What Made Diane Rise and Leave the Room
by Marjorie Saiser

Last week one of the poems
made tears come and it was
too intimate she said. That was the
surprising word she used, intimate.
I think it was the line where
you and I look at one another, an ordinary
moment, and then keep going on
this train we could slow
and get off, but we keep on,
and Diane can't, her mate having
died. I wake up and
I want to take your hand,
though yesterday
we had been snarling like dogs.
Let me hold your hand
and look out the window at the passing sky
or scruffy town or scattered cattle in a field,
and talk to you about something, anything.


“What Made Diane Rise and Leave the Room” by Marjorie Saiser from Learning to Swim. Stephen F. Austin University Press © 2019. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

Yellowstone was named a national park on this date in 1872. Written descriptions of Yellowstone began to appear in the East Coast media over the next few decades, but most of them were dismissed as tall tales. Mountain man Jim Bridger insisted over and over that he had seen petrified trees and waterfalls shooting upward into the sky. Trapper Joe Meek, describing the Norris Geyser basin, recounted stories of steaming rivers, boiling mud, and fire and brimstone. Because of the Native American wars and the Civil War, the United States Geological Survey did not come in to investigate Yellowstone until 1871. The crew submitted a 500-page report to Congress, and on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Act of Dedication to preserve more than 2 million acres of wilderness as the world's first national park.

It's the birthday of Ralph Ellison, (books by this author) born on this day in Oklahoma City (1914). His grandparents on both sides had been slaves, and his parents moved to Oklahoma Territory, a place with no history of slavery, in hopes of giving their children a better life.

He went to college. He was interested in music or sculpture, but after he met Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, he decided to become a writer instead. Richard Wright became his mentor, and he pushed Ralph Ellison to write fiction. Ellison joined the Merchant Marine in 1943 and got a bad kidney infection. He went to recuperate on a friend's farm in Vermont. He took his typewriter out to a barn and tried to work on a novel, but he wasn't getting anywhere. One day, out of the blue, he typed, "I am an invisible man." He had no idea where the line came from, but he started wondering what kind of character would say it. Seven years later, he published Invisible Man (1952), which became a best-seller and is now considered a classic.

It's the birthday of the poet Richard Wilbur, (books by this author) born in New York City (1921). He served in the infantry during WWII. In his foxhole, he read Edgar Allan Poe and wrote the poems that became his first book: The Beautiful Changes (1947). Things of This World (1956) received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He said, "The poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental."

It's the birthday of poet Robert Lowell, (books by this author) born in Boston, Massachusetts (1917). He met the poet Allen Tate, and he pitched a tent in Tate's front yard and stayed there for two months. He said he learned from Allen Tate that poems "must be tinkered with and recast until one's eyes pop out of one's head." Robert Lowell's breakthrough book was Life Studies (1959), in which he used less formal language and dealt with personal issues like mental illness, marriage, and the Vietnam War. It was called the first "confessional" book of poetry. He wrote, "If we see the light at the end of the tunnel,/It's the light of the oncoming train."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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