Nobel Laureate in Literature 1993

Toni Morrison (born 1931) was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Her birth name is Chloe Wofford.

Toni Morrison is best known for her novels The Bluest Eye, published in 1970; Song of Solomon, published in 1977; and Beloved published in 1987. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction of her novel Song of Solomon:

I have long despised artists’ chatter about muses — “voices” that speak to them and enable a vision, the source of which they could not otherwise name. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one’s insight, to avoid questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. I regarded the “mystery” of creativity as a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process — for fear it would fade away.

Writing Song of Solomon destroyed all that. I had no access to what I planned to write about until my father died. In the unmanageable sadness that followed, there was none of the sibling wrangling, guilt or missed opportunities, or fights for this or that memento. Each of his four children was convinced that he loved her or him best. He had sacrificed greatly for one, risking his house and his job; he took another to baseball games over whole summers where they lay in the grass listening to a portable radio, talking, evaluating the players on the field. In the company of one, his firstborn, he always beamed and preferred her cooking over everyone else’s, including his wife’s. He carried a letter from me in his coat pocket for years and years, and drove through blinding snow-storms to help me. Most important, he talked to each of us in language cut to our different understandings. He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl — the one who lived in his head — that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was. I think it was because I felt closer to him than to myself that, after his death, I deliberately sought his advice for writing the novel that continued to elude me. “What are the men you have known really like?”

He answered.

What it is called — muse, insight, inspiration, “the dark finger that guides,” “bright angel” — it exists and, in many forms, I have trusted it ever since.

The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the sit of my work. To travel. To fly. In such an overtly, stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels. A journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like. Old-school heroic, but with other meanings. Opening with the suicidal leap of the insurance agent, ending it with the protagonist’s confrontational soar into danger, was meant to enclose the mystical but problematic one taking by the Solomon of the title.

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Faces on the Wall: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (born 1931) was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Her birth name is Chloe Wofford.

In my English Comp class tonight, I will ask my students how many faces are in the classroom. The class size ranges from 15 to 20, but I am referring to the faces of the poet and fiction writers on the classroom posters. As the semester winds down, I will introduce my students to the faces on the wall.

Toni Morrison is best known for her novels The Bluest Eye, published in 1970; Song of Solomon, published in 1977; and Beloved published in 1987. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction of her novel Song of Solomon:

I have long despised artists’ chatter about muses — “voices” that speak to them and enable a vision, the source of which they could not otherwise name. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one’s insight, to avoid questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. I regarded the “mystery” of creativity as a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process — for fear it would fade away.

Writing Song of Solomon destroyed all that. I had no access to what I planned to write about until my father died. In the unmanageable sadness that followed, there was none of the sibling wrangling, guilt or missed opportunities, or fights for this or that memento. Each of his four children was convinced that he loved her or him best. He had sacrificed greatly for one, risking his house and his job; he took another to baseball games over whole summers where they lay in the grass listening to a portable radio, talking, evaluating the players on the field. In the company of one, his firstborn, he always beamed and preferred her cooking over everyone else’s, including his wife’s. He carried a letter from me in his coat pocket for years and years, and drove through blinding snow-storms to help me. Most important, he talked to each of us in language cut to our different understandings. He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl — the one who lived in his head — that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was. I think it was because I felt closer to him than to myself that, after his death, I deliberately sought his advice for writing the novel that continued to elude me. “What are the men you have known really like?”

He answered.

What it is called — muse, insight, inspiration, “the dark finger that guides,” “bright angel” — it exists and, in many forms, I have trusted it ever since.

The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the sit of my work. To travel. To fly. In such an overtly, stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels. A journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like. Old-school heroic, but with other meanings. Opening with the suicidal leap of the insurance agent, ending it with the protagonist’s confrontational soar into danger, was meant to enclose the mystical but problematic one taking by the Solomon of the title.

