Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
"Sweetness” by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems. © Norton, 1994. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce (books by this author), born near Horse Cave Creek, Ohio (1842). He wrote essays, journalism, and satire, and he’s well known for his short stories, especially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) and The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), a satirical reference book. He volunteered for the Union Army when the Civil War broke out, and he was only the second person in his county to do so. He fought in some of the bloodiest battles, and later he wrote stories about the war: bleak, bitter stories with senseless deaths and no heroes.
It was on this day in 1374 in Aachen, Germany that an outbreak of dancing plague or dancing mania, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, first began. From Aachen it spread across central Europe and as far away as England and Madagascar. Dancing mania affected groups of people — as many as thousands at a time — and caused them to dance uncontrollably for days, weeks, and even months until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some danced themselves to death, suffering heart attacks or broken hips and ribs. At the time, people believed the plague was the result of a curse from St. Vitus. Scientists now tend to believe it was due to ergot poisoning or mass hysteria.
It’s the birthday of poet John Ciardi (books by this author), born in Little Italy in Boston’s North End (1916).
He taught at various colleges, including Kansas State and Harvard, before giving up teaching for writing full time. Ciardi’s popularity grew after the publication of his 1959 textbook, How Does a Poem Mean? — still widely used in high schools and colleges across America. He completed his last collection of poetry, The Birds of Pompeii, shortly before his death in 1986.
It’s the birthday of novelist Anita Desai (books by this author), born in Mussoorie, India (1937). Her mother was German and her father was Bengali. She grew up speaking German at home, Hindi with her friends, learned Bengali from her father, and listened to Urdu poetry recited in the street. But she first learned to read and write in school, and in English. She said: “I think it had a tremendous effect that the first thing you saw written and the first thing you ever read was English. It seemed to me the language of books. I just went on writing it because I always wanted to belong to this world of books.”
Desai has published 12 novels, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999).
It’s the birthday of poet Stephen Dunn (books by this author), born in Forest Hills, New York (1939). He published more than 10 books of poetry before his collection Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.
Dunn’s first love was basketball. He was a star on the 1962 Hofstra basketball team that went 25 and one on the year. They called him “Radar,” for his accurate jump shot. After college, he played professional basketball for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Billies for a couple of years before giving up the sport.
Dunn found a job as a brochure writer for Nabisco, and for the next seven years, he rose through the ranks of the corporation. He started to worry though that he would get stuck in a job doing something he didn’t believe in, so he quit and moved to Spain with his wife and he started to write poetry.