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'Swan Wife' by Sarah Moore Wagner

12/2/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
. . . the measure of the value of any work of fiction . . . is the worth of the speculations, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it.
​David Masson
Author of 
Edinburgh Sketches
​Born December 2, 1822
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D. Masson

My Book World

Wagner, Sara Moore. Swan Wife. San Diego: Cider Press, 2022.

These may be some of the most exciting poems, the most developed poems I’ve read by a contemporary poet in a long time. Wagner’s structure is deliberate, appropriating certain aspects from Joseph Campbell studies to frame her collection. Sure of her technique and subject matter, Wagner ensures her poems pop with energy: they possess a natural, almost childlike quality in their enthusiasm about youthful love, marriage, having that first child. In “Licentious,” my favorite passage may be:

                                      She tells me come out,
someone might see me, the bounce
of my breasts, this ache. I will have to marry the snake
slivering into the banks, will have to marry the sun,
a thick hand on my shoulders (xi).
 
Wagner’s title may well spring from “Ball and Chain,” the moment the persona emotionally becomes the betrothed, the soon-to-be swan wife:
 
                       I dipped my toes in and you called me swan,
you said you’ll go where you want. It was maybe then I knew you saw me, how I wanted to fly or float, to cover. How even a mute swan will hiss and attack if you get too close. How you called me beautiful then, so beautiful and so loud, the say I’d hoot up to the stars, the way I showed my teeth (7).
 
The poet’s persona maintains her controlled ebullience throughout the entire collection, and I hope to read more of Wagner’s work. Congratulations to her for winning the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award. The collection is quite deserving.

​Coming Next:
TUES 12/06: A Writer's Wit |
Ève Curie 
WEDS 12/07: A Writer's Wit | Noam Chomsky
THURS 12/08: A Writer's Wit | John Banville
FRI 12/09: My Book World | Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country
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Sylvia Plath's Life: A Red Comet

8/26/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26,  1904

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C. Isherwood

My Book World 

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Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 2020.

This impressive biography of the famed poet may be the most comprehensive literary biography I’ve ever read. Clark, who took more than ten years to write this book, utilizes a broad range of sources, including Sylvia Plath’s diaries, letters (some never before seen), journals, and poems. Clark also includes the story of Plath’s famous poet husband, Ted Hughes. It would be like telling the story of one conjoined twin without including the other; that is how inextricably woven their lives are, right up to Plath’s infamous suicide, in 1963. The acknowledgement page and Clark’s notes section are filled with other sources, she having visited England to conduct research as well as interviews, and having combed U.S. libraries from coast to coast.

The book reads more like a novel, achieving a fiction-like narrative arc. We learn of Plath’s early childhood, the loss of her father, her dominating but generous mother. We learn of Plath’s education, particularly her four years at the prestigious Smith College. We learn of her creepy attempt at suicide, almost succeeding, when her near-dead body is discovered in a crawl space beneath the family home, her electroshock therapy at a draconian institution in Massachusetts. We cross the Atlantic where Plath continues her education at Cambridge University, where she meets her match intellectually as well as future husband, Ted Hughes. This narrative continues to build as we learn of her struggle to cope with a male dominated literary life in London. She is alternately elated and deflated as some of her work is accepted with accolades and “her best work” rejected by the likes of the New Yorker as well as prestigious English journals. It would have been a mistake for her to eschew her British education because the Brits seem, at times, more open to her raw style than the Americans.

We live through the Plath-Hughes tempestuous marriage and become acquainted with their two children. Plath’s death comes with fifty pages to go. It is the climax, all right, but it is not the end of Plath’s story. All throughout the biography Clark intersperses lines from Plath’s and Hughes’s work to demonstrate not only biographical elements but fascinating literary observations, as well. But even Plath’s death is deconstructed in such a way that we may understand it differently from earlier biographies (Anne Stevenson’s “famously negative” one, for example). With twenty-twenty hindsight, we see that Plath’s suicide (as many are) is mere minutes away from being another failed attempt. Plath is always, in the damp English climate and because she runs herself ragged, having bouts of a cold or the flu. As a result she takes a number of OTC medications, as well as a merry-go-round of prescription drugs, including antidepressants, sedatives to sleep, other drugs to wake her up so she can work—all of these interacting horribly as a perfect storm to help end her life (some experts understand that those particular antidepressants may have intensified her depression before finally kicking in).

