Harold Bloom, 1930 -

Literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom was born in New York City (1930) to Jewish immigrants. His first language was Yiddish, and he started reading poetry in English before he'd ever heard English spoken. He didn't do well in high school but took the statewide Regents exams, got the highest score in the state, and that won him a scholarship to Cornell.
He went on to study literature at Yale in the 1950s at a time when there was a dress code. The students wore jackets and ties. Harold Bloom wore an old Russian leather coat and a pair of fisherman's trousers. He became famous at Yale for his great love of poetry. He memorized everything that he read. He could recite enormous, long poems.
As a professor at Yale and as a critic, Bloom has moved further and further away from the mainstream of literary criticism in this country. Most other critics look at literature as a product of history, politics, and society. Whereas Bloom is one of the last critics in America who believes that great literature is a product of genius. He treats characters in books as though they are real people, and he believes that we should read not to learn about historical periods or political climates but to learn about the human soul.
In the last few years, he's begun writing books for general readers, believing that scholars have forgotten how to read for pleasure, and many of his recent books have become best sellers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and How to Read and Why, and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

“Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?”

*In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

*We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

*What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

*I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike , and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two , are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

*We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

*Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

*But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

*Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way you choose between people. You can't become friends with every acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with what you read.

*I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

*Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Langston Hughes, 1902 –1967

     

Poet and novelist Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). His father divorced his mother and moved to Mexico when Hughes was just a baby. He was raised by his mother and grandmother, but after high school he went to Mexico to get to know his father for the first time. He was disgusted when he found that his father was obsessed with money and more racist than most white men Hughes had ever known.

He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from the world rather than books. He quit college, hopped a boat to Africa, and as soon as the boat left New York Harbor, he threw all his college books overboard. He took odd jobs on ships and made his way from Africa to France, Holland, Italy, and finally back to the United States.

He got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsey. Lindsey loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, /Rounders,/ Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses - / Dream-singers all."


*Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly, Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams go, Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow.

Harlem  (Excerpt from Montage of a Dream Deferred)  by Langston Hughes


What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags 

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Flannery O'Connor

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.

*I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth. 

*To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness. 

Word of the Day

Sitting pretty, Informal.

a.

in an advantageous position.

b.

well-to-do; successful.

Hortative\HOR-tuh-tiv\, adjective, :giving exhortation : serving to advise or warn, The candidate's hortative style of speaking appealed to some voters but led others to dismiss him as a blowhard., "But it's important to remember that 'Jersey Shore' is on MTV, a youth-oriented cable channel that has a hortative streak: series like 'Teen Mom' and 'If You Really Knew Me' carry a strong 'don't try this at home' message." — From an article by Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times, August 20, 2010 

Simone Weil, 1909 – 1943

Simone Weil (French: [simɔn vɛj]; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.
Weil's whole life was marked by an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others; at the age of six, for instance, she refused to eat sugar after she heard that soldiers fighting in the First World War had to go without. She died from tuberculosis during the Second World War, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition after refusing to eat more than the minimal rations that she believed were available to soldiers at the time.
After completing her education, Weil became a professor. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the left in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer so she could better understand the working class.
Unusually among twentieth century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, though most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous on continental Europe and throughout the English speaking world. Her fame began to decline in the late sixties, and she is now rarely taught at universities.[1] Yet her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields;[2] a meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012, over 2500 new scholarly works had been published about her.[3] While sometimes described as odd, humourless and irritating, she inspired great affection in many of those who knew her. Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times".[4

Gathering Leaves by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Spades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop? 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude,
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery,
But 'tis figured in the flowers,
Was never secret history,
But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song
_____________________

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

The Telephone by Edward Field, 1924 -

My happiness depends on an electric appliance

And I do not mind giving it so much credit

With life in this city being what it is

Each person separated from friends

By a tangle of subways and buses

Yes my telephone is my joy

It tells me that I am in the world and wanted

It rings and I am alerted to love or gossip

I go comb my hair which begins to sparkle

Without it I was like a bear in a cave

Drowsing through a shadowy winter

It rings and spring has come

I stretch and amble out into the sunshine

Hungry again as I pick up the receiver

For the human voice and the good news of friends

*Edward Field (born June 7, 1924) is an American poet and author.

