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Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980)

Teoksen Crowded Hours tekijä

6 teosta 106 jäsentä 2 arvostelua

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Yleistieto

Virallinen nimi
Longworth, Alice Lee Roosevelt
Syntymäaika
1884-02-12
Kuolinaika
1980-02-20
Sukupuoli
female
Kansalaisuus
USA
Asuinpaikat
New York, New York, USA
Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, New York, USA
Washington, D.C., USA
Ammatit
autobiographer
Suhteet
Roosevelt, Theodore (father)
Lyhyt elämäkerta
Alice Lee Roosevelt was the oldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt. Her mother Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died two days after the birth, and TR left the child in the care of his sisters until he remarried in 1886. Alice was a teenager when her father became President. She was high-spirited and witty and became a trendsetter for other young Americans -- Alice even became a popular baby name. In 1906, she married Nicholas Longworth, a member of Congress, in a much-publicized White House wedding, and became a leading Washington hostess and political activist. Alice's most famous saying was embroidered on a pillow in her home, "If you can't say something nice, come sit next to me."

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

People should have their poetry. Ordinary people. Readers of poetry should not have to be scholars, connoisseurs, critics, an inside elite. The reading of poetry should not require elaborate explication de texte. The Poetry Establishment in the US is currently a self-perpetuating, exclusive clique The Poetry Establishment in the US is currently a self-perpetuating, exclusive, privileged, elitist conglomerate. Every college and university now must have its “creative writing” program, which provides support for “poets in resident.” They teach little, if at all. They conduct “poetry writing” workshops, which require little if any daily preparation and, if they are effective, produce more practicing poets like the one conducting the workshop. These professional practitioners become the experts used by foundations, university presses, and government agencies (like the Library of Congress) to edit poetry reviews, select poems to be published (in reviews and in books), select award winners, review published works, judge applications for tenure and promotion in universities, grant M.F.A.’s, and employ young poets to staff “creative writing” programs, like the one that produced them. It’s a never-ending circle, a self-winding mechanism, an in-bred clan.

Name the published, award-winning poets of our generation. Then ask how they earned their livelihood, published their works, received awards and recognition. Occasionally poetry will have been their avocation; for example, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ted Kooser. But you can probably name all those on your ten fingers and still have some left over. Consider recent US poets laureate: Charles Simic (U of New Hampshire), Donald Hall (U of Michigan, Bennington College), Louise Gluck (Williams College, Yale, Boston U et al.), Billy Collins (Lehman College of CUNY), Stanley Kunitz (Columbia U), Robert Pinsky (Boston U), contradictory Haas (St. Mary’s College of California, UC Berkeley, Iowa Writers Workshop), Rita Dove (Arizona State U, U of Virginia), Mona Van Duyn (Washington U in St. Louis), Joseph Brodsky (U of Michigan, Queens College, Smith, Columbia U, Cambridge University, Mount Holyoke), Mark Strand (Utah, Johns Hopkins, U of Chicago among others), Howard Nemerov (Hamilton, Bennington, Brandeis, Washington U in St. Louis), Richard Wilbur (Wesleyan, Smith),and Robert Penn Warren (Minnesota, Yale and others). The only exceptions have been Ted Kooser (VP, Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance Co., now a visiting prof at U of Nebraska) and Kay Ryan (part-time teacher in a community college, College of Marin).

What this means, of course, is that our Poetry Establishment has become a community of academicians, whose rigorous standards require a certain “academic” style: oblique, erudite, paradoxical, ambiguous, obscure. Words and phrases used to describe T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land have become de riguer among Establishment poets: broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery, disjunctive anti-narrative, dislocation and construction of an exclusive meaning. “A poem must not mean but be.” If its meaning can be reproduced in a prose paraphrase, it is not poetry. One can read through whole sections of the annual Best American Poetry, for example, without finding a single poem that has a direct statement of meaning. Therefore, modern poetry from the Establishment has few readers outside the inner, academic circle. The exceptions are Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Robert Lowell and the Confessional poets, and Billy Collins and his modern “school” of poets, recognized but grudgingly by the Establishment. His poems are often brief, humorous, gentle, pointed – and, most important, accessible, understandable on a first reading. As Poet Laureate, his Poetry 180 project was an attempt to reintroduce high-school students to such “accessible” poetry – not to be studied and analyzed, but simply to be heard and enjoyed, one a day over the school intercom. Similarly, Robert Pinsky, Robert Haas, and Ted Kooser undertook projects to reconnect poetry with the populace. Poetry readings, akin to rap sessions and, indeed, to rap music, have reestablished a popular poetry.