And it isn’t as if she doesn’t try to live. She consults doctors and psychiatrists galore. She corresponds with an American psychiatrist across the Atlantic. She fights like hell to stay out of British psychiatric wards because she is terrified she will be subject to shock therapy again, which she believes, has altered her brain and her life forever. For fans or nonfans alike this biography is a must-read. It generously takes all we knew about Plath before, all the research that has come earlier, and adds or even convincingly contradicts a great deal of the old. I can’t see any biographer attempting to top it for a long time to come. Indeed, the book may finally put her story to rest alongside her grave atop a lonely spot near where her husband grew up at Heptonstall—a simple granite marker worn down now by nearly sixty years of inclement weather.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver

THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

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Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
​James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
​Born August 19, 1903
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J. G. Cozzens

My Book World

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 (1961).

If one has seen only the movie version of this book, a fine work in its own right that premiered in 1969 with the inimitable Maggie Smith starring in the main role, one might be lulled into thinking the book to be quite similar. One would be wrong. This short novel set in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland, impresses me as being an extended prose poem about an intelligent and nonconformist teacher who is yet rather naïve. Brodie eschews the prescribed school curriculum to lecture her female pupils concerning a wide variety of cultural and artistic topics, and yet when she also embraces the likes of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler, she reflects either a certain naivete or an intellectual dullness. The word “prime” or phrases containing that word appears more than thirty times throughout these brief pages; the phrase “crème de la crème” more than five. Both have a rather fatuous ring to them, “prime” referencing Miss Brodie’s heightened sense of her own refinement and knowledge, and “crème de la crème” indicating the girls she has rather commandeered to follow her—not just for the year they are in her class but for their entire lifetimes: they are the “Brodie set.”

Spark’s structure is an omnisciently meandering one in which she may speak of one child in her adult future, one dying prematurely, another becoming a nun. Very lightly Sparks inserts that the year is 1931 or 1937 or that Ms. Brodie is now forty-three. One knows where one is at all times as if the novel were a sort of hologram. Young Sandy is the only pupil who sees through Jean Brodie’s ways, and early on readers learn that she will bring Brodie down. In the last scene of the film, a wounded Brodie who has been released from her teaching position because of Sandy’s actions screams the word “Assassin!” after her beloved Sandy, but the book ends rather quietly when readers visit Sandy upon her adult position in a nunnery. When asked about her childhood influences, she simply says, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137).

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | 
Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's ​Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Career of Sylvia Plath
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A Writer's Wit: Ted Hughes

8/16/2022

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What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
​Ted Hughes
Author of ​The Iron Man
​Born August 16, 1930
 
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T. Hughes
WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Sparks's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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A Writer's Wit: Philip Larkin

8/9/2022

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Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name.
—from "The Old Fools"
​Philip Larkin
Author of ​A Girl in Winter
​Born August 9, 1922
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P. Larkin
Coming Next:
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World |Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo
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A Writer's Wit: Elizabeth Hardwick

7/27/2022

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This the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.
​Elizabeth Hardwick
Author of Sleepless Nights
​Born July 27, 1916
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E. Hardwick
Coming Next:
THURS: AWW |Malcolm Lowry
FRIDAY: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate
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A Writer's Wit: Walt Whitman

5/31/2022

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My America is still all in the making. It’s a promise, a possible something: it’s to come: it’s by no means here. Besides, what do I care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a forecast, a prophecy.
​Walt Whitman
Author of Leaves of Grass
​Born May 31, 1819
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W. Whitman
FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words
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A Writer's Wit: Seamuś Heaney

4/13/2022

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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamuś Heaney
Author of Death of a Naturalist
Born April 13, 1939
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S. Heaney
FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American
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A Writer's Wit: Jane Hirshfield

2/24/2022

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What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless. 
​Jane Hirshfield
Author of Ledger: Poems
Born February 24, 1953
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J. Hirshfield
TOMORROW: My Book World | Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden 
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A Writer's Wit: Langston Hughes

2/1/2022

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Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
​Langston Hughes
Author of The Weary Blues
Born February 1, 1902 [Some sources say Feb. 1, 1901]
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L. Hughes
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories
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Residence on Pablo's Earth

8/13/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
My take is, privacy is precious. I think privacy is the last true luxury. To be able to live your life as you choose without having everyone comment on it or know about.
​Valerie Plame
Author of Fair Game
​Born August 13, 1963
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V. Plame

My Book World

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Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth. With an introduction by Jim Harrison. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions, 2004.

