Poet of the Month 107: LAURA KASISCHKE

 

 

LAURA KASISCHKE

c 2017 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT I LEARNED IN NINTH GRADE

 

 

 

Always, it's early winter, and you can

  always

see through the venetian blinds

that you are floating, and lost

in a classroom made of mist.  And

  that

 

the false flattery of certain groups of

  girls

is a feast of pure sugar that you must

  eat

with your eyes closed while you

swallow down its spoonfuls

along with your flatterers' smiles.

 

And you'll do it. Tropism =

 

a natural inclination. The roots

grow down. The bird flies up. In some

future my husband will run toward

  the accident

to see whether we can help, while I'll

  stand

frozen on the sidewalk

covering my eyes with my hands.

 

But that was just Biology.

And Mrs Anders liked me. Elsewhere

 

there's a number

that is not the phone number of a 

  friend, but

which I'm told I have to memorize,

  for

 

without this number, the whole

civilization will have to end, and I 

  might

never go on to tenth grade,

  remaining

forever in ninth.

 

God, how hard Mr Nestor was trying

in his raging kindness and shiny ties

 

to teach us what it meant

to designate the ratio of the

  circumference of

a circle to its diameter, and to call it

  pi.

 

But this was Dummy Math. Some of

  us

were sleeping. Some of us were high.

Some of us were so desperate and

  confused

that we were weeping. Surely

 

he wasn't serious. We

would never flunk or die. Surely

one day a cure could be found for the

  kind

of cancer my mother had, and 

then there would no longer be

this need for math. Surely

some researcher at some place

like Harvard — a place

I've been assured

I'll never see — will

discover this eventually. And even

 

if a cure for math cannot be found,

  can

math not simply be destroyed? This

 

is the greatest country in the world.

  Why

must its children suffer under pi? 

  Cannot

 

a scapegoat be slaughtered on an

  altar

as in the Bible? Or an entire

civilization, as in the past? May we

 

not bomb it, invade it, steal its oil —

or set its oil wells on fire at least? To

 

my fellow soldiers (dummies, all of

  us

— ruthless, and proud of it) I

 

said, 'We will spare their children

if we can, of course, but

only if they renounce their god of

  pi...' 

 

Yes, in another year I would learn of

  love

from reading about Daisy and Jay.

  But

in ninth grade I learned about hatred:

  How

 

to raise an army in my imagination.

How to dress it in bright uniforms

with hierarchical stripes. How

to spray the peaceful valleys of my

enemies with pesticides

until it rained poisonous butterflies

  onto

their flesh from the skies. And then,

  sweet

 

Jesus, after it had already been

memorized, to be told

that 3.14159

is not quite pi.

Because pi is irrational,

and transcendent, so

pi might just go on and on.

 

Or not go on.

 

Like ninth grade, or civilization,

  which

also began

and ended in Babylon. 

 

 

 

New and Selected Poems

2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet and novelist LAURA KASISCHKE:

 

 

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/laura-kasischke#tab-poems

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 098: RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP

 

 

Poet of the Month 069: ROSEMARY TONKS

 

 

Poet of the Month 052: CARSON McCULLERS 

 

Poet of the Month 106: EZRA POUND

 

 

EZRA POUND

1885 – 1972 

 

 

 

 

THE TEA SHOP

 

 

The girl in the tea shop

      Is not so beautiful as she was,

The August has worn against her.

She does not get up the stairs so eagerly;

Yes, she also will turn middle-aged,

And the glow of youth that she spread about us

      As she brought us our muffins

Will be spread about us no longer.

      She also will turn middle-aged.

 

 

 

collected in 

Lustra 

(1916) 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet, translator and critic EZRA POUND:

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 060: HART CRANE

 

 

Poet of the Month 056: TS ELIOT

 

 

Poet of the Month 050: FORD MADOX FORD

   

The Write Advice 213: KAY BOYLE

 

How to release reluctant students to speech is the first problem for the teacher of writing.  At times the young find it as difficult to express their inner thoughts in words as do those whose minds have solidified into all but unbreakable moods.  But why, after all, should this inability to speak with the heart as well as with the lips be blamed on 'restrictive teaching'?  Is it not more a case of restrictive thinking (induced by restrictive living) causing this muteness, which perhaps no teacher can cure?  One can suggest reading to such students — great poetry, great novels — to help allay the fear of speaking.  But one cannot be sure that the students will dare to understand the words that other men have said.  It takes courage to say things differently: caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.… Most adults, having somehow lost touch with the great simplicities, have forgotten that to write is to speak of one’s beliefs.  Turning out a typescript with the number of words neatly estimated in the upper right hand corner of the first page has nothing to do with writing.  Neither have questions about the prices paid by Harper’s Magazine or The Atlantic Monthly or The Ladies’ Home Journal or Esquire.  Writing is something else entirely, as the young instinctively know.

