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| rus bowden
New member Username: rusbowden Post Number: 90 Registered: 12-2003 |
Hello Poetry Fans, Poetry & Poets in Rags Two weeks ago, our back page was about a poetry writing challenge in the Guardian from Julia Darling's Workshop. This week, the top results from that challenge, and the way she talks about those poems, make for our headliner. (Did any of you try?) In a way, we have two special sections, because last Wednesday was Edgar Allen Poe's birthday, and today is Robert Burns's. Some really neat articles came out about Poe. You'll find three of these as the 9th, 10th, and then final articles in our main section. But, all over the world today, the Scots and the Scottish diaspora have been celebrating Burns's birthday, and they do it in a certain way. How to have such a party is described in our first of five articles in a section called "Auld Lang Syne Rabbie." Like March 17th for the Irish, January 25th is for the Scottish, and all can be Scottish for a day. I was raised thinking that I was most likely 3/4 or so Irish and 1/4 or so English. So how can I be Scottish? My facial features from the Flynn side of the family will attest to all the Irishness, as will being of the pinkish race and prone to sunburn. In the 1920s, my grandfather Carl Flynn married Dorothy Coose, in a fairly scandalous-then Irish/English union. My father was apparently born a Carrigan with Greeley and Sullivan and other Irish names in the background tree. But I can do this on Rabbie's birthday. In the 1930s, my father was adopted into a union between my two nurse grandmothers, the elder Jane Bowden and the youthful Elizabeth Simonds, Simonds being Scottish--so I am at least Scottish by adoption. But, in these late years, my father has grown to look strikingly like a portrait of an elder Simonds that hangs in one of the family homes, and the members drew his attention to such undeniable resemblance. My grandmothers Bowden and Simonds took the truth to their graves, but it seems that either Elizabeth, or maybe more likely her older brother (says the gossip tree), was a Scottish biological parent to my father. This gives me at least 1/4 Scottish, and another "floating" quarter for celebrations of my choosing when we move beyond St. Patrick's Day. Yours, Rus Our Links: Poetry & Poets in Rags IBPC Home IBPC Newswire |
