An Open Letter to Readers of Our Website
Good idea. I enjoyed the diverse perspectives on the economy and politics and related topics, but the focus should be…
The editor and publisher of Peace Corps Worldwide have decided to narrow the focus of this blog, and limit articles to only those pertaining to the written works by PCVs and RPCVs, and those about the Peace Corps itself — much as was the case in the past when we began producing the newsletter RPCV Writers & Readers in 1989, and subsequently the website Peace Corps Writers.
This decision is based on the fact that with 50+ years of the Peace Corps, numerous books and other works are being published by RPCV writers, and we are overwhelmed with material, need to sharpen our attention, and bring the purpose of the site back to our original efforts to fulfill the Third Goal.
We especially appreciate, and thank, all of those RPCVs who have written blogs for Peace Corps Worldwide outside these criteria that we have discontinued, but it is time for us to adjust to the expansive Returned Peace Corps Volunteer writing community, and the ever-changing realities of the agency.
PCV and RPCV bloggers whose writings relate directly to 1) Peace Corps and 2) Peace Corps writers continue to be welcome to apply to blog with us and be part of our efforts. Additionally, we are always looking for those readers who would like to write books review for us.
Finally, we would also like to thank you readers for your continued support of what we do with Peace Corps Worldwide.
Marian Haley Beil and John Coyne
Makes a lot of good sense and this is a good statement. Congratulations on all your good work.
We earlier PC members are bumping between 75 probably and 90, those still alive at least. I view our lives as apprenticeship, and here influenced this kind of meditation is a piece on it: Ed
Edward Mycue PAGE 1 OF 4 PAGES APPRENTICESHIP
It’s all apprenticeship until you die. Stay alive.
I began being attracted to the idea of the apprenticeship as a description of a life journey after reading the Lincoln part of Josephine Miles’ poem “For Magistrates” that was first published in her last book, the Collected Poems in 1983. Connected to this was the Confucius admonition not to conflate error and thus turning it into a crime.
I had a Ryan uncle in Boston who became unable to make decisions in his job at Social Security because of a condition known or called then as scrupulousness carried to such an excess that he was rendered unable to act (because anything you would do could be harmful to another); the other was Celia Carpenter (a senior I worked with in The Office of the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in Washington, D.C. high in government administration) whose Quaker upbringing in her 50’s caused her a similar breakdown a few years earlier when she was during the WW II the regional director (also in Boston) of the Office of State Merit Systems for the New England States.
Something a Jain might be subject to and unable to act because any action one could make however without intent might harm some living being, even an ant, or a
APPRENTICESHIP Edward Mycue page 2
decision could have a harmful result (to the environment?) “For Magistrates” is a poem in ten unnumbered parts, and the longest poem that she would publish. Here are the lines relating to Lincoln (though it is a poem most fully all together to complete the meaning — and perhaps she was still in process of simplifying it when she began to fail and see her end).
Josephine Miles’ poem on Abraham Lincoln,,from “For Magistrates,” COLLECTED POEMS 1930-1983 (U of ILLINOIS PRESS 1983)
………………………………….
“Shaving, an uncle asks,
What is this face before me in the mirror?
Look well, children, for you see
A face that may grow handsomer every day.
Not Alger, not Narcissus in the stream.
—
Gazing at it, would the martyr ghost
Returned from the grave
Ask, Is this the face I shaved?
APPRENTICESHIP Edward Mycue Page 3
As we search the photographs, bearded to full-whiskered,
We watch a man not yet forty
Who might be years younger
Develop into an ageless ancient, which indeed his secretaries
called him
He would be considered no worldly success till late in his
career
But his many failures read
Less as mischance than as apprenticeship.
The superiority of Abraham Lincoln over other statesmen
Lies in the limitless dimension of a conscious self,
Its capacities and conditions of deployment.
In 1863 Walt Whitman watched him
During some of the worst weeks of the war.
I think well of the President. He has a face
APPRENTICESHIP Edward Mycue Page 4 or 4 pages
Like a Hoosier Michael Angelo, so awfully ugly
It becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth,
Its deep-cut crisscross lines,
And its doughnut complexion.
Suffering endured stoked his energy
With penetration and foresight, often hidden from contemporaries,
Visible
Through restored photos.”
(The above is on pages 250-251within “The Magistrates”, the book’s final poem, on pages 247-253)
Josephine or Jo as I called her is the truest and finest poet (thinker as poet, too) I have known in my life (well George Oppen and Ann Stanford are in there as well). Sometimes I view the conclusion of my life as a poet the way the poet Lennart Bruce (Swedish, who published in English and lived in San Francisco, then Walnut Creek — generally same age group as George, Ann and Jo) told me — that the triumph for him would be that by his end he had added one grain to the shore.
© Edward Mycue 3 September 2015
Good idea. I enjoyed the diverse perspectives on the economy and politics and related topics, but the focus should be on authors and their works.