Chief Seattle, 1786 - 1866

Suqwamish and Duwamish

Seattle, also known as Sealth, was very young when George Vancouver came to Puget Sound to map the region. Before that time, the Duwamish and Suquamish (his mother and father's respective tribes) had had very little contact with the whites. Seattle's brief experience with Vancouver impressed him greatly, which was perhaps why, in later life, he tried to advocate a peaceful coexistence with the settlers. When he was a young man Seattle inherited his father's position as chief, after first having proved his leadership in warfare against other tribes in the area. Seattle was so impressed by the French Catholic missionaries that in the 1830's he converted to Christianity, taking the baptismal name "Noah".
By the 1850's the settlement had begun to grow and prosper and the name was changed from Alki Point to Seattle. More and more settlers began to move into the area, and in 1855 the governor of Washington Territory called together the tribes to propose a new treaty. This treaty would send the tribes to a reservation and their lands would be controlled by the government. Although Seattle continued to council for peace, the conflict lasted many years. Finally Seattle moved onto a small patch of land on the western side of Puget Sound where he spent the remainder of his life.

Quotes:

"The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man."

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on."

"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected."

"Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints."

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people."

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the son of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."


_______

"In 1851 Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and other Indian tribes around Washington's Puget Sound, delivered what is considered to be one of the most beautiful and profound environmental statements ever made. The city of Seattle is named for the chief, whose speech was in response to a proposed treaty under which the Indians were persuaded to sell two million acres of land for $150,000." -- Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path.
Chief Seattle's Thoughts

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man --- all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.

So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

I do not know. Our ways are different than your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect's wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition - the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.

I am a savage and do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover; our God is the same God.

You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.

That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.

The end of living and the beginning of survival.

Katherine Anne Porter, 1890 - 1980

*The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

*I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

* I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

* Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.”

 

* “Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.”

*“Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.”

 *“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”

** You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a lang uage that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

*Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution from the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belong ing. Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.

“A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution.”

Ninotchka~Greta Garbo 1939~III

Greta Garbo was a beautiful and talented actress. She played the strictBolshevik with an expressionless and cold face. Then, when she succumbed to the love of a man and the pleasures of Capitalism, she was her gorgeous and seductive self.  

Ninotchka, with all her stern Bolshevik reluctance, resists Leon’s comic advances. But he never gives up and she appears to never relent. “We don’t have men like you in my country,” she says. “Thank you,: says Leon. “That is why I believe in the future of my country,” she adds.She begins to weaken. In answer to Leon’s question, “Do you like me just a little bit? she says, “Your general appearance is not distasteful.”

“Must you flirt?” she asks. “Well, I don’t have to, but I find it natural.” Leon says. “Suppress it,” Ninotchka says, but she doesn’t turn away.”What kind of a girl are you, anyway? “ Leon asks. “Just what you see,” she says. “A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution.”
“You’re the most adorable cog I’ve ever seen,” says Leon. “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood,” she says. But he does and she responds.

” When I kissed you,” she says, “I betrayed a Russian ideal. I should be stood up against the wall.” “Would that make you feel better?” Leon asks.” Much better,” she says, “I have paid the penalty.” Then the romance really starts.

William Carlos Williams and McCarthyism

Politics

Modern liberals portray Williams as aligned with liberal democratic issues; however, as his publications in more politically radical journals like New Masses suggest, his political commitments were further to the left than the term "liberal" indicates. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism, and in 1935 published "The Yachts", a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution. The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race". Furthermore, in the introduction to his 1944 book of poems "The Wedge", he writes of socialism as an inevitable future development and as a necessity for true art to develop. In 1949, he published a booklet/bar "The Pink Church" that was about the human body but was understood, in the context of McCarthyism, as being dangerously pro-communist. The anti-communist movement led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, an event that contributed to his being treated for clinical depression. In an unpublished article for Blast, Williams wrote artists should resist producing propaganda and be "devoted to writing (first and last)." However, in the same article Williams claims that art can also be "in the service of the proletariat".