 

 

'The Teaching of Writing' [reprinted in Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1985]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of a US-based 

organisation dedicated to celebrating the life and

work of writer, educator and political activist KAY 

BOYLE (1902–1992):

https://kbs.hypotheses.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 085: KAY BOYLE

 

 

The Write Advice 193: CAN XUE

 

 

The Write Advice 113: ELIZABETH McKENZIE

 

The Write Advice 211: BETSY LERNER

 

Chances are you want to write because you are a haunted individual, or a bothered individual, because the world does not sit right with you, or you in it.  Chances are you have a deep connection to books because at some point you discovered that they were the one truly safe place to discover and explore feelings that are banished from the dinner table, the cocktail party, the golf foursome, the bridge game.  Because the writers who mattered to you have dared to say I am a sick man.  And because within the world of books there is no censure.  In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies.  All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive — as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little… I am not suggesting a writer let it bleed so much as I am suggesting that he understand his motivation.

      The more popular culture and the media fail to present the real pathos of our human struggle, the more opportunity there is for writers who are unafraid to present stories that speak emotional truth, or that make such an intimate connection that briefly we become children again, listening with rapt attention… At a time when people are encouraged to follow their bliss, to pursue whatever makes them feel good, I suggest you stalk your demons.  Embrace them.  If you are a writer, especially one who has been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab your demons by the neck and face them down.  And whatever you do, don't censor yourself.  There's time and editors for that.

 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers (Revised edition 2010)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American writer, poet, editor and literary agent BETSY LERNER:

 

https://betsylerner.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 184: BETSY LERNER

 

 

The Write Advice 197: BETSY LERNER

 

 

The Write Advice 151: MAGGIE O'FARRELL

 

Poet of the Month 096: STEPHEN DUNN

 

STEPHEN DUNN

24 June 1939 — 24 June 2021

 

 

 

 

 

BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

 

 

 

More things come to them,

and they have more to hide.

All around them: mirrors, eyes.

            In any case

they are different from other women

and like great athletes have trouble

making friends, and trusting a world

quick to praise.

 

 

I admit without shame

I'm talking about superficial beauty,

the beauty unmistakable

to the honest eye, which causes

some of us to pivot and to dream,

to tremble before we dial.

 

            

            Intelligence warmed by generosity

is inner beauty, and what's worse

some physically beautiful women have it,

and we have to be strapped or handcuffed

to the mast, or be ruined.

 

 

But I don't want to talk of inner beauty,

it's the correct way to talk

and I'd feel too good

about myself, like a parishioner.

            Now, in fact,

I feel like I'm talking

to a strange beautiful woman at a bar, I'm

animated, I'm wearing that little fixed

smile, I might say anything at all.

 

 

Still, it's better to treat a beautiful woman

as if she were normal, one of many.

She'll be impressed that you're unimpressed,

might start to lean your way.

This is especially true if she has aged

into beauty, for she will have learned

the sweet gestures one learns

in a lifetime of seeking love.

Lucky is the lover of such a woman

and lucky the woman herself. 

 

Beautiful women who've been beautiful girls

are often in some tower of themselves

waiting for us to make the long climb.

 

But let us have sympathy for the loneliness

of beautiful women.

Let us have no contempt for their

immense privilege, or for the fact

that they never can be wholly ours.

 

 

1990

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and sample the work of North American poet and academic STEPHEN DUNN (1939–2021):

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-dunn

 

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The Write Advice 206: e.e. cummings

 

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

      This may sound easy. It isn’t.

      A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling.  And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

      Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why?  Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

      To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

      As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine.  Why?  Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else.  We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

      If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

      And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

      Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

      It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

      Or so I feel.

