The Writer's Almanac from Monday, June 3, 2013

The Writer's Almanac from Monday, June 3, 2013

"Sonnet" by Willa Cather, from April Twilights. © Amereon House, 1968.

ORIGINAL  TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013

It's the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). He was raised by a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants; his father was a high school teacher and a poet, and his mother struggled with mental illness her entire life. At Columbia University, he fell in with a group of poets and artists that included Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. They read poetry to each other and took drugs and had all-night conversations, and sometime in the late '40s, they started calling themselves "Beats."

When Ginsberg was 26 years old, he was sitting in his apartment in Harlem when he suddenly had a vision of William Blake. He called it "a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I'd been existing in." But Ginsberg still wasn't sure that he wanted to be a poet after he graduated from Columbia. He worked as an apprentice book reviewer for Newsweek magazine for a time, and then he spent five years working for an advertising agency in an office in the Empire State Building.

In 1955, he moved to San Francisco, where he became part of the poetry scene that included Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In October of that year, he read his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was a huge success, and it launched a writing career that lasted more than 40 years.

The poem "Howl" begins:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."

Ginsberg said, "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

It's the birthday of Larry McMurtry, born in Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). His early novels were set in the Southwest, on the frontier and in small towns. They included Horseman, Pass By (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966), which were both made into movies. Then in 1981, he wrote an essay in The Texas Observer in which he said that "the cowboy myth" had become "an inhibiting, rather than a creative, factor in our literary life," and that "there was really no more that needed to be said about it." The future of Texas literature was urban, he said: "Now what we need is a Balzac, a Dickens." But a few years later, he published one of his best books, Lonesome Dove (1985), a historical novel about a cattle drive, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

He said: "The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight."

It's the birthday of Josephine Baker, born Freda Josephine Carson in St. Louis, Missouri (1906). She was told that she was "too skinny and too dark" to be a chorus girl at the Plantation Club, but she worked backstage and learned all the routines and went on as an understudy. Instead of acting cool and sophisticated on stage, she rolled her eyes and pretended to fall over things. Audiences loved her. She wore skimpy costumes made of feathers and bananas, and sang and danced in a way no one had ever seen before. Baker said: "I wasn't really naked ... I simply didn't have any clothes on."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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