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 second 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.