Today: "Genealogy" by Gail Mazur | |
Genealogy by Gail Mazur Listen Online
Of my ancestors I know little, and to try tracing them now would be absurd, their surnames reinvented, mangled at every gate. Was there, among their number, a hero? Were there heliographs, a silhouette, daguerreotypes, lost in the wolverine dark as they fled where they were unwanted for where they were unwanted? To me, it doesn’t matter—like William James, they believed in free will. Summer nights, I stroll Broadway or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts Avenue, haloed in the night lamps’ sodium vapors, and they are my marveling entourage, small, bent, dogged, homely, though I turned out tall—oh, generations of nutrition—and when I sleep, they toss beside me, blacksmiths, dentists, deliverers of ice, of knives, of artificial flowers, of a posterity bred heartlessly to lose them. "Genealogy" by Gail Mazur from Forbidden City. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Reprinted by permission. (buy now) |
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| It's the birthdayof poetElizabeth Bishop(books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). She went to Vassar, where she really began her career as a poet. Her mentor was the poet Marianne Moore, who taught Bishop that she could write poems that weren't about big ideas like love or death, but just about the observation of ordinary things. Elizabeth Bishop was a slow, meticulous writer - she published just 101 poems during her lifetime. | | It's the birthdayof the best-selling novelistJohn Grisham(books by this author), born in Jonesboro, Arkansas (1955). He became a successful lawyer and then decided to write a novel based on one of his court cases. He spent three years writingA Time to Kill(1989), but only a few thousand copies were printed, and it didn't sell out on the first run. So he read Writer's Digest magazine and found an article about the rules of suspense, and he used that formula to write a thriller about a law student who realizes that the firm he works for is connected to the mafia. That wasThe Firm (1991). It was a huge best-seller, and John Grisham went on to writeThe Pelican Brief(1992),The Rainmaker(1995), and many more best-sellers. | | It's the birthdayofKate Chopin(books by this author), born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850. She came from a wealthy family - her father was a successful businessman and her mother was a beautiful socialite from one of the city's oldest Creole families. Kate was a Southern belle, a devoted wife, and the mother of six children. But then her husband died, and soon after that her mother died. Chopin was depressed. Her family doctor thought she was a very good letter-writer, so he encouraged her to try writing fiction as a way to stay occupied. Over the next 15 years, Kate Chopin wrote almost 100 short stories and sketches, and two novels,At Fault(1890) andThe Awakening(1899).The Awakeningis the story of Edna Pontellier, who gives up her roles as wife and mother, has an affair, and eventually walks into the sea, perhaps committing suicide. And when it was published, Kate Chopin was censored and criticized. But now she is considered an important early feminist author, andThe Awakeningis considered a classic of American fiction. | | It's the birthdayofNeal Cassady(books by this author), born in 1926 in Salt Lake City. He was a con man, in and out of jail, and finally moved to New York City, where he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The Beats idolized Cassady. He embodied everything they embraced in theory - he was a self-made man, he had been educated on the streets by bums and crooks, he was smart and free and charming. Neal Cassady appears inThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Testby Tom Wolfe. In "Howl," Allen Ginsberg refers to him as "N.C., secret hero of these poems." But Neal Cassady is most famous as the inspiration for Dean Moriarty, the hero of Jack Kerouac'sOn the Road(1957). | | Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | | | National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation. |
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| Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse. Purchase O, What a Luxury | |
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