 

A Poet's Advice to Students (1953)

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and sample the work of North American poet e.e. cummings:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 106: JAMES JONES

 

 

The Write Advice 062: CLEMENTINE VON RADICS

 

 

The Write Advice 021: AL KENNEDY

 

 

The Write Advice 197: BETSY LERNER

 

…The writer's psychology is by its very nature one of extreme duality.  The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.  It isn't surprising, then, that many writers are ambivalent, if not altogether neurotic, about bringing their work forward.  For in so doing, a writer must face down that which he most fears: rejection.  There is no stage of the writing process that doesn't challenge every aspect of a writer's personality.  How well writers deal with those challenges can be critical to their survival.

 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers (revised edition 2010)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American writer, poet, editor and literary agent BETSY LERNER:

https://betsylerner.com/

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 184: BETSY LERNER

 

 

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The Write Advice 064: JOY WILLIAMS

 

 

Poet of the Month 090: STEPHEN CRANE

 

 

STEPHEN CRANE, 1898

 

 

 

 

 

LI

 

 

A MAN WENT BEFORE A STRANGE GOD, —

THE GOD OF MANY MEN, SADLY WISE.

AND THE DEITY THUNDERED LOUDLY,

FAT WITH RAGE, AND PUFFING,

'KNEEL, MORTAL, AND CRINGE

'AND GROVEL AND DO HOMAGE

TO MY PARTICULARLY SUBLIME MAJESTY.'

 

                                        THE MAN FLED

 

THEN THE MAN WENT TO ANOTHER GOD, —

THE GOD OF HIS INNER THOUGHTS.

AND THIS ONE LOOKED AT HIM

WITH SOFT EYES

LIT WITH INFINITE COMPREHENSION,

AND SAID, 'MY POOR CHILD!'

 

 

The Black Riders and Other Lines

1895

 

 

The first edition prints all the poems — or 'lines' as Crane insisted on calling them — in block capitals as replicated above.  Subsequent editions omitted to do this, nullifying the effect of scare-mongering newspaper headlines the poet had intended to create.

[Untitled]

 

A newspaper is a collection of half injustices

Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,

Spreads it curious opinion

To a million merciful and sneering men,

While families cuddle the joys of the fireside

When spurred by a tale of dire lone agony.

A newspaper is a court

Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried

By a squalor of honest men.

A newspaper is a market

Where wisdom sells its freedom

And melons are crowned by the crowd.

A newspaper is a game

Where his error scores the player victory

While another's skill wins death.

A newspaper is a symbol;

It is fetless* life's chronicle,

A collection of loud tales

Concentrating eternal stupidities,

That in remote ages lived unhaltered,

Roaming through a fenceless world.

War Is Kind

1899

* 'Fetless' is possibly an archaic form of 'unfettered' or a substitute for 'footless.'

 

 

 

 

 

The literary reputation of North American writer, journalist and poet Stephen Crane rests primarily on his 1895 bestseller The Red Badge of Courage, the story of a young Union soldier's introduction to combat during his country's bloody Civil War.

 

This short novel, which earned its twenty-four year old author the admiration and friendship of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and HG Wells among others, is now considered a pioneering work of literary impressionism, one that exerted a powerful influence on the work of several of his fellow writers including Conrad whose 1897 novel The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' was directly inspired by its groundbreaking use of 'in the moment' realism.  The book, neglected for many years following Crane's death as was all his work, was subsequently rediscovered by critics in the 1920s and went on to inspire a young Ernest Hemingway along with some of the poets of that decade's emerging Imagist movement.

 

Stephen Crane, the fourteenth child of Methodist minister Jonathon Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck, was born in Newark, New Jersey on 1 November 1871.  His childhood was dominated by his parents' strict religious beliefs and their disdain for anything they considered to be 'ungodly.'  This did not prevent Crane from developing a nose for trouble and a precocious gift for language which saw him obtain a summer job in 1888 as a reporter with a local news bureau that already employed one of his brothers.  After failing to complete an Engineering degree and enrolling as a 'special student' at Syracuse University, Crane continued to work as a freelance journalist for the New York Tribune while penning his first stories and sketches, permanently abandoning his studies in September 1891 in order to devote himself exclusively to writing.

 

In December of that year, shortly after the death of his mother, Crane wrote the first draft of his first novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, a book based on his personal observations of life in and around the saloons and flophouses of New York's notoriously down-at-heel Bowery district.  Crane allegedly completed the book in two days, only to rewrite it the following year before publishing it at his own expense — using money borrowed against the inheritance he was due to receive from his mother's estate — in March 1893 under the identity concealing pseudonym 'Johnston Smith.'  Luckily, the book was read by novelist and essayist Hamlin Garland who recommended it to his friend William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic who was, at that time, the most respected figure in North American letters.

