>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Rob Casper: Hello, my name is Rob Casper. I'm the Head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress and I want to welcome you today to help us celebrate the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is the first of our Literary Birthdays events. We do six of them annually. We're excited that we bring in the spring with Ms. Millay. Let me ask you before we begin to take out your cellphones or any electronic devices that you have and make sure they're turned off. The electronic equipment here is a little bit sensitive to the static that those produce. Second, I want you to know that our program is being recorded and by participating in any way you give us permission for future use of this recording. I can tell you a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center, which turned 75 this year. We are the home to the Poetry Laureate Consultant in Poetry and we put on literary readings, lectures and panels of all sorts throughout the year. In the back, near the books, there is a list of our spring events for 2013. Please pick them up and come. We have Literary Birthday with William Shakespeare, Robert Penn Warren and Catherine Ann Porter coming throughout the spring. You can also signup, our signup sheet which is outside, to get information about our Literary Birthdays and the other events that we put on. We do some 40 events throughout the year. And you can check us out online at www.loc.gov/poetry. We have a new website that just came out today, so go check it out. We're very excited about it. You can read about Millay who would have turned 121 years old today and about our feature poets in our program, which were on your seat. We are thrilled to have two great American poets, Claudia Emerson and Alicia Ostriker here from Virginia and New Jersey respectively, to discuss Millay, read some of her poems and talk about her influence on their own work. We are also happy to welcome any of you who are members of the Millay Society who have done so much to support Millay's work here at the library and across the country. We have some information on Steepletop, which is the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay up in Western Massachusetts, 10 minutes from West Stockbridge if you know where that is. It will be opening up May 24th, so you can check it out. You can find out more information online. That's also in the back. Following the readings by our poets who will come up in alphabetical order Verna Curtis from the library's Prints and Photographs Division will say a few words about our great, great tabletop display of Millay materials in our collection. They're really, really lovely and if you haven't gotten a chance to already come up and check them out I urge you to do so. Ms. Curtis will also talk about the invaluable work Prints and Photographs does to ensure that future generations can continue to learn about the exemplars of our culture like Edna St. Vincent Millay. So, without further ado please join me in welcoming Claudia Emerson and Alicia Ostriker. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Claudia Emerson: Thank you Rob, Caitlin, everyone for making this event possible. I'm Claudia. I'm very pleased to be here today to participate in the celebration of Edna St. Vincent Millay's birthday and I'm particularly honored to share the podium with Alicia whose work I've long admired. I'm going to talk today about the influence of Mallay's sonnet that they have had on my writing and I'm going to focus particularly on the sonnets in her a Pulitzer prize winning collection, " The Harp-Weaver" and other poems including, " Sonnets From An Ungrafted Tree" the sequence that closes the book. My awareness of Millay began when I was a teenager in the 1970's, a time when I would not have read Millay in any of my English classes. I believe she was out of favor in the Virginia high school English curriculum. But, a friend of mine had a grandmother who was a great reader with a wonderful library, the kind of library I had only seen in movies. The kind with a real fire in the fireplace, impossibly deep chairs and it was there I happened upon a collection of Millay. I believe it was the Collected Millay. Before I continue I should confess to you that though I stand before you a practitioner of poetry for the past 30 years, I was never a young poet. When I was in my teens I considered myself a writer of country songs and short stories, but not a poet. Nevertheless, I was a passionate, well sort of hysterical sort who was drawn initially to Emily Dickinson's poems, those that I at least considered to be about love and to Millay's sonnets, those that strummed fully the chord of despair that so often accompanied what I thought was love and love thwarted. Here's an example from Millay, a poem I loved when I was 15. I think it's that kind of despair so fully unabashedly strummed. Pity me not because the light of day at close of day no longer walks the sky. Pity me not for beauties passed away from field and thicket as the year goes by. Pity me not the waning of the moon, nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon and you no longer look with love on me. This I have known always: Love is no more than the wide