| Pity the Beautiful
by Dana Gioia Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows. The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men. Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck's gone lousy. Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.
“Pity the Beautiful” by Dana Gioia from 99 Poems: New and Selected. © Graywolf Press, 2016. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of Alice McDermott (books by this author), born in Brooklyn in 1953. She grew up on Long Island, part of an Irish Catholic family. She is still a practicing Catholic, and she often writes about that faith in her novels. When she first started publishing her books, she got the impression that interviewers were judging her for her religious beliefs; she said she could almost hear them thinking, "Oh, I thought you were an intellectual. Well, I guess not." But now, she says, "it's getting a little bit more hip to be Catholic. [...] For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution." McDermott has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for three of her books so far: That Night (1987), At Weddings and Wakes (1992), and After This (2006). Her 1998 novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award, and her most recent novel is The Ninth Hour (2017).
It's the birthday of poet Lucille Clifton (books by this author), born in Depew, New York (1936). She grew up without much money, and no car, and she wrote a poem about how her father walked 12 miles to Buffalo to order the first dining room set ever owned by a black family in Depew. Her mother wrote poems, but her father disapproved and made his wife burn them, which made Lucille all the more determined to become a poet. She started to write poetry when she was 12, and she won a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was friends and classmates with Amiri Baraka. She transferred to Fredonia State Teachers College, and there she met her husband, and they got married and had six children. And while she was raising kids, she published her first book, Good Times (1969). It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, and she went on to publish many books of poetry, including An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Blessing the Boats (2000), as well as almost 20 books for children. The untitled opening poem in Good Times begins, "in the inner city / or like we call it / home / we think a lot about uptown / and the silent nights / and the houses straight as dead men / and the pastel lights / and we hang on to our no place / happy to be alive."
On this day in 1844, Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Latter-day Saints movement, was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Born in Sharon, Vermont, in 1805, Smith reported he had been visited by an angel named Moroni in 1823. Moroni directed him to a buried cache of gold plates on which were written the history of the Israelites. He retrieved these and translated them with the help of two seer stones that were with them, and so wrote the Book of Mormon, on which he based a new sect of Christianity. He and his followers moved west in 1831, headed to Missouri to found a "New Zion"; on the way, they passed through Kirtland, Ohio, where they doubled the size of their church after converting about a hundred people. Smith declared Kirtland the "eastern boundary of New Jerusalem," calling all the Saints to meet him there. Eventually they arrived in Illinois, where Smith and the Mormons presented themselves as refugees and oppressed minorities, but they ran into trouble, and public opinion had turned against them by 1842. Smith was arrested and jailed in Carthage, Illinois. Two hundred men, their faces painted black with gunpowder, broke into the jail and shot Smith and his brother Hyrum to death.
It’s the birthday of Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama (1880). As a toddler, she became sick with an illness that left her both blind and deaf. She became a difficult child, until her 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, managed to communicate the letters for “water” while running water from the pump on the little girl’s hand. It was a breakthrough, and on that day alone, Keller learned 30 words. Keller was very bright—she went on to Radcliffe College, where she became a popular lecturer and began sharing her story and advocating for others with disabilities. She also became a radical activist along the way, joining the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909, when she was 29, and then the Industrial Workers of the World. She supported Communist Russia and hung a red flag over her desk. The FBI opened a file on her. She advocated for women’s suffrage and for access to birth control. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. Helen Keller died in 1968, at the age of 87. She said, “No one has ever given me a good reason why we should obey unjust laws.”
It’s the birthday of writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs (books by this author), born in Providence, Rhode Island (1915). Her parents were immigrants from Guangdong province in China, and her father ran a Chinese restaurant in downtown Providence. She grew up in a tiny apartment above the restaurant. Her mother didn’t know how to read — she had been sold into slavery in China as a young girl, and her only escape was an arranged marriage with Grace’s father, who was 20 years her senior. Grace remembers being a young girl, crying over one thing or another, and hearing the waiters in her father’s restaurant suggest her parents should leave her outside to die since she was a girl. She said, “That’s how I learned early on about living for change.” When her family moved to New York City to open up restaurants there, they had to buy their house in Queens in the name of their Irish contractor, because Asians weren’t allowed to own land there. She won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied philosophy. She went on to get her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College, and after she graduated, she couldn’t find a job — not only was it impossible for women of color to get jobs as academics, but even department stores told her that they didn’t hire Asians. So she headed to Chicago and was eventually offered a job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. She earned $10 a week and lived for free on a couch in a basement filled with rats. She wore the same clothes every day: a blue corduroy jumper, saddle oxfords, and when it was cold out, a leopard coat. The rats were so bad that she went to check out the South Side Tenants Organization, which fought against rat-infested housing on the South Side. Through that group, she began working with the black community in Chicago, and she participated in the March on Washington. She became a radical community organizer there. Her books include Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974), co-written with her husband; and The Next American Revolution (2011), published when she was 95 years old. She died in 2015. She said: “Do something local. Do something real, however, small. And don’t dis the political things, but understand their limitations.” | 
