It's a Poetry Party!

April is National Poetry Month, which makes it an ideal time to go to your bookshelves and pick out your favorite verse, sonnet, ballad, haiku, or limerick. Predating modern history, poetry stands as one of the earliest forms of artistic expression with the Epic of Gilgamesh being one of the oldest recorded poems dating to circa 2100 BCE. With poetry being so essential to our history, it’s of no surprise that no matter where you go you can find rich, poetic traditions in any place or culture, including Mississippi. With such an abundant and rich literary history, Mississippi no less offers its own voices to the poetic craft, including works from the likes of Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, as well as other unique voices such as Etheridge Knight, Charles Henri Ford, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. You'll find some suggestions of local Mississippi poets below, as well as a breakdown of poetry styles.

Hola, Hispanic Heritage Month!

Elisabeth Scott

Reference Librarian/Literacy Projects Coordinator

National Hispanic Heritage Month began earlier this month on the fifteenth. Did you know that, according to population estimates, 3.4% of Mississippi's population identifies as Hispanic or Latino and a whopping 18.5% of the United States's population does the same? In fact, Hispanics are one of the fastest growing minority groups in the nation, and the fastest growing group in the South. We thought it would be fun to tie in this month's reading prompt "Read a Classic" with just a few of our favorite old and new classic Hispanic authors. Check them out below!

 

• Isabel Allende was born in Peru in 1942 to Chilean parents, but now lives in California. She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2010. Start with her 1982 book The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her grandfather.
  
• Rudolfo Anaya was born in New Mexico in 1937. Anaya is one of the grandfathers of Chicano literature and won an American Book Award and a National Medal of Arts. Start with his 1972 classic Bless Me, Ultima, the first in a trilogy of books set in his home state.
  
• Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to parents from Mexico/of Mexican descent. She has won an American Book Award and a MacArthur Genius Grant. Start with her second book, The House on Mango Street, a collection of linked vignettes. Cisneros began work on it as a graduate student; it was published in 1984.
• Juan Felipe Herrera was born in California in 1948. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015-2017 and was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011. Start with 2008's Half the World in Light.
  
• Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951; both his parents were originally from Cuba. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. Start with his prize-winning novel from 1989, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

These five authors can be found at the Mississippi Library Commission, your local public library, and BARD. These are also great places to explore other books written by Hispanic and Latino authors. If you would like to learn more about Hispanic heritage and culture, you should look into what the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities have put together for you. We hope the next month is filled with revelatory reading and learning for you. Until next time, happy reading!

Among the Pages

Choosing a book to read. It’s not about only what’s newly published, hotly reviewed, or otherwise hitting the bestseller lists; it’s also about your mind wandering, a memory revisited, hearing something of interest through whatever medium, or simply a title and what it evokes. Like this, I read multiple books in shifts some months, bookmarked and ready to resume in whatever order I choose, some months just one book. Other months I look up, get on the road, and take photographs. Here’s what I’m reading now in no particular order:

• Compass & Clock (poems) by David Sanders (Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press)
• Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition by Adam Gussow (The University of North Carolina Press)
• Lonesome Lies Before Us (novel) by Don Lee (W.W. Norton & Company)
• ShallCross (poems) by C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press)
• Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis by T. R. Hummer (The University of Michigan Press)
• She (novel) by Michelle Latiolais (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Ever (poems) by Ralph Adamo (Lavender Ink)
• Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann (Little, Brown and Company)
• Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Crazy Moon (poems) by Bet Wooten (Mila Ink)

Be adventurous. Be random. Enjoy!

Beyoncé Gets In Formation for Information

Beyoncé is getting all the ladies in formation for information! In that vein, we'd like to recommend the following 20 recently published books by and about African-Americans. (We know we're leaving out classics like The Souls of Black Folk and The Mis-Education of the Negro, or even Black Boy and Coming of Age in Mississippi. We decided to stick with books published in the last ten years in order to keep the list at manageable length.)

