"I Think This Is the Start of a Beautiful Friendship

October 26, 1900: Henry James and Edith Wharton begin corresponding

On this day in 1900, writer Henry James first writes to Edith Wharton, whom he will finally meet in 1903. Wharton, then 38, had published her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, the previous year. An enormous admirer of James, she modeled parts of her work after his, including his attention to form and his interest in ethical questions. The two became great friends, and James encouraged her writing.

Wharton was born to a wealthy, patrician family in New York in 1862. She grew up in an opulent world where pre-Civil War society kept the nouveau riche at bay, maintaining its own isolated sense of superiority. Wharton, expected to become a typical wife, mother, and hostess, instead showed intellectual talent and began to write at an early age. She had begun to fear spinsterhood when, at age 23, she married prominent socialite Edward Wharton--who had no profession or money worth speaking of. The match was unhappy and troubled, but the couple did not divorce until 1913. Wharton returned to writing, often dealing with themes of divorce, unhappy marriages, and free-spirited individuals trapped by societal pressures.

Wharton's 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, told the story of a New York socialite with a strong sense of individuality who cannot adapt to the roles expected of her. The book became a bestseller.

Wharton traveled abroad frequently and after her divorce began writing for women's magazines. Her novella, Ethan Frome, detailing a New England farmer trapped by the demands of the women in his life, is still one of her best-known works. Her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence, won the Pulitzer. Wharton published numerous other books, but some of her later work suffered from the deadlines and pressures imposed by writing for money. She remained in France during World War I, assisting refugees, and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1916. She published another bestseller, Twilight Sleep, in 1927, and her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934. She died in France in 1937.

(from History.com: Today in Literary History)

Can you imagine those letters?

Hart and Hull: This Week in Poetry Class

Don't they beg to be adored...

Lose control, tumble overboard?


This semester, after decades of trying, knowing I should but not having the capacity, I have finally fallen in love with Hart Crane. It took Lynda Hull's poems to bring me to his with a new understanding.

That's one of the aspects I love most about poetry, the fact that we can go forward and backward, learn and relearn lyrics.

New Poem and Old Favorite

Finally the muse has given me something into which I can sink my teeth/the nib of my pen. I have been worrying for over a year (since finishing my thesis) that I'd never write anything else. It's here, it's big for me, and it's very scary/exciting. I write more--everywhere--when I'm writing poetry, so expect to see more frequent posts again.

In our online class, we've been reading Mark Doty, and I've been thinking about turtles...Here's a little bit of Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath:

Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull it over. Its front foot caught a piece of quartz and little by little the shell pulled over and flopped upright. The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust. (from chapter 3)



Beauty bespeaks survival, right?

Juicy Juice: From Today's Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of humorist Roy Blount Jr., (books by this author) born in Indianapolis (1941) but raised in the South in a "sort of a suburb of Atlanta" named Decatur, Georgia. He's the author of more than 20 books, covering subjects that range "from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking."

But Roy Blount loves to tell stories, and his recent book, Alphabet Juice, is a collection of stories about words — often in stream of consciousness digressions and arranged loosely like a dictionary. The book's subtitle is "The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory." He explained: "Alphabet Juice is my glossographia. Juice as in au jus, juju, power, liquor, electricity. (Loose words and clauses left lying around are like loose live wires — they'll short-circuit, burn out, disempower your lights.) As in influence; as in squeezin's; as in, the other day I saw a woman walking down the street wearing some highly low-cut shorts. On her hourglass figure, the top of those shorts was at about, I would say (not a snap judgment), twenty minutes. Just below that part of the back where some people — she, for instance — have dimples was where her waistband cut across; and just below the waistband, in two-inch letters, was an inspired, if vulgar, brand name: Juicy. (See zaftig.)"

In Alphabet Juice, there are entries for synchronicity; synesthesia; syntax collie; syrup, tallywacker; tango; taxicab; teh (originally a typo for "the"); Terpsichore; Times, The New York; tmesis ("inserting a word or nonsense syllable into another word for intensifying effect, as in … absobloominglutely"); tump; TV, on being on; and TV, being on, p.s.

There are entries for unacceptable, unbeknownst, understand, uneven, unreliable narrator, unscribable, Urbandictionary.com, Utopian and uvula. There are entries for zydeco (comes from beans) and zyzzyva (a class of weevils).

Blount devotes several pages — rife with humor and utter earnestness — to an entry on "y'all," declaring, "People who grew up with this word face the Sisyphean task of correcting people who didn't and who insist that it is sometimes singular."

Roy Blount Jr. once said, "Language seems to me intrinsically comic — noises of the tongue, lips, larynx, and palate rendered in ink on paper with the deepest and airiest thoughts in mind and the harshest and tenderest feelings at heart."