Against Endings
by Dorianne Laux

On the street outside the window
someone is talking to someone else,

a baffling song, no words, only the music

of voices—low contralto of questions,
laughter’s plucked strings—voices in darkness

below stars where someone straddles a bike
up on the balls of his feet, and someone else

stands firm on a curb, her arms crossed, two

dogs nearby listening to the human duet,
stars falling through a summer night

a sudden car passing, rap song thumping,

but the voices, unhurried, return, obligatos afloat
on the humid air, tiny votives wavering

as porch lights go out—not wanting it to stop—

and Mars rising over the flower shop, up
through the telephone wires


"Against Endings" from Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux. © 2005, 2007 by Dorianne Laux. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. All rights reserved.   (buy now)

It was on this day in 1901 that the first oil gusher in the United States erupted at Spindletop, just outside Beaumont, Texas. It was considered the beginning of the oil age or petroleum age. Until then most of the oil came from Pennsylvania, and oil and petroleum were used mostly for lamps. Suddenly, with Spindletop, oil became the cheapest fuel at just three cents a barrel.

Patillo Higgins lived near Spindletop and was convinced that there was enough oil there to shift the focus from Pennsylvania to Texas. He obtained funding and hired a Croatian-born oil explorer named Anthony Lucas. They started drilling in late 1900, and on this day in 1901, they hit a depth of about 1,200 feet, and natural gas started shooting out of the ground, followed by crude oil.

The oil gusher reached a height of 200 feet straight up in the air, and produced about 4.2 million gallons of oil every day for nine days. Over the course of those nine days, about 50,000 people observed the gusher. Within the year, the town of Beaumont went from 8,000 people to 60,000. That first Spindletop well produced as much oil as 37,000 Eastern wells combined, and by the end of 1910 there were more than 100 wells on Spindletop.

It’s the birthday of poet Philip Levine (books by this author), born in Detroit, Michigan (1928). He started working in auto factories at the age of 14. Some of his high school teachers convinced him to apply for college, so he went to enroll at a local college, Wayne State University. When they asked him if he wanted a bachelor’s, he had never heard of it — he thought they were referring to a type of apartment, and he told them he already had a place to live. In college, Levine discovered how much he loved poetry. He continued to work at auto plants during college and after graduation, and it was so loud in there that he recited poetry aloud without anyone hearing.

He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford, and then got a job teaching at Cal State Fresno. In 1963, he published his first book, On the Edge. His early poetry didn’t draw much on his life in Detroit. He said: “I found the places hateful, and the work was exhausting. Even in my imagination I didn’t want to spend time where I was working. [...] I was unable to write anything worth keeping about Detroit for years.” That changed about 10 years after he left. He said: “I had a dream about people I’d known there. I woke up and realized that I was ignoring a big piece of my life and needed to go back to deal with it. About an hour later, I got an idea while eating breakfast in my pajamas.” He called in sick to Cal State and got to work, writing eight of the nine poems that appeared in his second book, Not This Pig (1968).

He wrote poems about factory workers and regular people working hard, in Detroit and places like it across the country. He said: “As young people will, you know, I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be. And sure enough I’ve gone and done it.”

His books include The Names of the Lost (1975), What Work Is (1992), The Simple Truth (1994), and News of the World (2009).

It’s the birthday of a poet who said, “I love poetry that feels as it thinks.” That’s Dorianne Laux (books by this author), born in Augusta, Maine (1952). She grew up poor in San Diego, barely making it through school. Her stepfather abused her throughout her childhood and teenage years, and through it all she wrote poems. She said: “I wouldn’t have gotten through that without a friend. If I hadn’t been able to talk with myself, with respect, as a whole human being, who had a mind and heart and desires, a goodness, a desire to be good — you know, all of those things, I think, are the original impulse when we sit down and write.” When she was a teenager, her parents committed her to a mental institution, and it was there that she published her first poem, in a book of poetry put together by the patients.

She worked as a waitress, and after her daughter was born she decided she needed a more stable career. She had always been good at writing, so she went back to school to become a journalist or editor. One of her composition classes had a poetry unit, and her professor was so impressed that she told Laux that she should become a poet. She didn’t think she would ever make a living from poetry, but she started giving readings and publishing poems, and published her first book, Awake (1990). She said: “You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. That was not something I thought would ever happen.” She wrote four more books of poetry, including What We Carry (1994) and The Book of Men (2011). Her latest book is Only as the day is long: New and Selected Poems, (2020), a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

And, “Any good poem is asking you simply to slow down.”

RCA introduced the 45-rpm record on this date in 1949. It wasn’t the first flat record — that honor belonged to the old 78-rpm, which had been around since the late 1880s. The 45 was smaller and could fit more records into one Jukebox and so it became popular with teenagers. The rise of the single coincided with the rise of rock-and-roll music.

The 33-rpm record, otherwise known as the LP (for “long-playing”), didn’t come along until 1948 and came to be known as an album.

And it’s the birthday of Stephen E. Ambrose (books by this author), born in Lovington, Illinois (1936), who wrote several best-selling books about American history, including Band of Brothers (1992) and Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996).

He was a longtime professor, and many of the stories he wrote in his popular history books were ones he’d told over and over to his college students, trying hard to entertain them. He said: “There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8:00 a.m. to start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the look on their faces is a challenge — ‘Let’s see you keep me awake.’ You learn what works and what doesn’t in a hurry.”

Ambrose participated in the more than 1,400 interviews of World War II veterans, collecting oral histories of the war, and he drew upon those interviews to write one of his most popular books, D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994). He was also the founder and director of the National D-Day Museum, which opened in New Orleans in 2000. He died in 2002.

Ambrose said: “The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: Marry an English major.”

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

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