Gary Synder. A. Macleish

 Hammering a dent out of a bucket

      a woodpecker

               answers from the woods.

—Happy birthday to Gary Snyder, who was born #OnThisDay in 1930.

May 7 is the birthday of Archibald MacLeish. An American-born (in Glencoe, Illinois, 1837) poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, of Scottish descent, Macleish was also a veteran of WWI, having fought in France.

Like many postwar poets and writers, MacLeish would later say that his education began not in his undergraduate years, but in the years after the war (when he was at Harvard Law School, trying to integrate the battlefield horrors he had witnessed with ordinary life).

Today, we remember him  primarily as a poet.

For lines like "A poem should not mean / But be" (Ars Poetica).

For a description, in The End of the World, of the nonchalant impersonal force that brings this about, beginning his destruction thus: "The armless ambidextrian was lighting/ A match between his great and second toe..." 

(I read this poem in my early teens, and have carried the words "armless ambidextrian," as an expression of existence's inherent contradiction, ever since.)

According to the Poetry Foundation, "MacLeish’s personal dilemma, and the constant theme of his early writings, was the reconciliation of idealism with reality."

As an idealist, I'm inclined to say, "Isn't that ALWAYS the theme?" 

And also, "Thank you, Archibald MacLeish, for nailing it.

#poetsbirthday #archibaldmacleish #thearmlessambidextrian #apoemshouldnotmeanbutbe #crescentdragonwagonsfearlesswriting