AN EVOLUTION OF PRAYER
by Stephen Dunn

As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.

Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void.

Lord, he'd begin, because he was afraid
to alter the language of prayer, Lord, deliver
me from envy and mean-spiritedness,
allow me to love people as I love animals.

Then his father died, and he became the sad Lord
of himself, praying for pleasures immediate and grantable.
Let me tango the night long with Margot the receptionist,
he'd say to no one. Let me do unto others.


“An Evolution of Prayer" by Stephen Dunn. Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

It's the anniversary of the first exhibition of Picasso's work in Paris (1901). Art dealer Ambroise Vollard staged the exhibition in his gallery on the Rue Lafitte. Picasso, then 19, had already produced hundreds of paintings but he was unknown outside of Barcelona. He exhibited 75 paintings at the exhibition and the response of the few critics who visited was generally favorable. Picasso decided to stay in Paris, and by 1904 he had set up a permanent studio there.

The summer of 1901 also marked the beginning of his Blue Period, which lasted three years.

Picasso used blue tones to evoke a feeling of melancholy and introspection. The Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903) are outstanding examples of the Blue Period.

It's the birthday of novelist Anita Desai (books by this author), born in Mussoorie, India (1937). Her mother was German and her father was Bengali. She said, "I am sure this is what makes my writing whatever it is; I see India through the eyes of my mother, as an outsider, but my feelings are my father's, of someone born here." She grew up speaking German at home, Hindi with her friends, learned Bengali from her father, and listened to Urdu poetry recited in the street. But she first learned to read and write in school, and in English. She said: "I think it had a tremendous effect that the first thing you saw written and the first thing you ever read was English. It seemed to me the language of books. I just went on writing it because I always wanted to belong to this world of books."

After she finished the manuscript for her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), she wasn't sure what to do with it. She said:

"Readers of the English language almost without exception preferred to read English written in its native land, the only English considered pure and acceptable; P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen clubs flourished. I, too, grew up reading Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. No Indian author had entered the school or college syllabuses at that time. It dawned on me what a hopeless business it would be to make a living as a writer. No literary agents existed then and I made a list of publishers from the books on my shelves and started sending out the manuscript of my first novel to one after the other."

Finally she sold it to a tiny London publishing house that focused on international writing. She was not discouraged and she has gone on to publish many novels, including Clear Light of Day (1980), Fasting, Feasting (1999), and The Zigzag Way (2004). Her most recent book, The Artist of Disappearance (2011), is a collection of short stories.

On this day in 1947, the first widely reported UFO sighting occurred. Experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted "a formation of very bright objects" out the window of his plane while flying over the Cascade Mountains of southern Washington state. The Chicago Tribune printed his account on the front page two days later:

"The first thing I noticed was a series of flashes in my eyes as if a mirror was reflecting sunlight at me. ... I saw the flashes were coming from a series of objects that were traveling incredibly fast. They were silvery and shiny and seemed to be shaped like a pie plate. ... What startled me most at this point was ... that I could not find any tails on them."

Arnold said they moved like saucers skipping across the surface of water, which led to the common term "flying saucer." The Army Air Corps questioned him and later downplayed the sighting; their official position was that Arnold had been hallucinating.

Arnold's sighting was only the first of about 850 sightings that were reported that summer, including the famous Roswell, New Mexico, incident, in which an alleged alien spacecraft crashed into the desert and was — allegedly — recovered and hidden by the military.

It’s the birthday of poet John Ciardi (books by this author), born in Little Italy in Boston’s North End (1916).

He taught at various colleges, including Kansas State and Harvard, before giving up teaching for writing full time. Ciardi’s popularity grew after the publication of his 1959 textbook, How Does a Poem Mean? — still widely used in high schools and colleges across America. He completed his last collection of poetry, The Birds of Pompeii, shortly before his death in 1986.

It’s the birthday of poet Stephen Dunn (books by this author), born in Forest Hills, New York (1939). He published more than 10 books of poetry before his collection Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

Dunn’s first love was basketball. He was a star on the 1962 Hofstra basketball team that went 25 and one on the year. They called him “Radar,” for his accurate jump shot. After college, he played professional basketball for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Billies for a couple of years before giving up the sport.

Dunn found a job as a brochure writer for Nabisco and for the next seven years he rose through the ranks of the corporation. He started to worry though that he would get stuck in a job doing something he didn’t believe in, so he quit and moved to Spain with his wife and he started to write poetry.

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

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