Today in Writing History May 7, 1861: Indian poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore was born. Also known as the Bard of Bengal, Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also an anti-imperialist and supported Indian nationalism. In 1916, Indian expatriates tried to assassinate him in San Francisco.
It's Plain Reading's season finale! Join us for a discussion with #poet and educator L. S. McKee—we're talking personas, relics, interdisciplinary #writing, #epic, and so much more!
Today in Labor History April 21, 1816: Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet, was born. After her mother died of cancer, in 1821, her father sent the five Brontë sisters to Clergy Daughters' School, where the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis. The disease killed them both in 1825. Charlotte always said that the terrible conditions in that school stunted her physical development and caused her lifelong health problems. Charlotte wrote her first poem in 1829, at the age of 13. She would go on to write 200 more poems. In 1836, she asked Poet Laureate Robert Southey for encouragement as a writer. He replied, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and ought not to be.” Because of this advice, she chose to publish under the gender-neutral name of Currer Bell, to avoid prejudice. She published a book of poetry in 1846, and her most famous novel, “Jane Eyre,” in 1847. In Jane Eyre, she uses the Clergy Daughters' School as the model for the school attended by her eponymous protagonist, Jane Eyre. Bronte died in 1855, most likely from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy.
As young adults, my brothers and I thoroughly looted our parent’s library. I still have many of those books, with their dog-eared pages and faint whiff of mildew. I think of them as comfort food for the mind. I picked up some great Melville that way, and Jack London, too. But my favorite score was a matching set of Jayne Eyre and Wuthering Heights that I recently found in their library, after my father died. My mom told me that they had belonged to her mother, who passed them down to her. And now she was passing them down to me. Great literature, of course, but they also contain beautiful artwork. And provenance, with my grandmother’s name printed on the inside cover.
Hey, hey—episode 12 is up! Come check out Plain Reading's discussion with #poet Lisa Dordal! We're talking #memory, transcendence, the #imagination, correcting misconceptions about #poetry, and more!
Today in Labor History March 25, 1811: Oxford University expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was an English Romantic poet, radical in both his art and his politics. His poem "The Mask of Anarchy," which he wrote in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre, is one of the first modern descriptions of nonviolent resistance. His admirers included Karl Marx, Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw. He was married to Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.”
"Walking through an Emerald Forest,
I found Him there.
His body resting among the dancing trees,
the sweet sweat of His flower crown
blossoming, with an orgiastic scent of Lust
Seducing nature around.
The laughing King of High Heavens,
with golden curls, gently and softly
Touches the open his petals with Lips..."
As the bird eats
The succulent fruit,
and flowers are kissed
by the host of bees,
I see creatures in my garden
from a world unseen.
Behind perfumed Evergreens....
NASA Unveils Design for Message Heading to Jupiter’s Moon Europa
The moon shows strong evidence of an ocean under its icy crust, with more than twice the amount of water of all of Earth’s oceans combined. A triangular metal plate on the spacecraft will honor that connection to Earth in several ways.
Today in Labor History February 27, 1812: Poet Lord Byron gave his first address as a member of the House of Lords. In his speech, he spoke out in support of Luddite violence against industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire. He spoke specifically against the Frame Breaking Act, which gave the death penalty to anyone guilty of breaking a machine. The state hanged 60-70 Luddites during the time the law was on the books. However, most of the time, the courts used other laws to convict them.
Today in Labor History February 10, 1898: Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht was born. Brecht was a doctor, poet and playwright. He fled the Nazis only to be persecuted in the U.S. by HUAC during the Cold War. He is most well-known for his play, “The Three Penny Opera.” He also wrote “Mother Courage and Her Children” and “The Days of the Commune,” about the Paris Commune. Additionally, he wrote poetry and composed the lyrics to many of the songs performed in his plays, like “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” (AKA Whiskey Bar).
So close to death is the sorrow of love
—the ecliptic joy,
that I can feel its
long fingertips,
its sharp, venom-dipped nails
reach behind, right behind,
my inward-turned eyes:
they no longer see what I've always felt
they've seen,
they see man as you saw him—
in everyone else.
The wheel of life turns, consciousness makes abrupt shifts between, on one hand, a clear and distinct image of reality, and on the other hand, a vague and hallucinatory projection of the realm of imagination. Is it then possible to observe your own consciousness? Does it cease to be conscious of the link to the otherworldly if it is not dusted off?
Walking past thousands of openings in the ether, long reddish cracks in a seemingly invisible wall, as they would appear to the trained eye, we were truly happy. Lyanna held my hand—something she usually didn't do for some unknown, inexplicable reason. I, on the other hand, was a romantic fool; hence, I loved holding her hand, showing her, and the whole fucking world, that I belonged to her. That I was her grangent, and nobody else's…