Primitive
by Joyce Sutphen

How lucky we are that we do not live
in the time of the Plague, when, in three

years a third of Europe's population––
20 million people––died, and no one

knew the cause. How fortunate we
are to know that it was not the planets

or the wrath of God that caused it
but a tiny bacillus carried by fleas

on the backs of rats coming by ship
from Asia, and how much better it is

to live now, rather than in 1891, when
Thomas Edison filed patents for

the first motion picture camera and viewer,
which operated on a perceptual phenomenon

called "persistence of vision"––a thing that
tricked the brain into thinking it was seeing

seamless movement as the viewer stared
through a tiny peephole and beheld the

gray-and-black image of a horse, galloping.
This is what I think about as I leaf through

the ads for flat-screen TVs in today's paper
or click a button on my phone to watch

a video posted from a pub in Ireland. Aren't
we lucky that we have no idea how primitive

our lives will seem one day? How appalling
to realize that our best cures for cancer will

look like a form of torture and that we really
thought we couldn't be everywhere at once.

Reproduced from Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems by Joyce Sutphen by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming October 2019 with the University of Nebraska Press. (preorder now)

It's the birthday of writer Alexis de Tocqueville (books by this author), born in Paris (1805). He was 25 years old when the French government sent him to America to study the prison system. He spent nine months touring towns and cities and taking notes. A few years later, he published his famous book, Democracy in America (1835).

During his tour, the aristocratic Tocqueville was impressed by the fact that American Democracy actually worked. He wrote: "There is one thing which America demonstrates invincibly, and of which I had been in doubt up till now: it is that the middle classes can govern a state. I do not know if they would come out with credit from thoroughly difficult political situations. But they are adequate for the ordinary run of society. In spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education and their vulgar manners, they clearly can provide practical intelligence, and that is found to be enough."

It's the birthday of poet Stanley Kunitz (books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1905). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father committed suicide in a public park before Kunitz was born, and his mother, Yetta, erased all traces of Stanley's father from the house, and refused to speak about him. She opened up a dry-goods store and sewed clothes in the back room, working overtime to pay off the debts that her husband had left behind, even though legally she was not obligated to pay them.

One thing his mother did not destroy were the books his father had left behind, books by Tolstoy and Dickens. One of Kunitz's favorite books was the dictionary. He said: "I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria — some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it."

His first job as a boy was riding his horse down the streets of Worcester and lighting the gas lamps at night. He became a reporter for the Worcester Telegram, went to Harvard, and stayed for his master's degree. He wanted to pursue his Ph.D., but the head of the English department at Harvard told him that Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught by a Jew.

So he moved to a big farm in Connecticut, and worked as a reporter and farmer. He sold fresh herbs to markets in Hartford. Kunitz was drafted into World War II, and when he came back, he was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. In 1949, the college tried to expel one of his students — Groucho Marx's daughter Miriam — right before her graduation because she had violated a curfew. Kunitz helped organize a protest of the decision, and the president of Bennington showed up at his house and told him to stop immediately. Kunitz took the plant that he was potting and threw it in the president's face, then quit.

He published a second book, but it was barely noticed. He was so unknown that his third book, Selected Poems (1958), was rejected by eight publishers — three of them refused to even read it. When it was finally published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When someone asked W.H. Auden why nobody knew about Stanley Kunitz, Auden said: "It's strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He's a patient man."

It was more than 10 years before he published his next book, The Testing Tree (1971), and slowly but surely, people began to take notice. He was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100.

He said: "It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self.”