blossom which the wind assails, than the great tide that treads the shifting shore, strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales. Pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn. I wrote everything when I was 15 with a rapidograph ink pen, all my letters small in lower case. I took to copying Dickinson and Millay poems in my tight small letters, not plagiarizing to be very clear, just as a way of making mine, whichever poem I choose to send to whichever person had most recently taken and broken my heart. [Laughter] My handwriting looks like a kind of intricate embroidery when I happen upon it now. And while I didn't know it at the time the act of copying in your hand the work of someone you admire as a kind of imitation of ghosting of the original composer, a way of dancing with her shadow. It is only in the looking back that I can see that part of what had to have drawn me to Millay in these sonnets was not only the expression of drama and even melodrama, but its lyric containment, the restraint of the form that is vital part of the meaning. Her embroidered sound so far surpasses the obviously masterful end rhymes, her syntax an incantation, the passionate lyrical cadence, the irresistible integrity of the lines, the assonants and consonants so intricately entwined, great tide that treads the shifting shore, fresh wreckage gathered in the gales, all of which would have appealed to the songwriter in me. And the anaphora like pity me not, pity me not until the volt-- till at the Volta she reveals what she and so I have known always, the slowness of the heart to learn what even the 15 year old mind had already encountered and would again. Here is another favorite of the younger me Loving you less than life, a little less than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess I cannot swear I love you not at all. For is that-- for there is that about you in this light, a yellow darkness, sinister of rain, which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight to dwell on you, and dwell on you again. And I am made aware of many a week I shall consume, remembering in what way your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek, and what divine absurdities you say, till all the world and I and surely you, will know I love you, whether or not I do. Is there any better composition of conflict of indecision, of not knowing what everyone else must know about the stubborn heart that will not learn? Three well-wrought sentences punctuated with absolute precision, lovely variation. I mean for a high school student just to see that many hyphens, commas, dashes and a dramatic colon before the closing couplet. You don't really need your, "Strunk & White", just read Millay. And the example of repetition to dwell on you and dwell on you again, is there any better model of the importance of the sentence, the sense of the sentence within the ingeniously mannered form. Years later when I turned in my third book to the sonnet I was influenced greatly in my choice by Ellen Bryant Voigt's, "Kyrie." A collection Voigt calls a mosaic of sonnets or variations on the form. But, it was around this same time that I taught in a summer school session a seminar on poetic meter and form and a young woman in the class decided to do her final paper on Millay. I hadn't read Millay in years and was immediately drawn to, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." But, now as a grown woman, writing myself from the place turned subject of divorce, my own ungrafting and struggling with an edge being honed, one of part despair, part controlled emotion, part survival and part resilience that came from a relieved period of solitude. I was working hard when I rediscovered Millay in the sonnet, teaching 100 students a semester in writing intensive classes and even though my divorce was an insistent subject for new poetry, I was also happily remarried to someone whose much loved first wife had died from cancer five years before. So, though the poems in the book were coming from different places emotionally both sequences would benefit from my attention to, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." Millay's sequence looks over the shoulder of a woman estranged from her husband who returns home to care for him as he is dying. These were the sonnets that I had rejected when I was young as dull with their ordinary imagery, the form not so much the face of these poems, but their foundation. Something I as an immature reader hadn't been able to see and also male critics of the day hadn't seen, some calling the poems quote unquote, "Deficient in masculinity." [Laughter] And the sonnet's appeal to me was immediate and very rich, multifaceted, bring into play form meaning as well as a particular emotional intensity beautifully restrained. I suppose I've always seen the creative process as a confluence of such elements, emotional urgency, time and space and by space I mean the space where one physically writes as well as the poetic architecture. My new husband Kent commuted by train north of Fredericksburg to Woodbridge leaving at 7:00 in the morning and coming on the 6:15. I gave myself from 4:30 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when I left school until the train came in