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  Michelle Alexander
• Buck: A Memoir
  M.K. Asante 
• Nat Turner
  Kyle Baker
• Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm
  Percy Carey
  
• Between the World and Me
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Bad Feminist: Essays
  Roxane Gay
• Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Moments from Black History
  Joel Christian Gill
• The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
  Jeff Hobbs
• Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
  Gilbert King
• How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
  Kiese Laymon
• Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
  Jill Leovy
• March: Book One
  John Lewis
• F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
  William J. Maxwell
• Citizen: An American Lyric
  Claudia Rankine
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  Rebecca Skloot
• Ordinary Light
  Tracy K. Smith
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
  Bryan Stevenson
• Native Guard
  Natasha Trethewey
• We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
  Akinyele Omowale Umoja
• Men We Reaped: A Memoir
  Jessmyn Ward

What would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments. Until next time, informative and happy reading!

All About Percy

William Alexander Percy was born on this day, May 14, in 1885 in Greenville, Mississippi. Perhaps most well-known nowadays for his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, he led a rich and varied life.

• His father was LeRoy Percy, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi and a hunting buddy of Teddy Roosevelt.
  
• Percy went to Harvard Law School and practiced law in Greenville, but he also spent much of his time writing poetry. He produced four volumes of poetry before writing his memoir.
  
• During World War I, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and bronze and silver stars.
  
• Percy was appointed as the head of the Washington County Relief Committee during the Great Flood of 1927. To learn more about the flood, we highly recommend Rising Tide by John M. Barry.
  
• When their parents died, he became the guardian of his cousins Walker, LeRoy, and Phinizy Percy. Walker Percy, another great Mississippi author, actually began his friendship with future author Shelby Foote in Greenville.
• He even wrote a hymn that was adopted by the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. Hymn number 661 by Percy starts with the words: They cast their nets in Galilee just off the hills of brown...
  
• The public library in Greenville is called the William Alexander Percy Library.
  
• William Alexander Percy passed away January 21, 1942 in Greenville, Mississippi.

If you would like to read William Alexander Percy's poetry or to find out more about his life, stop by the Mississippi Library Commission or your local public library!

http://www.washington.lib.ms.us/greenville_writers_exhibit.htm
http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/percy_william_alexander/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/flood-leroy/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/flood-will/

On Runcible Spoons and Owls and Pussy-Cats

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat was one of my favorite poems growing up. I have always been a cat lover, and the sweet and lyrical courtship between the pussy cat and the owl warms my heart to this day. One can't help falling in love in time to the jaunty words:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

   In a beautiful pea-green boat

And:

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

It was first published in 1871 in a collection called Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. If you have never read the poem in it's entirety, you can do so here. It's quite a treat!

Edward Lear, the poem's author, was born on this day, May 12, in 1812 in Holloway, England. Here are a few nuggets about Lear and The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:

• Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children.
• He was an epileptic.
• As an adult, Lear was a prolific letter-writer, sometimes writing as many as 35 friends before breakfast.
• Lear loved to coin new words and phrases. He first used the term runcible spoon in The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. It is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a kind of fork, curved like a spoon and typically having three broad prongs, one of which has a sharp edge. (Does this sound like a spork to anyone else? It's not quite how I dreamed a runcible spoon would look.)
• Beatrix Potter wrote a prequel to The Owl and the Pussy-Cat called The Tale of Little Pig Robinson in which Piggy-wig travels to the Land where the Bong-Tree grows. It was published in 1930.

 Be sure to check out more on Edward Lear and his poetry at your local library!

De Jong, Mary. "Edward Lear." Critical Survey Of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002): 1-5. Literary Reference Center. Web. 12 May 2015.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Lear_The_Owl_and_the_Pussy_Cat_1.jpg
"runcible, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 12 May 2015.

Benjamin Franklin and poetry and libraries and kites with keys

On this day in 1790, Benjamin Franklin passed away in his home in Philadelphia, PA at the age of 84. Franklin was well know for things like Poor Richard's Almanac, the invention of bifocal glasses, aiding in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and a little experiment involving a kite, a key, and a bolt of lightning. But did you know he also helped establish the first circulating library in Philadelphia?

