William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The novelist William Styron, was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925. He served in the Marines, and then he worked at a publishing house, but he got fired, so he decided to try writing full time. He was only 26 years old when his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was published (1951.) It's the story of a young Southern girl who commits suicide, and he wrote it after he heard about the suicide of a girl he used to date, but the critics were convinced that he was the heir to William Faulkner and the next great storyteller of the South. He didn't like this very much; he said, "I don't consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is," and he said that the main character "didn't have to come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from."
He moved to Paris, and he helped found The Paris Review. He wrote a couple of novels that got some attention and mixed reviews, but then he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a fictional account of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, and it was an influential book, a book that got a lot of attention because it came out at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and at first it got great reviews, but then there was a backlash against Styron for his attempt to portray a black man, and people started to question whether he was stereotyping black culture. Styron was upset, and it took more than 10 years for his next novel to be published, the novel Sophie's Choice (1979), about a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor. It was also a controversial novel, and also a very popular novel; it was at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and won the American Book Award for fiction.
Styron liked to follow a routine, but unlike many writers who wake up early and write every morning, Styron would sleep until noon, stay in bed for an hour thinking, write in the afternoon, have a late dinner, and then stay up until the middle of the night. He said, "Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever."

*"I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor."

*Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

*A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

*Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.

Horace 65-8 B.C

Roman poet Horace was born on this day in Venusia, in southern Italy (65 B.C.E.). His father was a former slave, but by the time Horace came along, he was well-off and had a lot of money to spend on his talented son. He sent him to Rome as a boy, and then to Athens to learn philosophy and literature.
He is probably best known for his Odes, which he began publishing in 23 B.C.E., often considered the best lyric poetry ever written in Latin. He also coined some famous phrases that we still use, like Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which roughly translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country," and carpe diem, "seize the day."
Horace was favored by Emperor Augustus to write a poem for the special public entertainment event known as the Secular Games that Augustus put on in 17 B.C.
Horace provides autobiographical information in his poetry. We learn that he was the son of a freedman who worked as a coactor argentarius 'auction broker' and publicanus 'tax collector'. Another source for his life is Suetonius who calls Horace a native of Venusium. He adds that Horace was short and fat, liked lascivious pictures, and spent most of his time in retirement on his farm.

Horace received an education at Rome under L. Orbilius Pupillus, and then in Athens, at the Academy, where he met Cicero. While in Greece, Horace joined the army of Brutus and fought at Philippi as military tribune. As a result of being on the losing side against Octavian and Mark Antony, Horace's family's property was confiscated.

In 39 B.C., after Augustus granted amnesty, Horace became a secretary in the Roman treasury. In 38, Horace met and became the client of the artists' patron Maecenas, who provided Horace with a villa in the Sabine Hills. Augustus favored Horace, commissioning him to write the Carmen Saeculare for the Secular Games of 17 B.C.

When Horace died at age 59, he left his estate to Augustus and was buried near the tomb of Maecenas.

The Works of Horace

De Arte Poetica Liber - The Art of Poetry (18 B.C.)
Carmen Saeculare - Poem of the Secular Games (17 B.C.)
Carminum Libra IV - The Odes (4 Books) (starting 23 B.C.)
Epistularum Libri II - The Epistles (2 Books) (starting 20 B.C.)
Epodon Liber - The Epodes (30 B.C.)
Sermonum Libri II (Satura) - The Satires (2 Books) (starting 35 B.C.)
More information - Horace. Also see: A Con

Marcus Aurelius
*"Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last,"

*" Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith," and "Very little is needed to make a happy life."

"Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good."

Masters Of War, Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

War Profit Litany by Allen Ginsberg

To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
in order,
here named the Fathers in office in these industries, tele-
phones directing finance,
names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of the
stockholders of these destined Aggregates,
and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,
representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking
in hotel lobbies to persuade,
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
military, gossip, argue, and persuade
suggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, this
done for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon, consul-
tants to military, paid by their industry:
and these are the names of the generals & captains mili-
tary, who know thus work for war goods manufactur-
ers;
and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,
investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens em-
ployed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
coherent and definite,
and the first form of this litany begun first day December
1967 furthers this poem of these States.

