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13 poets born in November, from
Mary Robinson born in the 1750s
to the very contemporary Saeed
Jones, born in 1985, they cover
Life’s ever-relevant quandaries
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November 23
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1941 – Derek Mahon born as the only child of Protestant working-class parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Irish poet and journalist who lived in a number of cities around the world. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and some of his poems were published in the school’s magazine. He also won the school’s poetry prize. He then studied French, English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, then in 1965 went to the Sorbonne in Paris for a year. Mahon next worked his way through Canada and the U.S., but by 1968, he was teaching English at Belfast High School. He also published his first poetry collection, Night Crossing. Mahon later taught school in Dublin before working as a freelance journalist in London. He had moved back to Ireland by 2006 when he won the Poetry Now Award for the first time, for his collection Harbour Lights. In 2007, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature, then won a second Poetry Now Award in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection. In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right. Derek Mahon died at age 78 in Cork after a short illness in October 2020. His eleven poetry collections include: The Snow Party; The Hunt By Night; The Yellow Book; An Autumn Wind; and Washing Up.
The Terminal Bar
by Derek Mahon
(for Philip Haas)
.
The television set hung
in its wire-net cage,
protected from the flung
bottles of casual rage,
is fetish and icon
providing all we want
of magic and redemption,
routine and sentiment.
The year-old tinsels hang
where an unclaimed no-hoper
trembles; fly-corpses cling
to the grimy flypaper.
Manhattan snows swarm
on star-boxed waters,
steam trails from warm
subway ventilators . . .
Welcome to the planet,
its fluorescent beers
buzzing in the desolate
silence of the spheres.
Slam the door and knock
the snow from your shoe,
admit that the vast dark
at last defeated you.
Nobody found the Grail
or conquered outer space;
join the clientele
watching itself increase.
.
"The Terminal Bar" from New Collected Poems. © 2011 by Derek Mahon – The Gallery Press
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1949 – Gayl Jones born in Lexington, Kentucky; African-American author, poet, and playwright. After attending segregated schools in Lexington, she earned a BA in English at Connecticut College, where poet Robert Hayden was one of her teachers. Her debut novel Corregidora was published when she was 26, and her book The Healing was shortlisted for the 1998 National Book Award. Her poetry collections include: Song for Anniho; The Hermit-Woman; and Xarque and Other Poems. However, she married a man who became mentally unstable, and he committed suicide when a SWAT team stormed their house to arrest him in 1998. There followed long periods when she did not publish any work, but her novel The Birdcatcher was a 2022 finalist for the National Book Award.
Circle
by Gayl Jones
.
He sits on the floor and stretches forward
Till his index fingers touch his big toes.
Another yoga posture.
“What are you doing now?” I ask
“I’m forming a natural circuit,” he says.
“Recharging my body.
Making an unbroken circle.
The energy just keeps flowing
And re-flowing.”
He’s talking even after I’ve stopped listening.
I’m only watching now—
His motions—not his words.
I imagine what kind of energy
Would be formed
If my toes were touching his,
My fingers the tips of his.
I go over and try to break his circle,
But he will not let go.
.
“Circle” from Deep Song and Other Poems, © 2020 by Gayle Jones – independently published
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1965 – Jennifer Michel Hecht born in Long Island, New York; American poet, teacher, non-fiction author, and an article contributor to scientific and philosophical journals. She earned a BA in history from Adelphi University and a PhD in the history of science from Columbia University. She taught history at Nassau Community College (1994-2007). As an atheist, she is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She also wrote the book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It in opposition to suicide. In 2001, her first poetry collection, The Next Ancient World, won the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her other poetry collections are Funny and Who Said. Several of her poems have appeared in anthologies, including the 1999 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry.
Split
by Jennifer Michael Hecht
.
We speak of rebellion when the kid
is a hellion and the folks are as mild
as a spoon.
.
Likewise Republicans
born of freethinking lesbians
.
seem like reactors, turncoats
on how they were raised.
Let me offer another
concatenation
of this explanation. Think of your mother
.
as one discrete corner
of a person with a multiple
mental disorder.
You're one of the others. One that split off.
.
Not a turncoat then, but the expression
of what was suppressed. This same woman,
your mother, who wants to help others,
.
also likes life as a racket
where the best finagler wins.
.
For reasons we do not fully assemble,
she cannot voice this redder side
of her nature, and the voicing of it,
that is you.
.
You are not teaching the former
generation.
.
Their frenzied distaste in certain directions
was the cue you used
to decipher the code
of just how you were not to do
as you were being told.
.
