Gerald Locklin

Poets and writers, left to right:: Ron Koertge (former Pasadena City College Professor of English; still going strong), Ben Pleasants (LAUSD teacher for 30 years; 1940-2013), Charles Bukowski (former U.S. Post Office employee; 1920-94), Steve Richmond (former UCLA law student and poetry mentor to Jim Morrison; 1941-2009), and Gerald Locklin (California State University, Long Beach Emeritus Professor of English; still going strong).
Photograph by Mark Sullivan, Los Angeles, 1975.

why I don't teach kindergarten
by Gerald Locklin

no night classes. 

The Best Year of Her Life

by Gerald Locklin 

When my two-year-old daughter

sees someone come through the door

whom she loves, and hasn't seen for a while,

and has been anticipating

she literally shrieks with joy. 

I have to go into the other room

so that no one will notice the tears in my eyes. 

Later, after my daughter has gone to bed,

i say to my wife, 

"She will never be this happy again,"

and my wife gets angry and snaps,

"Don't you dare communicate your negativism to her!"

And, of course, I won't, if I can possibly help it,

and, of course, I fully expect her

to have much joy in her life,

and, of course, I hope to be able

to contribute to that joy—

I hope, in other words, that she'll always

be happy to see me come through the door— 

but why kid ourselves—she, like every child,

has a life of great suffering ahead of her,

and while joy will not go out of her life,

she will one of these days cease to actually,

literally, jump and shriek for joy.

An Uncool Yul 

by Gerald Locklin

a lot of people seem to think

that it's just wonderful how yul brenner,

while he was dying of cancer,

made an anti-smoking commercial

that is playing now,

a year after his death. 

they say it's the most effective

anti-smoking commercial ever made. 

my first reaction is: what an ignominious

and mechanical form of immortality. 

my second is: how old was he anyway? what's

so great about old age? i can testify that

middle age ain't no 24-hour orgasm. 

my third thought is that he could at least

have provided a companion commercial

extolling all the joys and pleasures and

triumphs of his life that he associated with tobacco. 

if you think I'm a smoker,

you're wrong.

i haven't smoked in twenty years

and i only smoked for a couple of years

when i did. i gave up smoking so that

i wouldn't die thirty years younger

than yul brenner. 

but during the time that i smoked,

i really smoked up a storm. i just about out-smoked smokin' joe frazier. i'd come

a-smokin' out of bed each mornin', smoke

a blue streak through my waking hours, and

smoke myself into submission each evening. 

if i were to find out today that i were going

to die in a year i suspect that one of the first

things i might do is take up smoking again.

and i really do wonder what, a few years from

now, will be left to us to make each day

worth looking forward to. 

Biography of Gerald Locklin

from the Santa Barbara Independent: Charles Bukowski once called Gerald Locklin “one of the greatest undiscovered talents of our times.” With more than 3,000 published poems, stories, articles, reviews, and interviews and more than 125 books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, Locklin is also one of America’s most prolific writers. Paul Kareen Taylor has called him “a legend,” and noted poet Edward Field wrote of Locklin, “The male spirit in him remains honest, bighearted, sentimental, generous, gentle, vulnerable, but sassy in the face of adversity-qualities that could be applied to as few American poets as to presidents.” Field has also noted, “No one knows what to make of his poetry since he’s both a scholar and a populist, and poetry critics don’t like populism.” 

from geraldlocklin.org: A legend in the small press and beyond, Gerald Locklin is now a Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught from 1965 through 2007 and still teaches an occasional class. He is the author of over 150 books, chapbooks, and broadsides of poetry, fiction, and criticism, with over four thousand poems, stories, articles, reviews and interviews in periodicals. His monumental body of work spans a half century. Gerald Locklin’s books so far in 2013 include, along with Deep Meanings (www.presapress.com) a novella trilogy from Spout Hill Press: The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen: Come Back, Bear, and Last Tango in Long Beach (available individually from amazon.com), a reprint of Gerald Locklin: New and Selected Poems (2008) from Silver Birch Press (also on amazon.com), a single-story e-book of The Sun Also Rises in the Desert from Mendicant Bookworks (available on Smashwords), and Le dernier des damnes (The Last of the Damned), a full-length collection of the best of Gerald Locklin's stories and Bukowski memoirs from his Water Row Press Books, scheduled for publication by 13e Note Editions of Paris, France, in French translation in May, 2013 (http://www.13enote.com). To learn more about the poet, visit his fan page on Facebook.

