THE BALL

The author of this poem, Wislawa Szymborska, died February 1, 2012 at age 88.  She won the Nobel prize in literature in 1996.

THE BALL

As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

as long as Earth is still unlike

the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there's neither hide nor hair

of other grasses graced by other winds,

of other treetops bearing other crowns,

other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo

has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven't heard word

of better or worse mozarts,

platos, edisons somewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes

are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness

is still incomparable,

peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions

still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone

still raise voices to high heavens ----

let's act like very special guests of honor

at the district-firemen's ball,

dance to the beat of the local oompah band,

and pretend that it's the ball

to end all balls.

I can't speak for others ----

for me this is

misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater

where even the stars have time to burn

while winking at us

unintentionally.

-WislawaSzymborska

(pronounced vees-WAH-wah sheem-BOR-ska)

(Translated, from the Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

Guppy to Guillotin: The Namesakes of Words

Guppy to Guillotin: The Namesakes of Words

All Things Considered, February 9, 2008 · For author Philip Dodd, a simple trivia question sent him on a quest that crossed oceans and spanned continents.

The question: What fish was named for a West Indian clergyman?

The answer is in the title of Dodd's new book, The Reverend Guppy's Aquarium: From Joseph P. Frisbie to Roy Jacuzzi, How Everyday Items Were Named for Extraordinary People. From Guppy himself, who was quite a character, to the Earl of Sandwich and instrument-maker Adolphe Sax, Dodd delves into the lives of those who left their names deeply embedded in the English language.

Tracing the paths of these often unwitting heroes, Dodd's travels took him from Texas — where he met the notorious cattle rancher Samuel Maverick — to Trinidad, where he found the spot where naturalist Robert Lechmere Guppy found his now-famous freshwater fish. Though many of his subjects are long dead, Dodd also found people still alive, well and brimming with ideas, including inventor Roy Jacuzzi, who lives in California.

Some of the stories Dodd discovered were tragic. He tells the sad family story behind the Mercedes, which was named for the young daughter of Emil Jellinek, an entrepreneur who commissioned the first Mercedes cars. Jellinek lost his fortune in the war and died a broken man in 1918.

Andrea Seabrook spoke with Dodd about the stories behind some of the characters who give the English language its color.

To listen to the interview CLick Here.

Don't Look Back

Don't Look Back
by Kay Ryan


This is not
a problem
for the neckless.
Fish cannot
recklessly
swivel their heads
to check
on their fry;
no one expects
this. They are
torpedoes of 
disinterest,
compact capsules
that rely 
on the odds
for survival,

unfollowed by
the exact and modest
number or goslings
the S-necked
goose is—
who if she
looks back
acknowledges losses
and if she does not
also loses.


"Don't Look Back" by Kay Ryan, from Say Uncle. © Grove Press, 2000. 


From the Writer's Almanac

Furiously saying goodbye

I had thought the tumors...


by Grace Paley
from Fidelity. © Etruscan Press, 2008.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.


I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kill me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinary competitive this week.


For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables I did not drink I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong

I don't mean morally or ethically or
geographically I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack nor did I allow my children
to do so I lived in a city no worse
than any other great and famous city I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn't seem so bad and was
often convenient


In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand—
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye


From the Writer's Almanac

Pettifog

pettifog - argue over petty things; 
bicker, brabble, squabble, niggle, quibble

Origin: 1605–15;  back formation from pettifogger,  equivalent to petty  + fogger  < Middle Low German voger  or Middle Dutch voeger  one who arranges things; akin to Old English gefōg  a joining


Supply and demand are, alas, two things I find no uses for, Econometric processes to me are just an awful bore; I use my mathematics skill to pettifog my treatises, And use my flair for jargon-speak to obfuscate my sophistries.

There is nothing else to say

Javier Sicilia is a novelist and a poet. In 2009, he was awarded Mexico's prestigious Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This September, he read a poem dedicated to his son, Juan Francisco, at a rally:


There is nothing else to say
The world is not worthy of the word
They drowned it, deep inside of us
As they asphyxiated you
As they ripped your lungs apart
And the pain does not leave me
All we have is a world
For the silence of the just
Only for your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

This was the last poem Sicilia wrote. His son was murdered in the central state of Morelos in March, along with six other people, by members of a drug cartel.


Javier Sicilia renounced poetry and became the leader of a national protest against the drug war. Yet he says poetry has been an integral part of the "Peace with Justice and Dignity" movement.


"Poetry has been present, the poets have been part of it," Sicilia says. "The problem is that the mass media don't like to cover it and don't understand that this movement was born out of poetry, and the reason why it's important is because it's filled with a poetic content that has transformed the language. And behind all of this is a profound ethics, as with all poetry."


Sicilia says the poet has a moral responsibility to tell these stories.


From Weekend Edition Saturday

Lot's Wife

LOT'S Wife


Sometime soon after the embers cooled, 
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings 
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air, 


they must have come, people of those three cities 
remaining, to pick among the charred bones, 
the rubble of what was once temple and house,


stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug 
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades. 
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain, 


cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning, 
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder, 
full of the scavenger's overabundant hope, 


they would have found her--even as now 
some men encounter the woman of their dreams 
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture 

with a camera's flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)--
found her, that is, not as-the person she was 


but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman, 
each of them would have wanted a piece of her. 
Standing in that wasted landscape, 


she must have seemed a statue erected there 
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized, 
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl 


she had been in the city she had known. 
And they must have stood there, as we do, 
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,


and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle, 
chipped at her violendy and stuffed their leathern 
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which


to season for awhile their meat, their daily bread.


Gary J. Whitehead


From The New Yorker January 2, 2012