Split" from Who Said, © 2013 by Jennifer Michael Hecht - Copper Canyon Press
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November 24
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1876 – Ameen Rihani born in Freike, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate. Lebanon, the oldest son of six children born to a Lebanese raw silk manufacturer; Lebanese-American writer, political activist, and poet. He was a major figure in the mahjar literary movement started by Arab immigrants. His father sent him and his brother to New York City in 1888, to enroll in schools where they could learn English. Their father and his brother arrived a year later to set up their import-export business. Ameen worked for the family business as chief clerk, interpreter, and bookkeeper. He began studying law, first in night school, then at New York Law School. In his spare time, he was an avid reader of American and European authors. However, he soon fell ill, and was sent back to Lebanon to recover, where he taught English in exchange for classes in Classical Arabic. He returned to New York in 1899, and became an American citizen in 1901. He published his translations of the Arab poet Abul-Ala Al-Ma’arri (973-1057), and then began publishing his own work, some written in English and some in Arabic. From 1905 to 1911, he lived in solitude in his native Lebanese mountains, and, influenced by Walt Whitman, wrote the first Arabic prose poetry, and a novel, The Book of Khalid. After his return to New York in 1911, this novel, the first English language novel written by a Lebanese Arab, was published. He became an advocate for the liberation of Lebanon from the Ottoman Empire, and for a global cultural dialogue. Between 1924 and 1932 he wrote six books in English and Arabic about his extensive travels in Arabia. He died in Lebanon at age 64 in September 1940 after a bicycle accident which caused multiple skull fractures. His poetry collection Hutaf al-awdiya (Hymn of the Valleys) was published posthumously.
It Was All for Him
by Ameen Rihani
.
I strolled upon the Brooklyn Bridge one day,
Beneath the storm;
None but a lad in rags upon the way
I saw;—there on a bench he lay
Heedless of form.
.
He seemingly was reading what the Shower
Was publishing upon the Bridge and down the Bay;
Yet he was writing, writing at this hour,—
Writing in a careless sort of way.
.
Upon a pad he scribbled and as fast the rain
Retouched, effaced, corrected and revised.
Was he recording Nature’s solemn strain,
Or sketching choristers therein disguised?
.
Whatever it be, I found myself quite by his side:
My nod and smile he pocketed and wrote again;
“Read me your drizzling stuff,” I said, and he replied:
“I’ve written a check in payment for this shower of rain.”
.
“It Was All For Him” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry - published by the University of Utah Press in 1988
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November 25
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1916 – Ann Stanford born in La Habra, California; American poet, author, teacher, anthologist, and translator. She attended Stanford University, and earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, then taught at California State University, Northridge. She wrote two verse plays, a book on Anne Bradstreet, translated the classic Sanskrit text The Bhagavad Gita, and edited The Women Poets in English, an anthology that gathered, for the first time, hundreds of years of poetry by women. In addition to publishing 8 volumes of poetry, her poems appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and The New Republic. She received numerous honors for her work, including a Pushcart Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. She died of cancer at age 70 in July 1987.
Done With
by Ann Stanford
.
My house is torn down—
Plaster sifting, the pillars broken,
Beams jagged, the wall crushed by the bulldozer.
The whole roof has fallen
On the hall and the kitchen
The bedrooms, the parlor.
.
They are trampling the garden—
My mother's lilac, my father's grapevine,
The freesias, the jonquils, the grasses.
Hot asphalt goes down
Over the torn stems, and hardens.
.
What will they do in springtime
Those bulbs and stems groping upward
That drown in earth under the paving,
Thick with sap, pale in the dark
As they try the unrolling of green.
.
May they double themselves
Pushing together up to the sunlight,
May they break through the seal stretched above them
Open and flower and cry we are living.
.
“Done With” from Holding Our Own, © 2000 by Ann Stanford – Copper Canyon Press
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1924 – Yoshimoto Takaaki AKA Takaaki Yoshimoto born as Ryūmei Yoshimoto, in Tsukishima, a section of reclaimed land in the Sumida Estuary in Tokyo, Japan. Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic who was a founding member of Japan’s New Left, and at the forefront of the movement to force Japanese writers to confront their responsibility as wartime collaborators. His family were boatbuilders who had moved to Tsukishima from the southern island of Kyushu. At the start of WWII, he was a ‘militarist youth’ but by the end, he was exploring Marxism. He graduated in 1947 from the Tokyo Institute if Technology with a degree in Electrochemistry. He went to work for the Toyko Ink Manufacturing Company in 1952, but was also writing and publishing poetry. He won the Arechi Prize for new poets. He supported the Anpo protests against the 1960 revision of the U.S.- Japan Security Treaty, and joined student activists at protests. There was a violent confrontation with police in which one student was killed, and Yoshimoto was arrested and interrogated for three days before being released without charges. The treaty was ratified, which disillusioned him with politics, so he pursued jiritsusei, individual autonomy and responsibility. He was a co-founder and contributor to Shikkō (Experiment), a magazine which published anti-sectarian essays and criticism. He won the 2003 Kobayashi Hideo Prize for his book Reading Natsume Sōseki, and his collected works won the Fujimura Memorial Prize. He died at age 87 in March 2012. Most of his poetry remains unpublished in English translation.