More Poetry by Gerald Locklin

a sample of his poetry can be found at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Please note: several of the links do not lead to the complete text of the poem named. Most, however, will get you to the titled poem.

Interviews with Gerald Locklin

from blues.gr, Orange County Weekly, raindog, Rusty Truck, Spike Magazine, and LA Weekly. The latter I wrote in June of 2000.

Part 2,  Part 3, and Part 4 of the Gerald Locklin interview at YouTube.

Gerald Locklin,  September 2008, during his reading at the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival.
Photo by Paul Wellman. 

Charles Bukowski on Gerald Locklin:

 ”I like Gerald Locklin. I like his stuff. He swings from his heels. . . 

he's open and calls the shots. He's also funny and tells the truth.“

Locklin in his Long Beach home.

1A: Plato

Plato (c. 428 BCE in Athens, Greece–c. 348 BCE in Athens, Greece)

For information about Plato's life, see bio and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Biography of Plato from The European Graduate School

Plato was born around the year 428 BCE in Athens. His father died while Plato was young, and his mother remarried to Pyrilampes, in whose house Plato would grow up. Plato's birth name was Aristocles, and he gained the nickname Platon, meaning broad, because of his broad build. His family had a history in politics, and Plato was destined to a life in keeping with this history. He studied at a gymnasium owned by Dionysios, and at the palaistra of Ariston of Argos. When he was young he studied music and poetry. According to Aristotle, Plato developed the foundations of his metaphysics and epistemology by studying the doctrines of Cratylus, and the work of Pythagoras and Parmenides. When Plato met Socrates, however, he had met his definitive teacher. As Socrates' disciple, Plato adopted his philosophy and style of debate, and directed his studies toward the question of virtue and the formation of a noble character.

Plato was in military service from 409 BC to 404 BC. When the Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC he joined the Athenian oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants, one of whose leaders was his uncle Charmides. The violence of this group quickly prompted Plato to leave it. In 403 BC, when democracy was restored in Athens, he had hopes of pursuing his original goal of a political career. Socrates' execution in 399 BC had a profound effect on Plato, and was perhaps the final event that would convince him to leave Athenian politics forever.

Plato left Attica along with other friends of Socrates and traveled for the next twelve years. To all accounts it appears that he left Athens with Euclides for Megara, then went to visit Theodorus in Cyrene, moved on to study with the Pythagoreans in Italy, and finally to Egypt. During this period he studied the philosophy of his contemporaries, geometry, geology, astronomy and religion.

After 399 BC Plato began to write extensively. It is still up for debate whether he was writing before Socrates' death, and the order in which he wrote his major texts is also uncertain. However, most scholars agree to divide Plato's major work into three distinct groups. The first of these is known as the Socratic Dialogues because of how close he stays within the text to Socrates' teachings. They were probably written during the years of his travels between 399 and 387 BC. One of the texts in this group called the Apology seems to have been written shortly after Socrates' death. Other texts relegated to this group include the Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, and Hippias Minor and Major.

Plato returned to Athens in 387 BC and, on land that had once belonged to Academos, he founded a school of learning which he called the Academy. Plato's school is often described at the first European university. Its curriculum offered subjects including astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory, and philosophy. Plato hoped the Academy would provide a place where thinkers could work toward better government in the Grecian cities. He would preside over the Academy until his death.

