Safe upon the solid rock

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay Millay, Edna, St. Vincent (22 Feb. 1892-19 Oct. 1950), poet, was born in the small town of Rockland, Maine, the daughter of Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher, and Cora Buzzelle.


In 1900 Cora Millay divorced her husband for financial irresponsibility and soon thereafter moved to Camden, Maine, with Edna and her sisters. The hardworking mother supported them by nursing--often overnight--and encouraged her daughters to love reading and music and to be independent.


Millay attended public high school, where she wrote for and served as editor in chief of the school magazine (1905-1909). She also published several juvenile pieces in the St. Nicholas Magazine (1906-1910). Her first great poem, "Renascence," was published in an anthology called The Lyric Year in 1912.

When a Young Women's Christian Association education officer heard Millay read this poem, she helped obtain a scholarship for the talented girl to attend Vassar College. Millay took preparatory courses for one semester at Barnard College and then entered Vassar in 1913. While there she wrote poetry and plays (published in the Vassar Miscellany), acted, starred in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page, and studied literature and languages. Although she frequently rebelled against rules designed to protect female students, Millay graduated with an A.B. in 1917. That year Millay published Renascence and Other Poems.


She moved to New York City, where she acted with the Provincetown Players, lived impecuniously in Greenwich Village, and indulged in love affairs with several men, including the novelist Floyd Dell and, briefly, the married poet Arthur Davison Ficke.


She earned a little money by publishing short stories (under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd) and poems in Ainslee's magazine (1918-1921). In 1919 she wrote and directed a one-act, antiwar verse play with a fairy-tale motif titled Aria da Capo, for the Provincetown Players. During this period she also met the critic Edmund Wilson, at that time the managing editor of Vanity Fair, which had published some of her work (1920). Millay won a $100 prize from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for "The Bean-Stalk" in 1920.

She also published her second book of verse, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920; rev. eds., 1921 and 1922), and Aria da Capo (1920), which sold well. With an agreement to write for Vanity Fair, the hardworking Millay enjoyed a varied sojourn in Europe from 1920 to 1923. In 1921 she published two more plays and a solid collection of poetry, Second April. Meanwhile, she had other love affairs, including a reported relationship with a French violinist that led to an abortion.


She encouraged but soon decided not to marry the poet Witter Bynner. After obtaining a $500 advance from Horace Liveright for a novel titled "Hardigut" that was never completed, she sent for her mother, and the two toured France and England; they then returned to New York. In 1923 Millay was honored as the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I


n that same year she published The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, and after a brief courtship she married the 43-year-old widower Eugen Jan Boissevain; they had no children. He was a burly American importer of Dutch-Irish extraction who was sensitively intelligent, profeminist, and considerate. Millay went on arduous reading tours and sailed around the world with her husband in 1924.


The couple bought and occupied "Steepletop," their permanent home on 700 acres of farmland near Austerlitz, New York, during 1925. Shortly thereafter Millay created the stirring libretto for The King's Henchman, Deems Taylor's splendid opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1927 starring the American baritone Lawrence Tibbett. The libretto was published and went through four quick editions, reportedly earning Millay $100 a day for a while.

Later in 1927 Millay became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists and labor agitators, had been convicted in 1921 of the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The verdict was challenged by those who felt that the two were being persecuted for their history as social activists and anarchists.


Although questions about their innocence remained, they were executed on 23 August 1927. Millay and many other intellectuals had joined in a sensational protest, in which she personally appealed to Governor Alvan T. Fuller and was arrested and jailed for joining the "death watch." In response, Millay wrote and published "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" (New York Times, 22 Aug. 1927). Her involvement in the protest was evidence of her long-standing sympathy for the socialistic aspects of communism.


Despite or perhaps partly because of this notoriety, many honors came to Millay, including her election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1929) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1940). During approximately this same period, however, three deaths severely depressed her. Her close friend, the poet Elinor Wylie, died in 1928, her mother died in 1931, and her estranged father died in 1935. Given her psychological makeup, Millay had found the ideal husband in Boissevain.


