Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 398

Helping The Truth Burst Forth

“I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.”– Alice Duer Miller

Born in July 1874, Duer Miller’s poetry actively influenced political opinion, including making a major impact on the women’s suffrage movement and encouraging the U.S. to enter WWII – especially through her epic verse-play The White Cliffs. She also wrote many novels and screenplays and was one of the most influential women of the first half of the 20th century (she died in 1942).              Her 52-verse The White Cliffs is a very worthy read.  For Saturday’s Poem, here are the first and last verses and a link to the entire poem.
The White Cliffs
I.               I have loved England, dearly and deeply,
Since that first morning, shining and pure,
The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply
Out of the sea that once made her secure.
I had no thought then of husband or lover,
I was a traveller, the guest of a week;
Yet when they pointed 'the white cliffs of Dover',
Startled I found there were tears on my cheek.
I have loved England, and still as a stranger,
Here is my home and I still am alone.
Now in her hour of trial and danger,
Only the English are really her own.
LII.      And were they not English, our forefathers, never more
English than when they shook the dust of her sod
From their feet for ever, angrily seeking a shore
Where in his own way a man might worship his God.
Never more English than when they dared to be
Rebels against her-that stern intractable sense
Of that which no man can stomach and still be free,
Writing: 'When in the course of human events. . .'
Writing it out so all the world could see
Whence come the powers of all just governments.
The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread,
But the seed was English.
I am American bred,
I have seen much to hate here— much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.
To read the poem in its entirety, click on https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-white-cliffs/

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Walking and Living Her Writing

“When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.” – Natalia Ginzburg
       Ginzburg, who was born on July 14, 1916, was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships and politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II.   The author of novels, short stories and essays, she won numerous awards including the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize in her native Italy. 
Best known for her novels Voices in the Evening and Family Sayings (also published as The Things We Used To Say), Ginzburg also wrote a number of plays, including the much performed The Advertisement and A Town By The Sea.
Ginzburg got involved in politics in her later years and was elected to the Italian Parliament in 1983 (she died in 1991).  Many of her essays from that time focused on the interdependence of countries as the world grew smaller from technological advancements.
“Today, as never before,” she wrote shortly before her death,  “the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.”



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Seeing The World's Natural Wonder

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau 
Today is Thoreau’s birthdate.  Born on this date in 1817, he remains one of America’s great philosophers, naturalists and poets.  Best known for his book Walden, he wrote not only on the world around us but also on the importance of being aware of how we reflect that world through our words and actions.    Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are writings on natural history and philosophy.  Thoreau also holds the distinction of influencing both writers and naturalists.  Among the dozens of leading writers who cite his work as having a major impact on their own were Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway.  Among the dozens of naturalists who list his work as key to their own are John Burroughs, John Muir, B.F. Skinner and David Brower.         An avid reader all his life, Thoreau advised all to enjoy books as a key part of life.  “Books,” he said, “are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”



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Among Our Greatest Treasures

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau  Today is Thoreau’s birthdate.  Born on this date in 1817, he remains one of America’s great philosophers, naturalists and poets.  Best known for his book Walden, he wrote not only on the world around us but also on the importance of being aware of how we reflect that world through our words and actions.    Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are writings on natural history and philosophy.  Thoreau also holds the distinction of influencing both writers and naturalists.  Among the dozens of leading writers who cite his work as having a major impact on their own were Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway.  Among the dozens of naturalists who list his work as key to their own are John Burroughs, John Muir, B.F. Skinner and David Brower.         An avid reader all his life, Thoreau advised all to enjoy books as a key part of life.  “Books,” he said, “are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”



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Expanding That 'Voice' Inside You

“When you come from a family of storytellers, you're doomed. You just have to tell stories.” – Patricia Polacco.
Author and illustrator Polacco was born into that family in Michigan on this date in 1944 and overcame severe dyslexia to become one of America’s most beloved writers of children’s books.  To date she has written more than 60 books and earned multiple awards and accolades – including being inducted into the Author’s Hall of Fame – despite not starting her writing career until age 41.
Among her bestsellers are a book about growing up being unable to read and the kindness and support of a teacher who helped her overcome it. “I believe with all my heart that the American classroom teachers are one of our greatest and most heroic treasures.”  Thank You, Mr. Falker is Polacco's retelling of this encounter and its outcome.  Among her numerous other bestsellers are Mr. Lincoln's Way; The Lemonade Club: and Bully.           “I have enjoyed a wonderful career of writing books for children,” she said.  “I get my ideas from the same place that you do. . . .my imagination. All of us have a ‘voice’ inside where all inspired thoughts come from. When I talk to children and aspiring writers, I always ask them to turn off the TV and listen to that voice inside them.”