The period from 387 to 361 BC is often called Plato's "middle" or transitional period. It is thought that he may have written the Meno, Euthydemus, Menexenus, Cratylus, Repuglic, Phaedrus, Syposium and Phaedo during this time. The major difference between these texts and his earlier works is that he tends toward grander metaphysical themes and begins to establish his own voice in philosophy. Socrates still has a presence, however, sometimes as a fictional character. In the Meno for example Plato writes of the Socratic idea that no one knowingly does wrong, and adds the new doctrine of recollection questioning whether virtue can be taught. In the Phaedo we are introduced to the Platonic doctrine of the Forms, in which Plato makes claims as to the immortality of the human soul. The middle dialogues also reveal Plato's method of hypothesis.

Plato's most influential work, The Republic, is also a part of his middle dialogues. It is a discussion of the virtues of justice, courage, wisdom, and moderation, of the individual and in society. It works with the central question of how to live a good life, asking what an ideal State would be like, and what defines a just individual. These lead to more questions regarding the education of citizens, how government should be formed, the nature of the soul, and the afterlife. The dialogue finishes by reviewing various forms of government and describing the ideal state, where only philosophers are fit to rule. The Republic covers almost every aspect of Plato's thought.

For more of this biography, follow this link.

A video from the Encyclopedia Channel on Plato

The prisoners are to the left.





The Cave: an adaptation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave in clay

Map of Ancient Greece and the Mediterranean

The relationship between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Plato (c. 428 BCE – c. 348 BCE), student of Socrates (c. 470 BCE - c. 399 BCE).

 Aristotle (c. 384 BCE - c. 322 BCE), student of Plato. 

Konstantin Petrov: World Trade Center Photographs

photograph by Konstantin Petrov

The New Yorker
September 15, 2014 issue

Take Picture

by Nick Paumgarten

In June, 2001, Konstantin Petrov, an immigrant from Estonia, got a job as an electrician at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was given a little office without cabinets, and after he built a shelf there, by bolting a steel plate to an exposed steel girder, he sent his friends a photograph of himself lying across it, and boasted that if the shelf ever collapsed the building would go down with it.

Petrov worked the night shift. This suited him, not only because he had a day job, as the superintendent of an apartment building at the other end of Manhattan, but because he was an avid photographer, and the emptiness of the Trade Center at night, together with the stunning vistas at dawn, gave him a lot to shoot, and a lot of time and space in which to shoot it. In the summer of 2001, he took hundreds of digital photographs, mostly of offices, table settings, banquettes, sconces, stairwells, kitchen equipment, and elevator fixtures. Many shots were lit by the rising sun, with the landscape of the city in the background, gleaming and stark-shadowed, more than a hundred floors below.

For more of the story on the photographer Konstantin Petrov click on this.

For World Trade Center photographs by Petrov click on this.

For a wider selection of his World Trade Center photographs taken before 9/11 click on this.

A Better Ice Bucket Challenge

The New Yorker, Sept. 5, 2014


BY MICHAEL SPECTER

This has been a summer of sustained outrage: tenth-century zealots committing unspeakable atrocities in Syria and Iraq; a season of violence and hate in Israel and Gaza; and, in Ukraine, the invasion of a sovereign nation by a power-mad autocrat. There has, however, been at least one bright spot on the human frontier: the “ice-bucket challenge,’’ which so far has raised more than a hundred million dollars for the A.L.S. Association, which supports research and care for those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Last year, the organization raised less than a quarter of that sum.

Unless you spent the summer in Antarctica, the mechanics of the challenge are no doubt familiar: dump a bucket of ice water on your head or make a donation—most people do both—and then challenge others to do it, too, and post it all on Facebook or some other social-media site. It has been a brilliant campaign, an ever-changing video chain letter, quick, easy to understand, a way to feel good about yourself while dripping, briefly, in ice water during the summer’s hottest days.

George W. Bush did it, and challenged Bill Clinton to do it, too. So did Gisele Bündchen. Matt Damon, who has long been committed to easing sanitation problems in the developing world, used toilet water. Bill Gates’s challenge was very Bill Gates: to drench himself, he designed a new contraption. According to the BBC, more than two million ice-bucket-related videos have been posted on Facebook, and twenty-eight million people have uploaded, commented on, or liked ice-bucket-related posts. Justin Bieber’s video, on Instagram, has more than a million “like”s.