He attended to all the household chores, traveled widely with his "Vincent"--often to Florida, the Riviera, and Spain--and cooperated with her intellectual and linguistic interests. He catered to her whims and even condoned her having an occasional lover. One, George Dillon, who was fourteen years her junior and whom she met in 1928 while giving a reading at the University of Chicago, inspired Fatal Interview (1931), a 52-sonnet sequence. In one sonnet she snarls: "Love me no more, now let the god depart, / If love be grown so bitter to your tongue!"


Nonetheless, Dillon and Millay collaborated later on translations from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1936). Still later, in a sonnet in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), she says, "As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy, / Upon the name of love however brief." Beginning in 1933, Millay and her husband enjoyed summer retreats on tiny Ragged Island, having bought the 85-acre spot in Casco Bay, Maine. Her other pre-World War II works include The Buck in the Snow (1928), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation at Midnight (1937); the original, unique manuscript of this dialogue of seven men was burned in a Sanibel Island hotel fire a year earlier.


In Huntsman, What Quarry? Millay had included stirring poems against the brutalities of Fascist Spain, Nazi Germany, and imperialistic Japan. Other events, such as Italy's attacks on Ethiopia and the German-Russian nonaggression treaty, caused the once-pacifist poet to call for preparedness and then to dash off pro-British and pro-French propaganda verse. Most of her poetry of World War II, much of which she collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940), has proved vapid, but a memorable exception is The Murder of Lidice (1942).


This long, dramatic verse narrative is based on the depraved German army butchery of an entire Czech village. In 1944 Millay suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write for two years. During this time and later, her husband catered to her so selflessly that he depleted his own reserves of strength and died in 1949 of lung cancer followed by surgery and a stroke.


Millay, who with her husband had drunk to excess since the 1930s, evidently grew more dependent on alcohol during her brief, inconsolable widowhood. She died sitting at the foot of her staircase, alone, at Steepletop. Millay is the poetic voice of eternal youth, feminine revolt and liberation, and potent sensitivity and suggestiveness.


Her best and most representative themes are bittersweet love, sorrow, the inevitability of change, resignation, death, and ever-abiding nature. One of her very best poems is her early, mystical "Renascence," about spiritual interment and resurrection through the cycles of nature. It smoothly combines naiveté and profundity and modern and archaic diction.


In "Afternoon on a Hill" (published in Renascence [1917]) the delicate persona says, "I will touch a hundred flowers / And not pick one." She occasionally takes a snide tone in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920); for example, she begins one sonnet with these lines: "I shall forget you presently, my dear, / So make the most of this, your little day." But the collection also includes "Recuerdo," which memorably describes the dawn that a happy couple sees from a ferryboat: "The sky went wan, and the wind came cold, / And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold." Second April (1921) contains tender elegies to a Vassar friend who died of influenza in 1918. "


The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," the technically brilliant title poem of Millay's 1923 collection, dramatizes a mother's love: a woman too poor to provide necessities for her little son weaves clothes for him by magically playing her harp. In the same book "The Spring and the Fall" bitterly contrasts a lover's vernal attention and his autumnal gibes and concludes that "'Tis not love's going hurts my days, / But that it went in little ways." The Buck in the Snow (1928) proved unpopular, perhaps because it features much experimental verse; for example, "The Pigeons" contains one line of twenty-five syllables. Her imagery grows startling, as when in "On First Having Heard the Skylark" the bird's cry is "like a crystal dart." The bitter philosophical poems in Wine from These Grapes (1934) are well represented by "Apostrophe to Man," in which, seeming to anticipate World War II, Millay exhorts everyone to "expunge yourself, die out, / Homo called sapiens."


