Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. -Edna St. Vincent Millay
I'm writing this sitting in a coffeeshop in downtown Asheville. And to paraphrase Cicero: "Times are bad, everybody's writing a book, and there is always a parent with a squalling infant." Well, he said 2 of three of those things, I'll let you guess which. Plus, there is some sort of Argentine music on the speaker system and business guys in blue jeans. Coffee is $1.35 and there is a warning sign on the front door that if you don't park in the right lot your vehicle will be towed (toed? tolled? told?)... Alas the woman with the shrieking infant has left and perhaps I can finish this without going out back and sliting my own throat.
What I really wanted to write about today was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay whose sonnets were often of fractured hearts and death, but the gal sure could say in a few lines what most of us cannot express about those two subjects in a three-volume set of leather bound books.
There is much debate about who originally said, "The only things worth writing about are love and death." (Please, if anyone can point me to the original source, I'd really appreciate it, as well if someone can tell me who said, "The devil's in the details." An oft quoted phrase but without a source.).
But getting back to writing about love & death, I think whether it was Ezra Pound or Woody Allen, whoever said it was right. And when you think about it, almost every notable work of fiction, including the Bible, deals extensively with those two subjects. And "Vincent" as she insisted her friends call her, wrote about Love & Death extremely well, by which I mean, she made you feel the bitter sadness of both. She was in fact, the first woman to recieve the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. That's how freaking good she was.
In fact she was so good that a listener hearing Vincent reciting her poetry offered to pay her tuition to Vassar College, which she gladly accepted.
She was so good that both men and women fell in love with her and she with them. She was openly bisexual and perhaps that gave her a much better perspective on human sexuality than your average poet. Is there such a thing as an average poet? She eventually married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a much older man and a widower and they lived on a farm in New York. Theirs was an "open" marriage with both taking a variety of lovers. (Who said those farmers are boring?) They were married 26 years and over that time Boissevain took care of Vincent's domestic needs. While married to him, Vincent's most notable affair was with George Dillon, editor and poet 14 years her junior, whom she collaborated with on translating Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil.
But no matter the affairs Vincent or Eugen had, nothing could or did seperate them but death. Eguen died of lung cancer in 1949 and the following year Vincent was found dead at the bottom of her stairs the following year. It is believed she died of a sudden heart attack, but there is also speculation she may have been pushed.
But what matter of death any more than what matter of love? Both are profound and alter our universe, just as do the words of poets, the hearts of lovers, the deaths of each of us. Vaya con dios, dear Vincent.
Some stuff that happened this day in History:
The FDA approved the use of the birth control pill (1960). I just wish more people would use it!
L. Ron Hubbard founder of the Church of Scientology published his book Dianetics (1950). According to at least one of his NY writing pals who claims he was there that night Hubbard wrote the work, claims that Hubbard had been a struggling science fiction hack who declared he was tired of writing for peanuts and getting nowhwhere and was going to write a bestseller and sat up all night writing the book that would lead to founding of the Scientology Church. This pal claims hubbard had a roll of butcher paper he fed into his typewriter so he wouldn't have to slow down in his writing and finished the entire first draft in one sitting. True or not, it would be no stranger story than how Joseph Smith started the Church of Latter Day Saints.
Dante Alighieri, Italian poet and author of Dante's Inferno was born (1265).
Picadilly Circus was first lit by electricity (1932)
President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamtion (1914) asking Americans to express reverence for their mothers and the greeting card industry cheered, and so to did Applebees and the florists. I'm still waiting for someone to declare: Eternally Struggling Writer's Day. That's who is going to get my vote.
Okay, they're kicking me out of the coffee shop - a big ol' barista with a dirty loin cloth and facial piercings who says a dollar cup of coffee don't buy me the right to sit in the uncomfortable chair all day listening to squalling brats, and I either have to buy a fifty dollar bagel or get the hell out!
I leave you with one of my favorite Vincent poems
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
do well, don't make fun of writers, give a sucker an even break...
www.authorbillbrooks.com
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