It would seem churlish, then, to argue that all of this cheerful decency has been misplaced. A.L.S. is a horrible disease, causing intense suffering to its victims and to all those who love them. In a world with unlimited resources and bottomless generosity, A.L.S. research would deserve ten, even twenty times the money that it has just received. But we don’t live in such a world. And, while most people are repulsed by the idea, when we spend money on saving and prolonging some lives, we are making judgments about how much those lives (and others that we don’t try as hard to save) are worth.

Are people participating in the ice-bucket challenge because it is about A.L.S.? Let’s say that the meme had been devoted to fighting breast cancer, unsafe drinking water, Huntington’s disease, or Alzheimer’s. Would fewer people have participated? I doubt it. Once again, let me stress that I don’t think it is possible to question the good intentions of those who have anted up for A.L.S. But outcomes are another matter.

Ever since the nineteen-eighties, when ACT UP demanded (and received) increased focus on and money for AIDS treatment and research—which, until then, had been relatively neglected—medical funding in the United States has been based as much on who is lobbying for which illness as on the impact of the disease. Particularly in the age of the Internet, people often confuse what is right with what is popular or “viral.” Richard Posner made this point best, in “Economic Analysis of Law.” “The true utterance,’’ he wrote, is like the “brand of beer that commands ninety-five percent of the market and the false brand only five percent.”

But does it? Every life has equal value, but every cause does not. It’s estimated that A.L.S. kills more than a hundred thousand people a year, worldwide. Malaria kills at least five times that many; a million people die from tuberculosis. It should also be noted that people with TB or malaria can be treated, and cured, for a small fraction of the cost of treating somebody with A.L.S. As the philosopher William MacAskill recently wrote, “All people have an equal right to a happy, flourishing life; but some ways of spending money help more people, and help them to a greater extent, than others. This means we need to have a conversation about what the most effective ways of donating are.”

That is a conversation that almost nobody wants to have. In 1993, the World Bank came up with a new way for public-health officials to calculate the relationship between disability and the value of life. In the bank’s annual development report, economists focussed, for the first time, on the concept of the “disability-adjusted life year,” or DALY, a measure that has come to serve as the standard for how to assess the burden of a disease. Previously, the impact of an illness—cancer, the common cold, and everything in between—had usually been evaluated on the basis of how likely it was to kill you.

But life without good health also carries enormous costs for individuals, families, and societies. The disability-adjusted life year combines years of potential life lost owing to premature death with years of productive life lost to disability. Blindness is an example of a health problem that, while not fatal, can dramatically reduce one’s quality of life or ability to function within society. Alzheimer’s disease is another. (And so, of course, is A.L.S., a degenerative disease that destroys motor neurons and robs its sufferers of voluntary muscle movement, sometimes over years, often virtually paralyzing them before they die.)

The DALY metric has flaws, but it does make rough comparisons possible. The drug Riluzole, for example, slows the symptoms of A.L.S. and, on average, extends a patient’s life by three months. In the United States, that costs about fifty thousand dollars and would provide, by the World Bank’s standards, one disability-adjusted life year. Yet, as MacAskill points out, if we spent the same fifty thousand dollars on bed nets to prevent malaria, it would buy five hundred times as many life years by preventing the deaths of children.

By all means, keep dumping those buckets on your heads, and keep writing the checks. Occasionally, though, it might be worth sending them to an organization that fights malaria, or some other disease that threatens the lives of tens of million of people each year. The videos, the icy screams, and the crazy challenges will be just as much fun.

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.

This essay can also be found online at The New Yorker's website. Click on this link.

Ron Koertge: Poet, Novelist, PCC Emeriti Prof. of English

Ron Koertge discusses & signs Sex World

at Vroman's Books, Thursday, September 18th @ 7PM.

This collection of flash fiction will leave you in stitches as you read about a robot who claims that the sound of turbines is his lullaby, or how a fed-up daughter finds a foolproof way to do away with her horrible mother.  Fans of the classic Persephone and Demeter story will love Koertge's new take on the tale and you'll also hear about a page from Lois Lane's diary that reveals a surprising secret!  Each story is more unique than the last and is told in a way that only Koertge can. A former English professor at Pasadena City College, teacher of poetry and writing courses, he is also admired for his own poetry and Young Adult novels. 

