Writer's Almanac Today

Breeze for your sail
by Claudia Serea

Tonight, the world is an abandoned lot
enclosed by chain link fences,
and us, trapped,

two helpless birds,
two fish caught in nets,
two knotted napkins.

But I’ll say to you,
Hang on, love,
hang on.

Don’t raise your white flags yet.
Don’t surrender.

I’m sending you
a breeze for your sail,
sweet wind of faith.

I’ll blow a lock of hair
off your pale forehead

and sing to you
from far away.

Don’t give up, mi amor.

Together, we’ll hang on
the wires of the world.

We’ll billow, sway,
and flutter.

Soon, the fence will crumble
and we’ll dance.

“Breeze for your sail” by Claudia Serea from TwoXism. 8th House Publishing © 2018.
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It’s the birthday of one of the great Texas troubadours and a legend in songwriting circles, Townes Van Zandt, born in Fort Worth (1944). He was born into wealthy oil family, and they moved around quite a bit when he was a young kid – to Minnesota, Colorado, and Illinois– but he abandoned wealth for poetry and singing and living couch to couch.

His friend Steve Earle famously said he was “the best songwriter in the whole world,” adding, “I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” To which Van Zandt was said to have replied: “I’ve met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don’t think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.”

Years later, Earle recanted. He said, “When somebody’s as good as Townes Van Zandt was and more people don’t know about it, it’s Townes’s fault. Part of him didn’t consider himself worthy of anything.” Van Zandt died in 1997, at age 53.

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It’s the birthday of novelist Robert Harris, (books by this author) born in Nottingham, England (1957). His novel Fatherland (1991) became an international best-seller, and he’s since written many other best-selling books of historical fiction, including Enigma (1995), about British code breakers during World War II, Archangel (1998), about the search for a secret Stalin diary, and Pompeii (2003) , about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. His latest novel is The Second Sleep (2019).

Harris, who was a BBC correspondent and newspaper columnist before he was a novelist, said, “It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.”

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It’s the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, (books by this author) born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He studied literature at Columbia University and soon after graduation he traveled to Europe. He had heard about the notorious book Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, and he decided to buy a copy when he was in Paris. He said, “I went straight to Luxembourg Gardens and read the final chapters, and discovered that it wasn’t a dirty book but a fascinating one.” He also realized that by pure coincidence, he had purchased the book on June 16, which is the day on which the action takes place. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works. When he returned to the U.S., he started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library. He went on to become president of the James Joyce Society, and he wrote four books about Joyce, including A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959) and A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake (1969).

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