An Apology for Using the Word 'Heart' in Too Many Poems
by Hayden Carruth

What does it mean? Lord knows; least of all I.
        Faced with it, schoolboys are shy,
And grown-ups speak it at moments of excess
        Which later seem more or less
Unfeasible. It is equivocal, sentimental,
        Debatable, really a sort of lentil—
Neither pea nor bean. Sometimes it’s a muscle,
        Sometimes courage or at least hustle,
Sometimes a core or center, but mostly it’s
        A sound that slushily fits
The meters of popular songwriters without
        Meaning anything. It is stout,
Leonine, chicken, great, hot, warm, cold,
        Broken, whole, tender, bold,
Stony, soft, green, blue, red, white,
        Faint, true, heavy, light,
Open, down, shallow, etc. No wonder
        Our superiors thunder
Against it. And yet in spite of a million abuses
        The word survives; its uses
Are such that it remains virtually indispensable
        And, I think, defensible.
The Freudian terminology is awkward or worse,
        And suggests so many perverse
Etiologies that it is useless; but “heart” covers
        The whole business, lovers
To monks, i.e., the capacity to love in the fullest
        Sense. Not even the dullest
Reader misapprehends it, although locating
        It is a matter awaiting
Someone more ingenious than I. But given
        This definition, driven
Though it is out of a poet’s necessity, isn’t
        The word needed at present
As much as ever, if it is well written and said,
        With the heart and the head?

Hayden Carruth, “An Apology for Using the Word 'Heart' in Too Many Poems”  from Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991. Copyright © 1983, 1992 by Hayden Carruth. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)

On this date in 1535, the first complete modern English translation of the Bible was printed. It's known as the Coverdale Bible because it was compiled and printed by Myles Coverdale, an English priest who was living on the Continent at the time; he would later go on to become Bishop of Exeter. He didn't speak Greek or Hebrew, so he used a variety of sources, including William Tyndale's New Testament and several of his Old Testament books, as well as the Latin Vulgate and German translations by Martin Luther. Coverdale dedicated the translation to England's King Henry VIII — whom he called "a better defender of the faith than the pope himself," and his "dearest just wyfe and most vertuous Pryncesse, Queen Anne [Boleyn]."

This date marks the first formal run of the Orient Express in 1883. The train was the brainchild of Georges Nagelmackers, a Belgian banker's son. He had been impressed by railway innovations he'd seen in America in the 1860s — particularly George Pullman's "sleeper cars" — and envisioned a richly appointed train running on a continuous 1,500-mile stretch of track from Paris to Constantinople (now Istanbul). For its formal launch from the Gare de Strasbourg, Nagelmackers arranged battered, rusty Pullman cars on adjacent tracks to show his luxurious conveyance to its best advantage. Many of its first passengers on the 80-hour journey were journalists, and they spread the word of its paneled interiors, leather armchairs, silk sheets, and wool blankets. They also dubbed the train "the Orient Express" with Nagelmackers' blessing. The train later earned another nickname, "the Spies' Express," due to its popularity in the espionage community.

One particular car played a role in both world wars. On November 11, 1918, German officers signed their surrender documents in an Allied commander's private car. The car was a museum piece in Paris until 1940, when Hitler commandeered it and used it as the setting to dictate the terms of the French surrender. Later, when his defeat was imminent, he blew the car up so that it wouldn't become an Allied trophy again.

The original Orient Express stopped serving Istanbul in 1977, and its new route ran from Paris to Vienna until 2007, when the train departed from Strasbourg instead of Paris. Finally, in 2009, the Orient Express ceased operation, citing competition from high-speed trains and discount airlines. It has spawned several offspring that have adopted the name for promotional purposes, including the Direct Orient Express and the Nostalgic Orient Express. Only the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which runs from London to a variety of European destinations and charges $2,300 U.S. to ride in the restored original cars, approaches the original "King of Trains and Train of Kings."

 It's the birthday of Damon Runyon (1884) (books by this author), born in Manhattan, Kansas, and known for his distinctive narrative style: part New York street slang, part vernacular that existed nowhere until he brought it out of his own head. He shunned sentiment, contractions, and the past tense.

He wrote: "Only a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude's doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up at you."

 Today is the birthday of the Great Stone Face: silent comedian Buster Keaton (1895), born Joseph Frank Keaton in Piqua, Kansas. His parents were vaudevillians, and according to Keaton, he earned his nickname as a toddler, when he fell down a staircase. Harry Houdini picked up the child, dusted him off, and said some variant of, "That was a real buster your kid took!" His parents added him to the act when he was three years old, and he quickly learned that the more serious he looked, the harder the audience laughed. He had a natural ability to take a fall without being injured; many times his parents faced child abuse charges based on the way they threw him around the stage like a dummy, but Buster would remove his clothes to show no broken bones or bruises, and the charges were dropped. "The funny thing about our act," he said in a 1914 interview with The Detroit News, "is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises ... the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment."

He met film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in New York in 1917, and Arbuckle took him under his wing. The slight, acrobatic Keaton was the perfect complement to the large, bumbling Arbuckle, and their partnership flourished. Keaton successfully made the transition to a solo act in the 1920s, although, in that era of excess, his deadpan style didn't earn him as many fans as Chaplin's sentimental Little Tramp character, or Harold Lloyd's plucky, optimistic on-screen persona. It was more than 20 years before his feature films — like The Navigator (1924), The General (1926), and The Cameraman (1928) — took their place in the pantheon of silent film masterpieces.

But the silent era was drawing to a close, and in 1928, he signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM decided that they needed to take an active role in Keaton's films. They hired other people to write and direct, and hired a double to do all his stunts. Though he always had work, and his MGM films made money, he considered signing with MGM the worst business decision of his life, and he left the studio in 1933. Marital trouble, heavy drinking, and creative frustration made him miserable. He returned to MGM in 1937, spending a couple of years writing gags for the Marx Brothers and providing material for Red Skelton, and then made some mediocre short films for Columbia. By the 1940s, his personal life was less tumultuous, he beat alcoholism through sheer force of will, and he spent most of the decade playing small roles in feature films. In the 1950s, he'd moved on to television, and his regular appearances on the small screen revived interest in his silent films. He was still working in the 1960s and still doing most of his own stunts. His last film was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), which was filmed late in 1965. In January 1966, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, although he was never told of his diagnosis and thought he just had a persistent case of bronchitis. He died on February 1st.

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

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