Fun_People Archive
21 May
LIT BITS V3 #142

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sun, 21 May 100 20:52:39 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #142

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #142
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Monday, 22 May 2000; on this day,

297 years ago (1703),

	Daniel Defoe is fined, imprisoned in Newgate, and later pilloried
     for writing an ill-timed satire, _The Shortest Way with Dissenters_.

141 years ago (1859),

	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is born in Edinburgh.

75 years ago (1925),

	Gertrude Stein  writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald about his new novel,
     _The Great Gatsby_: "This is as good a book [as _This Side of
     Paradise_] and different and older, and that is what one does, one
     does not get better but different and older and that is always a
     pleasure."

31 years ago (1969),

	One of the foremost interpreters to the world of the black
     experience in the United States, Langston Hughes ("I, Too, Sing
     America") dies in New York. On poets, Hughes writes, "Hang yourself,
     poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead."

Today's poem:

                        Not What Was

     By then the poetry is written
     and the wild rose of the world
     blooms to last so short a time
     before its petals fall.
     The air is music
     and its melody is spiral
     until it widens
     beyond the tip of time
     and so is lost
     to poetry and the rose--
     belongs instead to vastness beyond form,
     to universe that nothing can contain,
     to unexplored space
     which sends no answers back
     to fill the vase unfilled
     or spread in lines
     upon another page--
     that anyhow was never written
     because the thought could not escape
     the place in which it bloomed
     before the rose had gone.

                                             Langston Hughes
Fun_People Archive 21 MayLIT BITS V3 #142

Fun_People Archive
21 May
LIT BITS V3 #142