The translator for this collection, Donald Walsh, in his Translator’s Note, sites critic Amado Alonso who declares: “‘Instead of the traditional procedure, which describes a reality and suggests its poetic sense between the lines, poets like Neruda describe the poetic sense and nebulously suggest to which reality it refers’” (363). Amen. Instead of moving from the concrete to the abstract or allowing metaphors to emanate from the specific, Neruda seems to dwell, in the bulk of his work, on abstractions or impressionistic articulation of ideas, and one can tend to tune out. However, of course, a number of his poems do catch hold of me for their perceptions of human nature, of the nature of power, particularly political power in mostly Spanish-speaking nations. I particularly admired “Burial in the East,” “Single Gentleman,” and “Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca.” “General Franco in Hell” arrested my attention with its quickly shifting imagery, emphasizing in its closure the utter contempt and hatred for fascist, Franco. All in all, not my cup of spiced tea, but I feel better for having read perhaps Neruda’s most notable collection.  

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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A Writer's Wit: Hart Crane

7/21/2021

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The bottom of the sea is cruel.
​Hart Crane
Author of The Bridge
Born July 21, 1899
[Because Hart Crane apparently committed suicide by jumping from a ship in 1932, his statement rings with a certain irony. RJ]
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H. Crane
FRIDAY: My Book World | Frank Lloyd Wright's An Autobiography
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A Writer's Wit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

3/24/2021

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If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
​Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Author of A Coney Island of the Mind
Born March 24, 1919
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L. Ferlinghetti
FRIDAY: My Book World | Benjamin Dreyer: Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
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A Writer's Wit: Arthur Rimbaud

10/20/2020

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I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
​Arthur Rimbaud
Author of A Season in Hell
Born October 20, 1854
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A. Rimbaud
FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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A Writer's Wit: Eavan Boland

9/24/2020

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Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
​Eavan Boland
Author of A Woman without a Country: Poems
Born September 24, 1944
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E. Boland
TOMORROW: My Book World | E. M. Forster's The Life to Come and Other Stories
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A Writer's Wit: Dannie Abse

9/22/2020

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The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
​Dannie Abse
​Author of The Presence
Born September 22, 1923
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D. Abse
FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Life to Come and Other Short Stories
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A Writer's Wit

6/3/2020

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Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.
​Robert Hillyer, Poet
Born June 3, 1895

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R. Hillyer
FRIDAY: My Book World | Letters of Cole Porter
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This Book of Daniel Is Not in the Bible

5/1/2020

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 A WRITER'S WIT
One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Born May 1, 1940
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B. Mason

My Book World

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​Smith, Aaron. The Book of Daniel: Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2019.

This poet's persona clearly has a crush on actor Daniel Craig and cleverly weaves together nearly fifty poems with pop culture in mind. A couple deal directly with our eponymous persona, Daniel, but many cover other icons. In “I Need My O’Hara Frank” he idolizes other poets:

I Need Sharons:
 
Tate and Olds,
but mostly Olds,
 
and never, ever
the Rose of.
​In “Celebrity,” he, stream-of-conscious style, connects the deaths of various celebs with himself:
Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.
Thomas James died in 1974 and was born
in Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wrote
Letters to a Stranger before he killed himself.
I’ve written three books few people read
and wanted to kill myself. He was 27 like
Joplin   Hendrix    Morrison   Cobain.
In the title poem, the persona levels with readers about Daniel Craig:
                                  I made a Daniel Craig scrapbook
called The Book of Daniel. For years I bought
every magazine with him on the cover. In Interview
he’s stripped to the waist, hopping around on the beach.
Jamie Dornan was in Interview, too: arms behind his
head in a bathtub. I fell in love with Daniel Craig
when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love--
before he was Bond-hot and too famous.
​I rarely read a book of poetry in one sitting. To me, that’s like eating an entire box of chocolates in thirty minutes or less (which I’ve never done but know better than to try). Yet I found myself turning page after page, getting Smith's poetry when often I do not get what a poet wants me to. And when I was finished, it may also be the only book of poetry I turned around and read all the way through again. There.
NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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A Writer's Wit

1/22/2019

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No man,
Til thirty,  should perceive there’s a
plain woman.

​Lord Byron
Born January 22, 1788
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Byron
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-38  Maine
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Bullets to Bells: a Powerful Collection of Poems

9/28/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
​Stephen Spender
Born September 28, 1909
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S. Spender

My Book World

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Clements, Brian, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader, eds., with an introduction by Colum McCann. Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Boston: Beacon, 2017.
 
