The acclaimed poet Marie Ponsot began writing poetry for America in the 1950s. Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill writes about  the poet's love of language in the February 14 issue. Here we offer a few of Ponsot's compositions for the magazine:

Conception

Rejoice rejoice that the taken seed

It is time someone said a good word for our cities. With unmentionable slum conditions, snarled traffic, architectural anarchy and mounting air pollution, they are incontrovertibly appalling. Living in a city block that can hold its own with almost any for visual disarray and stylelessness, and within a city area where the air-pollution index is reckoned the highest in the nation, we editors are unlikely to indulge in fantasies of urban eulogy. But on sober reflection, we wonder if things are really so much worse than they used to be.

Sighing for the good, clean, prewar days, our oldish friends affirm that things are really much worse. Yet, as we look over stacks of impartial photographs, we see evidence that such days were neither specially good nor at all clean. True, while city smells may be less nauseating than not so long ago, noise and noxious gases are surely at an all-time peak. Statistics show, however, that today's slums are less crowded and are probably less inhuman than they were two generations ago.

A good deal of demythologizing about our cities is gathered in the lead article of the January 22 New York Times Magazine by Irving Kristol, co-editor of the quarterly The Public Interest. In the past 50 years, for example, the percentage of Americans living in large cities has remained just about stationary. As in 1910, roughly one-tenth of our population inhabit cities of over one million, while less than a third live in what are cities by any definition. The great growth is in suburbs, where, more than ever in the past, people now work as well as live. Further, New York, often thought of as the typical city, is really the least typical. For even in as large a city as Philadelphia, 70 per cent of the homes are owner-occupied. Moreover, traffic congestion, claims Mr. Kristol, is no worse than it was in 1900 or 1850. We do have more vehicles, but (save for poor, untypical New York) we also have a corresponding improvement in thoroughfares.

Meanwhile, while most of the rich live in suburbs, as they always did, thus avoiding many city taxes, the cost of keeping up our cities mounts steadily. Thus, the central city continues to be inhabited by the poor, especially the newly arrived poor, who haven't yet managed to escape to the suburbs. The problem today, however, is not simply the same old problem. It is exacerbated by the "revolution of rising expectations."

This phrase is, of course, anathema to those who prefer to believe romantically that the "good old days" were just about the best of all possible worlds. Today, instead, the poor are no longer reconciled (if indeed they ever were) to living in subhuman squalor. Thanks to the mass media, which make the advantages of American standards so obviously desirable and apparently accessible, no housewife can be satisfied to cook, clean or wash in the same old way. Needs that were

By the second April 10, as the African Synod opened in Rome--the official title for this meeting is 'The Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops"--details had just reached the outside world of the slaughter in Rwanda. Among those killed in the wave of "ethnic cleansing" were 19 Africans gathered at the Jesuits' Christus Centre in the Rwandan capital, Kigali: nine young Rwandan sis¬ters of the congregation "Vita et Pax"; the Rwandan cook; a Rwandan social worker who had apparently sought refuge there; five Rwandan diocesan priests meeting at the center, and three Rwandan Jesuit priests.

At Jesuit headquarters in Rome, African bishops who had arrived for the synod joined the Jesuits' superior general and young African Jesuits studying in Rome to pray for all the victims of ethnic violence in central Africa and for the restoration of justice and peace. The Jesuits who died were remembered precisely for their work at the Christus Centre, which was dedicated to ethnic reconciliation and the protection of the vulnerable.

The term "ethnic cleansing," as we know all too well from former Yugoslavia, is a European coinage. There is nothing specially African about either the euphemism or the reality. As in the Balkans, so in Rwanda, efforts to understand what is happening fall back on terms like "ancient hatreds" and "historic grievances," but there is nothing predestined or inevitable about it. As in the Balkans, so too in Rwanda, unscrupulous and weak-minded politicians--in this case, not hard-line Serbs but hard-line Hutus--have seized upon an unsettled moment to grab more power for themselves and their party by killing off political opponents, mostly Tutsis, but also Hutus working for political reconciliation. Waving the ethnic banner, as in the Balkans, the hard-liners have unleashed ignorant men to massacre the "others," and by

For America's centennial celebration in 2009 James T. Keane, S.J., and Jim McDermott, S.J., authored a series of articles on pivotal episodes in the magazine's history.

"A Man of Independent Character: John J. Wynne and the founding of America Magazine,"

According to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's recent instruction on my calling, we theologians are not to be seen or heard in the public media. We are to carry out our squabbles in code, in the pages of esoteric journals. If we have any complaints with official doctrine, we are to communicate them to the proper authorities behind closed doors, in secret. That's the theory. But on Dec. 13, for the second time this past year (see AM., 8/18/90, pp. 76-77), members of my professional group, the Catholic Theological Society of America (C.T.S.A.), spoke out, inevitably on the airwaves, criticizing Vatican actions and procedures in four areas of concern—the collegiality of bishops, the relation between the magisterium and theologians, women in the church and ecumenism. Provoked by Rome's treatment of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen and the Curran case among other incidents, the C.T.S.A. censure had been brewing for some time—but the incentive to go public came from the other side of the Atlantic.

