The Writers almanac newsletter
Today: "Waving Good-Bye" by Gerald Stern
Monday, Feb. 22, 2016
Waving Good-Bye
by Gerald Stern
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.
"Waving Good-Bye" by Gerald Stern from This Time. © Norton, 1998.
Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It's the birthday of the first president of the United States, George
Washington, born in Westmoreland County, Virginia (1732), whose
favorite foods were mashed sweet potatoes with coconut, string beans
with mushrooms, cream of peanut soup, salt cod, and pineapples. He lost
all of his teeth except for one by - according to second president John
Adams - cracking Brazilian nuts between his jaws. He got dentures made
out of a hippopotamus tusk, designed especially to fit over his one
remaining real tooth. But the hippo dentures were constantly rubbing
against that real tooth so that he was constantly in pain. He used
opium to alleviate the pain.
He snored very loudly, and instead of wearing a powdered wig like other
fashionable people, he put powder on his own hair, which was naturally
a reddish brown. He was not good at spelling and he had a speech
impediment. George Washington's inaugural address was the shortest
inaugural address in U.S. history: It was only 133 words long and took
him just 90 seconds to deliver.
It's the birthday of poet Gerald Stern (books by this author), born in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1925). He was the child of Eastern European
Jewish immigrants. His younger sister died of spinal meningitis when he
was just eight years old, and his parents never recovered from the
loss. He grew up the only Jewish kid in his school, and he often got
into brutal street fights with boys in the neighborhood.
He began to write poetry in college but he didn't know any other poets,
so he didn't try very hard to get anything published. He once wrote an
epic poem called "Ishmael's Dream" and sent it to the poet W.H. Auden.
Auden was so impressed that he invited Stern to tea, but Stern never
even sent the poem out for publication. He later said, "I was too harsh
a critic of my own work, and I couldn't focus my thoughts and feelings
in a way that would satisfy me."
He worked a series of teaching jobs but began to suffer from
depression. Then, one day, in his late 30s, after a doctor's
appointment, he suddenly realized that his life was almost half over,
and he began to write poems furiously. He said, "I discovered [...]
everything at once - voice, style, approach, and have been practically
besieged by poems from that time on." He published his first poetry
collection, The Pineys, in 1971, and has gone on to write many more
collections, including Leaving Another Kingdom (1990),Save the Last
Dance (2008), and most recently, In Beauty Bright (2012).
It is the birthday of American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (books by
this author), born in Rockland, Maine (1892). She had two sisters and
her parents divorced when the girls were small. Her mother, a nurse,
moved the girls from town to town. They often lived in poverty, but her
mother kept the trunk filled with volumes of Shakespeare and Milton,
and she read aloud to her children. Millay was resourceful and smart,
and she began writing when they permanently settled at her aunt's house
in Camden, Maine.
Millay was also stubborn. She preferred to be called "Vincent," which
her grade school principal refused to recognize. He called her any name
that began with "V," as long as it wasn't "Vincent."
She thought she might be a concert pianist, but her piano teacher said
Millay's hands were too small, so she concentrated full time on
writing, which her mother encouraged. They had no money, so Millay
stayed home, keeping house, until long after she'd finished high
school. She entered a poetry contest and won fourth place with what
would become one of her most famous poems, "Renascence." Even the
winner acknowledged that she should have won, saying, "The award was as
much an embarrassment to me as a triumph." The second-place winner
offered her his winnings of $250.00. It was while giving a reading of
the poem that she so impressed a wealthy arts patron named Caroline Dow
that Dow offered to pay for Millay's education at Vassar College.
Millay entered Vassar in 1913 at the age of 20. She was petite, with
flaming red-hair and personality to burn. She had affairs with men and
women, and wrote, "People fall in love with me and annoy me and
distress me and flatter me and excite me."
After Vassar, she decamped to Greenwich Village and began to live a
wild Bohemian life. Millay said she and her friends were "very, very
poor and very, very merry." She lived in an attic apartment at 75 ½
Bedford Street that was nine feet long and six feet wide. It was the
narrowest house in New York City and is today known as "The Millay
House." Her first collection of poetry,Renascence and Other Poems, was
published to great acclaim (1917). She befriended the writers Witter
Bynner, Edmund Wilson, and Floyd Dell. Dell and Wilson asked for her
hand in marriage, but Millay, who was openly bisexual, refused. Dell
called her "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing
slippers and mouth like a valentine."
She was also a master of the sonnet and nimbly imbued modernist
attitudes on traditional forms. Her collection A Few Figs from Thistles
(1920) drew much attention for its depictions of female sexuality and
feminism. In 1923, she became the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry when she published The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.
For a time, Millay was the most famous poet in America. She'd finally
married, choosing a coffee importer named Eugen Boissevain, a
self-proclaimed feminist who agreed to an open marriage and was handy
at arranging her finances and her cross-country reading tours. They
bought a home in Austerlitz, New York, and called the house Steepletop,
building a barn from a Sears and Roebuck kit and a writing cabin for
Millay. By 1943, though, Millay was suffering from alcohol addiction
and her life was in disarray. She became the second person to receive
the Frost Medal for her lifetime contributions to poetry, but her best
writing was behind her. Her husband died, and she became isolated at
Steepletop. She died at the foot of her staircase, by suicide or a
fall, no one is quite sure.
Her sister Norma took over Steepletop and carefully began to renovate
it. In 1973, she established the house and grounds as the Millay Colony
for the Arts.
Frank Woolworth opened the first of his "five cent" stores on this date
in 1878. Armed with $300 and experience working in a dry-goods store,
he opened "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store" in Utica, New York; by
May, the store had gone under. He tried again in 1879, this time in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and included merchandise priced at a dime. His
"dime stores" undercut the prices of local merchants, and they differed
from traditional stores in that merchandise was readily available for
shoppers to pick up and handle without the assistance of a shop clerk.
The Lancaster location proved successful, and Woolworth opened a second
location in Harrisburg, at a cost of $127. By the time he died in 1919,
the "five and dime" F.W. Woolworth Corporation was worth about $65
million and owned more than a thousand stores worldwide.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