December 1, 1967
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Paul Theroux, 1941 -

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). When he was growing up, his father read to him and his siblings from novels by Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. He and his brothers were encouraged to write, and at an early age they started a family newspaper to report on the daily events of their household.

Theroux joined the Peace Corps after college and went to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting journalism to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling. He did keep traveling, and he believes that living outside the United States is the best thing that ever happened to him as a writer. He said, "Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude."

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first bestseller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975). He has since written many books of fiction, including The Mosquito Coast (1981), and many books of travel writing, including Fresh Air Fiend (2000). His most recent travel book is Dark Star Safari (2003), about traveling over land from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa.

Happy the Man by Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
"Happy the Man" by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden

Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). Pound was born within a few years of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot, and he was instrumental in promoting the careers of each one of these writers — as well as many, many others. He was a champion of modern poetry and prose; Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair proclaimed that it was Ezra Pound "more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it." He was extraordinarily generous with his clout, often described as "the poet's poet." Pound's mantra was "Make it new."
He'd earned a grant to study Romantic languages and literature in Europe, and then returned to the United States and got a teaching position a Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. But his rising academic star fell four months later when he allowed a stranded vaudeville actress to sleep over at his place. His landlady disapproved, his college superiors were notified, and in the ensuing scandal the 22-year-old Pound was dismissed from his professorial duties. (He later claimed all accusations were "ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin Quarter type.'") Nevertheless, when the college fired him, they also gave him the rest of his year's salary, and with it he headed back to Europe.
Pound spent time in Venice and moved to London. He believed that William Butler Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English, and he was determined to find him and apprentice himself to the master. He befriended Yeats in England, worked as his secretary for a while, and even lived with him for a period in a cottage at Sussex. Once, when Yeats was lecturing on at an informal gathering about the intersection of poetry and music, Pound began eating two red tulips to get some attention.
Later, in 1914, Pound would marry Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats's former lover. It was that same year that he met T.S. Eliot, whom Pound is credited with "discovering" after pushing for the publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry magazine.
Pound lived in England for eight years, and his Kensington flat became a hive of modern literary activity. He helped found the Imagist movement, along with H.D. — pen name of Hilda Doolittle — and declared its principles to be "direct treatment of the thing," to use only words that "contribute to the presentation," and in regard to rhythm: "to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."
He wrote a famous poem called "In a Station of the Metro," which goes:
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough."
He wrote it after getting off a train at La Concorde station in Paris and seeing a succession of beautiful faces; he found expression for his emotion came not in speech, he said, "but in little splotches of colour." At first, he wrote a 30-line poem about it, which he destroyed. Six months later, he wrote a poem half the length of the original, and then a year later he wrote this two-line poem, which consists of just 14 words.
Pound spent most of his writing life on The Cantos, a modern epic. The first was published in 1917. He completed 109 of his Cantos; an additional eight were incomplete but published. The first of The Cantos begins:
"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)

During World War I, Ezra Pound was an American émigré in London and the impresario behind imagism and vorticism in England. After many of his friends were killed in the trenches, including the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he described his postwar activities in the following terms: “1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same.” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, from which the following two excerpts are taken, is one result of Pound’s war-guilt investigations.



IV

These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case. . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

Fortitude as never before

Frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

War in Vietnam

On 29 March, 1973, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, ending the direct involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Several thousand civilian Defense Department employees stayed on in Vietnam after the withdrawal of troops. The last of these Americans were airlifted out of the country when Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975.