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A Model for Character Development

“Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”– Dean Koontz
When he was a senior at Shippensburg State in Pennsylvania, Dean Koontz won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition and he’s been writing ever since. His books are published in 38 languages and have sold hundreds of millions of copies.   Born on this date in 1945, he is arguably America’s leading writer of suspense thrillers.
Reading Koontz’s work provides a text on character development and how to draw readers into a story.   “Each reader,” he says, “needs to bring his or her own mind and heart into the text.”  Fourteen of his novels have risen to number one on the New York Times hardbound bestseller list, including the mega-selling Strangers, Sole Survivor, and What the Night Knows, making him one of only a dozen writers ever to have achieved that milestone. Sixteen of his books have risen to the number one position in paperback and also been major bestsellers in countries as diverse as Japan and Sweden.                                              Koontz said he was abused as a child and because of that has championed causes to help victims of abuse.  “Even in the darkest moments light exists if you have faith to see it,” Koontz said.  “Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.”




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Writing Fills Her Bookshelf

“There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, or a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”   – Anna Quindlen
Born in Philadelphia on this date in 1952, Anna Quindlen started writing in high school and has never stopped, jumping right onto the New York Timesstaff at age 18 as a copy girl and working her way through college at the paper.  After college she spent some time at the New York Post before returning to the Times where she became only the third woman in Times’ history to write a regular column on the Op-Ed Page.
Her column, "Public and Private," won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. Other columns included "About New York" and "Life in the 30s." In 1995, she left the paper to devote herself to becoming a novelist – another excellent career move as she has now written five best-sellers, including three –  One True Thing, Black and Blueand Blessings –  made into movies.                                      Quindlen's body of work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, self-help and children's books. Thinking Out Loud, a collection of her "Public and Private" columns, also was a best-seller.
“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves,”  Quindlen said.




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Words Become A Poet's Life

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.” – John Leonard

Born in the UK on this date in 1965, Leonard studied at the University of Oxford and then moved to Australia in 1991 where he still makes his home in Canberra.  The past poetry editor of the quarterly Overland, he is focusing on both writing poems and criticism, his most recent book is Think of the World: Collected Poems 1986-2016.
For Saturday’s Poem, here are two of Leonard"s short poems.
Words  Words’ purpose – to tellOf the earth and starry sky.All living things betweenOf sunlit, spindrift moments.Where only and once can youFind yourself, your time.

                                    Certainty Becomes                                    Certainty becomes time’s whole cloth.                                    But that is what we never can have.                                    And a moment more in time shows                                    Our time is out of true.
                                    Certainty sees only the straight road.                                    Many chapters have been written.                                    Many conclusions proposed, all comfortable.                                      But we cannot know the end of our story.

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Creating A Magic Carpet Ride

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon  Caroline Ferguson Gordon was a notable American novelist and literary critic and friends with nearly every famous writer of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.   A great writer herself, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and the O.Henry Award for her short story Old Red in 1934.   In 1963 she republished the story as the lead work for a book called Old Red and Other Stories, also an award winner.  A “free spirit” (her term for herself), she and husband Alan Tate often hosted major writers in their Kentucky home where “writing was the talk from dawn ‘til dark.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot and Robert Penn Warren were frequent visitors, but the most important one for her was Ford Maddox Ford, who she considered her mentor.  It was Ford who counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, which was influential in gaining her the prestigious Guggenheim.  She wrote 9 more novels and dozens of short stories, often autobiographical and drawn from the South, giving the rest of the world an in-depth look at the region.  The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, published at the time of her death in 1981, was lauded by Warren, who wrote the introduction. “Caroline Gordon,” he said,  “belongs to the group of Southern women writers – Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter – who have been enriching our literature uniquely in this century.”                               Gordon thought of her own writing as a form of art.  “And art,” she said, “should never be judged.  It should be the judge of us.”

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Neil Simon: A Real 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'

“Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.”– Neil Simon
 
Born on the 4th of July in 1927, Simon grew up during the Great Depression, a time that was a great shaper of not only his life but also his art.  Writing “life” became the grist for his creative mill, beginning with work on comedy scripts for radio and then gravitating to the Broadway stage in the early 1960s. 
As one of America’s most prolific stage and screenwriters, he has written more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, earning more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.   After breaking onto the playwriting scene with Come Blow Your Horn (in 1961), Simon won his first Tony for the long-running and one of the most widely performed plays in history, The Odd Couple.   
The first playwright to earn 15 “Best Play” awards, he also was given a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Lost in Yonkers.    In 2006 he was named for America’s top humor award, the Mark Twain Prize.  Simon is the first living playwright to have a Broadway theater named in his honor.                                Literary Critic Robert Johnson said that while humor is Simon’s forte’, “(Simon’s plays) have given us a rich variety of entertaining, memorable characters who portray the human experience, often with serious themes."   Simon says his willingness to try new things has been a key to success.    “If no one ever took risks,” he said,  “Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.”

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