in the evening, as my time for writing and I choose to go to a local coffee shop near the station. The sonnet became a space I could handle over the course of the days it took to draft one. Those 14 minds were manageable in the time I had and necessary for the emotional intensity of the subject, a series of letters to Kent. These epistolary sonnets would be paired in the collection with poems written to my ex-husband. And while those poems didn't take the form of the sonnet, they were very much influenced by the tone of, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" and obviously the fact that Voigt and Millay had chosen to write in sequence had great appeal. The sonnet is a particular architecture and whether one follows its rules strictly or is inclined to take liberties with such rules, the sequence becomes its own architecture allowing greater possibilities with a narrative arc and with variation of the form within it. Here is the first of the 17 sonnets from, "An Ungrafted Tree." So she came back into his house again and watched beside his bed until he died, loving him not at all. The winter rain splashed in the painted butter tub outside, where once her red geraniums had stood, where still their rotted stalks were to be seen. The thin log snapped and she went out for wood, bareheaded, running the few steps between the house and shed. Here, from the sodden eaves blown back and forth on ragged ends of twine, saw the dejected creeping-jinny vine, and one, big-aproned, blithe, with stiff blue sleeves rolled to the shoulder that warm day in spring, who planted seeds, musing ahead to their far blossoming. We are taught as poets to show, not to tell, never tell and yet here Millay boldly begins a narrative with blatant telling. So she came back into his house again and watched beside his bed until he died, loving him not at all. In a way then, in terms of narrative, after telling this there is nothing left to tell. I recall understanding as a grown woman then in my early 40's the power of this and took this lesson to heart in the beginning of my own sonnet sequence. And though the poems I wrote to Kent are essentially love poems, I would also begin with some very telling language. Here's an example from book, "Late Wife" the first in the letters to Kent. For three years you lived in your house just as it was before she died, your wedding portrait on the mantle, her clothes hanging in the closet, her hair still in the brush. You have told me you gave it all away then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation cross she wore, her name in cursive chased on the gold underside, your ring in the same box, those photographs you still avoid and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed, small things. Months after we met you told me she had made it after we had slept already beneath its loft and thinning raveled pattern as though beneath her shadow, When I began to draft the poems I would write about my first failed marriage. I appreciated greatly Millay's use of domestic details, a rural landscape, the ways the woman confuses herself with that landscape, her husband's disappearance, her reality, a person she has come to care for out of the lingering sense of obligation and the way Millay handles time, its compression. She is one of the poets who gave me permission then to mine my 19 year failed marriage, one that had exhausted itself against a similarly rural landscape to perform my own excavation of figures. There is one of the divorce epistles from my work. This one is called, "The Last Christmas." We were both sick. I had lost my voice; you were feverish, coughing. I had to split the kindling myself. We'd been without power for two days, the spindling cedar darkening the room. The lines, still sleeved in ice, sagged all afternoon above the arc of the axe, the lift and fall of the edge you made sure it kept. It was late when I watched the blade grazed wood and keep falling toward me. I felt it brush my pants leg close as a cat, harmless. I quit then, certain I had let it fall where it wanted, not into seasoned wood but into me. Surely, the ice would never melt, the pines would not straighten; I'd never speak. Later, when I carried up your supper on a tray, you woke-pale, glazed from the fever breaking and told me you'd worried when the sound of splintering stopped. You were sure you had gotten up from your sickbed to look out that very window. You said my mouth was open, but I was too far away and you could not hear me. I was small, mute beneath the window frame, your breath forming, freezing on the panes until you could not see me, and there was nothing you could do. I spent the two decades of that marriage living in the old farmhouses, heating with wood, hanging clothes on the line outside in winter where they did this thing I called freeze-drying. Perhaps that's why this the 11th of Millay's, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree", is quite possibly my favorite. It came into her mind, seeing how the snow was gone, and the brown grass exposed again, and clothes pin-- clothes pins and an apron long ago, in some white storm that sifted through the pane and sent her forth reluctantly at last to gather in, before the line gave way, garments, board-stiff, that