Nowadays, most everyone can be a writer of poetry, but still relatively few read poetry, much less purchase it. Is poetry one of the lost arts, a genre of the past superseded by song lyrics, anime, television, and film as the arts of the people?

Already, in the 1930s and early 1940s, when Eliot’s Wasteland, Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, the New Criticism, and “the objective correlative” were occupying the literary landscape, questions about the survival of poetry were being asked. On Februiary 4, 1937, Alexander Woollcott in a national radio broadcast, made a public request: send a copy of that old “tattered and crumpled” poem you keep stored away in a desk drawer, in a wallet or pocket book, that you have kept on hand and treasured year after year. The number of responses was overwhelming: 40,000. Theodore Roosevelt (Teddy’s son) and his sister Alice Longworth chose some 400 for an anthology, The Desk Drawer Anthology, an Anthology that is Different. The very first poem, before the Foreword, set the tone:

I’d like to write the sort of things
Folks read and then cut out
To tuck away and read again
When there’s no one else about.

They limited themselves to relatively recent American poems, selecting poems that had not been widely anthologized at the time. The leading poets, with five poems each, were Elizabeth Coatsworth, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. The poems of the latter two (e.g., “O Captain! My Captain!” “I Hear America Singing,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Hired Man,” “The Runaway”) have long since become widely anthologized. And, of course, some old favorites are in practically every volume of “100 best-love poems” ever published; e.g., “The House by the Side of the Road,” “The Old One-Horse Shay,” “In Flanders Fields,” “When the Frost Is on the Punkin,” and the like. Along with Edgar Allan Poe, and William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson are names no longer heard of: Persis Greely Anderson, Patience Eden, Ethel Romig Fuller, Ironquill, and Susan Adger Williams. Some sixty are in a special section called “The Port of Missing Authors.” Some are humorous, some are sentimental, some are gently ironical, a good many, religious or pointing to a life after death. A fierce debate on the future between two ugly caterpillars concludes,

And so, yto make their funeral quite complete,
Each wrapped himself in his little winding-sheet.
The tangled web encompassed them full soon.
Each for his coffin made him a cocoon.
All through the winter’s chilling blast they lay,
Dead to the world, aye, dead as human clay.
Lo! Spring comes forth with all her warmth and love;
She brings sweet justice from the realms above –
She breaks the chrysalis – she resurrects the dead –
Two butterflies ascend – encircling her head.
And so this emblem shall forever be
A sign of immortality.

Most celebrate the joy of simple things: the front porch, a wild plum, shelling peas, an old cellar, the American flag, fog (Sandburg, of course), country churches, insomnia, the woodbox, a hay wagon, the jar, books, a busy street – this and that, odds and ends. One poet (Ethel Jacobson) gets a suntan at the beach:

Here, by m strictly private ocean,
Here, on my personal stretch of beach,
Alone with my soul and the sunburn lotion
While the sun impartially beams on each . . . .

Here in the hot sun I lie sprawling,
Here, till the last ray is sped;
And somewhere, somewhere a voice is calling
“That’s why Ethel’s teched in the head!”

Occasionally, a selection is somewhat more sophisticated or assumes the reader’s acquaintance with some literary allusion. Occasionally, but not often. I could not pass up Persis Greely Anderson, the first poet in the alphabetized table of contents:

Penelope

He was her husband then, this stranger,
This brown spare man of jaunty eyes,
Who told his tale of love and danger,
And showed the scar upon his thigh. . . .