Possession
by Yoshimoto Takaaki
.
Our words are charming.
"Flesh," once said;
we immediately cling to the earth.
"Spirit," if spoken;
we are already flying.
.
Our souls belong
to gravity and buoyancy,
to suspicion and aspiration.
The world is made of coercion,
causes and mistakes,
but surely, a blue the same as the sky
hangs deep in our skulls.
.
Otherwise,
standing on fragile legs,
how could we ride the image of wings
to possess endlessly higher places.
.
“Possession” translated by Kijima Hajime and Nagatomo Shigenari, from The Complete Works of Yoshimoto Takaaki, © 1987 by Yoshimoto Takaaki
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November 26
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1985 – Saeed Jones born in Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in Lewisville, Texas. American writer and poet whose debut collection Prelude to Bruise was named a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His second book, the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. He worked for Buzzfeed as its first LGBTQ+ editor, and co-hosted BuzzFeed News’ morning show AM to DM (2017-2019). His second poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World, was published in 2022.
Alive at the End of the World
("The end of the world was mistaken")
.
by Saeed Jones
.
The end of the world was mistaken
for just another midday massacre
in America. Brain matter and broken
glass, blurred boot prints in pools
of blood. We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn’t answer. We texted,
begging them to call us back, but
the newly dead don’t know how to
read. In America, a gathering of people
is called target practice or a funeral,
depending on who lives long enough
to define the terms. But for now, we
are alive at the end of the world,
shell-shocked by headlines and alarm
clocks, burning through what little love
we have left. With time, the white boys
with guns will become wounds we won’t
quite remember enduring. “How did you
get that scar on your shoulder?” “Oh,
a boy I barely knew was sad once.”
.
"Alive at The End of the World" from Alive at the End of the World: Poems, © 2022 by Saeed Jones – Coffee House Press
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November 27
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1757 or 1758 – Mary Robinson (née Darby) born in Bristol, England; English actress, poet, dramatist, and novelist who lived mostly in Bristol and London, but also traveled in France and Germany. She attended social reformer Hannah More’s school until her father, a British naval captain, abandoned the family. Mrs. Darby, in order to support herself and her five children, started a school for young girls in Little Chelsea, London. Mary taught in her mother’s school from the age of 14. However, during one of Captain Darby’s brief returns to the family, he had the school closed, as he was entitled to do under English law. He died in naval service in 1785. Mary had been introduced to famed actor David Garrick, who was impressed with her, especially her voice. Recently retired from the stage, he tutored her in acting. But at her mother’s urging, at age 14 Mary married Thomas Robinson, a clerk who claimed to have an inheritance, but he turned out to be a cheat and a liar, and was eventually imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison. Mary and their infant daughter Maria, with nowhere else to go, lived in the prison with him. Here, she began her writing career, and her book, Poems By Mrs. Robinson, was published in 1775. Her husband was offered work copying legal documents to pay off some of his debt, but he refused to do the work, so Mary did it and collected “his” pay. Her second volume of poems, Captivity, was published in 1777. It was dedicated to the Duchess of Devonshire, who was instrumental in getting it published. When they were released from prison, she launched her acting career, playing Juliet at Drury Lane Theatre in December 1776, and she became very popular for her portrayals of Shakespeare’s heroines. In 1779, her performance in The Winter’s Tale led the Prince of Wales to offer her 20,000 pounds to become his mistress. She tried to maintain the fiction of her marriage to avoid scandal, but eventually moved in with the Prince. But he ended the affair in 1781, and reneged on paying her the promised 20,000 pounds. She had better luck with Banastre Tarleton, a military man with whom she had a relationship that lasted 15 years. But an illness in 1783 left her bed-ridden for the rest of her life, where she used her pen to write more poetry, 8 novels, 3 plays, feminist treatises, and had started an autobiography, which was left unfinished when she died at age 43 in December 1800.
London’s Summer Morning
by Mary Robinson
.
Who has not waked to list the busy sounds
Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London? On the pavement hot
The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face
And tattered covering, shrilly bawls his trade,
Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door
The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell
Proclaims the dustman’s office; while the street
Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins
The din of hackney-coaches, waggons, carts;
While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers,
Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,
Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries
Of vegetable-vendors, fill the air.