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Essays of E.B. White

The following excerpt is from E.B. White’s Essays, published in 1977:

Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street

Turtle Bay, November 12, 1957  For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world. During September I kept hoping that some morning, as by magic, all books, pictures, records, chair, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass, utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silence on a bare beach. But this did not happen. My wife and I diligently sorted and discarded things from day to day, and packed other objects for movers, but a six-room apartment holds as much paraphernalia as an aircraft carrier. You can whittle away at it, but to empty the place completely takes real ingenuity and great staying power. On one of the mornings of disposal, a man from a second-hand bookstore visited us, bought several hundred books, and told us of the death of his brother, the word cancer exploding in the living room like a time bomb detonated by his grief. Even after he had departed with his heavy load, there seemed to be almost as many books as before, and twice as much sorrow.

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) is best known for his book Charlotte’s Web. He received an honorary Pulitzer in 1978 for his work as a whole.

Every morning, when I left for work, I would take something in my hand and walk off with it, deposit in the big municipal wire trash basket at the corner of Third, on the theory that the physical act of disposal was the real key to the problem. My wife, a strategist, knew better and began quietly mobilizing the forces that would eventually put our goods to rout. A man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff. It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day — smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them. Goods and chattels seek a man out; they find him even though his guard is up. Books and oddities arrive in the mail. Gifts arrive on anniversaries and fete days. Veterans send ballpoint pens. Banks send memo books. If you happen to be a writer, readers send whatever may be cluttering up their own lives; I had a man once send me a chip of wood that showed the marks of a beaver’s teeth. Someone dies, and a little trickle of indestructible keepsakes appears, to swell the floor. This steady influx is not counterbalanced by any comparable outgo. Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.

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Essays of E.B. White

The following excerpt is from E.B. White’s Essays, published in 1977:

Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street

Turtle Bay, November 12, 1957  For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world. During September I kept hoping that some morning, as by magic, all books, pictures, records, chair, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass, utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silence on a bare beach. But this did not happen. My wife and I diligently sorted and discarded things from day to day, and packed other objects for movers, but a six-room apartment holds as much paraphernalia as an aircraft carrier. You can whittle away at it, but to empty the place completely takes real ingenuity and great staying power. On one of the mornings of disposal, a man from a second-hand bookstore visited us, bought several hundred books, and told us of the death of his brother, the word cancer exploding in the living room like a time bomb detonated by his grief. Even after he had departed with his heavy load, there seemed to be almost as many books as before, and twice as much sorrow.

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) is best known for his book Charlotte’s Web. He received an honorary Pulitzer in 1978 for his work as a whole.

Every morning, when I left for work, I would take something in my hand and walk off with it, deposit in the big municipal wire trash basket at the corner of Third, on the theory that the physical act of disposal was the real key to the problem. My wife, a strategist, knew better and began quietly mobilizing the forces that would eventually put our goods to rout. A man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff. It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day — smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them. Goods and chattels seek a man out; they find him even though his guard is up. books and oddities arrive in the mail. Gifts arrive on anniversaries and fete days. Veterans send ballpoint pens. Banks send memo books. If you happen to be a writer, readers send whatever may be cluttering up their own lives; I had a man once send me a chip of wood that showed the marks of a beaver’s teeth. Someone dies, and a little trickle of indestructible keepsakes appears, to swell the floor. This steady influx is not counterbalanced by any comparable outgo. Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2010

Fact

Operation Phantom Fury.

*       *       *

The full force   

of the will to live   

is fixed   

on the next   

occasion:

someone   

coming with a tray,

someone   

calling a number.

*       *       *

Each material   

fact   

is a pose,

an answer   

waiting to be chosen.

“Just so,” it says.

“Ask again!”

……………………………………….

Rae Armantrout (born 1947) won the Pultizer for her book Versed. Other Pulitzer finalists in 2010 were Angie Estes for her book Tryst and Lucia Perillo for her book Inseminating the Elephant.

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Quotes from Willa Cather

In the classroom was a poster of Willa Cather (1873-1947) with this quote beneath it, There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. 

