On February 9

On this day in ...
... 1934 (75 years ago today) , at Athens, the leaders of Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia entered the Pact of Balkan Entente. The agreement "was formed to guarantee mutually the security of their frontiers and thus was directed largely against Bulgaria."
... 1944 (65 years ago today) , in Eatonton, Georgia, a daughter was born to sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. This eighth and last child of theirs won a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, having earned honors as class valedictorian though blinded in one eye by a shooting accident during her childhood. Alice Walker (left), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple (1982), her epistolary novel, continues to agitate for peace and the rights of women and minorities, and against nuclear weapons and female genital mutilation. IntLawGrrls reviewed 1 of Walker's most recent books here.

Celebrate poetry

Today begins National Poetry Month, an annual event for more than a decade in the United States and Canada. Organizers admit that April was chosen because school's still in session and teachers can plan lessons around the commemoration; still, tongue in cheek, they pay note to notable in-verse invocations of the month:

T.S. Eliot wrote, 'April is the cruelest month.' It is our hope that National Poetry Month lessens that effect.

On a lighter note, Chaucer wrote:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flow

Finally, Edna St. Vincent Millay asked, 'To what purpose, April, do you return again?' For National Poetry month, of course!

Skimming of lists of poets (here and here) turns up many whom IntLawGrrls have profiled over the months of our existence; for example: Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Atwood, Emily Brontë, Julia Ward Howe, Emma Lazarus, Gabriela Mistral, and Alice Walker. In honor of today's kickoff we'll add another:

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874, Allegheny, Pennsylvania. When she was 3 her parents, of German-Jewish origin, moved the family to Vienna and then to Paris. By age 4 they were living in Oakland, California, where she lived until moving East for university studies. In 1903 Stein (far left) moved to Paris, and remained abroad for 30 years. With San Francisco-born Alice B. Toklas (near left; in the middle is the couple's poodle, Basket) Stein established a salon at their home and helped the careers of artists ranging from Djuna Barnes to Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso. Stein's own writing has been likened to cubist paintings. Her poem America, which demonstrates both her modernist style and a bit of her transnational turn, is reprinted below.
All this month, your poet/ry nominees are most welcome!



(credit for middle image, 1927 photo of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, protesting the planned execution of Sacco and Vanzetti)

Read On! "Why War Is Never a Good Idea"

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing we're reading) Featured now at children's bookstores is a new work by Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of the 1982 epistolary novel The Color Purple. (photo below of Walker courtesy of Santa Clara University)
In Why War Is Never a Good Idea Walker makes "War" a character, an unwelcome visitor of havoc on the lush countrysides and loving country folk in the illustrations by Stefano Vitale. Indeed, only one page depicts an urban scene -- a bombed-out city that could be Dresden or London, Sarajevo or Santiago -- creating a romanticism that is perhaps unreal yet nonetheless effective as an essential reminder of the innocence that is lost in time of war.
As with much of Walker's work, the best passages here are those that forgo polemic in favor of word images that pique thought. My favorite:

Though War speaks
Every language
It never knows
What to say
To frogs.