| Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht
by Peter Meinke
At Christmas, my sisters and I
learned to sing carols in German:
Grandpa would give us a quarter
apiece for performing, though
only Carol could carry a tune.
After the start of the War
Father forbade us to practice,
and when Grandpa asked for his songs
we told him they weren't allowed.
You are German, he shouted. Sing!
Singt, mein kinder, für mich!
We stood mute, unhappy, ashamed,
between father and son locking eyes
while the U-boats were nosing the currents
and propellers coughed in the skies
like angels clearing their throats.
"Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht" by Peter Meinke, from Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of Rudyard Kipling (books by this author), born in Bombay, India (1865). Though he'd never fought in battle, his poems about military life became classics among British soldiers around the world. When he finally moved to Vermont after the war he began to re-imagine the India of his childhood and wrote The Jungle Book (1894) about a boy raised by wolves in the jungle. Rudyard Kipling said, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." It’s the birthday of poet, punk rocker, and National Book Award winner Patti Smith (books by this author), born in Chicago on this day during the Great Blizzard of 1946. She was raised a Jehovah Witness in New Jersey, the daughter of a waitress and a factory worker. She grew up reading a lot of books --- mostly fairy tales, biographies, and travel books about Tibet and the Himalayas. Straight out of high school she went to work on a factory assembly line. At 19 she was pregnant. She gave her child up for adoption and she moved to New York City. She didn’t have any money when she arrived. So for the first couple months, instead of going to movies or plays or anything else, she just walked around the city. She said, “I didn’t need any entertainment. . . . It was beautiful going to Washington Square or Tompkins Square Park and seeing people gathered to read poetry or sing or play chess. For me, New York meant freedom.” She worked at Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan, a job that she adored. They were required to read the New York Times Book Review, and she loved that people there “took book clerks seriously.” At the store she read a lot of French poetry and biographies of poets and painters. Outside the store she spent time at the St Mark’s Poetry Project and also wrote articles for Rolling Stone magazine. She had some friends who’d moved to New York City before her and she was supposed to stay with them for a while. She showed up at their apartment looking for them. But it turns out that they didn’t live there any more, and instead of finding them she stumbled across a sleeping art student, Robert Mapplethorpe, a man who would go on to become a famous photographer. But at the time Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were each just 20 years old and they became lovers and roommates --- inseparable young cash-strapped companions living out bohemian dreams in New York City. They rented the smallest room at the Hotel Chelsea so they could reside in a place famous for housing writers and artists like Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Simone de Beauvoir. She and Mapplethorpe vowed to support each other’s art. They would stay up all night together working on their separate projects and then take cigarette breaks to comment on each other’s work. She said, “We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.” The two stayed close friends and artistic collaborators even after they ended their romance and Mapplethorpe discovered that he was gay. Their relationship is the subject of Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The book has been described as “beautifully crafted love letter” to Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989. He had encouraged her to draw and she spent a lot of time hanging around the campus where he was an art student. Pretty soon she was writing poetry verses in her notebooks in addition to sketching up pencil drawings. She published her first collection of poems, Seventh Heaven, in 1972 when she was just 25. She gave poetry readings around New York City and became known for her dramatic delivery in which she seemed to vacillate between anger and helplessness. One night a friend played electric guitar on stage as she read poems. She said that they were aiming to “infuse new life into performing poetry---merging poetry with electric guitar, three chords—and to reembrace rock and roll.” To work at this ambitious project she formed a band, The Patti Smith Group. Four years after she released her first book of poems, Patti Smith released her first punk album, Horses (1975). It begins with the lyrics “Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.” The album was wildly successful and it’s considered one of the top rock albums of all time. Patti Smith is known as “the godmother of punk,” and in 2007 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She’s recorded a dozen albums, including Radio Ethiopia (1976), Wave (1979), , Peace and Noise (1996), and The Coral Sea (2008), and most recently Banga (2021). Her books of poems and drawings include Witt (1973), Babel (1978), Woolgathering (1992), Stranger Messenger (2003), Auguries of Innocence (2005), and most reently Year of the Monkey (2019). It's the 60th birthday of Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland (books by this author), born on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany. His first novel was Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), another novel is Player One: What Is to Become of Us (2010). Player One is set in real time, telling the story of 5 people in an airport cocktail lounge during the apocalypse. His latest novel is Binge: 60 stories to make your brain feel different (2021). Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924. At the time it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy represented the entirety of the universe. Hubble was studying the Andromeda Nebula using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson observatory in California. With a weaker telescope nebulae just looked like clouds of glowing gas, but with the Hooker telescope — the most powerful telescope in the world at that time — Hubble was able to distinguish individual stars within the nebula. One of the stars in the Andromeda Nebula turned out to be a Cepheid variable: a particular type of star that pulsates and is very bright. Astronomers had figured out a decade earlier that, by observing a Cepheid variable and measuring its brightness and the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again, they could calculate the star's distance from the Earth. Hubble crunched the numbers and realized that the star he was observing was 800 thousand light years away, more than eight times the distance of the farthest star in the Milky Way. It was then that he realized that the "cloud of gas" he'd been observing was really another vast galaxy that was very far away. He renamed the Andromeda Nebula the "Andromeda Galaxy," and went on to discover 23 more separate galaxies. His findings proved that, unimaginably vast though it seemed to us, our Milky Way was just one of many little islands of stars. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 