved deeper into the genre.

My enjoyment of poetry continues to grow.  I’m constantly on the look out for Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver collections.  I’ll always like hearing poetry over reading it.  My inner voice never is never as insightful as that of an excellent reader.  Guess which podcast I listen to most?  That’s right, Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. 

Far and away, my favorite book of the year was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.  This work is wonderful on its own, but great books are more than their content.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog opened the door to translated literature for me.  We spent the summer on the blog reviewing translated books, some terrific, some okay, but overall the best reading experience of the year.  I’m far more aware of and interested in books from other languages and cultures than at the beginning of the 2009.  

Looking for translated books led to learning about new publishers.  It never occurred to me that I would feel loyal to a publisher, but that is 2008 thinking.  All I have to do is see Eurpoa’s funny bird and the book is with me at the cash register.  NYRB’s e-mails are the first I open.  The best literary day of the month is when Archipelago Books’ shipment arrives.

So what are my 2010 resolutions?  I’m considering naming some I would actually achieve, like taking more naps.