So I'm reading Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Millay was a poet and playwright, and she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for poetry.  I'd never really read her work, but I first saw the bio in some bookstore years ago, and I read the inside cover and looked at all the black and white photos in the middle.  That's what I do with bios; I always look at the pictures.  I love the written word, and I wouldn't say that most photos are worth a thousand of them, but photographs are obviously more specific, more concrete.  And when you're reading a biography, you're looking for specific and concrete.  But photos have their limits, just as words do.  And there are some people and things that suffer from those limitations. 

Take old Edna, or, as her family and friends called her, Vincent.  She was a notorious man-killer, and woman-killer.  Pretty much everyone fell in love with her, often instantly.  But if you look at pictures of her, you wouldn't see why.  Her allure was in her voice and the way she carried herself and what she said and how she said it.  And being a brilliant poet didn't hurt, either.

So anyway, I kept seeing the book in different stores, and my interest grew stronger when I read the author's biography Zelda: A Biography, about F. Scott's wife.  I've also read bios of F. Scott himself, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and others.  For some reason, I find the lives of early 20th century American writers fascinating.  And the publishing practices from that time are interesting as well. 

The two top bestsellers from 1937, according to the bio, were How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  Both remain big sellers.  According to the author, "Self-help books and historical fiction swept an America eager to emerge from the Depression and escape from the turmoil in Europe." 

Rather foolishly, apparently, I had thought that self-help books were a fairly new phenomenon.  But I think the quotation is interesting, and true today if you make a few changes:  "Self-help books and historical fiction swept an America eager to emerge from depression and escape from the turmoil in the Middle East (and everywhere else)." 

It isn't particularly profound to say that the more things change the more they stay the same.  But I do find it interesting. 

Millay didn't like being called a woman poet.  For one thing, while she considered herself a feminist, she wasn't a big fan of women (outside of the bedroom, at least).  More importantly, of course, she simply wanted to be called a poet.  Which is also a big issue today--some artists want to be known as women writers or black writers or whatever because all of that whatever has a great deal to do with style, subject matter, and, well, politics, or just the desire or need to represent a certain group.  Others just want to be writers, artists.  Art should be judged by its artistry, regardless of its artist.  Of course, theoretical shoulds and wants are largely irrelevant in the practice of assigning labels.  If you're a minority that almost always becomes your label, whether or not you're happy about it.

And the thing is, while Millay's poetry was enjoyed by everyone, she is credited with writing a sort of anthem to or rallying cry for women, especially young women:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends ­
It gives a lovely light!

I like that one, partly because it's easy to remember, and I have trouble quoting anything; my memory for such things is shit.  But then, its surface simplicity is also a problem in the end.  Because that is the poem most people remember, just as "News Item" (Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses) is the poem of Dorothy Parker's that folks tend to quote.  Such poems nutshell a nuance of the essence of each writer, which is pretty amazing for such short pieces, but still, you'd want to be remembered for more than a nuance, wouldn't you?  Then again, being remembered at all beats being forgotten entirely, I guess.

It's interesting how much poetry changed during the twentieth century.  I'm not a poetry person; I don't really understand most of it.  But structurally, grammatically, and even topic-wise, poetry has really evolved.  After all, there are some people now that can't stand poetry that rhymes.  Rhyming seems old-fashioned and artificial.  Damn, though, when someone rhymes well, seemingly effortlessly, that's some good stuff. 

Taking a little tangent, prose seems to be changing, too.  Shorter and tighter is the rage.  Flash fiction.  I'm not always a fan, though, of stripping things down.  Raymond Carver had an editor that always cut his stories down, but that didn't always create a stronger story.  I have a friend who can't write a story shorter than 20 pages.  So I'm always telling her to cut them by half, or at least a quarter, if she wants to get them published.  You'd think that technology would create all this space.  Instead, it's inspired shorthand.

Anyway.  My initial complaint with the bio was that it focused too completely on Millay's life and not enough on her craft.  Because while a biography focuses on a person's life, what that person does is a huge part of that life.  But as the book wears on, craft comes into play.  Millay would work out poems completely in her mind, quite a feat considering some were pages long, and then she'd write them down.  There was some tinkering afterward, but not much.  And as she gre older, writing would give her terrible headaches, and yet she kept on writing. 

That's what writers do, I guess.  Which is one reason why I identify myself more and more as a reader than a writer.  Writers have that drive, that compulsion, that discipline. 

I think people read bios of writers for the controversy and scandal, but writers read bios of writers also to make themselves feel better.  Say you adore the works of Hemingway.  After you read a bio, though, of his depression and his mother dressing him like a girl when he was a baby and all that other crap, would you really want to be Ernest Hemingway?  Fuck no.  Or you read about Millay, who had that craft, or someone else with some extraordinary gift.  Well, if you don't have any great gift, you can hardly feel bad about not being some genius.  Ordinary people can create works of seeming genius, I think, but I doubt it happens regularly.  Or, you read about someone who seems like you, and that gives you hope that while you haven't created anything worthwhile yet, you still might.  But few writers, few really good ones, are really in no way ordinary.  Creating something good gives weight to a life.  When you feel like a balloon, sometimes it's worthwhile to read about souls anchored to the earth through their work.

Millay ended up being like her candle.  She died at 58; fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck.  I never heard much talk of her when I was in school, but, again, poetry was never my thing. 

I once wrote a poem that rhymes.  It's not good, although my non-rhyming poetry is little better.  I like the boundaries of rhyme, the streamline.

Projection

See the mime stuck in a box:

there are no bars; there are no locks.

And yet he's frozen in his space,

while mounting fear shows on his face.

And when the box begins to shrink,

we watch his hopes crumble and sink.

The mime is forced now to his knees,

and yet his lips emit no pleas.

Invisible forces drown his cries,

still his will, and blind his eyes.

Imagined horrors have control;

they sap his strength, steal his soul.

Words can never quite express

the length and breadth of his distress.

Yet no one thinks much of the mime;

his troubles are not worth our time.

Clowns and mimes, they're all the same:

they turn our fears into a game.

The lack of freedom in a cage;

the lack of strength to show our rage.

The vagueness of a gray situation;

the stark futility of our frustration.

These are the dregs from which we hide,

and thus the mime we won't abide.

See, I need to read more Millay.