 

Crane began writing The Red Badge of Courage soon after meeting Howells, making up for his lack of direct combat experience by devouring the memoirs and correspondence of Civil War veterans in addition to historical accounts of the conflict's most significant battles.  The book, which originally appeared in serial form in several east coast newspapers, was published in October 1895, by which time the perpetually industrious Crane had completed the novels George's Mother and The Third Violet and published The Black Riders and Other Lines, a collection of epigrammatic free verse strongly influenced by the Biblical imagery and language that had been the defining element of his childhood.  The collection was scorned by the critics who disapproved of its unusual, all capitals typography and 'anti-poetic' style, leading one of them to dismiss Crane as 'the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry.'  The poet took these objections in his stride, telling friends that he was pleased his lines were at least gaining some attention. 

 

During this period Crane also found time to travel to the western states of Missouri, Nebraska, Louisiana and Texas, ostensibly to gather material for a column he had been contracted to write for the Bacheller newspaper syndicate.  He ended his trip in Mexico City where he took a keen interest in studying the inhabitants of its poorest slums before traveling further south into what, in those days, were Mexico's largely lawless provinces.

 

By the middle of 1896 Crane was a well-established literary presence in New York, a member of the Lantern Club — a group of young, up-and-coming writers who met regularly on the roof of a building in Brooklyn to drink and carouse — and a genuine publishing phenomenon whose debut work of fiction had already been reprinted sixteen times.  His novel had even won the approval of future US President Theodore Roosevelt, then serving as the city's hardnosed Police Commissioner.  Despite this success, Crane continued to live a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence in New York, eating poorly and overindulging in alcohol, tobacco and coffee while maintaining a grueling work schedule that saw him churn out articles and stories at a rate that, even by hyperproductive nineteenth century standards, was nothing short of astonishing.

 

In September 1896 Crane's work brought him into conflict with the law while he claimed to be conducting research for a piece about the city's prostitutes at an 'entertainment resort' known as the Broadway Garden.  He left the establishment at 2AM in order to accompany two of its chorus girls to a nearby trolley stop, the group being met on the street by another woman named Dora Clark, a streetwalker well known to the police under her professional name 'Ruby Young.'  Leaving Ms Clark to chat with one of the chorus girls, Crane escorted the other girl to her trolley stop, returning to find that Ms Clark and her friend had been arrested in his absence by a police officer named Charles Becker for the alleged crime of soliciting.  

 

After protesting their innocence and insisting to Becker that the remaining chorus girl was his wife, Crane appeared in court on behalf of the two women later that morning (against the advice of his new friend Theodore Roosevelt) where he gladly repeated his story to the presiding magistrate who, having recognized the famous young writer from previous research gathering visits to his courtroom, immediately exonerated them.  Publicly humiliated and now very angry into the bargain, Becker subsequently counter-sued Dora Clark after she filed a lawsuit against him for harassment and wrongful arrest.

 

Crane was called as a witness in Becker's court case, with the former policeman's lawyer doing everything possible to portray the writer as a man of dubious character.  The trial, which Becker won, became a widely publicized east coast scandal that prompted Crane to flee New York for the distant, less judgmental atmosphere of Jacksonville, Florida.  From here Crane planned to sail to Cuba with a consignment of weapons being smuggled to the rebels who were seeking to overthrow the island's Spanish colonial government.  It was in Jacksonville, while preparing for this voyage, that he met Cora Taylor (also known as Cora Howarth), a twice married brothel owner six years his senior who became his common-law wife and eventually took his surname.

 

 

CORA TAYLOR and STEPHEN CRANE, c 1897

 

Crane never made it to Cuba.  The SS Commodore, the ship he had boarded in Jacksonville, sank on 2 January 1897, forcing him and three other men to abandon it in a dinghy that remained at sea for a day and a half before they were finally able to save their lives by swimming back to the Florida coast.  The incident, which would later serve as the inspiration for Crane's short story The Open Boat, was widely reported in many US newspapers, adding to the writer's growing fame as a kind of literary soldier of fortune and doing much to repair the damage done to his reputation by his involvement in the Dora Clark scandal.  He remained in Florida until 11 January before returning to New York where he was joined two months later by Cora.  