galloped on the blast clashing like angel armies in a fray, an apron long ago in such a night blown down and buried in the deepening drift, to lie till April thawed it back to sight, forgotten, quaint and novel as a gift it struck her, as she pulled and pried and tore, that here was spring, and the whole year to be lived through once more. I absolutely adore the artifact, the apron as an article of repression buried until spring, season we normally associate with renewal and rebirth being instead a sign not that a whole year is to be lived through, but the, the whole year as in the self-same, not survived but doomed to be repeated. I also found lots of imagery from winter as I looked for similar metaphors of entrapment. One more poem, this one from my work called, "Chimney Fire." I learned to dread winter early, before fall showed any real sign of itself, the world still filled with locusts, crickets, bees in the boneset, ashen moths quickening the dusk. Then around the time the hickory nuts came and began to fall, the tree far larger than the house and fertile with sharp husks that struck and struck again, startling the tin roof and me beneath it. I began to dread as well the silence I knew would come yoked to the cold. By then you'd cut and stacked the wood, cleaned out the stove. In late afternoons we scoured the undergrowth for fatwood, skeletal sap for lighting the fire you rarely let go out. Every night you'd close the stove down tight before we went upstairs and the meager heat from that slow burn might keep the pipes from freezing, but it wouldn't reach the bedroom where we slept beneath layers leaden as water that would not float me, dense as mud beneath that water. In the morning all our breathing had turned to ice, blooming like white liken on the insides of the window panes. One night, one winter nearing spring the fire would not be kept, the chimney caught it and we watched; heard it pour up into the tree the fire would have consumed with the house if it had burned much longer. But, slowly the flames turned back, receded to the familiar rise of smoke, banked coals, my eyes, my mouth filled with ashes, in short, the whole year to be lived through once more. In the somewhat bizarre documentary, "Millay at Steepletop" has anyone seen that little 20 minute video? There is footage of Millay in winter, her bedroom window open so that chickadees can fly to her hand and eat the seed cupped there. Lots of us creatures have sought Millay's hand in our efforts to find a way through a night, a winter's day. In that same film an unidentified friend is reported to have said of Millay that quote, "One never forgot the things she noticed", end quote. I can't imagine any greater tribute to a writer than that and I believe that in celebrating the day of her birth we are also celebrating all of the things she noticed and we will never forget. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Alicia Ostriker: Good morning. I'm Alicia. Can you hear in the back? Is that okay? Thank you Rob, thank you Caitlin, thank you Claudia, thank you all for being here, thank you Edna for being born and inspiring so many of us. Let me begin with a poem I loved as an adolescent, one of those Edna St. Vincent Millay poems that I had memorized before I even knew that I was memorizing it. That probably has happened with-- to many of you. Your young brain just absorbs a poem and there it is when you want it. Oh world-- this is, "God's World." Oh world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag and all but cry with color! That gaunt crag to crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, but never knew I this. Here such a passion is as stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear thou'st made the world too beautiful this year. My soul is all but out of me, let fall no burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call. It seemed to me like Claudia I was probably around 13, it seemed to me as if the voice that spoke that poem was my voice, my experience. John Keats speaks in a letter of the true voice of feeling. The true voice of feeling is something that modernism tried hard to kill and that postmodernism has stabbed many times [Laughter] with the silver dagger of insistence that language cannot mean anything yet it survives and is likely to go on surviving and this poem is an example. Here such a passion is as stretcheth me apart. What and where is this passion, nature, the world, the self, yes, yes and yes. The feeling of intense joy so strong you feel when you're 13 as if you will burst, yes. What does God means in Millay's poetry? What does the soul mean? These are things I didn't ask as a 13 year old girl, didn't need to ask because I knew. It was the same God as she speaks to at the close of, "Renaissance." God I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on thy heart. A student of mine recently remarked to me that she believes in the God of the poets, not the God of the Theologians. At the risk of stating the obvious, God in Millay's poetry exists in the world of nature and in beauty and never indoors. Here's a second poem I knew by heart when I was still a girl and felt it to be a part of me before I had anything approaching the kind of experience from which it drives. This one is a Shakespearean sonnet. Probably many of you know it by heart or did. 