The Writer's Almanac for Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Summer
by John Clare

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;
She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,
And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;
I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,
And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.

The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,
The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,
And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest
In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast;
I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear
That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear;
I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away
Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

"Summer" by John Clare. Public Domain. (buy now)

Just after midnight on this day in 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant. Kennedy had just won California's Democratic presidential primary, and he was exiting through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy, was shaking his hand when Sirhan began firing. Several of the men with him tackled Sirhan, including writer George Plimpton, Olympic athlete Rafer Johnson, and football star Rosey Grier. Romero knelt by Kennedy, and put a rosary in his hand.

His brother Edward "Ted" Kennedy delivered the eulogy:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'"

On this day in 1977, the Apple II computer went on sale, and the era of personal computing began. Developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it was the first successful mass-produced microcomputer designed for home use.

Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (books by this author) was baptized on this day in 1723 in Kircaldy, Fife, Scotland. He was a professor of logic and, later, moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

Smith published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, to general acclaim, but it's his second, The Wealth of Nations (1776), for which he is chiefly known today. It took him 10 years to write, and in it he posits that the pursuit of individual self-interest will lead, as if by an "invisible hand," to the greatest good for all.

It's the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898) (books by this author), born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada. His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. He became a national celebrity upon the publication of Gypsy Ballads.

He had an intense relationship with Salvador Dali from 1925 to 1928. He grew depressed, and a falling out with Dali and the end of another love affair with a sculptor only made things worse. In 1929, his family arranged for him to take an extended trip to the United States. It was in New York that he began to break out of his pigeonhole as a "gypsy poet." He wrote A Poet in New York (published posthumously in 1942), a collection that was critical of capitalism and obsessed with urban decay and social injustice.

He turned back to drama when he returned to Spain in 1930. And in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he found that the Nationalists didn't look favorably on his work or his liberal views. They dragged him from his home on August 16 and imprisoned him without a trial; two or three days later, they drove him to a hill outside of town and shot him. His body was never found.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (books by this author) began its serial run in abolitionist newspaper the National Era on this date in 1851. It ran in weekly installments for 10 months. It generated some interest among opponents to slavery, but it didn't reach a larger audience until it was republished as a book in 1852.

Many critics dismissed the novel as sentimental, and several characters gave rise to persistent stereotypes of African-Americans. Even so, it attracted thousands of Northerners to the abolitionist cause. The book sold 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year in print.

And it’s the birthday of poet and novelist David Wagoner (books by this author), born in Massillon, Ohio (1926). He grew up in Whiting, Indiana — a gritty town between Gary and Chicago — where the family moved after his father lost his job in a steel mill. In spite of his Midwestern upbringing, Wagoner has become a poet of the Pacific Northwest. His friend and mentor Theodore Roethke offered him a teaching position at the University of Washington in 1954. “When I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe,” Wagoner remembers. “I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.” His earlier poems had reflected the polluted industrial area where he was raised. His second collection, A Place to Stand (1958), was his first foray into nature writing, which would become his trademark. “I came from a place where nature was ruined,” he said, “and here the natural world was still in a pristine state.” His aesthetic, emotional, and psychological relocation from the Midwest to the Northwest was complete by the time his fourth collection, The Nesting Ground, was published in 1963. Wagoner served as editor for Poetry Northwest for 30 years; for many years it was the only national magazine devoted entirely to poetry.

Wagoner also writes fiction. He was down to his last 10 dollars when his first one, The Man in the Middle (1954), was published. He’s best known for The Escape Artist (1965).