There would nothing wrong with presenting a book-length collection of anti-gun poetry by itself, but Bullets into Bells increases its power by pairing each poem with a response written by a person who has been deeply affected by such violence. Note the eloquence of these lines from “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World,” by poet, Martín Espada.

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away.Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells (53-4).

 
Or feel the biting irony of this response by Dan Gross to “The Gun Joke” by Jamaal May.

I’ve got another one:
         A Republican hunter who loves guns and a Democrat city slicker who doesn’t are sitting at the local watering hole somewhere in rural America. The bartender, with a warped sense of humor, brings up “gun control” and sits back to watch the sparks fly—and initially they do. Then, as the two get to talking, they realize they actually agree much more than they disagree, especially about expanding Brady background checks to keep guns out of the hands of people they both agree shouldn’t have them, like criminals, domestic abusers, people who are dangerously mentally ill, and terrorists. Then a Congressperson walks into the bar, and the two citizens excitedly share their breakthrough, “Hey, Congressman, guess what! Turns out we’ve found a solution to gun violence that everyone agrees on and will save lives!” The Congressman responds, “Sorry guys, doesn’t matter. The gun industry is paying my tab.”
         OK, so this one’s not funny either. But you know what would at least be fun? Imagine if we could write a new ending where the Republican and the Democrat get outraged, decide to say #ENOUGH and to hold this Congressman accountable for placing the interests of the gun industry ahead of our safety. Then, in two years, that Congressman is out of a job and needs to buy his own drinks. That’s the kind of real change that we all can make through our activism (116).

There are too many fine poems and too many strong responses to them to list here. Just buy the book and READ them for yourselves. Words alone may not solve this problem of gun violence but they can certainly articulate its many problems.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-25 Michigan — October 17, 2018
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My Journey of States-24 Arizona

9/26/2018

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
As gun owners, my husband and I understand that the Second Amendment is most at risk when a criminal or deranged person commits a gun crime. These acts only embolden those who oppose gun ownership. Promoting responsible gun laws protects the Second Amendment and reduces lives lost from guns.
Gabrielle Giffords
Born June 8, 1970 Tucson, Arizona
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G. Giffords
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fourth post of fifty.

ARIZONA (1975, 1993, 2004, 2017)

​I first made it to Arizona when, in 1975, I accompanied a couple of friends who wanted to drive to Phoenix from Lubbock. It was in June, and while Texas is certainly hot at that time of the year, it has nothing on Phoenix. One evening, as the sun went down and the temperature fell to 102°, someone was heard to say that it was nice that things had cooled off. Anyway . . . we spent a great deal of time either in a pool or inside bars with AC.
​The second time I visited the state was in 1993, when I drove my mother and father out to visit my mother’s sister, who lived in Mesa. Again, June. Again, hot! I met two of Mother’s cousins, and when we all sat in a circle in one cousin’s living room, Mother looked more at home than I’d seen her in years, more genteel, more loquacious. She was at home! We visited a friend, an interior designer who’d bought an old adobe home and was remodeling it. Dinner with him was a respite from hauling the folks around. 
R. Jespers, Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona — 2004
​Ken and I visited Arizona again in 2004, staying with a cousin from my father’s side of the family, as well as working in a visit with my late mother’s cousin, whose wife and he greeted us with great hospitality, a meal, and a jar of preserves.
From Our Hotel Room, Gilbert, Arizona — 2017
​In 2017, I visited my aunt who lives in Mesa, eighty-six at the time. She called together all my cousins, one of whom I hadn’t seen since we were children (see below). More of my family resides in Arizona than any other state in the union.
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Jespers and Summers Cousins with Grandma & Grandpa Richards —1960

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware 
3-Texas                   15. New York
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut
5-Missouri           17. Colorado
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas
7-Indiana              19. California
8-Ohio                   20. Florida 
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA        22. New Mexico
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee
12. Virginia
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Bullets Into Bells

A Writer's Wit

9/25/2018

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I believe that if you don't want to do anything, then sit there and don't do it, but don't expect people to hand you a corn beef sandwich and wash your socks for you and unzip your fly for you.
​Shel Silverstein
Born September 25, 1935

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S. Silverstein
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-24 Arizona
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Orphans

12/4/2013

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
Born December 5, 1934

Orphans

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Somewhere in 1957 Ohio
My parents beg me to drive them
To the desert, almost a thousand miles
In three days.

“It may be the last time
I get to see Sis,” Dad says with Mom
Nodding, her tongue

Poised on her top lip—like my sister always did,
Plotting to change the channel when no one was looking. 
“Daddy doesn’t see so good anymore,” says Mom,
“And I don’t drive at night.”