ref: http://www.poemhunter.com/william-carlos-williams/biography/

* Although his health gradually deteriorated, Williams’ indomitable spirit enabled him to continue writing, completing his long poem, "Paterson," and Pulitzer Prize-winning Pictures from Brueghel. Williams also was appointed as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, delayed first by his health, then held up and finally withdrawn because of political accusations of leftist sympathies and acquaintance with Ezra Pound. An enormous disappointment to Williams, this politically charged event during the McCarthy era contributed to a deep depression, necessitating 8 months of "living hell" in a mental hospital. After the big stroke in 1952, as physician-poet Merrill Moore also observed, "it was remarkable that preservation of the creativity center of Williams’ brain allowed him to produce an astonishing volume of writing in the mid 1950s"

ref: http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/67/5/1512

*MRS. WILLIAMS

That was in 1952, when Bill was going down to take the chair of poetry. Senator McCarthy was in the news then, and they were frightened to death in Washington. There was a woman who was lobbying for a reform in poetry, who had no use for free verse. She had a little periodical, I've forgotten the name of it, and she wrote a letter saying what an outrage it was that a man like that—  

INTERVIEWER

Of course, this was all in the aftermath of the Bollingen award to Pound.  

MRS. WILLIAMS

Bill had nothing to do with that. But if he had been a member of the Fellows then, he would certainly have voted for him.  

INTERVIEWER

Was Dr. Williams ever asked to testify against Pound?  

MRS. WILLIAMS

They questioned him two or three times. They wanted him to listen to some records and swear it was Pound. Bill couldn't do that, but he said he would tell them frankly what he knew. And that was all. Every time we went down to Washington, Bill went to see him.

ref: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4486/the-art-of-poetry-no-6-william-carlos-williams

A Fence by Carl Sandburg 1878 – 1967

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the 

workmen are beginning the fence. 

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that 

can stab the life out of any man who falls on them. 

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble 

and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering 

children looking for a place to play. 

Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go 

nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow. 

Eudora Welty, 1909 - 2001

Writer Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1909). Her mother was a schoolteacher, and Welty learned to love books before she was even able to read them. She said, "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."

She tried working in advertising but said, "It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want." So she became a writer.

Though she wrote several novels, including The Optimist's Daughter (1972), she's best known for her short stories in collections such as The Wide Net (1943) and The Golden Apples (1949). She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart with scissors at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins.

Her story "Why I Live At the PO" begins, "I was getting along fine with Mama, Pap-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking 'Pose Yourself' photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same. Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than I am and for that reason she's spoiled."

A critic once asked Welty to explain where she got the idea for a marble cake in one of her stories. She replied, "It's a recipe that's been in my family for some time."

*A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

*Beware of a man with manners.

*Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

*I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

*It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

*Never think you've seen the last of anything.

*The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

*The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

*Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

*To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

*Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

*Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

*Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

William Carlos Williams, September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). Williams fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman in high school, and began keeping a series of notebooks full of his own Whitman-esque poems. He wanted to devote his life to writing after graduation, but his parents persuaded him to study medicine. So he became a doctor in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. He set up a patients' room off the kitchen of his house at number 9 Ridge Road, and began to treat the poor immigrants who had begun moving into the neighborhood: Italians and Poles and Germans.

He came to believe that the greatest poetry was produced by devotion to the poet's local culture. He paid close attention to the language used by gas station attendants and nurses and shopkeepers, and he began to incorporate that more simple, spoken language into his poetry. And he wrote about ordinary things: plums, wheelbarrows, hospitals, and the New Jersey landscape, with its polluted rivers and suburban lawns.
*      “I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them. . . .”

* “What power has love but forgiveness?”

* “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.”

*But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

*In summer, the song sings itself.

*What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

*Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

*I have eaten

the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold” 

* “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

*“We sit and talk quietly,

with long lapses of silence,

and I am aware of the stream that has no language,

coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.”

*so much depends

upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white

chickens.

*a song in the front yard

I've stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it's fine

How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.

And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

*

Pastoral

WHEN I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

"There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode or a man that couldn’t be throwed”

"There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode or a man that couldn’t be throwed” is a bit of cowboy wisdom that’s been attributed to Will James (1892-1942), a cowboy artists and author who was popular in the 1920s and 1930s.