Song of a Reformed Headhunter

My first 7/7 effort for the new year: write a poem a day for one week, starting on the 7th day of the month. Not sure if the draft is any good, but I wrote about people about whom I don't usually write: politicians, scientists and actors. The first part, with its matter-of-fact tone, is at odds with the rest of the poem. The Millay section (Vincent) is factually inaccurate since she did not die in Paris, but I don't know if that fudge really matters. I could change her to someone else. The poem is a gallery of characters and may be added to. Concierge Guardian of the gate, a doorman, I greet your visitors and keep out the street. On rainy days I whistle for your cab and stow your bags carefully at the back. I salt the sidewalk so you won’t slip, after the snowfall has been cleared in heaps. When power goes down, as in the earthquake, I provide candles, like my medieval namesake. And when you are gone, I hold the parcels f...

A Poem to a Poet I am a poet, I have had my day For I have written one immortal line; Nor Greek nor Latin ever wrote more fine— The Poem: Edna St. Vincent Millay.             Cora Millay, “A Poet to A Poem,” quoted in Nancy Milford’s biography of Vincent You had pleasure at my making, happiness rolling in foam that on the scalloped shore raises to a gull shout and creaking oar an astonishing figure in an astonishing dress. Hardship you had also, the heavy progress from island to wild island, store to store, to have shut in your face the frightened door, before one dared receive you, your largesse. Mother! The name is too small for a lover, like Hestia who yielded her throne and fled. For dandelions, mustard, pig-weed, clover, abandoning the flowers of marriage bed, you search, jealous as Hera, the world all over. I am the best thought springing from your head.

Savage Beaut y does not dispel the impression that Edna St. Vincent Millay was a major life but a minor poet. This well-written biography quotes many poems in full, including "Renascence," which early won Millay warm admiration from poets and editors, and financial support for an education at Vassar. The biography occasionally grades the poems it quotes, saying of one "extraordinarily lovely" and of another "masterful." It is, however, more interested in identifying the addressee of the poems, and other details from Millay's life. A discussion of the style of "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" begins insightfully but ends too quickly by linking the harp with a woman's head to the lap loom on which Clara Millay, Vincent's mother, wove hair for a living. Interesting identification, but it is surely not the last word on the poem. Matters are not helped when emphasis is placed on the astonishing attraction of Millay's low reading voice...

Today my reading group met for the last time to read the last four chapters of The Odyssey , in E. V. Rieu's prose translation. HS, who also led us to read The Iliad last year, gave us our further reading after a most satisfying session. One handout collects the scholia written in the margins of the manuscripts. In Book 1, someone wrote, "They say in the myth that Poseidon went to the Ethiopians at a certain season and was honored by them. But in the allegory, Poseidon is a term for water. Since water, that is, the ocean, circles the whole earth, and because the Nile at a certain season waters the land of the Ethiopians and makes the trees grow, on this account they say Poseidon, or water, is honored by them as the cause of many good things for them. Book 9: Homer . . . seems to have been the first to devise fearful pleasantries, as in the passage describing that most unpleasant personage the Cyclops: "Noman will I eat last, but the rest before him"--that "gues...