Fun_People Archive
9 Oct
LIT BITS V3 #282

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon,  9 Oct 100 18:20:39 -0700
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #282

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #282
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Monday, 9 October 2000; on this day,

94 years ago (1906),

     Leopold Senghor, poet and statesman and cofounder of the Negritude
     movement in African art and literature, is born in Senegal, French
     West Africa. Drafted in 1939 at the beginning of WWII, he is captured
     in 1940 and spends two years in Nazi concentrations camps where he
     writes some of his best poetry. In 1984, he is inducted in the Academie
     Francaise, becoming the first black member in that body's history.

50 years ago (1950),

     Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet, dies at 58 in Austerlitz, New York.

39 years ago (1961),

     Nunnally Johnson writes to Groucho Marx: "some drunk dame told [James
     Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim
     said, 'Surely you don't mean by unartificial insemination!'"

Today's poem:

                I, Being Born a Woman

     I, being born a woman and distressed
     By all the needs and notions of my kind,
     Am urged by your propinquity to find
     Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
     To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
     So subtly is the fume of life designed,
     To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
     And leave me once again undone, possessed.
     Think not for this, however, the poor treason
     Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
     I shall remember you with love, or season
     My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
     I find this frenzy insufficient reason
     For conversation when we meet again.

                                     Edna St. Vincent Millay

© 2000 Peter Langston