 

Out of work again, Crane signed on as a war correspondent for the New York Journal, a tabloid newspaper owned and run by William Randolph Hearst, to cover the Greco-Turkish War.  Cora was also hired by Hearst as a war correspondent (she was the first female citizen of the United States to be employed by a newspaper in this capacity) and the couple left for Athens soon afterwards, making a brief stopover in England, the country they returned to when the conflict, which had lasted a total of thirty days, ended on 20 May 1897.  

 

It was in England, not long after moving into a cottage in the Surrey village of Oxted, that Crane was introduced to Joseph Conrad by the latter's publisher SS Pawling, beginning what would become an important friendship for both writers.  'His eye is very individual,' Conrad wrote to his friend Edward Garnett after reading The Open Boat, 'and his expression satisfies me artistically.  He certainly is the impressionist and his temperament is curiously unique.  His thought is concise, connected, never very deep — yet often startling.'  It has been suggested, and not without reason, that Conrad based the relationship between his characters Marlow and Jim in his 1900 novel Lord Jim on his own, semi-paternalistic relationship with Crane.

 

Increasingly short of money and worried that his reputation might be on the wane at home, Crane soon embarked on a typically punishing schedule of work, churning out copy that was eagerly snapped up by many prestigious periodicals both there and in the UK.  Unfortunately, Crane's diligence did not improve his financial position.  After being sued by a former lover who claimed he owed her $800 and displaying the first symptoms of the then-fatal lung disease tuberculosis, he accepted an offer from Hearst's great rival Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, to travel to Cuba to report on the newly begun Spanish-American War — a conflict that was largely the product of Hearst's shameless fear-mongering in the pages of the Journal following the sinking of the battleship the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898.

 

Crane's stay in Cuba — which saw him come under Spanish fire in Guantánamo, Las Guásimas and San Juan Hill and earn what one of his fellow journalists described as 'the first place among correspondents' — had a disastrous effect on his health, further weakening his damaged lungs and eventually forcing him to flee the war zone so he could recuperate at a Virginia resort where it was hoped that daily exposure to sea air would have a positive impact on his health.  By August he was back in Havana, simultaneously working on newspaper articles, a new series of poems that would be published under the title War Is Kind as well as a new novel titled Active Service that was based on what he had witnessed and experienced during the Greco-Turkish War.  Out of touch with Cora who had remained in England and was now close to penury thanks to her unchecked extravagance, he returned to New York in mid-November, only to sail again for England on 31 December.

 

The final eighteen months of Crane's life, which were spent in the county of Sussex in a draughty, partially restored manor house known as Brede Place, were divided between furious bouts of work on several new projects — including stories, poems and the short novel The Monster — and ruinously expensive parties that further jeopardized his failing health and threatened to bankrupt him.  Undernourished, overworked and physically exhausted, he suffered his first tubercular hemorrhage on 29 December 1899, almost one year to the day since he and Cora had set sail for London.  Sick as he now was, Crane continued to work on articles and The O'Ruddy, a swashbuckling novel set in Ireland that had been inspired by a brief visit he and Cora had paid to that country in 1897.

 

By April Crane's condition had deteriorated to the point where he was obliged to make a new will.  In May, growing weaker by the day, he was transported to Dover as a 'litter patient' (a patient deemed incapable of standing or walking) in preparation for what was to be his final journey to a sanitarium in the Schwarzwald region of southern Germany.  While in Dover he was visited by Conrad and his wife Jessie, who saw him for what was to be the last time on 16 May, and by other friends including Ford Madox Ford and HG Wells (although not by Henry James who could not face the horror of seeing him in such a debilitated state).  Crane crossed the English Channel to France on 24 May accompanied by Cora, a butler, two nurses, a doctor and his dog Sponge, reaching the German spa town of Badenweiler a few days later.  He barely survived a week before dying on 5 June 1900 at the age of twenty-eight.  

