1. Rehab and recovery for Everett is a slow undertaking. Christy spent a lot of time with Everett today and reports some signs of gradual improvement in his blood work and in some of his physical movements. I think the best we can all hope for right now is that these slow improvements and Everett's overall stability continue.
Riley stayed with me today. Early in the afternoon, Paul dropped by to take Riley for a run and they visited Everett's window at the hospital. I have to believe seeing Riley has got to be a boost to Everett's morale - Christy's pictures of these visits are a boost to mine!
2. I ordered about half a dozen or so books from independent booksellers a while back through bookstore.org and biblio.com and a couple others through betterworldbooks.com. Another one arrived today: Jane Hirshfield's Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. I'm bouncing around these days between reading history, watching history documentaries, and reading poetry and writings about poetry. The history material is brutal and reading poems and poetics gives my mind a rest from the harsh realities of Reconstruction and, my second current interest, the USA's expansion into lands west of the Mississippi.
The Hirshfield book is a series of essays, some of them lectures she's given, and I started with her piece, "What is American in Modern American Poetry?". I thoroughly enjoyed her survey of American poets breaking free of British and European forms and idioms and writing poems that have an American voice and that forge a national identity apart from the traditions of Europe. I love reading lines by and comments about Walt Whitman. I am always eager and hungry to learn more about Emily Dickinson's poetry and Jane Hirshfield helped me do that today. I enjoyed how, as she looked at some developments in 20th century poetry she highlighted the Imagists, the New York School of poetry, the Beats, experiments in expressionist poetry, and the work of the Confessional poets as she worked to give readers a sense of the many invigorating paths American poetry has travelled since Walt Whitman's breakthroughs in the 19th century.
I'm still waiting for one more book, a book I used to love teaching from, entitled, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass. Bill Moyers, in one of his poetry series, introduced me to Robert Hass and his devotion to translating and discussing the haiku. Hass delighted me and set my mind afire at the same time and I am eager to have his book back in the house again.
In preparation for its arrival, I read much of Jane Hirshfield's essay (in Ten Windows) on Basho, which is also an essay on the development of the haiku tradition in Japan and the immense contributions Basho made to this form of poetry. I'm stoked to be back into this style of poetry again after several years of being away.
3. For an hour or so this evening, I took a break from Jane Hirshfield and watched the second hour of the four hour PBS documentary series, Reconstruction. It was painful. During early years of Reconstruction, aided by the intervention of the federal government, conditions for the recently enslaved people improved economically, politically, and educationally. It wasn't long, though, before the backlash violently opposing Reconstruction asserted itself, primarily in the form of the Klu Klux Klan and other similar terrorists groups, and white people resentful of equality for these newly freed people went on the attack. The federal intervention weakened; laws written to protect Black people were not enforced; the violent and cruel campaigns to return the South to something more like the pre-Civil War conditions of white supremacy gained momentum and succeeded.
My impression is that the two hours of viewing that lie ahead will explore the development of Jim Crow.
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