She said: “Where have you been, Ulysses?”
He shuffled on embarrassed feet.
As he recalled forbidden kisses –
“Oh, here and there,” said he. “Let’s eat!”

And there is the anonymous, but still timely one,

Methuselah

Methusaleh ate what he found on his plate,
And never, as people do now,
Dod he note the amount of the calorie count;
He ate it because it was chow. . . .

He cheerfully chewed every species of food.
Untroubled by worries or fears,
Lest his health might be hurt by some fancy dessert –
And he lived over nine hundred years!

Grammarians are not immune to the rhymed sarcasm:

The parts of take you’re very syure
Are take and took and taken,
Yet bake seems very wrong somehow,
As bake and book and bacon. . . .

If ever I make a grammar,
There shall be some sense to it,
And if bite and bit are proper,
So shall these be: fight and fit.

One, appropriately placed on the last page, is attributed to The Dauber:

Prophecy

Heaven, I think, would not be great or strange,
Nor shining with a glitter of all gold;
There’d be no noise of cymbals or of harps,
But only things we knew and loved of old.

Reading our books – and having tea at five,
Smiling across a table at dear faces,
Horses and dogs – and lamplight on the snow,
And having people in – and going places . . . .

Yes, virtually all of them rhyme and rhyme, sometimes double rhyme; they go ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dee. They aren’t profound or provocative; they don’t immerse us in the incongruous and the inexplicable. They sort of chant. They march. They grin at us – or with us. They give us an elbow in the ribs, or a pat on the back, or maybe even a kick in the seat of the pants, but never the middle finger or a thumbed nose. I doubt that I would keep any of them in my desk drawer with those seashells and smooth stones, my membership card for the Captain Marvel Club or my father’s pocket knife, or the folders labeled, “What made it all worthwhile” – no, not with those. Nor in the file with Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” or Wendell Berry’s “Wheel,” nor with Keats’ “Bright Star,” or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” or Blake’s “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau. Certainly not with those. Nor on the bookshelf with Men Who Have Walked with God, Wasserman’s The Finer Tone, The Tree of Life and American Religious Poems, nowhere near the Poetical Works of John Keats, bound in red leather. But I will keep this “different” anthology handy, and take it down when I need a lift, a smile, or simply a reminder of the kind of poetry that’s popular with the people. And I shall be grateful to Anderson M. Scruggs’ “Anthologist”:

He loiters down the avenues of time;
Down many a quiet street and listless lane
He culls the cold, forgotten flowers of rhyme,
And brings them forth for men to see again.

I purchased the anthology yesterday from an antique mall, called On the Square, in Perry, Oklahoma, along with a yellow pig bank wearing sunglasses and a glass polar bear holding a red candle – both for my collection of animal paperweights. The book was priced at $45, but the yellow sale tag listed it as $9, so I grabbed it.

On the same shelf, for $15, I found Raspberries Run Deep [q;v;]. It’s the kind of book that, if I were Scruggs’ “Anthologist,” searching for “forgotten flowers of rhyme,” I would find priceless.
… (lisätietoja)
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bfrank | Aug 25, 2010 |
3944. Crowded Hours: Reminiscences of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (read 14 Oct 2004) This book was published in 1933 and is the work of Teddy Roosevelt's oldest child. I found it thoroughly enjoyable reading even though I cannot admire Alice and often disagreed with what she had to say. She lived and breathed politics, and it is fun to read her acidic comments. Some things she does not mention--her father's and her husband's deaths, e.g., nor her daughter. And of course she says nothing about her affairs. For these one must read a book like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, by Carol Felsenthal (which I did read 1 Oct 1992)--who suggests the father of her daughter was Senator Borah, and that Alice wanted to name her daughter Deborah, but her husband vetoed the name. She always lived extravagantly and likes to tell about her gadding about. All in all, I found this book a fascinating look at what she chose to discuss.… (lisätietoja)
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Schmerguls | Nov 9, 2007 |

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Teokset
6
Jäseniä
106
Suosituimmuussija
#181,887
Arvio (tähdet)
3.0
Kirja-arvosteluja
2
ISBN:t
4

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