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 pain 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 well may be. I do not think I would. [ Silence ] >> What was happening to me here? Partly it was the training of my ear, the enjambment of lines three and four, oh you can do that with the end of a line and with the cadences that replicate musically what they are talking about nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again. The ells for lack of love alone, the sound effects of fill the thickened lung with breath. The repartition and caesura of the last line it well may be full stop, I do not think I would. You all smiled. You all got what the rhythms were doing as well as what it said that offering of food and wood. I think even as young as I was I recognized that the proposal of selling love for peace or trading the memory of a night for food was ridiculous. You can't do that. And yet, there was something in their about love. Many decades later if I set the close of the second quatrain next to William Carlos Williams more, now more famous quote it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. It strikes me that many a man is making friends with death even as I speak for lack of love alone is actually more true than what Williams says. And by the way I bet he had read Millay's poem [Laughter] before he wrote, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" which also by the way is also about the centrality of love in ones' life. And now a third poem, this one a Petrarchan sonnet, which is more difficult to write; the rhymes, the rhymes here are ABBA, ABBA, CDE, DCE. What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain under my head till morning, but the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply, and in my heart there stirs a quiet pain for unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, yet knows its boughs more silent than before. I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me a little while, Wow, poems such as these became an integral part of what I call myself. They're music, they're endorsement of joy; they're endorsement of Eros. In what, "Lips My Lips Have Kissed" there is a boast, the defiance of convention of so many of her poems mingled here with a quiet pain that combines the pain of the unremembered lads to whom she never intended to be faithful along with her own pain for herself. You notice that though it is implied that the lads needed her more than she needed them as individuals there is no sense of guilt here, only a recognition that time passes and one ages. It is taken for granted that Eros is all one; that lovers are interchangeable and yet love is precious. The word cry, the lad's word cry becomes the word song and the experience of sexuality is at once supernatural and natural and esthetic, a source of poetry and what is valued is natural and the poet is a tree, a girl for all seasons. So, let me read a few poems of my own. I haven't written as many poems about simple joy as Millay did, but I read many of them and they became part of me. So, here is one. This is called, "The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz." As if there could be a world of absolute innocence in which we forget ourselves, the owners throw sticks and half-bald tennis balls toward the surf and the happy dogs leap after them as if catapulted. Black dogs, tan dogs, tubes of glorious muscle, pursuing pleasure more than obedience. They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand, sometimes they'll plunge straight into the foaming breakers like diving birds, letting the green turbulence toss them, until they snap and sink teeth into floating wood then bound back to their owners shining wet, with passionate speed for nothing, for absolutely nothing but joy. So, looking at this poem I notice the word passion, which is one of Edna's words and I notice sink at the end of a line whose enjambment then takes it in a different direction, interesting. [ Silence ] >> A couple of other poems about Eros. [ Silence ] >> And it's, and it's very, it's very clear to me that whether its love responded to or whether it's heartbreaking love, love for Millay, Eros for Millay was divine. This is called, "Desire and Joy" and it's in a book called, "The Book of Seventy" and there's a lot of poems about death in it, in the opening section and then this is the beginning The fear of death behind the scrim of words, you've said enough about that; let fear be shut in the closet. Desire means you are inhabited by Aphrodite that laughing witch, her palms caress your breasts, her body presses lightly against your body, inside your body like an older sister teasing and giggling there. She warms the blood and this is lovely, then she heats it and you go crazy, but cling to your craziness and the object of desire doesn't matter. You turn him into Dionysus the Savage; you would go with him anywhere. You turn him into Krishna; he comes to you in his flowing silk, his feet step lightly down the granite slope. You can hear his flute so clearly you soften for him. You are sure he's real; the sureness is joy. [ Silence ] >> And then one that is a bit, a bit