The Writer's Almanac for Monday, June 3, 2019

Anomaly
by Linda Pastan

No one has a heart like yours
the doctor tells me, studying
the CT angiogram with barely
concealed excitement––

an explorer in white
discovering a tropical island––
exotic foliage instead of
the body's usual geography.

And he shows me the picture
of my heart proudly, one artery
instead of two snaking from the aorta,
dividing only later

into tributaries that nourish
this aging body: white cells
and red cells paddling madly
towards the organs on shore.

Oh uncharted rivers of blood!
Why am I heartsick, heartsore,
heavy hearted? Haven't I always known
my heart was different?

From QUEEN OF A RAINY COUNTRY by Linda Pastan. Copyright © 2006 by Linda Pastan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. (buy now)

It's the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg (books by this author) (1926). He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Paterson. His father, Louis, was a poet and high school teacher; his mother, Naomi, was a communist and a paranoid schizophrenic. Naomi and Allen were very close; when she was in the grip of her delusions, he was the only one she trusted, and he often accompanied her to her therapy appointments. She spent much of his childhood institutionalized. Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution himself in the late 1940s, when he was arrested for harboring stolen goods; he chose to plead insanity.

He went to Columbia University, first intending to study law, but during his freshman year he met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. He later said, "I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs — when I was 17 — that I realized I was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts." Ginsberg left Columbia in 1948, traveled, and worked some odd jobs, and in 1954, he moved to San Francisco. He met poet Peter Orlovsky there; they fell in love and were partners until Ginsberg's death. In October 1955, Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery. The next day, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent him a telegram quoting Emerson's letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." "Howl," which was written to be read aloud, revived oral poetry. Ginsberg said that it, along with the rest of his work, was autobiographical, and that at its core was his pain at dealing with his mother's schizophrenia.

His mother died in 1956; two days later, he received a letter from her in the mail, in which she had written, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window — I have the key — Get married Allen don't take drugs — the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window." He had wanted to have a kaddish — the Jewish mourners' prayer — recited at her funeral, but there weren't enough Jewish men present, so he wrote his poem "Kaddish" (1961) in reparation:

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream — what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window — and the great Key lays its head of light on top of
Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk — in a single vast
beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater — and the place of
poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now [...]

He said, "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

Today is the birthday of the "founding mother of the historical romance genre": Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939) (books by this author), born Kathleen Erin Hogg in Alexandria, Louisiana. She met her future husband, Air Force Lieutenant Ross Woodiwiss, at a dance when she was 16, and they eloped. She worked part-time as a fashion model and saved her money to buy a typewriter, which she gave to her husband one Christmas. She told him it was for him to write his poetry on; she really bought it for herself, and she worked on her first novel, The Flame and the Flower, during his absences, afraid to tell him what she was up to. The hefty manuscript was turned down eight times, but then she sent it to some paperback publishers; an editor at Avon, raiding the slush pile for something to read on a rainy afternoon, was captivated, and the book sold 600,000 copies on its publication in 1972.

Woodiwiss single-handedly remade the romance genre, setting the standard for nearly every bodice-ripper to follow. Previously, romance novels had been pretty thin, literally and figuratively. Her books were often 700 pages long, heavily plotted, and full of carefully researched historical detail and steamy sex scenes. Her heroines were strong and dynamic, considering the genre and the time period.

Woodiwiss wrote 12 more books after The Flame and the Flower, taking her time on each one to get the historical details right. She died of cancer in 2007, and her last book, Everlasting, was published posthumously.

It's the birthday of author Larry McMurtry (1936) (books by this author), born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and raised in nearby Archer City. His hometown is about 80 miles from the town of Thalia, which is the setting for several of McMurtry's novels, like his first, Horseman, Pass By (1961), as well as Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966) and its four sequels. He writes a lot about small-town life in Texas, and sometimes he writes historical novels about the frontier, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove (1985), although he strongly resists romanticizing the Old West and doesn't hold a very high opinion of cowboys in general.

In the early 1960s, when he was at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner fellowship, he began working as a rare-book scout, haunting used-book stores in search of first editions and other valuable books, which he would buy on behalf of antiquarian booksellers. It was a great job for a bookish kid who liked to hang around and browse the shelves, and when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, he opened his own store in Georgetown, called Booked Up. In 1988, he opened a second Booked Up in his hometown of Archer City, in four large buildings that once housed a car dealership.

On this day in 1924, Franz Kafka died (books by this author). He wrote to his friend Max Brod: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me [...] in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread. [...] Yours, Franz Kafka.” But Brod had already told him that he would never destroy any of Kafka’s manuscripts — not even if Kafka himself told him to — and critics are skeptical about the sincerity of Kafka’s request. The three novels Kafka left behind — The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle — were all published by Brod, who made substantial changes to the manuscripts. He corrected Kafka’s odd spelling and punctuation, moved chapters and paragraphs around, and gave the works cleaner endings. It was not until the 1970s that the originals were translated into English as Kafka wrote them.