| After Reading John Clare on Thoughts of A Cow
by Tom Hennen
There are deep hoofprints in the soft ground around the
wooden water tank. A steel windmill with its fan blades spin-
ning free in the summer wind. No water pumping because the
connecting lever is not in gear and the tank is full. Thick green
moss floats here and there on the water's surface. Blue sky and
white clouds reflect in the pool, pulled out of heaven in a piece
just the right size to fit the old round wooden tank. The cow
yard is empty, the cows in the far pasture, strolling its hills for
grass, slowly, with quiet pleasure as if on a boulevard in Paris,
France. Nothing about a cow yard enters their thoughts until
late afternoon when I come with the dog to fetch them home.
Then they amble, dust stirred from its summer stupor by their
hard hooves that kick up the smell of dirt and powdered dung.
After the long walk from the pasture they remember they are
thirsty. Now in a hurry, they crowd around the water tank.
They drink and drink. When one raises her head, water and
setting sunlight drip from nose and muzzle. With a tin cup I
drink icy water from the pump and pour some into a pan for
the dog. The cows are dry of milk until fall. Now all they need
do is sleep. From the east dusk is sliding across the fields. Frogs
and crickets are tuning up, fireflies cannot wait and are air-
borne before the sun is completely down. The summer night
settles weightless as a feather on the grass. The windmill turn-
ing, cold water running out of the iron pipe into the tank, far-
off bells, and the murmur of starlight falling on water.
Tom Hennen, “After Reading John Clare on Thoughts of a Cow” from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. Copyright © 2013 by Tom Hennen. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)
On this day in 1851, the first edition of The New York Times was published. Originally founded as The New-York Daily Times by journalists Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it cost one penny and was available Monday through Saturday. Raymond and Jones had met years earlier while toiling for the New-York Tribune. Raymond was convinced he could make a go of paper that avoided sensationalism and scandal and concentrated on objective, conservative reporting.
Raymond and Jones hustled up more than $100,000 in investment money from bankers, politicians, and the wealthy set of New York, and set up shop in a dilapidated six-story brownstone at 113 Nassau Street in what was then downtown New York. They didn’t have enough desks, the floors were raw wood, and they worked monastically by candlelight with a bedraggled crew of men to assemble the first issue. The press was a Hoe Lightning, a squat, steam-driven rotary that hunkered on the floor like a petulant animal. The room grew so hot the night before the first edition was delivered to the newsboys that the men stripped to their union suits.
On the front page, Jarvis wrote a lengthy introduction to the paper and its mission. He said, “There are few things in this world which it is worthwhile to get angry about, and they are just the things anger will not improve.” The first edition featured, among other things, news from several foreign countries, notice of President Millard Fillmore’s travels, and a lengthy article on the “New-York State Fair,” in which it was reported that “Poultry forms a grand feature this year, and the display is a very fine one.”
The paper reached 10,000 in circulation within 10 days and 24,000 by the end of the year. By 2015, The New York Times had won 117 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, more than any other newspaper.
The paper’s famous slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” was the brainchild of Adolph Ochs, who became the paper’s publisher in 1896. The slogan ran above Madison Square in red-neon lights, and once Ochs held a contest to see if a better slogan could be found. Suggestions from the public included, “Instructive to All, Offensive to None,” “A Decent Newspaper for Decent People,” and “Full of Meat, Clean and Neat.” Ochs stuck with the original slogan.
It’s the birthday of French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, born in Paris (1819). He invented the gyroscope and took the first clear photograph of the sun, and he introduced and helped develop a technique of measuring the absolute velocity of light with extreme accuracy. He is probably best known for originating the pendulum that demonstrated the earth’s rotation.
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