Charles Simic went to the same high school Ernest Hemingway had gone to, when his family moved from Belgrade to Illinois. Rumor has it that the teachers there were always reminding kids that Hemingway had gone before them — and this inspired Simic to become a writer. He was drawn to poetry because his English still wasn’t very good, and in poems he didn’t have to use so many words.
![tuesday-johnson:
ca. 1860’s, [composite carte de visite portrait of E.A. Scholfield confronting himself], E.A. Scholfield
via Connecticut History Online, Mystic Seaport, Scholfield Collection](http://24.media.tumblr.com/0119c351eb28ec36ea20a017ca17197d/tumblr_mgl3ku0tVA1qa51rdo1_400.jpg)
ca. 1860’s, [composite carte de visite portrait of E.A. Scholfield confronting himself], E.A. Scholfield
via Connecticut History Online, Mystic Seaport, Scholfield Collection
Robert Penn Warren
His parents’ house was full of books, and so was his grandfather’s run-down tobacco farm, where young Warren spent his summers. His grandfather quoted classical poetry while he tended his vegetable and flower gardens. He sat with his grandson under a cedar tree on the farm and told him stories of fighting in the Confederate army, and drew pictures of the battles in the dirt.
Baseball Season: Marianne Moore throwing out the first pitch 1968.
Modern Woodmen of America baseball team, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, ca. 1900.
The Modern Woodmen of America is a fraternal benefit society founded in 1883 and still in operation today. Photo by Hubert Wentorf.
via: Two Rivers History: Hubert R. Wentorf Photo Collection and Fisher-Hamilton Industries Product Catalogs, Lester Public Library by way of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
Apprentice Plumbers baseball team, Milwaukee Area Technical College, 1925-1929.
Nelson Algren
“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”
Gregory Corso & Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Upon his death, Ferlinghetti said this about Corso:
…he was always in your face, often not singing sweetly, but challenging you in some wild way, daring you or putting you on, shaking you up or at least mocking your ordinary way of looking at things. How many times did I hear him interrupt some solemn voice on stage with a loud shout from the back of the hall, comic or obscene, the outsider challenging the whole scene? But he was no mere egocentric wiseacre. He was a tragi-comic poet with a crazy sense of humor…
Sylvia Beach, librarian and literary hero, proprietor of Shakespeare and Company bookstore and lending library.
She met James Joyce in 1920, just as he was finishing Ulysses. He couldn’t get it published because all the big presses thought it was too obscene, so she offered to publish it for him, even though she’d never published a book before. To fund the project, she got people to buy advance copies. She had no editors, so she edited the huge manuscript herself, and she published it on Joyce’s birthday, February 2, 1922.
![tuesday-johnson:
ca. 1860-90’s, [tintype portrait of a bearded carpenter or shipwright, smoking a pipe, and holding a large square, compass, and the head of a large adze. A saw also leans against his leg]
via Be-hold, Fine Photographs](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcdbp1rNNj1qa51rdo1_500.jpg)
ca. 1860-90’s, [tintype portrait of a bearded carpenter or shipwright, smoking a pipe, and holding a large square, compass, and the head of a large adze. A saw also leans against his leg]
for Victor
Some things never change: the velvet flock
of the turf, the baselines smoothed to suede,
the ancient smell of peanuts, the harsh smack
the ball makes burrowing into the catcher’s mitt.
Here in the Grapefruit League’s trellised shade
you catch Pie Traynor’s lofting rightfield foul
all over again. You’re ten in Fenway Park
and wait past suppertime for him to autograph it
then race for home all goosebumps in the dark
to roll the keepsake ball in paraffin,
soften your secondhand glove with neat’s-foot oil
and wrap your Louisville Slugger with friction tape.
The Texas Leaguers, whatever league you’re in
still tantalize, the way they waver and drop.
Carl Hubbell’s magical screwball is still
give or take sixty years unhittable.
Sunset comes late but comes, inexorable.
What lingers is the slender hook of hope.
But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.
Leslie Marmon Silko
“Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?
But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found — I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.”
― James Merrill
prompts and pastimes