Franklin, along with other members of the philosophical association Junto, drew up articles of agreement to form the library on July 1, 1731. The library submitted its first order for books the following year and the rest is history. The Library Company is still open today. Read more about its history here. As it's National Library Week, we were thrilled to share this tidbit of information with you!

As a lover of books, it seems only natural that Franklin was a writerly sort, but did you know he also dabbled in poetry? National Library Week is almost over, but National Poetry Month is still going strong. Celebrate by reading some of Franklin's poetry! Read his poem "Death Is a Fisherman" below and check out some of his other poems here.

Death Is A Fisherman

Death is a fisherman, the world we see
His fish-pond is, and we the fishes be;
His net some general sickness; howe'er he
Is not so kind as other fishers be;
For if they take one of the smaller fry,
They throw him in again, he shall not die:
But death is sure to kill all he can get,
And all is fish with him that comes to net.

http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/philadelphia/library.htm

http://allpoetry.com/Death-Is-A-Fisherman

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/benjamin-franklin-dies

photo from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/BenFranklinDuplessis.jpg

Early Mississippi Poets

National Poetry Month provides a great opportunity to learn more about poets!  This blog post features several Mississippi poets from the late 1800s and the early 1900s.  We encourage you to visit MLC or your local library to learn about many more Mississippi poets. 

Katherine Jones Bellamann

Eudora Welty (left) with Mrs. Bellamann 

(Photo by Dr. Harry Bayne)

Katherine Jones Bellamann was born on October 7, 1877, in Carthage, Mississippi.  Mrs. Bellamann and her husband, Henry Bellamann, were very close and worked on much of their writing together until his death in 1944.  Her poems can be classified as romantic Southern nature verse inspired by her Southern upbringing.  In 1955 she became the president of the Mississippi Poetry Society.    

Maxwell Bodenheim

  

Maxwell Bodenheim, originally Maxwell Bodenheimer, was born May 26, 1892, in Hermanville, Mississippi.  His poetry books include Minna and Myself (1918), Advice (1920), Against this Age (1923), The King of Spain (1928), Bringing Jazz! (1930), and Selected Poems 1914-1944 (1946).  

Hubert Creekmore

 Hubert Creekmore, Eudora Welty, and Eileen McGarath in 1954 

Hubert Creekmore was born January 16, 1907, in Water Valley, Mississippi. He studied at the University of Mississippi and graduated in 1927.  His well known works include Personal Sun, The Early Poems of Hubert Creekmore (1940), The Long Reprieve and Other Poems of new Caledonia (1946), The Welcome (1948), and Daffodils Are Dangerous (1966).   

William Alexander Percy

William Alexander Percy was born May 14, 1885, and grew up in Greenville, Mississippi.  Percy, along with being an author and poet, was also very active in politics and graduated from Harvard with his degree in law. His works of poetry includes Sappho in Levas, and other Poems (1915), In April Once, and Other Poems (1920), Enzio's Kingdom, and Other Poems (1924), Selected Poems (1930), The Collected Poems of William Alexander Percy (1943), and Of Silence and Start (1953). 

Maude Leet Prenshaw

Maude Leet Prenshaw was born August, 2, 1889, in Greenville, Mississippi.  She was the first Mississippi Poet Laureate, from 1963-1971.  She was also editor of The Mississippi Poetry Journal, president of the Mississippi Poetry Society, and founder of the Mississippi Poetry Festival.  

Irwin Russell

Irwin Russel was born on June 3, 1853, in Port Gibson, Mississippi.  He began publishing poems in Scribner's Monthly Magazine and became know as an important figure to post-Reconstruction Southern writing. His books of poems are Poems (1888) and Christmas-Night in the Quarters, and Other Poems (1917), 

Visit http://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/home to learn more about National Poetry Month.