Oscar Santasusagna

Oscar Santasusagna, “Un Poeta a la Deriva (A Drifting Poet), 2016, Mixed Media on Paper, 40 x 54 cm

Oscar Santasusagna is an artist living and working in Barcelona, Spain. A collaboration between Santasusagna and poet Raūl Garcia Fernández produced a work called “Girl in a Cafe” in 2014. From a illustration just drawn by Oscar Santasusagna, Fernández wrote a poem that supported the drawing.

For Raúl Fernández’s new book entitled “Margarita Mustia”, a new collaboration project started with a poem by Fernández which then was illustrated by Santasusagna and is shown above, entitled “Un Poeta a la Deriva”.

“He navegado sobre las olas de lo obscuro

sobre la espuma de océanos sutiles

bajo el influjo de la luna en mares de palabras.

la luna ha izado olas de ensueños con sus pestañas

la espuma ha lubricado las letras con su tacto

las olas de noche han convocado a las musarañas.

He hundido mis rodillas en la nieve como un intruso

en lagos de nat monstruosos

en ánforas donde vibraba trémula la leche de la cabra.

la leche suavizó la tinta que no encontró la rima

los lagos se arremolinaron apagando cacofonias

la nieve arrolló tachones con avalanchas de virutas.

He despertado a la luz del día como si fuera un niño

al calor del alba como se abren los pétalos

y se curvan las ramas al arrullo de la aurora.

la aurora me consultó lánguida sobre el brillo de las estrellas

el alba quiso refrescarse entre las mareas nocturnas

la luz del día me sorprendió

rayando sus versos sobre el papel.” – Raūl Garcia Fernández

Calendar: October 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of October

Working in the Heat

October 20, 1854 was the birthdate of poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in the provincial town of Charleville, France, to a father who was a military officer and a mother lacking in a sense of humor, who Rimbaud nicknamed “Mouth of Darkness”. Rimbaud was a writer from a young age; at the age of nine, he wrote a seven hundred word essay objecting to his having to learn Latin in school. In 1865, he and his brother were sent to the Collège de Charleville where he became a highly successful student able to absorb great quantities of knowledge. In 1869 Rimbaud won eight first prizes in the French academic competitions, and in 1870 won seven first prizes.

Arthur Rimbaud’s first poem to appear in print was “Les Étrennes des Orphelins” (“The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts”), published in the January 2, 1870 issue of “La Revue Pour Tous”. At the age of fifteen Rimbaud was salready howing maturity as a poet. His poem “Ophelie” would be included in many anthologies and is regarded as one of Rimbaud’s three or four best poems. From late October in 1870, Arthur Rimbaud’s behavior at the age of sixteen became rebellious, drinking, stealing, and writing scatological poems. His friend Charles Auguste Bretagne advised him to write to the eminent Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.

Arthur Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters with poems, including his hypnotic and shocking “Le Dormeur du Val”. Verlaine was intrigued and sent Rimbaud a one-way ticket to Paris. Rimbaud arrived in late September of 1871 and resided briefly with Verlaine and his pregnant wife at their home. Verlaine and Rimbaud led a wild, vagabond-style life, a short and torrid affair filled with absinthe, opium and hashish. The Paris literary circle were scandalized by Rimbaud, who still writing poetry, was considered an archetypical enfant terrible. Their stormy relationship brought them to London in September of 1872, where Verlaine abandoned Rimbaud to return to his wire.

Arthur Rimbaud eventually returned to Charleville and completed his prose work “Une Saison en Enfer”, A Season in Hell, widely regarded as a pioneer work of modern Symbolist writing. He returned to London in 1874 with the French Symbolist poet Germain Nouveau, whose work was mostly published after his death. They lived together for three months while Nouveau finished his work “Illuminations”. By March of 1875, Rimbaud had given up his writing in favor of a working and traveling life.

In February of 1891, in Aden, Rimbaud developed what he thought was arthritis in his right knee. Failing to respond to treatment, he returned to France. On arrival in Marseille,, he was admitted to the Hôspital de la Conception where, a week later on the 27th of May, his right leg was amputated. The post-operative diagnosis was bone cancer. After a short stay at the family farm in Roche, he attempted to return to Africa, but his health deteriorated. He was re-admitted to the same hospital and received last rites from a priest before dying on November 10, 1891 at the age of thirty-seven.

Simeon Solomon

Simeon Solomon, Frontispiece to His Book ‘”A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”’, 1871

Solomon’s “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep” is an important early gay text, a prose poem,which was privately published in 1871. The image above is captioned “Until the day break and the shadows flee away”, a quotation from the Bible in the Song of Solomon 2:17.

The performance by Neil Bartlett, entitled “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”, was an one-man homage to the life and work of Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. The performance was originally created and performed at the height of the first wave of the British AIDs epidemic in 1987.

Edwin Morgan: “Clydegrad, Sonnets from Scotland”

Images from a Collection: Just…Muckin’ Aboot

“It was so fine we lingered there for hours.
The long broad streets shone strongly after rain.
Sunset blinded the tremble of the crane
we watched from, dazed the heliport-towers.
The mile-high buildings flashed, flushed, greyed, went dark,
greyed, flushed, flashed, chameleons under flak
of cloud and sun. The last far thunder-sack
ripped and spilled its grumble. Ziggurat-stark,
a power-house reflected in the lead
of the old twilight river leapt alive
lit up at every window, and a boat
of students rowed past, slid from black to red
into the blaze. But where will they arrive
with all, boat, city, earth, like them, afloat?”

—Edwin Morgan, Clydegrad, Sonnets from Scotland, 1984

Born in Glasgow’s West End in April of 1920, Scottish poet and translator Edwin George Morgan was associated with the Scottish Renaissance, the modernist literary movement which incorporated folk influences and held a strong concern for Scotland’s declining languages.

