Sunday Mar. 22, 2015

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Dancing

It was my father taught my mother
how to dance.
I never knew that.
I thought it was the other way.
Ballroom was their style,
a graceful twirling,
curved arms and fancy footwork,
a green-eyed radio.

There is always more than you know.
There are always boxes
put away in the cellar,
worn shoes and cherished pictures,
notes you find later,
sheet music you can’t play.

A woman came on Wednesdays
with tapes of waltzes.
She tried to make him shuffle
around the floor with her.
She said it would be good for him.
He didn’t want to.

“Dancing” by Margaret Atwood from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

Today is the birthday of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (books by this author), born in New York City (1941). He’s the author of many volumes, including The Art of Drowning (1995), Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000), and The Trouble with Poetry (2005). Collins wrote his first poem when he was a lad of seven, and although he spent a summer in Paris as an impressionable teenager, he says he was really just “a Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized about stealing a car and driving nonstop to Denver. I probably would have done it, but I didn’t have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassady had. Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice.”

It’s the birthday of author Louis L’Amour (books by this author), born Louis Dearborn LaMoore in Jamestown, North Dakota (1908). After a series of bank failures, his father took the family on the road in 1923. They skinned cattle in Texas, baled hay in New Mexico, and worked the mines of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. During these travels, young L’Amour met the colorful people who would later inspire the characters in his novels. He worked as fruitpicker, boxer, and longshoreman, traveling to Arabia, Egypt, and China. It was in Choctaw, Oklahoma, in the 1930s, that he changed his name and tried his hand at writing. He wrote stories for pulp magazines under the name “Jim Mayo” before his first novel, Westward the Tide, was published in 1951. A short story, The Gift of Cochise, was turned into the 1953 movie Hondo, starring John Wayne. L’Amour’s career flourished. During the next three decades, he turned out three novels a year, usually featuring plain-speaking, straight-shooting heroes of the Old West. L’Amour wrote more than 100 novels, selling 320 million books worldwide, and is considered the finest writer in the Western genre. Every one of his works is still in print. Before his death, when asked which of his books he liked the best, he replied: “I like them all. I never rework a book. I’d rather use what I’ve learned on the next one. The worst of it is that I’m no longer a kid and I’m just now getting to be a good writer. Just now.”

It’s the birthday of composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim, born in New York City (1930). He was an only child with very wealthy parents — they lived on Central Park in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He said: “I did not have an unhappy time, because it literally did not occur to me that other people had a family life. I saw my parents occasionally at night and on weekends, and I thought every child in New York lived that way.” His parents divorced when he was 10, and he had a miserable couple of years — his mother enlisted people to follow him when she wasn’t around and make sure he never saw his father.

When Sondheim was 12 years old, he made a friend named Jamie Hammerstein. Jamie’s father was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, and the Hammerstein family ended up virtually adopting the boy. He idolized Oscar Hammerstein, who was turning out blockbuster shows with his musical partner, Richard Rodgers. Sondheim decided that he too would write musicals when he grew up. When he was a teenager, he showed Oscar a musical he had written, and Oscar said that it was the worst thing he had ever read but that he could tell the boy had talent. So he mentored the aspiring composer, and when Sondheim was 25 years old, he got a big break — the offer to write the lyrics for the musical West Side Story, by Leonard Bernstein. He went on to write lyrics for some shows, music for others, and finally both music and lyrics. His musicals include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Into the Woods (1987).

He said, “I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.”

It’s the birthday of the best-selling novelist in the world, James Patterson (books by this author), born in Newburgh, New York (1947). He was an executive for J. Walter Thompson, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. But he decided to retire and devote himself to writing. He has published more than 70 novels, and according to recent data, he outsells Stephen King, Dan Brown, and John Grisham combined.

He said: “If you think of the story that you tell that’s your favorite personal story, or funny story, it doesn’t have flashy sentences. It doesn’t have too much detail. It just tells the story. That isn’t, for whatever reason, the way most people write books. But it seemed to me that there was no reason that it couldn’t be the way at least one person writes books. I said: ‘I’m going to stop writing the parts that people skim.’”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®