Roses are red….

I spent some time this month at the headquarters of the Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior in Chicago. It’s a lovely building, spare, not especially welcoming, but very pleasant once you get inside. (You might say that about some poems, too.)

Poetry Foundation Logo BlackThe Poetry Foundation was created in 2003, but its roots go back to Poetry magazine, which was established here in Chicago in 1912, by Harriet Monroe, with the goal of publishing the best contemporary English poetry. The magazine, which bills itself as “the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world,” published early works from  T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and many others.

In the 1970s, the pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly submitted some poems to magazine, but received only rejections from the editor at the time, Joseph Parisi. As The New York Times put it, “evidently she did not take the rejections to heart,” because on her death in 2002, Lilly left $100 million to Poetry, which the Times characterized at the time as “a struggling journal little known outside literary circles.”

Despite going from rags to riches overnight, the foundation has maintained an admirable focus on Poetry‘s mission of getting the word out about poetry, creating rich prizes for poets, hosting events, and making all sorts of poetry and related material available free and in full through its website.

You can even sign up to have a poem sent daily to your email, like today’s poem, “Harlan County,” by Kate Buckley.

Until Sept. 12, an exhibition of artist Tony Fitzpatrick’s Secret Birds drawings will be up in the lobby of the Poetry Foundation.

The Finkbeiner test

Longtime science writer Ann Finkbeiner wrote a terrific piece this year swearing off writing patronizing articles about female scientists, and it has been boiled down into what is being called “the Finkbeiner test.”

Finkbeiner advanced her manifesto in January in an article titled “What I’m Not Going to Do” on the blog The Last Word on Nothing*.

In March, Christie Aschwanden distilled Finkbeiner’s piece into a seven-point checklist on DoubleXScience, an online science magazine for women:

“To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention

  • The fact that she’s a woman
  • Her husband’s job
  • Her child care arrangements
  • How she nurtures her underlings
  • How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
  • How she’s such a role model for other women
  • How she’s the ‘first woman to…’

“Here’s another trick,” Aschwanden writes. “Take the things that are said about a female subject and flip them around as if they were said about a male. If they sound ridiculous, then chances are good they have no business in the story.”

I think it’s all about context. If you’re writing a breezy lifestyle story (or maybe even an obituary), the personal stuff is OK. But if you are writing essentially about your subject’s work, the Finkbeiner test should be pressed into service.

*“Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing” – Victor Hugo

Of “witches,” books and rocket science

I enjoyed reading Nadezhda Popova’s recent obituary in the New York Times. Popova was one of the Russian “Night Witches,” female pilots who flew bombers, flimsy former crop dusters, during World War II.

And Quiet Flows the DonIt was a dangerous mission. German pilots who shot down one of the Night Witches, so called because of the “whooshing noise” their planes made, which evoked for the Germans the sound of a witch’s broomstick, received the Iron Cross, according to the story.

I loved that the writer, Douglas Martin, included the fact that Popova noticed a wounded fighter pilot, Semyon Kharlamov, who would become her husband, “in a horde of retreating troops and civilians,” because he was reading Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don.

That book made a big impression on me when I read it. Its story reminded me of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, in that it centers on a man who is married to one woman but desperately in love with another. Instead of wealthy Russians whose lives are torn apart by World War I and the Russian revolution, though, it’s about Cossacks whose lives are torn apart by World War I and the Russian revolution. Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, though there is some controversy about his authorship.

I also liked that Martin, who got smacked around in the press for focusing on Yvonne Brill’s home life in his recent obituary of the rocket scientist who invented the propulsion system that maintains the orbit of the communication satellites we rely on on a daily basis, was confident enough in his own approach, even after that rumpus, to dwell on Popova’s private life in this story.

Though as a science writer, I am sensitive to the need to give women full credit for their professional accomplishments — usually the reason the obituary is written in the first place — the fiction writer in me believes that after 80 or 90 years, a person’s life is bound to add up to more than his or her work.