Friday June 5, 2015

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Up Against the Sea

At the foot of the cliff, the sea is taking back
what it left there long ago, and the landowners
have made a barricade of three old cars
between low and high tide and loaded them
with so many river stones, they’ve been weighed down
below their springs, below their shock absorbers.

The waves are breaking over the side panels,
on blurred teenage graffiti, and barnacles
and tougher limpets have made themselves at home
on mats and cushions, on the salt versions
of vinyl and rust. The sea is welcoming
all of them, as ever, as passengers
at the end of a lover’s leap, at the beginning
of a joy ride down an old lover’s lane again.

“Up Against the Sea” by David Wagoner from A Map of the Night. © University of Illinois Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It’s the birthday of Bill Moyers, born in Hugo, Oklahoma (1934). The family moved to Marshall, Texas, soon after he was born; when he was 16, the Marshall News Messenger hired him as a cub reporter, and thus began his career as a journalist. He was ordained when he was still a college undergrad, and has served as a Baptist minister in Weir, Texas.

He’s hosted several public affairs programs, and has become known for his in-depth, thoughtful interview series, including The Power of Myth and A World of Ideas. He’s often an outspoken critic of the news media and an advocate for media reform. He says: “The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests — and to the ideology of market economics. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.”

Moyers was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration, and he rose to deputy director of the organization after Kennedy was assassinated. He also served a number of roles in the Johnson administration — most notably as White House press secretary and interim Chief of Staff. He had a long working relationship with Lyndon Johnson, beginning when Moyers worked as an intern for Johnson while he, Moyers, was still in college. He returned to journalism in 1967, publishing the New York newspaper Newsday. The paper won two Pulitzer Prizes under Moyers’ leadership. In 1971, Moyers began a long association with PBS. His most recent role was as host of Moyers & Company, which ran from 2012 until this past January (2015).

Bill Moyers said, “News is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity.”

It’s the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898) (books by this author), born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada. His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. García Lorca published his first book, Impressions and Landscapes, in 1918, and then moved to Madrid the following year, enrolling in the Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence), a cultural center that provided a stimulating, dynamic, and progressive environment for university students. It was at the Residencia that García Lorca met and befriended a group of artists, including composer Manuel de Falla, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and painter Salvador Dalí; he also became interested in Surrealism and the avant-garde. During the 1920s, he wrote and staged a couple of plays; the first (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell [1920]) was laughed off the stage, and the second (Mariana Pineda [1927]) received mixed reviews. He also collected folk songs and wrote a great deal of poetry; much of it — like Poem of the Deep Song, published in 1931, and Gypsy Ballads, 1928 — inspired by Andalusian or gypsy culture and music.

He also had an intense relationship with Salvador Dalí from 1925 to 1928, which forced him to acknowledge his homosexuality. He became a national celebrity upon the publication of Gypsy Ballads, and was distressed at the loss of privacy this caused; he chafed at the conflict between his public persona and his private self. He grew depressed, and a falling out with Dalí and the end of another love affair with a sculptor only made things worse. In 1929, his family arranged for him to take an extended trip to the United States. It was in New York that he began to break out of his pigeonhole as a “gypsy poet.” He wrote A Poet in New York (published posthumously in 1942), a collection that was critical of capitalism and obsessed with urban decay and social injustice.

He turned back to drama when he returned to Spain in 1930. He wrote and premiered the first two plays in his Rural Trilogy: Blood Wedding (1933) and Yerma (1934), and completed the first draft of the third, The House of Bernarda Alba (1945).

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the Nationalists didn’t look favorably on his work or his liberal views. They dragged him from his home on August 16 and imprisoned him without a trial; two or three days later, they drove him to a hill outside of town and shot him. His body was never found.

And it’s the birthday of poet and novelist David Wagoner (books by this author), born in Massillon, Ohio (1926). He grew up in Whiting, Indiana — a gritty town between Gary and Chicago — where the family moved after his father lost his job in a steel mill. In spite of his Midwestern upbringing, Wagoner has become a poet of the Pacific Northwest. His friend and mentor Theodore Roethke offered him a teaching position at the University of Washington in 1954. “When I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe,” Wagoner remembers. “I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.” His earlier poems had reflected the polluted industrial area where he was raised. His second collection, A Place to Stand (1958), was his first foray into nature writing, which would become his trademark. “I came from a place where nature was ruined,” he said, “and here the natural world was still in a pristine state.” His aesthetic, emotional, and psychological relocation from the Midwest to the Northwest was complete by the time his fourth collection, The Nesting Ground, was published in 1963. Wagoner served as editor for Poetry Northwest for 30 years; for many years it was the only national magazine devoted entirely to poetry.

Wagoner also writes fiction, with 10 novels under his belt. He was down to his last 10 dollars when his first one, The Man in the Middle (1954), was published. He’s best known for The Escape Artist (1965).

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