like, "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" the retrospective. This is, "To Aphrodite." They call you the laughing one Aphrodite, honey woman, I suppose because you laugh when our hearts crack like red eggs and we want to die, but you keep us on our knees hoping, trying. Well I am hurt and angry, you are aware I have adored you all my life; sometimes lounging in fur and coal, sometimes as a beggarly hag for I recognized you in that poor disguise. And when the clock threw her arms in the air and I threw my legs around the moon you climbed inside me like the surge of a wave I could ride, I could sail and anyone I kissed I was kissing you, whom I fear I will never see again, never kiss again. [ Silence ] >> With the few minutes remaining to me let me mention that Millay suffered the fate of many women poets when she turned from the theme of feeling to politics where she didn't stop feeling, but started demanding as well. This happened to Adrienne Rich. It happened to Denise Levertov and it might well have happened to Sylvia Plath had she lived. On August 22, 1927, the day before the execution of Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti convicted, we all think falsely convicted of murder during the robbery of a shoe factory, convicted because they were anarchists. Millay was among the protestors on the steps of The State House in Boston and on the front page of, "The New York Times" was Millay's poem, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." Here is that poem. [ Turning pages ] [ Silence ] >> Let us abandon then our gardens and go home and sit in the sitting-room, shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud? Sour to the fruitful seed is the cold earth under this cloud, fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer; we have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them. Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room. Not in our day shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before, beneficent upon us out of the glittering bay, and the warm winds be blown inward from the sea moving the blades of corn with a peaceful sound. Forlorn, forlorn, stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow. And the petals drop to the ground, leaving the tree unfruited. The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted. We shall not feel it again. We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain. What from the splendid dead we have inherited furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued see now the slug and the mildew plunder. Evil does overwhelm the larkspur and the corn; we have seen them go under. Let us sit here, sit still, here in the sitting-room until we die; at the step of death on the walk, rise and go; leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway, and this elm, and a blighted earth to till with a broken hoe. The indoors in Millay always represents failure of energy and life-force. Nature renews us, but not in this poem. I think she was thinking in part of the Biblical admonitions by the Biblical Prophets telling us that if you obey God's commandments and ensure justice in the land then the land will be fertile and fruitful. And if you dishonor the requirements of justice there will be drought and famine and the land will die and you will die with it. She went on writing many more political poems popular at the time and decried by critics. Oh, she was not, she was not following her passions. She was not expressing subjective feeling enough. I have found myself writing increasingly about politics. Here is a poem called, "Listening to Public Radio." Lillooet continue, One: Every morning it feels increasingly like the world of the 30's our parents described and we have read about. When fascism knew what it wanted and descended over Europe like a light frost that suddenly becomes a blizzard or like volcano ash coughing before it erupts. Everyone saw it, but nobody could stop it or not enough people wished to stop it, so nature took its course. The Book of Job came true, the millions and the millions disappeared. Two: I am like one of those sheep in the hymn Sheep May Safely Graze or a lamb in the Psalm the Lord is my Shepard. When the wolves come growling from the woods of anger and hunger; I am not prepared. I have no idea what to do. I would have been trundled to the camps so easily, so without putting up a fight that's right. I am among the cows trotting, farting, pissing, shitting, crowded, bellowing toward the narrow gate, the metal head restraint, the stink up ahead pouring out like a river and after that the stun-gun, the blade, the steel hook, the axes, ultimately the plastic wrapping that protects the meat from air. [ Silence ] >> But let me end with a poem Millay published in 1934. Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely morning and noon and night until I die. Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die. If you would speak with me on any matter, at any time, come where these grapes are grown and you will find me treading them to must. Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust. Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die. Three women come to wash me clean shall not erase this stain, nor leave me lying purely, awaiting the black lover. Death, fumbling to uncover my body in his bed, shall know there has been one before him. [ Silence ] >> And-- oh, I didn't bring this up with me, never mind. I think my 20 minutes are up. I have a poem called, "At the Revelation Restaurant" which is about knowing that you're going to die and loving your body anyhow and saying I think I'd like the hors devours, the soup, the salad, the entree and the desert. [Laughter] Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Verna Curtis: I have never had to follow two poets, so. I guess we get back to the real world. If you'd like to come up after this wonderful program what you'll see on the table before you comes from the Prints and Photographs Division, a special collection here at the Library of Congress that has about 15,000,000 visual images in their original state. And amongst all those collections are some treasures about Edna St. Vincent Millay. They come from various collections and they stretch from 1914 to 1950 when she died. So, the objects you see in black mats come from, "The New York World Telegram and Sun" collection, which is a vast morgue, as we call it, of news photography. So, those photographs cover some of the events in her life that were newsworthy, such as appearance on NBC and CBS Radio when she was involved with protesting for Sacco and Vanzetti. There's a photograph that was used in the newspaper, it's whited out just to show her face and neck, which I think is rather interesting because it looked like it was very lyrical, but in the newspaper it looks very mundane, but it announces her protest. And then there are some that speak of her concern for Lidice, I think that's how you pronounce it, the Nazi massacre in the-- in Czechoslovakia that she and many others were horrified by. And another photograph that shows her presenting a canteen ambulance that was used, that was sent to Sierra Leone. I don't know the exact circumstances of that, but that's also in the 40's when she made a contribution towards feeding people who were starving. There were several important photographers whom we recognize today who photographed her in amongst them is Arnold Genthe who was an immigrant from Germany and we have an enormous collection of his work in the library. After he passed away there were no heirs, so the Librarian of Congress sent some people to New York and we virtually got his studio archive for shipping charges and we preserved his work and amongst his work are several photographs of Millay. There's one on the table in black and white. And then later we were presented with what has become the most famous photograph of her I think now. It's from 1914 and it was in the garden of the publisher Mitchell Kennerley in Long Island. It was originally a color autochrome, which was a process, the first color process we know that was viable. It was a decade old when Genthe experimented with it and took the photograph of Millay. And so, I have the original glass plate, but you can't see it very well. It's rather dark and so we have a contemporary digital print that'll help you. And also in the viewer is another photograph by the same photographer, Genthe, of another poet, Percy MacKaye the year before, 1913 when he appeared in a bird sanctuary mask in New Hampshire. But, that's how the Millay glass plate would have been viewed through that diascope viewer. The other important photographers who did, wanted to portray Millay include Berenice Abbott and we have several photographs of Millay by Abbott and a letter from Abbott asking Millay if she could photograph her, which is interesting. It came with, it came with the photographs. These come from her manuscript collection. And another woman, Jessie Tarbox Beals, it's the one of Millay and her husband. I think it's in Greenwich Village outside their house. I think it's probably one of the more characteristic of her photographs that we have on the table because it has humor, it has the out of doors. It has some of the things the poets here have remarked on today, so take a good look at that. And the largest photograph is by Carl Van Vechten who was a New York photographer and photographed all the important people in the arts at his time. So, please enjoy the table and come back and come to the Prints and Photographs Division if you're interested to see more. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Rob Casper: Thank you Verna and I know Verna will be up here if you want to come up and look at the photographs that we have Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thanks to both our readers, Claudia Emerson and Alicia Ostriker for a terrific, terrific event. I hope you enjoy the day. As I said please do sign up our signup sheet outside. There are books for sale, not only Millay's books, but books by our readers. I'm sure they would be happy to sign copies if you're interested. And just a little over a month from now we will be celebrating Robert Frost's birthday here in this room March 26th with Dana Gioia the former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and Eric Pankey. So, you can find out more about our readings including this one at www.loc.gov/poetry. Thanks again for coming. Have a great day. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.