Above the poster was a clock with the hour hand moving ahead quickly so that each hour passed in a matter of seconds. I’d look from my class to the clock, watching the hands spin around, feeling like I was in a movie where time moves forward rapidly to show how much the characters have changed. This is the clock that turned above Cather’s poster. Time marches on, but the stories never change.

Other Cather quotes:

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. 

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to literature.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

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Quotes from Willa Cather

I have taken a position teaching English at a local college and taught my first class last night. In the classroom was a poster of Willa Cather (1873-1947) with this quote beneath it, There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Above the poster was a clock with the hour hand moving ahead quickly so that each hour passed in a matter of seconds. I’d look from my class to the clock, watching the hands spin around, feeling like I was in a movie where time moves forward rapidly to show how much the characters have changed. This is the clock that turned above Cather’s poster. Time marches on, but the stories never change.

Other Cather quotes:

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to literature.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

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Poem of the day, Aug. 23 2010

Where I Live

is vertical:
garden, pond, uphill

pasture, run-in shed.
Through pines, Pumpkin Ridge.

Two switchbacks down
church spire, spit of town.

Where I climb I inspect
the peas, cadets erect

in lime-capped rows,
hear hammer blows

as pileateds peck
the rot of shagbark hickories

enlarging last
year’s pterodactyl nests.

Granite erratics
humped like bears

dot the outermost pasture
where in tall grass

clots of ovoid scat
butternut-size, milky brown

announce our halfgrown
moose padded past

into the forest
to nibble beech tree sprouts.

Wake-robin trillium
in dapple-shade. Violets,

landlocked seas I swim in.
I used to pick bouquets

for her, framed them
with leaves. Schmutzige

she said, holding me close
to scrub my streaky face.

Almost from here I touch
my mother’s death.
……………………….
Maxine Kumin (born 1925) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 for her book Up Country.

In German, the word Schmutzige means dirty.

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2009

W.S. Merwin (born 1927) won the Pulitzer for his book The Shadow of Sirius. He is serving currently as U.S. Poet Laureate. Other Pulitzer finalists in 2009 were Ruth Stone (born 1915) for her book What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems and Frank Bidart (born 1939) for his book Watching the Spring Festival.

Good People

From the kindness of my parents
I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only
it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend
pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their own hands

but it escapes their attention
or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

Boy Scout Council to Honor West Side Youth

The caption of this Sept. 21, 1942 article reads: William Merwin, fifteen, son of Dr. and Mrs. William S. Merwin of 1115 Washburn Street will be made an eagle scout at the morning service of the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church of which his father is pastor, Sunday, Sept. 27, when the badge of an eagle scout will awarded him by Col. E.H. Ripple.

Scout Merwin will appear at a public session of the Court of Honor of the Scranton Council Friday, Sept. 25, at the Technical High School when he will be examined.

He is a member of Troop No. 11 of the Washburn Street Church of which Russell Rome is scoutmaster. He is a graduate of the Sophomore Class, West Scranton Junior High School and last term was awarded a bronze medal for extra curriculum and leadership. He is now a junior at Wyoming Seminary, Kingston. The candidate was outstanding at the Boy Scout camp at Goose Pond during the past Summer having been appointed an instructor and passed the proficiency tests as a life guard. He also made a fifty-mile hike. He will be the first eagle scout in his troop under the leadership of Mr. Rome.

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2008

Meditations At Lagunitas
by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Talking to Ourselves 
by Philip Schultz

A woman in my doctor’s office last week
couldn’t stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer’s. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he’d come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father’s vending business was failing,
he’d talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn’t care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.

“Too important,” I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, “What’s that you said?”
…………………………………………………………………………………………
The 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry was awarded to both Robert Hass (born 1941) for his book Time and Materials and Philip Schultz (born 1945) for his book Failure. Hass served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997. Ellen Bryant Voigt (born 1943) was also a Pulitzer finalist in 2008 for her book Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006.

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