Happy 117th birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald

On September 24, 1896, the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald made his earthly debut in the house pictured above, located at 481 Laurel Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota. Fitzgerald’s father named him Francis Scott Key in honor of his distant cousin who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald is pictured at left in 1897, bundled up for the Minnesota weather, with his birthplace in the background.

In 2004, Friends of Libraries USA declared Fitzgerald’s birthplace a National Literary Landmark — one of only a few such designations in the United States.

Folktale, poem by Bruce Weigl

FOLKTALE
Poem by Bruce Weigl

Nineteen fifty-seven: you
            remember the fins,
don’t you,
            on the baby-
blue-and-white Bel Air?
            Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,
beyond the
            many-colored rabbits
penned for the evening
            by the tap-tap
 
of the old man’s cane, you can see
            another man
through the muslin iof time
            throw his baby
high into the air. Women
 
            scream from the porch, laughing.
Oh, the night is thick with blossoms
            from the blue plum tree,
and this man is full of liquor
            and of his own young life,
 
so he throws his baby boy
            high into the sky
as it is taken by evening
            Irrevocably away from them
so that it seemed
            that I would not come down. 

NOTE: “Folktales” appears in The Unraveling Strangeness (2002), a poetry collection by Bruce Weigl. (Available at Amazon.com.) Critic Denise Levertov called Weigl “one of the best poets now writing in America.”

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

From Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

Each time I go outside the world
is different. This has happened
all my life.
*
The moon put her hand
over my mouth and told me
to shut up and watch.
*
The clock stopped at 5:30
for three months.
Now it’s always time to quit work,
have a drink, cook dinner.

#

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser was released 10 years ago — but remains a remarkable testament to poetry, friendship, nature, and life. In the late 1990s, after nearly four decades as an executive in the insurance industry, Ted Kooser was diagnosed with cancer — and decided to quit his job and quit writing poetry, which he had done from 5:30 to 7:00 a.m. each morning before going to work.

After his recovery and remission, Kooser started to write short poems inspired by his morning walks. He then mailed each poem on a postcard to his friend — novelist and poet Jim Harrison. The poems appear in Kooser’s 2001 release WINTER MORNING WALKS: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon). The two writers continued their correspondence of short poems — resulting in BRAIDED CREEK: A Conversation in Poetry, a collection of over 300 poems. According to the publisher, “Harrison and Kooser decided to remain silent over who wrote which poem, allowing their voices, ideas, and images to swirl and merge into this remarkable suite of lyrics.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books, including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Shape of the Journey. His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. In 2007, Mr. Harrison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona. As Poet Laureate of the United States (2004-2006), Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column “American Life in Poetry,” which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Delights & Shadows. He lives in Nebraska.

PHOTO: Jim Harrison (left) and Ted Kooser by Don Usner (Lannan Foundation), ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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April 25th is Ted Kooser’s 74th birthday — and we send him our best wishes. We are honored to include his poetry in the Silver Birch Press SUMMER ANTHOLOGY — a collection of poetry & prose from authors around the world — available June 1, 2013.

Folktale, Poem by Bruce Weigl

FOLKTALE

Poem by Bruce Weigl

Nineteen fifty-seven: you

            remember the fins,

don’t you,

            on the baby-

blue-and-white Bel Air?

            Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,

beyond the

            many-colored rabbits

penned for the evening

            by the tap-tap

 

of the old man’s cane, you can see

            another man

through the muslin iof time

            throw his baby

high into the air. Women

 

            scream from the porch, laughing.

Oh, the night is thick with blossoms

            from the blue plum tree,

and this man is full of liquor

            and of his own young life,

 

so he throws his baby boy

            high into the sky

as it is taken by evening

            Irrevocably away from them

so that it seemed

            that I would not come down. 

NOTE: “Folktales” is found in The Unraveling Strangeness (2002), a poetry collection by Bruce Weigl. (Available at Amazon.com.) Critic Denise Levertov called Weigl “one of the best poets now writing in America.”

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Authors, Painters, Composers

Excerpt from a 1958 interview George Plimpton conducted with Ernest Hemingway, published in The Paris Review.

Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears, those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto…Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh…I put in painters, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers…I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

Photo: Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.