Posts Tagged → Poetry

Fatal Interview: Sonnets

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

SIGNED | First Edition | Harper and Brothers Publishers | 1931

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Edna St Vincent Millay, who went by Vincent throughout her life, was a fascinating woman living right at the turn of the nineteenth century. Raised, along with her two sisters, by her single mother, Vincent was encouraged to be self-aware, highly creative, and ambitious. 

Her writing career started at a young age, winning a poetry prize at 14 and published by 15. By 21 she was attending Vassar College on a full scholarship. School was difficult for Millay, who was used to a high degree of independence that the institution didn’t offer. She was a juxtaposition of the jazz age woman–often smoking, gambling, drinking, and flirting with both men and women; while also maintaining a strict, self-imposed writing schedule that won her both high honors in the literary circles and kept her mother and sisters out of poverty. 

After her graduation, Vincent moved to Greenwich Village–the beating heart of the bohemian jazz age. Often starring in theater productions and reading tours, Vincent was both widely popular and highly controversial. Her poetry over the years dealt with such taboo themes as feminism, divorce, war, and poverty. And yet, her vivacity and intelligence inevitably won people over. 

In 1923, at the age of 31, Vincent won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.” Though the Pulitzer Prizes had been around for six years, this was only the second year the Poetry Award had been established. 

During the next few years Vincent married Eugen Jan Boissevain and moved into her own home, Steepletop, near Austerlitz, New York. Once a blueberry farm, it became Vincent’s writing and entertaining retreat. After her death, her sister, Norma helped establish Steepletop as a writer’s colony, attended by such famous poets as Mary Oliver. After Norma’s passing, a land sale helped preserve Steepletop as a museum. 

Fatal Interview is Vincent’s seventh book of poetry. Published in 1931 when Vincent was 39 years old, the sonnets mourn a failed love affair. Though devotedly married and semi-retired at Steepletop, Vincent still led a very unconventional and bohemian life that included a number of lovers, a possible gambling problem, and a drug addiction from a traumatic car crash years before. 

Reading Vincent’s poetry is to take a peek into that life and feel, for just a moment, like you too are a young jazz age debutante, a vibrant performer, a social activist, an eclectic poet all rolled into one. 

Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949-1993

by Allen Ginsberg

SIGNED | Rhino Records | 1994

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Released on September 6th 1994, Holy Soul Jelly Roll is a 4-disc box set of Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-1997) spoken poetry, including a 64-page booklet of notes, read by the author at various events over the years. 

I sat down with the five hour long tracklist and spent a really chill afternoon listening. I’ve listened to many audiobooks in my day, but never one of poetry and it made for a really immersive experience. There’s light jazz playing in the background, faint static behind the tracks, and Ginsberg’s soft-spoken voice reading. Intermittently, he sings–the very first track “Walking at Night in Key West” is set to the tune of “The Saints Come Marching Home”–or gives a little introduction to his poetry, imbuing the whole album with a feeling like you’re sitting there with him. We’re at an open mic, it’s vaguely 1960-something, and Allen Ginsberg has just started reading to a hushed crowd. 

And then there’s something to be said for the album to be on CDs. It’s very mid-90s (vintage now) and tangible in a way that digital media is not. There’s ritual to listening: first of all, you will need a CD-player, then gently remove the CDs from their cases, place them in the play, and sit down to listen. Oh, I suppose you could get a portable CD player and listen while out and about. But something about Ginsberg’s calm reciting lends itself to remaining still and letting the words wash over you. 

To make this particular album more substantial, it has been signed by Ginsberg on the inside of the box. On November 13th 1994 he held this box and signed it for a fan. They’d probably just bought it and then went home to listen, forever linking mid-autumn with the sound of Ginsberg’s voice. It’s kinda lovely, to think you can extend that experience nearly twenty years later. 

Ginsberg died a few short years after the release of this album. He was a core member of the Beat Generation and a lasting voice in counterculture America. He once said, in a Face to Face interview with the BBC, that “a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years,” and though he may be gone, we are still here and we are still listening.