Between the Covers

I'm reading a book I own for, I believe, the fourth time: Savage Beauty, The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford. It is an extremely well-researched and beautifully written record of the very complex and difficult alcoholic, bisexual, repeatedly aborted, first female to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. (Side note: Milford's biography of Zelda [Mrs. F. Scott] Fitzgerald is an equally wonderful read. One feels that Milford brings these women to life before our eyes.) So what, right? Well the quirks are these: when one recommends a writer to me, what I really want to know is about the writer, not necessarily what s/he wrote. And I am a sheepish poetry ignoramus due to failure of teachers to prod me and lack of sufficient interest to dig out poetry on my own until about the past year and I'm doing nicely, thank you. Oh, and I do not, do not, appreciate most of Millay's poetry. But I love reading her life story. Though much celebrated, she suffered many harsh cruelties and few of life's truly beautiful things. I wonder if, after earliest childhood, she ever had a moment free of worry except when she drank.

My friend loves poetry perhaps above anything else because she considers the beauty of the desert and of light through glass and of flowers purchased at the farmers' market poetry, not to mention what she finds in print. She sought out lyric in school and has a minor scandal in her past relating to her tremendous desire to own a particular volume of rhyme. We'd only known each other a short time and she'd been sending me favorite poems frequently. "What are your favorite poems?" she asked.  I had to confess I was ignorant and a little bit prickly about being ignorant and not, after all, starving for the relief that only verse can bring. I was doing OK without poetry. She persisted in sending me sonnets and quatrains and then began to assign me the task of interpreting certain of them. WTF? I'm not a schoolgirl. But my friend is an oldest child and I think her sister and brother probably jumped when she said "jump".

I reluctantly began to scratch the surface and learned that I did know Charles Bukowski's writings quite well and who wouldn't consider Bob Dylan a poet? I can recite volumes of his words. I have been fortunate to read and enjoy the offerings of unpublished everyman kinds of poets, so perhaps I wasn't quite as benighted as I feared. I actually like Emily Dickinson and Robert Service and I've happily read some Sara Teasdale after being exposed to her in the book about Vincent Millay. My friend and I got into a  discussion - perhaps a spirited debate - about Millay after I began the book this time and after she confessed she'd never finished reading her copy even once. I commented that I skipped right over her poems when they were printed in full in the body of my book. "What?" exclaimed Friend. I admitted I just didn't like Millay's poems for the most part. Friend immediately began to shoot me some of her favorite Millay pieces. "No," said I. "Don't care for it at all."  Friend couldn't understand me at all.

Our discussion rolled on and Friend e-mailed me Recuerdo (don't Google it, Reader, you're about to have it from the source). I wrote back that though I am the woman who likes Victoriana, I find Millay's language stiff and dated. I did, however, describe to my friend the spirit of the poem as I believed it to be, and the sun broke through the clouds. "Yes!" she cheered, "You've got it exactly." Well, yes, Friend - I'm not soulless or stupid. And I do understand that Renascence rocked the world 100 years ago and rocks the world now, expounding on beautiful, lofty concepts, but I don't care for the words presented to relate the concepts. My friend commented that she likes old-fashioned language and does not care for today's overused hip, slick and cool talk. I agreed that I like good, descriptive language that people from many generations would understand ("rock the world", notwithstanding), but I'm unlikely to say that I am "merry" about anything. We congratulated one another for making a good case for our respective beliefs and I imagine she grinned as widely as I did.

The next morning I dawdled at the computer nursing coffee more slowly than usual. My friend is a night owl and often drops e-mails late at night to greet me on my virtual breakfast tray. I wanted to send her something, and on a hunch I Googled. Oh, yeah!  There it was! YouTube, of course. Millay reciting her own Recuerdo. I played it for myself and nearly toppled over. I'd been reading about Vincent's beautiful voice and speech patterns. I'm not sure who highjacked her and gave this reading, but it was a mean, mean trick. Had I paid a quarter or half-dollar in 1940s money to attend a reading, I'd have demanded my money back, I'm afraid. I just sent it to my friend without comment and said "Let me know what you think."  Even my poetry loving cohort had to admit the rendering has lost something across the decades. We shared a laugh and she quickly sent me another poem. Edna St. Vincent Millay was from Maine. I know Maine. My father lives in Maine. I have never heard another human being speak in Millay's manner. Not from Maine or anywhere else. I still absolutely love her story.

Something that charmed me:  I have found one of Millay's works I like, read beautifully by a man who sounds like perhaps he is from Maine. Have I mentioned I love learning new things?