14 Lines
My super model is stumbling nervous
Ly about the runway trying to soft
Shoe a sonnet ala Edna St. Vin
Cent Millay stiffly over sore ankles
But not willing to offer her neck
Yet. How many steps does she have left to
Profess (then dismiss) her love? (as Edna
Would do) Six? That hardly seems sufficient
But this model has been on and off her
Legs since she was nineteen and should be a
Ble to handle my shadow in the wings.
the hell with this sonnet. i want to love you outside this ancient rhyme scheme.
i missed you by days, really, a few spins of the globe, and i won’t even pretend
you would have noticed me throwing myself head first down the stairs at the stage door in order to catch your attention.
The Real Controversy Sneaks In
While you were sleeping, or for you Americans, in bed with the sheets up over your heads hoping to wake up with democracy intact, I’ve been seething with anger over a grave injustice having been done to a woman who died 70 some years ago. Her name, Edna St. Vincent Millay… which seemed a pompous name right out of the gate like the Queen of Hippopotamuses daintily taking notes on doilies. Then I learned she was literally named after a poor hospital. A complete 2 point reversal in wrestling terms. And another example of my functional idiocy.
My straw filled dilettante ass continued to be kicked up and down the blocks of any neighborhood when my lack of historical literacy got further exposed by learning she was famous, a sensation, in the new media of the 20th century. If you polled reasonably literate people in 1930 if they knew who Edna St. Vincent Millay is I don’t know what the numbers would be but just asking the question satisfies my pretense of study. Now let’s pause on what has brought her fame: Typing words on paper. How so not long ago and yet how quaint. She won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1923. Something called Movie Stardom is in its infancy but she was never in a movie. Who won the Pulitzer for poetry last year or any year? Yeah. That’s what I thought. I don’t care either. But I can name a bunch of fucking movie stars.
Moving along, but holding this last image in frame a bit; Edna, still living in a time of words and photographs, sure some of them moving (if not hers), was living in a time of mere words having actual relevance. We do have some photographs and maybe we can find her voice on radio. She was sexy. And she had power. She was sex and she used sex and she got used by it you must expect and I just learned this recently. Mighta got a little smitten.
But
Being that I am given to tepid approaches I tasted her poems with the furthest tip of my tongue hoping to flick open the bud only to be left searching for the you know. Unsatisfied I threw myself back into her personal life like a gossip from the future. This was satisfying in a way that maintained my boner. As a force. As a life she is vital. Well, up until her drug addiction, her servant/husband abusing, the whole unrequited infatuation thing, and her clumsy head first tumble down the stairs. These are mere macro details that should only add flavor to reading her documenting Sonnet book Fatal Interview. But she in the 21st century has been done wrong!
Submitted for your perusal a useful trifle.
I brace myself for her Sonnet Explosion fully expectorating my distaste for the form. I will come to terms with sonnetizing. I might incorporate a hem haw into my own poetasting. If nothing else I’ll appreciate the guttural mucous bubbling. I push my canoe into the water at Sonnet i. I sonnet along with the current through the single digits and the teens until it hits some rapids in the twenties and my canoe has ground ashore above a coming waterfall. We’re somewhere around Sonnet xxiv I believe. There’s some portage to do here. I’m a little bit lost because things wash away in the river. I shall reorient with my compass, Google. Let’s say xxviii.
https://www.google.com/search…
And rejoin the stream at Sonnet 28. Let us go to first link that takes us there.
https://allpoetry.com/Sonnet-XXVIII:-From-Fatal-Interview
And read
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream,
And out of all our burning their remains
No feeblest spark to fire us…
Wait what? their remains? Surely this cannot be correct. This obviously calls for there. Let us go to another link.
https://www.best-poems.net/edna-st-vincent-millay/sonnet-xxviii-from-fatal-interview.html
The same! I submit Edna has been jobbed! Look here, 21st Century
https://archive.org/details/inlibrary
(and ref. Fatal Interview)
The poem reads
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream,
And out of all our burning there remains
No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,
This be our solace: that it was not said
When we were young and warm and in our prime,
Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,
Sleeping away the unreturning time.
O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love,
When morning strikes her spear upon the land,
And we must rise and arm us and reprove
The insolent daylight with a steady hand,
Be not discountenanced if the knowing know
We rose from rapture but an hour ago.
This is important. And I expect there to be a clamor. They tried to do her in. But I stood in defense of her. I have written a poem about my experience. You can read it now.
Sonnet xxviii From Creepy Underview
(She requested “Ala Commelina“)
Hear now my final thrust for Enda Sweet
Vintage M’lay! Her honor defended?
Check. Maintained a c’est l’innocent ennui?
“Nay. See here terms to be gently ended.
Le monde a essaimé pour l’incarner
It says right here, meaning she, et vous,
That’s you, or tu, with the people, let’s say.”
Commelina petals have shoots to bruise
Ticklishly urgent blooming whitherays
Waiting to see the morning ‘strike her spear’
I pull the petal up over the droll
In my inner ear; one’s depth must appear
‘Insolent by day’ isn’t absurd at all
Spears throwing themselves all at or so about
That I would grab the money on my way out.
Favored Comments:
Sean: Edna would so fall for you.
Me: If she didn’t I would be prepared to push her.
