Crossing the Bar
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,
 
   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.
 
   Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;
 
   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.

“Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Pubic domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the poet X.J. Kennedy (books by this author), born Joseph Kennedy in Dover, New Jersey (1929).

He joined the Navy and for four years he served as a journalist, which mostly meant that he hung out on destroyers and took photos and wrote up profiles of sailors to publish in their hometown newspapers. He had a lot of extra time and not much to do on the boat, so he started writing poetry. While he was still in the Navy he sent two poems to The New Yorker  and they published them. He decided that he was tired of people making jokes that he was Joseph Kennedy, the Boston tycoon and ambassador, so he chose the initial "X" randomly and published his poems as X.J. Kennedy, which he has done ever since.

He went to Paris to study, then to Michigan, where he started work on a Ph.D., but after six years he still hadn't finished it and he gave up. But he met his wife there, also a poet, and together they edited a poetry journal, Counter/Measures.

He published more poetry, writing rhymed, structured verse. But it wasn't very popular, and he wasn't sure if he should keep writing. Then he got a letter from a children's poet who had read his first book and really liked two poems in there that would be good for kids. She told him that he should write more for children, and gave him the name of an editor and publisher to work with. So, in 1975, he published One Winter's Night and it got great reviews and he's been writing for children ever since, as well as his writing for adults and textbooks for college students.

He said, "Critics, the more kindly ones, have called my work 'witty,' a dangerous label to wear, since to many it suggests 'trivial' and 'superficially felt.' I would wish to be seriously funny, and cannot understand the supposed difference between certain poems called light verse and others ranked as poetry."

In "Mixed-up School" he wrote:
We have a crazy mixed-up school.
Our teacher Mrs. Cheetah
Makes us talk backwards. Nicer cat
You wouldn't want to meet a.

It was on this day in 1888 that William Seward Burroughs received a patent for an adding machine.

Some version of a calculator had been in existence for hundreds of years, but Burroughs designed a machine that was actually accurate. It was 11 by 15 inches and nine inches high, had 81 keys, arranged in nine rows of nine keys each.

It was on this day in 1831 that Nat Turner led a group of slaves in a revolt in Southampton County in southeastern Virginia. It only lasted two days, but in that amount of time Turner and at least 40 followers killed approximately 60 white people by going between farmhouses and murdering everyone they found, including children. On August 22, a group of militia confronted Turner's group, which dispersed, although Turner himself was not caught until October 30. He was hanged and skinned. His rebellion set off a fierce backlash of violence against African-Americans, slave and free.

Before he died, a white lawyer talked to him and wrote down his life story, changed and annotated it as he saw fit, and then published it as The Confessions of Nat Turner. Turner described his religious experiences — he saw visions in which the Spirit communicated with him and he saw himself as a servant of God carrying out his plan.

In 1967 William Styron published a novel, also called The Confessions of Nat Turner.

It's the birthday of poet Ellen Hinsey (books by this author), born in Boston in 1960. She's the author of three poetry collections: Cities of Memory (1996), The White Fire of Time (2002), and Update on the Descent (2009). In a 2003 interview with Poetry Magazine she said:

"Contrary to a generally held view, poetry is a very powerful tool because poetry is the conscience of a society. [...] No individual poem can stop a war — that's what diplomacy is supposed to do. But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: It answers to no one, it crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth. That's why ... it is one of the most powerful of the arts."

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

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