The mounted huntsman in the terse title poem of Huntsman, What Quarry? is tempted to enjoy "a one-night's bride" but decides instead to go kill the fox. Notable from the posthumous Mine the Harvest (1954) are Millay's delight that "thought unbraids itself" ("Ragged Island"), her conceited disgust with time-consuming visitors--"What chores these churls do put upon the great" ("Cave Canem"), and Christ's warning to His followers, "No shelter will be found / Save in my shadow" ("Jesus to His Disciples"). Millay will always be remembered for her flippant quatrain, which she titled "First Fig" (1920): 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! She should also be remembered, however, for her "Second Fig" (1920): "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!" Her "shining" poetry should never fall out of fashion. Its lyricism, praise of beauty, freedom, and individualism, and technical virtuosity are timeless. Most of Millay's papers are at the New York Public Library, Yale University, and the Library of Congress. See also Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (1952). Primary and secondary bibliographies are Karl Yost, A Bibliography of the Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1937); John J. Patton, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of Criticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay," Serif 5 (Sept. 1968): 10-32; and Judith Nierman, Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide (1977). Biographical studies include Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1969); Joan Dash, A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married (1973); and Anne Chaney, Millay in Greenwich Village (1975). The best critical study is Norman A. Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967; rev. ed., 1982). Discerning evaluations of Millay's early poetry are in Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) (1929), while generally derogatory comments are in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968; rev. ed., 1984). Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, ed. Colin Falck (1991), provides a provocative introduction. David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (1965), chronicles the crime, trial, reviews, and executions and concludes that both men were probably guilty. Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), describes the actions of the protestors, including Millay and Porter herself, during the Sacco-Vanzetti tragedy. An obituary is in the New York Times, 20 Oct. 1950.

Salty humor in a sad heart

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was an American writer and poet, born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild Eliza Annie(née Marston) at 732 Ocean Avenue in the West End village of Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage. Dorothy's mother was of Scottish descent, and her father was of German-Jewish descent (unrelated, however, to the Rothschild banking dynasty).


Her mother died in West End in July 1898, when Parker was a month shy of turning five. Her father remarried, in 1900, a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis. Parker detested her father and stepmother, accusing her father of being physically abusive and refusing to call Eleanor either "mother" or "stepmother," instead referring to her as "the housekeeper." grew up on the Upper West Side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother.

She was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion." Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine. Parker later went to Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. Her formal education ended when she was 13. Her father died in 1913. Following his death, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her verse.


She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II (March 28, 1893 in Hartford, Connecticut - ?), but they were separated by his army service in World War I.


She had ambiguous feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In 1919, her career took off while writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began in 1918 as a stand-in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood.


The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower," Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.


Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often. In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, she and Benchley were part of a "board of editors" established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine appeared in its second issue.


Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many about the perceived ludicrousness of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. Her greatest period of productivity and success came in the next 15 years.


In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies and garnered impressive reviews.


The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." Although some critics, notably the New York Times, dismissed her work as "flapper verse," the volume helped cement her status, as the New York World review put it, as "one of the most sparkling wits who express themselves through light verse."

Parker released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1927) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope, Gun and Death and she re-released the fiction with a few new pieces in 1939 under the title Here Lies.


In 1924, Parker collaborated with fellow Algonquinite George S. Kaufman on a one-act play, Business is Business. She next collaborated with playwright Elmer Rice to create Close Harmony. The play was well received in out-of-town previews and was favorably reviewed in New York but closed after a run of just 24 performances. It did, however, become a successful touring production under the title The Lady Next Door.


Some of her most popular work was published in The New Yorker in the form of acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader" (her response to a moment of whimsy in A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner: "Tonstant Weader fwowed up.").

Her reviews appeared semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933, were widely read, and were later published in a collection under the name Constant Reader in 1970. Her best-known short story, "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929.

Her short stories, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic. She eventually separated from her husband and had a number of affairs, including with reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins.


Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy, which Parker aborted, and a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide. Edwin and she divorced in 1928. It was toward the end of this period that Parker began to become politically aware and active. What would become a lifelong commitment to left-leaning causes began in 1927 with the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.


Parker travelled to Boston to protest the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of "loitering and sauntering," paying a $5 fine. In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations of being a screenwriter. (Like Parker, he was half-Jewish and half-Scottish.)


He was reputed to be bisexual—indeed, Parker did some of the reputing by claiming in public that he was "queer as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (who was also expected to act) earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week.


They would eventually earn $2,000 and in some instances upwards of $5,000 per week as freelancers for various studios. She and Campbell worked on more than 15 films. In 1936, she contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with music by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in the The Big Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby. With Robert Carson and Campbell, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing - Screenplay.


She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941 and received another Oscar nomination, with Frank Cavett, for 1947's Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman. In 1944, Parker and Alexander Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work as part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas.


With an introduction by Somerset Maugham the volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories along with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was released in the United States under the title The Portable Dorothy Parker. Parker's is one of only three of the Portable series (the other two being William Shakespeare and The Bible) to remain continuously in print.