Those wishing to get books signed will be asked to purchase at least one copy of the author's most recent title from Vroman's. For each purchased copy of the newest title, customers may bring up to three copies from home to be signed. This policy applies to all Vroman's Bookstore events unless otherwise noted. Save your Vroman's receipt; it will be checked when you enter the signing line. 

Vroman's Bookstore

695 E. Colorado Blvd

Pasadena, CA 91101

626-449-5320

(Fax) 626-792-7308

email@vromansbookstore.com

Koertge will also be appearing at the Federal Bar, North Hollywood, Sept. 14th at 7:00pm 

Go to Koertge's website to learn more about him, his writing, and events.

1A: Nancy Mairs (b. July 23, 1943)

To learn more about Mairs go to her official website: http://nancymairs.com/  Her biography can be found here.  Follow this link to see a good video with Mairs. To learn more about Multiple Sclerosis, go to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Mayo Clinic pages.

& Thou Shalt Honor: Nancy Mairs Interview with PBS Tucson

Nancy Mairs and her husband George Mairs were interviewed by Dale Bell of PBS Tucson. Original Airdate: August 2, 1995. Nancy Mairs' s response follows. Nothing is straightforward. Confinement is a curse; confinement is a blessing. Oh I hate the limitations. There are specific parts of limitations that I especially hate. I was always a walker, and I just miss being able to get up and take off and walk somewhere. Probably the greatest source of pain has been that I can't be with my grandchildren the way I want to be. You know, I can sit and look at them, but I can't pick them up, I can't cuddle them, I can't run around after them, I can't take care of them. If I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. Interestingly I've started doing it in dreams. I've started dreaming about them a lot as though, perhaps that was a way of acting on my desires, since I no longer had a way of doing so in my conscious life so I could do it in my dream life. But it's a blessing also, because that very sitting -- I say I sit and look at my grandchildren, that way I see them in a way that perhaps nobody else does. You know, if things are flashing by you, you don't have time to contemplate them and cherish them, you don't know that you're not doing it. And that's part of the reason why I refer to people that other people may refer to as able-bodied, as non-disabled. Because they lack disability. They have a whole element in their lives that they lack. And I have that element in my life. Because I wasn't born disabled, I also have grounds for comparison. I started my life as a non-disabled person, and I know my losses very sharply -- very painfully -- but I also know my gains. I don't know whether my relationship with George is unique, because I have no grounds for comparison. In other words, every relationship is by definition unique. But I think there are some unusual aspects judging from my observation of other people's relationships. And I've often tried to characterize it without making it sound ideal in some way. It's ordinary. It's just the way we are. Other people however, tend to respond, well, very warmly to it; as if they took reassurance from it; as if they took strength from it. Although my wedding day is sort of a blur, we must have pledged to love and honor each other, because that's in the traditional marriage ceremony. I'm sure that I at least, I can't speak for George, that I had no idea what I was pledging to do. I wonder if anybody ever does. When you wind up requiring personal care, then I think it's easy to fall into a pattern of thinking, well, George is an extension of me, and should know what I want, what I need, when I want it, when I need it, and I do fall into that trap regularly, and I have to stop and remind myself George hasn't that obligation. So I suppose that for me honoring him, is backing up and looking at him as a person. As not me, or a part of me but as a wonderful, separate being. I mean, to be as helpless as I am, means that it would be easier to die. It would be easier for everybody, if I just died. If we're talking ease, and in our society ease is a very great value, for it to be easy. If they get hard, tough, then we think something's wrong. There's something sick about it, there's something the matter and we have to do something to make them easy and comfortable again. Well, if I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. And having George participate in my care and having other people do the same, calls me into life. It says, despite your losses, despite your limitations, you belong here with us and we want you to stay. We want you to stay enough that we're willing to participate in the labor that it takes. That's perhaps the fundamental of caregiving -- to enable another to want to be in the world. Not just enable them to be, but to enable them to want to be in the world when it would be easier not to. Historically, I'm depressive, but I'm a suicidal depressive. And there have been times when I've wanted to be dead, and several times when I've tried to be dead. And