The Fairly Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by George Bilgere
 
Come live with me and be my unconditional love.
My feelings for you are unconditional.

The way I felt about those women in the past—
even Jill Davis—those feelings were conditional,
obviously. Otherwise, things would have worked out;
I'd still be with them, or at least one of them, right?

The condition with Jill was “let's get married.”
I could overlook that for a while,
but in the long run it was a deal breaker.

Another woman—Kate—well, for about a year
it was unconditional. No strings attached.
Unconditional love like that is beautiful.

But it turned out there were a couple of conditions,
such as, “You need to get a job.” Like working
on my novel wasn't “work.” And she did this thing,
this little clicking sound with her tongue
whenever I did something she didn't approve of,
which was often. This became a condition.

But after a careful appraisal of my feelings for you
I can honestly say that at the present moment
I see no problematic or inhibiting conditions whatsoever.

All indicators point toward a positive outcome,
and therefore I am quite comfortable in advising you
to come live with me and be my unconditional love.

“The Fairly Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by George Bilgere from Blood Pages. University of Pittsburgh Press © 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of poet James Wright, (books by this author) born in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1927). Neither of his parents had stayed in school beyond eighth grade — his dad worked in a glass factory and his mom worked at a laundry. He joined the Army, and on the G.I. bill, he was able to go to a good college, Kenyon College, and study writing there. He ended up getting a Fulbright Fellowship, traveling in Europe, and teaching all over the country, but he kept writing poems about Ohio, and he said that he wrote in "Ohioan." He said, "I have written about the things I am deeply concerned with — crickets outside my window, cold and hungry old men, ghosts in the twilight, horses in a field, a red-haired child in her mother's arms, a feeling of desolation in the fall, some cities I've known." When he was 27 years old, he wrote his first book, which was published in 1957 as The Green Wall, and W.H. Auden chose it for the Yale Younger Poet's series. His Collected Poems (1971) won the Pulitzer Prize.

He said , "My chief enemy in poetry is glibness. My family background is partly Irish, and this means many things, but linguistically it means that it is too easy to talk sometimes."

It's the birthday of playwright Marc Connelly, (books by this author) born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania (1890). He grew up around the theater — his parents had both been touring actors, and during Marc's childhood they ran a hotel, and he enjoyed meeting the people who stayed there, many of them theater people.

He started out as a reporter, moved to New York and got a job as a theater critic, and he met George S. Kaufman. They became friends and they ended up collaborating on plays, many of them successful, including Dulcy (1921) and Merton of the Movies (1922). And, along with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and others, he was a member of the infamous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel.

Connelly wrote The Green Pastures, retelling Old Testament stories with a large all-black cast, the first time that had ever happened on Broadway. The Green Pastures opened in 1930, and Connelly won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

It's the birthday of children's writer Tamora Pierce, (books by this author) born in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania (1954). She grew up poor, moved around constantly, attended 11 schools by the time she graduated from high school, and she said, "Books were my consistent friends."

She went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied social work and education there. After graduating, she started to write a novel, a fantasy novel for adults. When she finished, it was more than 700 pages long, the story of a girl who disguises herself as a boy to become a knight. She was working on editing it when she got a live-in job at a group home for troubled teenage girls. Every day, after school and before bed, Pierce told the story to the girls, leaving out the adult content, and the story worked well that way. She ended up turning her huge manuscript into four books, and making it a story for young adults, not adults. It was published as The Song of the Lioness Quartet: Alanna: The First Adventure (1983), In The Hand of the Goddess (1984), The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (1986), and Lioness Rampant (1988). The quartet was successful, and she went on to write many more books, and by 1992 she was able to make a living as a full-time writer.

She’s written 5 more series, a total of 20 novels, based on the same world as The Song of the Lioness, called The Tortall Universe. Her other literary world, The Circle Universe, contains 3 series and 11 novels.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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