Now every shop displays its varied trade,
And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet
Of early walkers. At the private door
The ruddy housemaid twirls the busy mop,
Annoying the smart ’prentice, or neat girl,
Tripping with band-box lightly. Now the sun
Darts burning splendor on the glittering pane,
Save where the canvas awning throws a shade
On the gay merchandise. Now, spruce and trim,
In shops (where beauty smiles with industry)
Sits the smart damsel; while the passenger
Peeps through the window, watching every charm.
Now pastry dainties catch the eye minute
Of humming insects, while the limy snare
Waits to enthrall them. Now the lamp-lighter
Mounts the tall ladder, nimbly venturous,
To trim the half-filled lamps, while at his feet
The pot-boy yells discordant! All along
The sultry pavement, the old-clothes-man cries
In tone monotonous, while sidelong views
The area for his traffic: now the bag
Is slyly opened, and the half-worn suit
(Sometimes the pilfered treasure of the base
Domestic spoiler), for one half its worth,
Sinks in the green abyss. The porter now
Bears his huge load along the burning way;
And the poor poet wakes from busy dreams,
To paint the summer morning.
.
“London’s Summer Morning” by Mary Robinson appeared in The Longman Anthology of Poetry, published in 2006
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1942 – Marilyn Hacker born in New York City; American poet, translator, and critic; her poetry collection, Presentation Piece, won the National Book Award, and her translation of King of a Hundred Horsemen, by Marie Étienne, won the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She also won the 1996 Poet’s Prize for Selected Poems 1965-1990.
Exiles
by Marilyn Hacker
.
Her brown falcon perches above the sink
as steaming water forks over my hands.
Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink.
I am in exile in my own land.
.
Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor
trailing a slime of blood from where they fed.
I lock the door. They claw under the door.
I am an exile in my own bed.
.
Her spotted mongrel, bristling with red mange,
sleeps on the threshold of the Third Street bar
where I drink brandy as the couples change.
I am in exile where my neighbors are.
.
On the pavement, cans of ashes burn.
Her green lizard scuttles from the light
around torn cardboard charred to glowing fern.
I am in exile in my own sight.
.
Her blond child sits on the stoop when I come
back at night. Cold hands, blue lids; we both
need sleep. She tells me she is going to die.
I am in exile in my own youth.
.
Lady of distances, this fire, this water,
this earth makes sanctuary where I stand.
Call of your animals and your blond daughter,
I am in exile in my own hands.
.
“Exiles” from Selected Poems 1965-1990 © 2014 by Marilyn Hacker – W.W. Norton & Co
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November 28
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1924 – Dennis Brutus, aka John Bruin, born in Harare, Zimbabwe; South African poet, professor, anti-apartheid activist, and journalist; classified as “coloured” under South Africa’s racial code, because some of his heritage was Khoi and Malaysian. Co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), which campaigned from 1964 through 1992 for banning South Africa from the Olympics. The South African regime said they would field ‘multi-racial’ teams, but the teams would have been chosen under segregated conditions. For his SANROC activities, Brutus was banned from meeting with more than two people outside his family, then arrested in 1963 for breaking the terms of his banning by trying to meet with an IOC official, and sentenced to 18 months in jail. While still on bail, he attempted to go to an IOC meeting, but was arrested by the Portuguese secret police in Mozambique. Back in South Africa, he was shot in the back while trying to escape, then sent to Robben Island for 16 months, five of them in solitary. His cell was next door to Nelson Mandela’s. Brutus was forbidden to teach, write, or publish in South Africa. His first book of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. Released from prison in 1965, he left South Africa on an exit visa, banned from returning, and went into exile, first in Britain, and then in 1967 in the U.S. In 1983, he was granted political refugee status after a lengthy legal battle. He was “unbanned” by the South African government in 1990. In 1991 he became one of the sponsors of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and returned to South Africa. He died at age 85 in 2009.
I am the tree...
by Denis Brutus
.
I am the tree
creaking in the wind
outside in the night
twisted and stubborn:
.
I am the sheet
of the twisted tin
shack
grating in the wind
in a shrill sad protest:
.
I am the voice
crying in the night
that cries endlessly
and will not be consoled.
.
“I am the tree…” from A Simple Lust: Selected Poems by Dennis Brutus, © 1973 by Dennis Brutus – Heinemann
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1942 – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin born in Cork, Ireland, daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence; Irish poet, translator, and editor. She was educated at University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She co-founded the literary magazine Cyphers, and remains one of its editors. Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow of Trinty College Dublin, and was appointed as Ireland Professor of Poetry (2016-2019). Her first poetry collection, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1973. In 2010, her collection The Sun-fish won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Among her many other collections are: Site of Ambush; The Rose Geranium; The Brazen Serpent; and The Boys of Bluehill.
