Word-Wednesday for December 23, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, December 23, 2020, the 52nd Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of winter, and the 358th day of the year, with 8 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for December 23, 2020
Our neighbor’s Great Grey Owl.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for December 23, 2020
Sunrise: 8:16am; Sunset: 4:31pm; 2 minutes, 14 seconds daylight today
Moonrise: 1:21pm; Moonset: 1:31am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for December 23, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             16                     42                     19
Low              -7                    -37                   -10


December 23 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Pfeffernusse Day
• National Roots Day
• Festivus
• Forefathers Day

December 23 Word Riddle
How does the veterinarian give holiday wishes?*


December 23 Pun
We know so little about Santa’s tenth reindeer, Olive - the other reindeer…


December 23 The Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Old Warroad Dog Learns New Trick


December 23 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1672 Giovanni Cassini discovers Rhea, a satellite of Saturn.
• 1690 English astronomer John Flamsteed observes Uranus without realizing it's undiscovered.
• 1692 Nahum Tate is appointed the third Poet Laureate by English monarchs William and Mary.
• 1815 Emma By Jane Austen by published by John Murray in London.
• 1888 Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear with a razor, after argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and sends to a prostitute for safe keeping.
• 1893 Opera Hansel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister Adelheid Wette premieres in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss.

December 23 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1819 Jan Jakob Lodewijk ten Kate, Dutch poet.
• 1828 Mathilde Wesendonk, German writer and poet.
• 1830 Adam Minchejmer, Polish composer and conductor.
• 1858 Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dantshenko, Russian playwright.
• 1860 Harriet Monroe, American poet and editor of Poetry magazine.
• 1905 Arn Bjornsson, Icelandic composer.
• 1926 Robert Bly, American poet & essayist.
• 1955 Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish poet, British Poet Laureate 2009-19.

December 23 Word Fact
raspberry
A monarch butterfly can fly 100km on the energy contained in a quarter of a raspberry.


December 23, 2020 Song of Myself, 

Verse 8 of 52

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart.


Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• autochthonic: existing where it was formed or born; native, aboriginal, indigenous.
• curglaff: the shock felt in bathing, when on first plunges into cold water.
• fianchetto: the development of a bishop by moving it one square to a long diagonal of the board.
• ghazal: (in Middle Eastern and Indian literature and music) a lyric poem with a fixed number of verses and a repeated rhyme, typically on the theme of love, and normally set to music.
• hiemal: wintry, or pertaining to winter.
• kunzite: a lilac-colored gem variety of spodumene which fluoresces or changes color when irradiated.
• passerine: relating to or denoting birds of a large order distinguished by feet that are adapted for perching, including all songbirds.
• suss: v. realize or grasp (something). n. knowledge or awareness of a specific kind. adj. shrewd and wary.
• ubiety: the state or condition of being in a specific, fixed location; whereness.
• wassail: spiced ale or mulled wine drunk during celebrations for Twelfth Night and Christmas Eve.

December 23, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Robert Bly
Robert Bly was born on this date in 1926 to Jacob and Alice Bly of Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota. After graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy. Bly then attended St. Olaf College for one year before transferring to Harvard University, where he joined other young authors, including Donald Hall, Will Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes.

After graduating in 1950, Bly spent the next few years in New York before he began two years of study at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he completed a master's degree in fine arts. In 1956, Bly received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway (his parents were of Norwegian descent) and translate Norwegian poetry into English. Bly then decided to start a literary magazine in the United States for poetry translation, sequentially called The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, which introduced many poets to other writers.

Bly’s first widely acclaimed collection was his 1962 collections of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields. His second book, The Light around the Body, won the 1967 National Book Award. As if the 1960s weren't productive enough, the 1970s were a prolific decade for Bly, in which he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations. Bly's work ranged from presentations of deeply personal images to anti-war activism to rural life to mythology to storytelling. Bly’s most popular books from the 1980s include The Man in the Black Coat Turns, which contains several prose poems and meditations on father-son relationships, Selected Poems, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, in which he explores love, intimacy, and relationships.

Bly's 1979 divorce precipitated a serious personal crisis, where his emotional recovery included his participation in a series of seminars for men with James Hillman and Michael Meade. Participants were encouraged to reclaim their male traits and to express repressed feelings through poetry, stories, and other rites. Bly’s character of “Iron John” was developed from this period. Based on a fairy tale of the same name by the Brothers Grimm, Iron John was an archetypal figure for help men connect with their psyches. It eventually became the 1990 book, Iron John: A Book about Men.

Though Bly has perhaps become most identified as a social critic, he continues to publish many books of poetry and translation. Following the practice of his friend William Stafford, Bly wrote a poem every morning, which produced a collection Morning Poems (1998). Recent collections include The Urge to Travel Long Distances (2005), the collection of ghazals, My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005); Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, 1950-2013 (2013), and Collected Poems (2018). Bly's poetry uses free association where his imagination discovers whatever images it deems appropriate to the poem, no matter the logical, literal demands of consciousness. Here's one of his poems about winter, our newest season.

Night of First Snow

Night of first snow.
I stand, my back against a board fence.
The fir trees are black at the trunk, white out on the edges.
The earth balances all around my feet.

The apple trunk joins the white ground with what is above.
Fir branches balance the snow.
I too am a dark shape vertical to the earth.
All over the sky, the gray color that pleases the snow mother.

A woman wades out toward the wicker basket, floating,
Rocking in darkening reeds.
The child and the light are half asleep.
What is human lies in the way the basket is rocking.

Black and white end in the gray color of the sky.
What is human lies in the three hairs, caught,
The rabbit left behind
As he scooted under the granary joist.



From A Year with Rilke, December 23 Entry
Wait and Gather, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

 
Poems don't come to much when they are written too soon. One should wait and gather the feeling and flavors of a whole life, and a long life if possible, and then, just at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people suppose, emotions—those come easily and quickly enough. They are experiences.

For the sake of one line of poetry, one must see many cities, people, and  things. One must be acquainted with animals and feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures of small flowers opening at the first light. One must be able to think back on paths taken through unknown places, on unanticipated meetings, and on farewells one had long seen coming, on days of childhood not yet understood; on parents one disappointed when they offered some pleasure one could not grasp (it was a pleasure suited to another); on childhood illnesses that came on so strangely, altering everything; on days in closed and quiet rooms and on mornings by the sea; on the sea itself, on all seas; on night journeys that rose and flew with the stars....

Question:
“What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter’s day?” Henry David Thoreau

Answer:                                                                                                                                                               The northwest Minnesota night.


Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until Friday,
and write when you have the time.

Mask Up Wannaska!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 *Fleas navidog and happy neuter year.