One shaft of sunlight that has illuminated a rather gloomy year for most Americans has been the year-long celebration in honor of George Gershwin. When Gershwin died suddenly at age 38 in 1937, the novelist John O'Hara wrote in his typically hard-boiled-sentimental style: "They tell me George Gershwin is dead, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to." Corny or not, O'Hara's sentiments seemed to have been shared by many this year, as the many television specials, new recordings and stagings of Gershwin's work attest. In fact, the 50th anniversary appears to be closing with a rush this December as one Gershwin gala crowds another throughout the country.

The helicopter that lifted Richard Nixon from the White House lawn nearly three years ago seemed an angel of mercy, rescuing the nation from the long, painful nightmare of Watergate. As it turned out, however, the bad dream had its afterglow, and books and articles by the dozen promised the inside story of the final days and a psychological profile of the man at the center of the scandals. The former President has till now maintained a dignified distance from Watergate post-mortems.

The silence could not last. Richard Nixon is a personality both born and destroyed in the media. His series of conversations with David Frost, on reflection, was inevitable. He has always been compelled to bring his case directly to the people, from the time he defended his campaign expenses in the "Checkers" speech in 1952 to his long and tortured explanations of Watergate. Now, once again, he is confronting the cameras in an attempt to salvage his reputation and, perhaps, even begin a retum to public life.

The careful staging of the media event points out once more that tragic lack of a sense of propriety which seems to haunt the man and those he chooses as his associates. In fact, he is allowing his potential confession to be marketed by the show-business entrepreneur, David Frost, in the same way he allowed his Presidency to be marketed by admen, Messrs. Haldeman, Erlichman and Ziegler. None of the networks would air the series, since "checkbook journalism," the competitive bidding for personality news, is generally thought to devalue news departments. When commercial sales lagged, a few leaks hinted at startling new revelations, and the spiciest segment, dealing with Watergate, was moved from the last of the four evenings to the first, to generate press coverage and advertising revenue. It succeeded. Mr. Nixon will earn close to $1 million and Mr. Frost about twice that amount. Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and CBS all gave feature space to the series.

Darwinism and Popular Science

From April 24, 1909

The April number of The Popular Science Monthly contains a series of articles on Darwin and Darwinism, most of them addresses delivered on the hundredth anni­versary of Darwins birth, February 12th, 1909. The impression that will be derived by the ordinary non­scientific reader, or even by educated people who are not closely in touch with present day thought in biology, will be inevitably that Darwinism is still a great force in the scientific world, an almost universally accepted theory that now has risen almost to the higher plane of a scientific doctrine. Of course any such idea is utterly false. Darwinism is not evolution, but an attempt to explain evolution. Darwin was not the first to make such an attempt of explanation; but literally hundreds of thinkers before him made the effort and at least half a dozen of them came as near making a successful ex­planation as his has proved to be.

In all of these ad­dresses there is practically no hint that at the present moment the great leaders of biological thought in Europe, the professors of the biological sciences at the Universities of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Strassburg, Tiibingen, Erlangen, Amsterdam and Heidelberg have in the last ten years written books against Darwinism. English speaking scientists still continue, apparently from national motives, to cling to Darwinism, but even such distinguished American biologists as Cope, perhaps the greatest of American zoologists, Packard of Brown, and Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia, wrote against the Darwinian theory. The greatest investigating scientists of the nineteenth century were almost without exception anti­Darwinians. The "antis" include Von Baer, the greatest of embryologists, though from embryology Darwinism is supposed to derive its strongest confirmation; Wigand, the botanist, though botany is supposed to have fur­nished most evidence for the transmutation of species; Agassiz and Sir William Dawson, the greatest of paleontologists, though it was the study of fossils that was expected to furnish the missing links; and Van Kolliker Nageli and Virchow, the great human and com­parative anatomists, whose knowledge of anthropology should make their opinions of great weight. Prof. Driesch of Heidelberg, Haeckels greatest disciple, de­clared last year in the Gifford Lectures at Edinburg, that "Darwinism fails all along the line." Of all this grow­ing protest against Darwinism there is almost no hint in this symposium on Darwin, published in The Popular Science Monthly, except a halting sentence or two from Prof. Morgan, who declares that "it is the spirit of Darwinism and not its formul­tion for the genuine scientist. Evidently this case is no exception. The centennial of Darwin has not made evolution more certain than he left it.

Darwins Place in Biology

From January 22, 1910