I'm pretty glad that it didn't work, most days. Most days I'm pretty glad to be here. To be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life. I think all the time about rights for the disabled. Often not in a political sense. I've been an activist on issues of peace and justice in general, but never have focused in upon disability rights exclusively. I do however, serve on the Board of the Arizona Center for Disability Law. And that does a great deal of work towards furthering employment rights and housing rights for people with disabilities. But I think what I'm good for more than anything else is being in the world in a disabled form and therefore confronting the world with its inability to deal with me. For instance I go in to see my doctor, let's say. There's a sign-in sheet. I can't sign in on the sign-in sheet, because the counter is about this high, and the sign-in sheet is on top of the counter, and I can't reach that high. I can't see the person behind the counter to tell that person that I'm here and need to be signed in. But what I can do is shout up, "there's a person down here" and then a little head peers over and I think I have, I hope, made my point, that there are persons this high and at least one of the counters should be cut down to the height of my waist and nobody else's waist. That's become built in to who I am -- to be open about my disability and willing to remind others even at the risk of embarrassing them -- and they do tend to get very embarrassed if they do something heedless. But why should they be embarrassed? Why should somebody expect to know something without experience? It's not like they're dreadful people that it never occurred to them that the counter was too high. They should hear me when I tell them that the counter is too high, and respond by lowering the counter. So one of the functions I can serve is help people to see that there are angles that they may not have considered. An extra vision. An extra perspective that they haven't had occasion to know yet, but that they might have occasion to know. That of course is the source of the resistance, I think, is in order to be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life, and most people are too terrified to do that. They resist it; it will never happen to me. Mairs talked about Voice Lessons with PBS Tucson on August 2, 1995.  Click here for the program. The New York Times HERS By Nancy Mairs;  Published: July 9, 1987 FOR months now I've been consciously searching for representations of myself in the media, especially television. I know I'd recognize this self because of certain distinctive, though not unique, features: I am a 43-year-old woman crippled by multiple sclerosis; although I can still totter a short distance with the aid of a brace and a cane, more and more of the time I ride in a wheelchair. Because of these devices and my peculiar gait, I'm easy to spot even in a crowd. So when I tell you I haven't noticed any woman like me on television, you can believe me. Actually, last summer I did see a woman with multiple sclerosis portrayed on one of those medical dramas that offer an illness-of-the-week like the daily special at your local diner. In fact, that was the whole point of of the show: that this poor young woman had M.S. She was terribly upset (understandably, I assure you) by the diagnosis, and her response was to plan a trip to Kenya while she was still physically capable of making it, against the advice of the young, fit, handsome doctor who had fallen in love with her. And she almost did make it. At least, she got as far as a taxi to the airport, hotly pursued by the doctor. But at the last moment she succumbed to his blandishments and fled the taxi into his manly protective embrace. No escape to Kenya for this cripple. For the rest of Mairs's column click on this. Los Angeles Times Book Review ORDINARY TIME: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, By Nancy Mairs (Beacon Press: $20; 238 pp.) July 11, 1993|Review by Michelle Huneven | Huneven is a fiction writer, a restaurant critic and a graduate student at the Claremont School of Theology Essayist Nancy Mairs is clearly astonished and delighted by at least one plot twist in the story of her own life. "I did not set out to be either a Catholic or a feminist, let alone both at once," she writes in her new book, "Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal." A Congregationalist in childhood, an Episcopalian in young adulthood, she still can't fully embrace the full paradox of her present condition. "A Catholic feminist? Dear God," she exclaims, "couldn't I please be something else?" Known for her extreme, even controversial candor, Mairs has written in "Plaintext" and "Remembering the Bone House" about her own suicide attempts, her crippling depressions, extramarital affairs and ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis. "Ordinary Time," a parallel narrative to these works, is another pass through her life, this time as seen through the twin lenses of Catholicism and feminism. For the rest of Huneven's review click on this.

DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN MASTERS (STREAMING AT PBS)

Lange at work during the Great Depression.
Photograph by her husband, economist Paul S. Taylor, 1934

The photograph of the dog stand, above, was taken by Dorothea Lange in October 1939 while she was under contract with the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency that hired photographers to document American rural life during the Great Depression. This stand was on U.S. highway 99 in Lane County, Williamette Valley, Oregon. Lange is considered one of the great American photographers, best known for her documentary photographs of rural Americans in the 1930s. A good place to start to learn more about Lange is this video, "Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs," from the Getty Museum. 

Her best known photograph, shown below, is "Migrant Mother," whose subject is Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old widow and farm worker during the Great Depression. It was taken in Nipomo, California in 1936. Four videos at YouTube--Lange's "Migrant Mother" (2:11), CSPAN's Story of "Migrant Mother" (4:09), Lange: An American Odyssey (37:46), and Lange: "Migrant Mother" (23:07)--present reports on Lange and the photograph, an important visual document of 20th Century America. You can find more photographs by Lange at this Library of Congress website. Check this site, too, for more photographs by Lange.

PBS broadcast Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (preview) on Friday, August 29th, 2014, at 9 PM. A trailer for the program appears above. If you missed the broadcast, you can now stream it.  Click here to stream the whole program. 

Her life is reported by bio. Read some of Dorothea Lange's words on photography at Dodho. a magazine of photography. 

Brainpickings presents the story of how Lange's "Migrant Mother" came to be. Read "The Story Behind the Iconic 'Migrant Mother' Photograph and How Dorothea Lange Almost Didn’t Take It" The U.S. Library of Congress Farm Security Administration archive is home to many photos that Lange took when visiting with Florence Thompson, the "Migrant Mother." You may be interested in reading an excerpt from No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The photograph also inspired Marissa Silver to write her novel, Mary Coin. NPR gave it a good review,  as did the Los Angeles Times. 

The photograph, "Migrant Mother," is of Florence Thompson, 32, and is part of the
Library of Congress collection. Lange took the photograph of Thompson
and three of her seven children in 1936, in a pea picking field in Nipomo, California.

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.    Copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. About This Poem About “The Layers” Stanley Kunitz has said, “I wrote ‘The Layers’ in my late seventies to conclude a collection of sixty years of my poetry. Through the years I had endured the loss of several of my dearest friends, including Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko, and—most recently—Robert Lowell. I felt I was near the end of a phase in my life and in my work. The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: ‘Live in the layers, / not on the litter.’” Stanley Kunitz was born on July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize and serving as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Kunitz was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and died at the age of 100 on May 14, 2006. Poetry by Kunitz The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, 2002) Poem-a-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

1B: William Carlos Williams & Pieter Brueghel

A man examines Pieter Brueghel the Elder's The Wedding Dance at the Detroit Institute of Arts

The Wedding Dance in the Open Air by William Carlos Williams Disciplined by the artist to go round & round in holiday gear a riotously gay rabble of peasants and their ample-bottomed doxies fills the market square featured by the women in their starched white headgear they prance or go openly toward the wood's edges round and around in rough shoes and farm breeches mouths agape Oya ! kicking up their heels *the poet: William Carlos Williams (American physician of New Jersey; 1883-1963) *artist: in this case,     Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flemish; 1525-1569) *doxie: mistress; prostitute Will the  Detroit Institute of Arts sell Brueghel's The Wedding Dance  or other masterpieces in its collection today?  How much are they worth to Detroit today?   How much would they be worth to Detroit in 10, or even 100 years from now? The Detroit Institute of Arts and the city of Detroit are having a hard time paying their bills.  Should the museum sell masterpieces from its collection in order to balance the museum's and city's finances? For more of the story, see  "Masterpiece theater: Will Detroit have to sell its art to pay its bills? Art's true value frames debate as Detroit ponders selling museum masterpieces" by Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune, October 18, 2013.