“Alrighty, then,” I say.

        The last day of touring--
        A string of bathroom stops
        Between Flagstaff and Phoenix--

        Leaves no time for pasta,
        Perhaps some poulet,
        So we stop at Burger King.

        Besides her Coke, Mother
        Now begs for a glass of water
        So she can gulp

        Seven small missiles for the arthritis
        Creating speckled claws
        That once cinched my Buster Browns. 

        “But I want it with a lid,”
        She whines to my father,
        “So I can take it to the room.”

        She cocks her head like my sister always
        Did before grabbing the last drumstick.

One door and a breath away,
I snap the seal on a fifth of Chivas,
And I summon

A similar stop
At the Blue Ribbon Café
Somewhere in 1957 Ohio.

The fare was gold nuggets of shrimp
Which I relished
While others ravaged their chicken.

“Put a lid on your Coke
And we’ll take it with us,”
Mother had said, rolling
Her eyes as I bubbled the 
Bottom with my straw.

That night
In an eight-dollar cabin
That shivered

When semis thundered by,
We all jammed into two beds:
Mom and Dad in one, 

Three of us in another,
Arms and legs crossed like
Debris from chicken dinners.

My wayward fingers clipped
Nearby flesh with greasy pincers,
And my sister squealed betrayal.

“Don’t make me
Come over there, Nicholas,”
Mother snapped over dad’s snoring. 

“I’ll whale you
Into the middle of next week,
I swear to Christ I will.”

I suppressed one last giggle
Like gas not passed
During communion, and I now

        Twiddle thumbs
        Over the steering wheel,
        Watching two old people

        Fiddle with that infernal lid,
        On their way out of a Burger King
        Somewhere in the desert.

        A strand of Mother’s hair whirls
        Like silver silk in the wind, and
        With head cocked to the sky,
        She might be ten. Again

        I sigh and ignite the engine
        As they fairly skip over to the car. 

        Dad snaps the back door knob
        As I did at twelve—and they
        Clamber into my

        Rear view mirror,
        The children
        I never bargained for.

©Richard Jespers

TUESDAY, A STORY

Aloft

11/27/2013

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that
   cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd
   by your senses five?
William Blake
Born November 28, 1757

Aloft

If you’ve ever seen a photo finish
of a man or woman running, you know
for a measly fraction of a second
the man or woman runner is airborne.

That, for me, is the entire glory
of running, not that of winning races.
All those airborne fractions of a second
add up to endless hours of flight.

If you could put all those moments
together, how far, imagine how far
you might fly. Could you see yourself on the
moon, or some equally desolate spot?

Running always makes you fit, but running
can make you creature to a kind of flight,
defying gravity right before your
very eyes in one last photo finish.

—Richard Jespers

Honors and Readings

11/17/2013

 

Ken Dixon at the Museum of South Texas

PictureDixon's Order & Disorder: "Maze"
For several decades Ken Dixon, visual artist, has provided exhibitions for the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas. On Saturday, November 9, the museum honored all the artists who have contributed work to its permanent collection, an exhibition entitled "Forty Works for Forty Years." For more details click on the museum link. Look below to view a slideshow of snapshots from the evening (all iPhone pics).

Nighthawks Reading

PictureSporting My "Burroughs" Look
For over five years I've been part of a writing group that meets at the local Unitarian church. For a modest annual fee, we meet monthly to critique and celebrate each others' writing. Our approach is positive, even when the piece under consideration may have some difficulties. As a result of this nurturing approach, we've all grown, and so has our confidence. New works are constantly finding their way into print because of our sensitive efforts to help one another grow.

On Thursday, November 14, we staged a reading of our recent works-in-progress. Barbara Brannon read a series of sonnets that trace the life of her adult daughter. Michelle Kraft shared a prose piece about how her childhood home in North Texas later became home to an Army Corps of Engineers lake. Marilyn Westfall, poet and leader of our group, read a number of linked poems, among others, about a recent trip to the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. Actor and playwright Juanice Myers organized a troupe of players to present her monologues limning characters—from an old woman regretting how her looks have faded to one that looks back at the fun times the alcoholics in her family provided. I read excerpts from the first chapter of my memoir concerning my twenty-seven years of public school teaching. Thanks to everyone who came, and to the Unitarian leadership for providing us with a place to present our work to the public. Below find photos documenting our efforts.  Ken Dixon, photographer.


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    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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