This lovely anthology, a festschrift honoring the late Dr. Kim Bridgford (whom I knew through her journal, Mezzo Cammin) is just out from Kelsay Books. It contains work from other poets whom I know (either personally and/or through their work)–Sally Nacker, Jean L. Kreiling, Karen Kelsay, and Ryan Wasser. Wasser, who is one of the editors who helmed this memorial volume, has also contribute a moving introduction that is a testimony to the positive and lasting effect Kim had on those around her. I am pleased to have three poems of my own included: “Rain Clouds to the East,” “Tiny Troubadour,” and “Silhouette: July Evening.”
It seems fitting for this to be published just as the summer season approaches, when living is a bit easier and the memories made a bit sweeter and more effortless.
What English major doesn’t have a love affair with dictionaries? And the Oxford English Dictionary looms over all the others in terms of sheer size, scope, and audacity of conception. It was on this date in 1928 that the first edition of this lexical magnum opus was published. (For those who wish to revisit the story of how I first encountered this vast wordy edifice–and perhaps re-read the two sonnets I wrote in April of 2018 inspired by that encounter, click HERE.)
While the OED is the largest historical dictionary it is not by any means the first such project to trace the origins of a language through quotations. In fact, it is much younger than similarly constructed dictionaries in other languages (including Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese) by, in some cases, centuries.
Initially, the plan was to create a dictionary that defined words left out of existing English dictionaries of the mid-19th century. When it was determined that such a supplemental volume would be far larger than standard dictionaries of the day, planning shifted to producing a new, comprehensive historical dictionary, and the leviathan project was concieved. A vast enterprise, it relied on professionals and an army of volunteers. It too twenty years to find a publisher, and another fifty years to complete the first edition.
Want to know still more? Me, too. The history of The Oxford English Dictionary is well-documented. Two books new to my library are Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K.M. Elisabeth Murray (Yale University Press, 1977) and Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED by Charlotte Brewer (Yale University Press, 2007). The first tells the heroic story of autodidact James Murray who helmed the project most of the way through the first edition, from 1887 until his death in 1915, and is written by his grand-daughter. The more recent book describes the ongoing efforts to enable the OED to keep pace with the English language as it continues to evolve.
In addition, in 2019, the dramatic story of the struggles to create the OED were dramatized in an effective (though intense) film presentation called “The Professor. and the Mad Man” starring Mel Gibson (as James Murray) and Sean Penn as one of the dictionaries most beset, troubling, and helpful volunteers.
Regarding the Poem “Kiwi”:
I first tasted a kiwi fruit when I was twelve, newly arrived in Australia (for what turned out to be a two-year sojourn.) This beautiful, pellucid, pale green fruit was set into the white of a dazzlingly white and light and sweet cloud of meringue and whipped cream called a Pavlova, perhaps the most popular summer dessert recipe star of women’s magazine pages (which I consumed avidly as a young teen there, along with other fluffy reading such as Barbara Cartland novels.)
Now I have a kiwi vine planted to the north of our front porch. It is beautiful, airy, sturdy, and even voracious. Every summer, we are compelled to get out the clippers so that it doesn’t consume the porch railings. Every few summers, now that I have a stand mixer, I whip egg whites and try to recapture the magic of that first bite of Pavlova (named by an Australian chef, it is said, in honor of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova’s visit Down Under in 1926, aiming to equal her legendary lightness.) Perhaps the kiwi vine, itself offer the better metaphor for Pavlova with its vaulting arabesques and reedy flexible toughness?
Kiwi Vine, April 2021Kiwi Vine in Full Leaf and Flower, Shielding a Wren’s Nest
Until tomorrow,
LESLIE
P.S. My copy of the OED offers no entry for “Kiwi” in the sense of native New Zealander or scrumptious dessert, only for the Maori-derived name for the bird whose Latin name is apteryx, or “wingless.”
This slender volume, The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, & Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham, with engravings by Barry Moser (David R. Godine, 2007) is a joy to hold, to look at, and to read. Braham’s prose is both polished and lively, and she succeeds in her aim of creating short (twenty pages or so) portraits of four New England poets whose work matters to her. It is a difficult and precise art, knowing what to include and what to leave out, and Braham knows unerringly which lines to include. This concision makes her prose a natural companion with the engravings of master engraver and book illustrator Barry Moser, a transplant to Massachusetts. (See some of his ambitious projects at the site of his Pennyroyal Press.)
I came to this book already knowing the poetry of Hall, Wilbur, Kumin, and Kunitz, but I think that this fine portraiture (which includes poems and excerpts from interviews for each poet profiled) would make a good introduction to this quartet of complex writers, too, for someone who did not know much about them but wanted to know a little more and was uncertain where to begin a new acquaintance.
Regarding the Poem “Lemon-Lime”: Today’s poem is a fictional conflation of memories of being young and often mute, about the pain that comes from uncertainty and not knowing when, whether, or how to speak out, and how to know if speaking up helps or perhaps might cause more damage, even if the right words can be found in the right moment. Today, when I am no longer young (older than the Wife of Bath!), the pendulum has swung the other direction, and the more difficult thing, at times, is to bite my tongue. Same problem and same pain of uncertainty.
My copy of poet Tess Gallagher’sA Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 1986; part of the Poets on Poetry series, Donald Hall, Editor) was a gift from my friend, Doris, in 1994 from the now-closed Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul. It is heavily underlined, particularly under eloquent passages connecting poetry and memory, as in the essay titled “My Father’s Love Letters.” Gallagher grew up, as I did, for a time, amid the logging-fishing-papermaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and she also suffered the death of a brother when she was twenty. (I was just turned twenty-one when my own brother died.) When I read this passage, I felt she was speaking for me:
“After my youngest brother’s death when I was twenty, I began to recognize the ability of poetry to extend the lives of those not present except as memory. My brother’s death was the official beginning of my mortality….It was as though memory were a kind of flickering shadow left behind by those who had died.”
This collection of essays is filled to bursting with thoughts that catch me up. Definitely time to read these essays with the even stronger sense of my own mortality and joy in poetry that I have now, a quarter-century later!
I have to confess that looking over this list engenders “poetic essay lust,” if such a term exists. I don’t have many of these, but I have a long-standing reverence for the poetry of Amy Clampitt and a fairly recently kindled blaze of admiration for the poetry of William Matthews, so perhaps I will be filling in the gaps of my shelves later this year. For now, I will simply say “Thank you, Donald Hall and the University of Michigan Press” for assembling this chorus of thought on a subject important to us all!
Regarding the Poem “Mizzling”:
As an early responder noted, this poem emerged from a painful memory, not one I recall very often but evoked by thinking about that word, “mizzling,” and the near constant rain of my grade school days in Oregon. I remember that walk to school, and that my shoes were almost always wet. I remember losing the coins and being plunged into despair, and that it was lightly raining. I don’t remember if I found them or which coins, exactly, I was allowed to take, but my amateur coin-collector dad had all of those mentioned in the poem in his collection. We did spend hours discussing and examining coins (and also currency), an enthusiasm that Dad had gained from his first job as a paper boy. He also had a vast collection of WW II “steelies,” the subject of a poem during my first year participating in the April poem challenge.
Newly balmy Northfield, April 17, 2021
Until tomorrow, yours from a sunny and sweet April day in Northfield, Minnesota,