Cherry Boy Comes Home from the War

When I came back to the states from Vietnam on 7 February 1968, DEROSing at Oakland Army Terminal from midnight to six in the morning, I was hoping my entire family would be in Stockton to greet me. Only my mother met me at the bus terminal. Naturally, I was pleased to see her, but I was bitterly disappointed that no one else had accompanied her. I didn't have a girlfriend because in Basic Training she had written me the proverbial Dear John letter. There wasn't a protester or, for that matter, an army recruiter at the terminal either. I had gotten a letter shortly before I left Camp Bearcat forewarning me that a "Welcome Home Party" was being arranged. I yearned to hear the cheers and yells from my loved ones, feel the pats and slaps on my back, the hands grasping hands, the lips touching lips, the words "We're so glad you made it back alive and in one piece" that I dreamt of it for days. I almost forgot the mortar attacks and the sniper rounds. I was in a state of short timer's frenzy. I pictured a humongous party on the 4th of February, the date I was supposed to arrive. Like all good signs born under a bad sign, the '68 Tet ruined my homecoming. On the fourth of February, swarms of Viet Cong endeavored to come through Long Binh Bien Hoa's perimeter of concertina wire to get our unarmed, young butts. I had already turned in my weapon and the rest of my gear earlier during processing. Their smoldering bodies--fresh from barrage after barrage of Willie Peter rounds--lay contorted, spread eagled, and fused to their fate, symbolic of man's ability to efface man from the planet. Was it their death or my own spiritual one that created the indifference I feel now?

It's been twenty-four years since the Nam and a little over five years since my mother died. Now, a homecoming party that never happened is nothing more than an old memory, a roll of film never developed.

Victor H. Bausch earned his master's degree in English from California State University, Stanislaus, and his master's degree in Library Science from San Jose State University. His work has appeared in Slipstream, The South Florida Poetry Review, Touchstone Literary Journal, Prophetic Voices: Anthology of War and Peace; Tour of Duty: Vietnam in the Words of Those Who Were There, and others. He is a Viet Nam veteran (1967-68), a member of Veterans for Peace, and works as a reference librarian at Monterey Public Library.

Larry Hardiman

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith."
J.B. Priestley

"I decline to accept the end of man."

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950

"All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. 'I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories.' he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account."

Richard Ellmann

________

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885 - 1951

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885), author of Main Street (1920)and Babbitt (1922), and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
He left his hometown in Minnesota as soon as he could. He worked for newspapers and for publishing companies, wrote short stories for magazines, and wrote some potboiler novels and even a few serious novels, but none of his books did very well.
In 1920, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who were editing the satirical magazine American Mercury, met up with 35-year-old "tall, skinny, paprika-headed" Sinclair Lewis, who was unknown in the writing world, at a mutual friend's apartment. Lewis walked up to Mencken and Nathan, put his arms around their shoulders and tightly around their necks, and began yelling at the top of his voice that he was the best writer in the country and that he'd just written the best book in the country, to be published in a week — and being critics, the two of them should duly take note of this. He went on like this at high volume for about half an hour, and when Mencken and Nathan finally escaped, they went to a pub to decompress and concluded that he was an idiot. But Mencken read the book anyway, and was bowled over by it.
The book was Main Street (1920), about a fictional small town in Minnesota called Gopher Prairie, a place inhabited by "a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
Main Street was a huge sensation. No one had ever written such a scathing indictment of small-town American life. Within nine months, it sold about 200,000 copies, and within a few years, the book had sold 2 million copies and he'd become a millionaire. In 1922, he published Babbitt, which was also highly successful. He turned down the Pulitzer Prize that they tried to award him for his 1925 novel Arrowsmith, and when the Swedish Academy called to inform him he was being awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature, he thought the phone call was a prank. H.L. Mencken, who'd been so exasperated by Lewis a decade prior, wrote: "The award of the Nobel Prize to Sinclair Lewis gave me immense pleasure. I can imagine no man whose recognition would be more offensive to the general run of American literary patriots. It was a blow exactly in the eye."
Though Sinclair Lewis left Minnesota as a teenager and spent most of his life traveling or living in Washington, D.C., 16 of his 22 novels involved Midwestern towns or Midwestern protagonists. He said he found creative inspiration while "sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States."