Edwin Morgan entered the University of Glasgow in 1937, where he studied Russian and French. During World WAr II, his studies were interrupted by his service as a conscientious objector member of the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, the Lebanon, and Palestine. Morgan continued his studies after the war and graduated in 1947 with a first class Honors degree in English Language and Literature. Upon graduating, he took an offer as a lecturer in the English Department of Glasgow University; he was appointed a full professor in 1975 and retired from the university in 1980.

Morgan first published his work in the High School of Glasgow Magazine in 1936 under the name ‘Kaa’, and continued that nom de plume for his published work in the Glasgow University Magazine. Working after the war as translator and reviewer, he reverted to his own name in works published in a variety of periodicals. Morgan’s first collection of poems entitled “The Vision of Cathkin Braes” and his translation of “Beowulf” were both published in 1952. For fifty years, he continued the dual task of publishing his own work and translating others’ work from Russian, French, Italian, and Old English.

Edwin Morgan’s “A Second Life”, published in 1968, contained subjects which ranged from the marginalized populations of Glasgow and the misery of the tenements to times of laughter in the city and the famous lives of personalities such as Edith Pilaf and Marilyn Monroe. “A Second Life” became the volume that established his importance and signaled a private change and a public achievement in his life. In 1963 Morgan met and had fallen in love with John Scott, to whom he remained attached until Scott’s death in 1978. Though a concealed love due to the laws at the time, this union and Morgan’s discovery of the Beat poets’ writings formed a new awakening for him.

Morgan’s wide reading habit, his love of the cinema, and his defined musical taste all contributed to his poetry. He was always inquisitive and interested in the changes to technology and science, the whole history of the earth, and the dynamism of invention. A master of the classic form of poetry, Morgan continued through his career to invent new verse forms from his first concrete poems in 1963, which relies for part of its effect on the visual impact in the arrangement of words and spaces on the page, to the new stanzaic forms in his 2002 “Cathures”, with its poems’ cadence set to music, both classical and jaxx.

Throughout his early career Edwin Morgan had kept his sexuality hidden as homosexuality was not decriminalized in Scotland until 1980. At the age of seventy, he revealed his sexuality in the 1990 work “Nothing Not Giving Messages”, a collection of talks, poems and interviews, in which was included an interview with the Scottish poet and novelist Christopher Whyte about Morgan’s life and orientation.

Edwin Morgan’s work has received a number of prestigious accolades and has assumed an increasingly public role. In 1999 he became Glasgow’s first official Poet Laureate and a year later received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2004, Morgan became Scotland’s first official national poet or ‘Scots Makar’, who is charged with ‘representing and promoting Scots poetry’.

In the years after his appointment to the Glasgow laureateship, Morgan was an active supporter of the repeal of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 that stopped councils and schools from “promoting the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. In many public appearances he criticized Church and business leaders for their support of the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign. This endorsement of gay rights and inclusive attitudes to social and cultural difference characterized Morgan’s publicly liberal stance in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Edwin Morgan died in Glasgow on August 19, 2010.

Additional information on the life of Edwin Morgan, as well as a small collection of complete poems, can be found at the Scottish Poetry Library located at: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/edwin-morgan/

Calendar: January 31

Year: Day to Day Men: January 31

Stereoscopic Viewing

On January 31st in 1800, one of the earliest Native American literary writers, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, was born in Sault Ste. Marie located in the upper peninsula of the present state of Michigan. She was of Scottish-Irish and Ojibwe ancestry, born to John Johnston, a fur trader, and Ozhaguscodaywayquay, the daughter of Waubojeeg, a prominent Ojibwe war chief. Her parents were historically famous leaders in both the Ojibwe and Euro-American communities.

Jane Johnson Schoolcraft was fluent in the language and learned of both the English and Ojibwe cultures, which offered her a unique perspective for her creative work. She wrote poetry and traditional Ojibwe stores and translated many Ojibwe songs into English. Schoolcraft mostly wrote in English but published some poems in the Ojibwe language.

In her early twenties, Jane Johnston met Henry Schoolcraft, an American ethnologist and geographer who was conducting an expedition in the territory of present-day Michigan. They married in 1822 and began a relationship that proved significant for both of them. The marriage offered Jane a means to express her own literary talents; she also provided Henry insights on Ojibwe culture and language that aided his ethnological work.

Jane Schoolcraft’s poetry and translated Obijwe stories made noteworthy contributions to American literature. Her work is one of the earliest examples of Native American literature published in the United States. Schoolcraft’s influence is evident in many of the stories that Henry Schoolcraft collected; her translations and insights aided him in his later role as a government agent for Native Americans.

In 1826 and 1827, Schoolcraft’s writings were published in a handwritten magazine entitled “The Literary Voyager”, produced by Henry Schoolcraft. These issues were distributed widely to residents of Sault Ste. Marie as well as people in New York, Detroit and other cities. Her work also appeared in a six-volume study known as “Indian Tribes of the United States” that was commissioned in 1846 by the United States Congress.

In 1841, Henry and Jane Schoolcraft moved to New York City where Henry was employed by the state of New York to research Native American culture. After having suffered several illnesses, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died at the age of forty-two in May of 1842 while visiting her married sister in Canada. She was buried at St. John’s Anglican Church in present-day Ancaster, Ontario. Schoolcraft is recognized as the first Native American literary writer, both as a woman and a poet, as well as the first to write out traditional Native American stories.

Notes: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe name was Bamewawagezhikaquay, the literary translation means “Woman of the Sound (that the stars make) Rushing Through the Sky”. Her writings began to attract interest in the 1990s as work by minority communities began to be more widely studied. In 2008, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan’s Women’s Hall of Fame.