Fun_People Archive
21 Aug
LIT BITS V3 #208

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 100 22:46:34 -0700
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #208

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #208
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Thursday, 27 July 2000; on this day,

223 years ago (1777),

     British poet Thomas Campbell is born in Glasgow. After Napoleon
     sentences the German publisher Johann Palm to death for printing
     subversive pamphlets, Campbell will give this toast at an authors'
     dinner: "To Napoleon"--murmurs of protest--"But, gentlemen, he once
     shot a publisher!"

87 years ago (1913),

     Vittorio Sereni--Italian poet, author, editor, and translator known
     for his lyric verse and translations into Italian of works by Pierre
     Corneille, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valery, Rene Char, Albert Camus,
     Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams--is born in Luino, Italy.

54 years ago (1946),

     When Gertrude Stein's  last words to Alice B. Toklas--"What is the
     answer?"--receive no reply, Stein asks: "In that case, what is the
     question?"

54 years ago (1946),

     Co-founder of the influential Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell
     dies in the town of Provincetown.

38 years ago (1962),

     In Sury-en-Vaus, France, English writer and editor Richard Aldington
     dies. His best work of fiction is _Death of a Hero_ (1929), followed
     by the sequel, _All Men Are Enemies_ (1933), both reflect the
     disillusionment of a generation that had fought through World War I.

Today's poem:

                          Goodbye!

     Come, thrust your hands in the warm earth
	And feel her strength through all your veins;
     Breathe her full odors, taste her mouth,
	Which laughs away imagined pains;
     Touch her life's womb, yet know
	This substance makes your grave also.
     Shrink not; your flesh is no more sweet
	Than flowers which daily blow and die;
     Nor are your mein and dress so neat,
	Nor half so pure your lucid eye;
     And, yet, by flowers and earth I swear
	You're neat and pure and sweet and fair.

                                           Richard Aldington

© 2000 Peter Langston