Flannery O'Connor, 1925 - 1964

The novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). As a young girl she was terribly shy and prone to temper tantrums. She became famous in her hometown when she was five years old by teaching one of her chickens to walk backward. A New York City reporter came and filmed the chicken for a newsreel.
She wanted either to be a writer or a cartoonist. During college, she submitted her cartoons to The New Yorker, but she was rejected, so she began to focus on her writing. She applied to one of the only creative writing programs in the country at the time, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she was almost rejected because the admissions interviewer couldn't understand her southern accent.
Once she got into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, people there didn't know what to make of her. She never read James Joyce or Franz Kafka, or any of the other fashionable writers of the era. She was more interested in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. During class, she almost never spoke, and her classmates only knew she was listening by the way she occasionally smiled when she thought something was funny.
But even though O'Connor was an outsider, her fiction impressed everybody, and she won an award that got her a contract to publish her first novel. She was still working on that novel when she began to notice a heaviness in her arms while she typed. Traveling home to Georgia for Christmas that year, she grew so sick on the train that she had to be hospitalized when she arrived. It turned out that she had inherited lupus, the same disease that had killed her father.
She moved in with her mother and began receiving steroid treatments, which made it difficult to walk without crutches. She said at the time, "I walk like I have one foot in the gutter but it's not an inconvenience and I get out of doing a great many things I don't want to do." Even though the disease made her extremely tired, she forced herself to write for three hours every day on the screened in porch of her mother's house. She wrote to her friend Robert Lowell, "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, (or so I tell myself)."
O'Connor's first novel Wise Blood came out in 1952. Three years later, she published the story collection that made her name A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955). It contains her two most famous short stories: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and "Good Country People" about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.
O'Connor filled her stories with crazy preachers, murderers, the deformed, the disabled, freaks and outcasts. An uncle once asked her why she didn't write about nice folks. O'Connor focused on the grotesque because she said, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." She died a little more than a week shy of her fortieth birthday.
Flannery O'Connor said, "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."


*At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

*Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

*I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

*The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Billy Collins, 1941

William “Billy” Collins (born March 22, 1941) is an American poet. He served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In his home state, Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004-2006. He was recently appointed the Irving Bacheller Chair of Creative Writing at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and is a Visiting Scholar with the Winter Park Institute. He remains a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.


Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.

______

Introduction To Poetry


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

William "Bill" McGuire Bryson, born December 8, 1951

Travel writer Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa (1952). As a young man he settled in England and supported himself with a series of jobs as a copy editor, and then he began writing about books lexicography, including The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984). He had been living outside of the United States for more than a decade, when he got the idea go back to America and write about how the country had changed in his absence. He borrowed his mother's Chevy and began driving to all the places he'd visited with his family on vacations as a child. He ultimately covered almost 14,000 miles, and visited 38 states.

The result was his book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), in which Bryson poked fun at his home country, while reminiscing about his Iowa childhood. He wrote, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.”

*What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

*He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.

*There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

*I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted -- stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

*And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

*Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.

*When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

*I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Humor

bur·lesque   [ber-lesk] , adjective, verb,-lesqued, -lesquing.
–noun
1.
an artistic composition, esp. literary or dramatic, that, for the sake of laughter, vulgarizes lofty material or treats ordinary material with mock dignity.
2.
any ludicrous parody or grotesque caricature.
3.
Also, bur·lesk. a humorous and provocative stage show featuring slapstick humor, comic skits, bawdy songs, striptease acts, and a scantily clad female chorus.

*slap·stick   [slap-stik]
–noun
1.
broad comedy characterized by boisterous action, as the throwing of pies in actors' faces, mugging, and obvious farcical situations and jokes.
2.
a stick or lath used by harlequins, clowns, etc., as in pantomime, for striking other performers, esp. a combination of laths that make a loud, clapping noise without hurting the person struck.
–adjective
3.
using, or marked by the use of, broad farce and horseplay: a slapstick motion picture.

*farce   [fahrs] noun, verb,farced, farc·ing.
–noun
1.
a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character.
2.
humor of the type displayed in such works.
3.
foolish show; mockery; a ridiculous sham.