 

Cora, who had been named Crane's sole heir in his revised will, outlived him by a decade.  She returned to Florida in 1901 where she prospered as a bar/brothel owner in Jacksonville and eventually married Hammond P McNeill, the twenty-five year old scion of a prominent South Carolina family whom she'd hired to manage one of her businesses.  McNeill subsequently shot and killed a man he suspected of being Cora's lover, only to be acquitted of the charge of murder by an all-male jury who deemed his actions to be legally justified given the possibility that adultery had occurred between the deceased and his wife.  When McNeill's trial ended Cora divorced him and reverted to using the name 'Cora Crane,' under which she published articles in magazines including The Smart Set and Harper's Weekly while living a decidedly bohemian life and hoping to one day return to Europe.  She suffered a stroke that left her severely weakened and died of heat exhaustion — brought on by her ill-advised decision to help a stranded motorist push their stalled car out of the sand — in the Florida resort town of Pablo Beach on 5 September 1910. 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more free verse by STEPHEN CRANE, including selections from The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899):

 

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-crane

 

 

 

 

 

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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by JOSEPH CONRAD

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 050: FORD MADOX FORD

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 064: HARRY HARBORD 'BREAKER' MORANT 

 

Poet of the Month 085: KAY BOYLE

 

KAY BOYLE

19 February 1902 – 27 December 1992

 

 

 

 

PORTRAIT

 

Richard is a gold beach.

Feet of waves run printless across him.

 

His eyelids are smooth shells

Curved beneath his forehead.

 

His eyes,

The sharp elbows of his mind

Through his threadbare face.

 

Rain swirls about legs,

An unruly skirt.

He walks with the rain on his shoulders

Like a loose mantle.

 

 

February 1927

 

 

 

As a poet and novelist, Kay Boyle was at the heart of North American letters for more than sixty years, initially finding work as an editor in New York City before moving to France in 1923 with her first husband.  It was in France that she wrote her first novel Process, a book that remained unpublished until 2011, and joined the staff of the influential 'new' literary magazine transition (deliberately printed in lower case in the best Modernist tradition).  She also found time to marry her second husband, the editor John Walsh, and become a mother five months after his death from tuberculosis in March 1927.

 

Boyle was an integral part of the expatriate scene in Paris, socializing with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and befriending Harry and Caresse Crosby, owners of the Black Sun Press who would go on to publish her first collection of short fiction in 1929.  Three years later she married her third husband Laurence Vail with whom she had three more daughters.  The 1930s saw the couple move from France to Austria to England while Boyle wrote and published her first two collections of poetry, four collections of short fiction and seven novels, including a 1936 attack on Nazism titled Death of a Man.

 

In 1943 Boyle divorced Vail and married her fourth husband, the German-born Joseph von Franckenstein, with whom she already had a daughter who had been born the previous year.  A son followed soon afterward and at the end of World War Two the family briefly re-located to Germany before moving again, this time to the United States. 

 

Boyle and Franckenstein were early victims of the 1950s anti-Communist witch hunts overseen by Senator Joseph McCarthy, with Boyle being fired from her job as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker and blacklisted by every other major North American magazine while Franckenstein was fired from his job at the US State Department.  Although they were eventually exonerated by Franckenstein's former employers, who re-hired him in 1963 shortly before his death, Boyle did not return to the world of freelance journalism, instead accepting a teaching position at San Francisco State College where she remained from 1963 until her retirement in 1979.  

 

Boyle's writing became increasingly political following her persecution by the McCarthyites and would remain so throughout the 1960s as she protested the Vietnam War and visited Cambodia in 1966 as a member of an 'Americans Want To Know' fact-finding group.  In her later years she also became a vocal supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the human rights organization Amnesty International.  In 1980 Boyle received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in recognition of her achievements as a writer and poet with more than forty publications to her name which by then included eight volumes of poetry, fourteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three children's books and a large number of essays and translations.  She died in 1992, at the age of ninety, in a retirement community in the northern Californian city of Mill Valley.

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet, novelist, academic and political activist KAY BOYLE:

 

https://poets.org/poet/kay-boyle

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 184: BETSY LERNER

 

I can't think of a riskier business than writing.  Not only because so few succeed in conventional terms, with publication and some payment, but because it almost certainly requires banishment.  First, there is the literal act of removing oneself, of choosing solitude.  Then there is the psychological separation, holding oneself apart.  And finally, the potential rejection of friends and family, critics and publishers… But you cannot censor yourself; successful writing never comes about through half-measures.  For most people the first book is about the family, if only metaphorically, and it must be conquered as surely as the walls of Jericho.

 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers (revised edition 2010)

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American writer, poet, editor and agent BETSY LERNER:

https://betsylerner.com/

 

 

 

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