This article from NPR outlines a part of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's. Some writers were employed to travel the country and record songs and stories. They were also employed to write travel guides on different states. Zora Neale Hurston wrote the Florida edition. In this article, if you scroll about half way down, you will see a link where you can actually hear the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God singing.
Here is an interesting article on a young boy who helped edit the Hobbit. (For all those people who say kids don't pay attention.)
I saw this on Cake Wrecks . But, the funny thing is, it's true! Not the easy torture part, but the cake with church part. It seems like every church, of any stripe serves tea and biscuits after the morning service. (They also have coffee, but its instant, and I wouldn't recommend it.)
I saved this profound poem for the last day. This is why I love poetry: it says something no other medium can. Enjoy.
Music
by Anne Porter
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I've never understood
Why this is so
Bur there's an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
As an English teacher, I am always trying to find new ways to teach the old, boring concepts. When I was teaching full time, I used this poem to teach the parts of speech. It gave me an opportunity to teach one of my favorite authors and introduce poetry to Freshman.
A Better Resurrection
by Christina Rossetti
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.
My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall--the sap of spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perished thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.
Confession: I had never read Wendell Berry's poetry before yesterday. I went to my friend Alison's house, and while she read to her little girl Eden, I read the book I found in the hallway. A book of Berry's poetry. I may have found a new favorite author. This lovely poem reminded me of my new home. The picture below is the cathedral in St. Andrews.
Cathedral
by Wendell Berry
Stone
of the earth
made
of its own weight
light
I have heard my good friend Alison read this poem twice. She is a talented poet in her own right, but she is also a wonderful reader. I don't know if it is one of her favorites, but it is one of mine, and it sounds even better when read out loud.
From one lover of marginalia to another
Marginalia
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
I love Dorothy Parker, so here is a poem by her.
A Pig's-Eye View of Literature
by Dorothy Parker
The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
I know I am a few days behind, but I thought I would keep going.
This poem is by a famous Southern writer. I fully understand it now that I live in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Fog
by Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
My Dream
by Ogden Nash
Here is a dream.
It is my dream—
My own dream—
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt,
Then I dreamt that my true love
unkempt it.
Alan Moore: Watchmen
I am reading it because I like graphic novels, not for the movie.
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