During the 1930s and 1940s period, Parker became a more vocal advocate of increasingly radical left-wing causes, a fierce civil libertarian and civil rights advocate and a frequent critic of those in authority. She reported on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist New Masses magazine in 1937. At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Muenzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.


The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League's membership eventually grew to some 4,000 strong, whose often wealthy but mostly unsuspecting members were, in the words of David Caute, "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as the whole American working class."


Parker also served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Rescue Committee. She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations. Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, with her relationship with Robert Benchley being particularly strained (although they would reconcile).


Her marriage with Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Alan's long-term affair with a married woman while he was in Europe during World War II. They divorced in 1947, then remarried in 1950, and remained married (although they lived apart from 1952–1961) until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood.


Parker's final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger. Parker was heard occasionally on radio, including Information Please (as a guest) and Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for the Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead used her material for radio monologues. Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950.


The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era. As a result, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In 1952 Parker moved back to New York, into the Volney residential hotel. She drew upon her experiences there to co-write, with Arnaud d'Usseau, the play Ladies of the Corridor. The play opened in October 1953 to uneven reviews and closed after six weeks. From 1957 to 1962 she wrote book reviews for Esquire, though these pieces were increasingly erratic owing to her continued abuse of alcohol.


Her favorable nod gave Ellison a foothold with both mainstream publishers and film producers, and shortly afterwards he headed for Hollywood. In 1961 Parker returned to Hollywood and reconciled with Campbell.


They worked together on a number of unproduced projects; among her last was an unproduced film for Marilyn Monroe. Parker found Campbell dead in their home in 1963, a suicide by drug overdose. Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to New York City and the Volney.


In her later years, she would come to denigrate the group that had brought her such early notoriety, the Algonquin Round Table: Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP.


Her executrix, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.

Hollow generation

Dahlia Ravikovitch


Dahlia Ravikovitch was born on November 27, 1936. Her father, Levy (Leo) Ravikovitch, was an engineer who loved poetry and who arrived in Palestine from Harbin, China, where he was the commander of a Betar (Revisionist youth movement) unit. He married Michal, a student in the Mizrahi teachers college for women, who became an educator in the land settlement movement. Dahlia Ravikovitch had a strong bond with her parents. She wanted to be Daddy's clever girl, and he identified and was amazed at her ability to read and write at the age of three.

On September 9, 1940, Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv. More than 100 people were killed and many wounded. Four-year-old Dahlia and her mother were on the street at the time of the air raid.


When Dahlia was five and a half, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Ahikam and Amiram. When she was six, her father was killed when he was hit by a car on Jabotinsky Street in Ramat Gan. For two years the news of her father's death was kept from Dahlia. "On that day the family fell apart," she wrote years later (in the short story "A Brief History of Michal," in the collection "Come and Gone," Modan, 2005). In her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange" (1959), she described her father as a silent figure standing on the road all night and her need to approach him every night, because she is his first-born, without having a choice in the matter, while he is unable to utter even one word of love.



Already during the week of mourning for their husband and father, Michal was persuaded to move to Kibbutz Geva with Dahlia and the twins, who were then a year and a half old. Michal remarried, but Dahlia never adjusted to life on the kibbutz.

In 1965, when Ravikovitch was already an established poet, her mother, Michal Gur Aryeh, was still settling accounts with Kibbutz Geva over the treatment of her daughter some 20 years earlier. When she heard that N., one of Dahlia's homeroom teachers - who had supported the actions taken with respect to the child at the time - was about to be appointed principal of an educational institution, she lost no time protesting:

I am writing this letter not because I am the mother who sat and cried to H., so he would take back what he said to the children - 'Do what you will to her, because she will go to the city,' and he replied, 'But that is what I really think' (the reference was to Dahlia, and this was the period of the 'personality cult' of H. in Geva) - but mainly because of my deep shock (from which I have not recovered to this day, and I simply tremble when I remember his words) at the case of N., who is going to head a large educational institution for youth today and not in the 1940s or 1950s!

To purify an abomination - what is needed for that: Naivete? Blind faith? Or perhaps something that is far from what can be called 'good-heartedness' and the strength to admit to my badness if it is bad? And for this my heart is mournful.

All the best!

A notebook of poems that Ravikovitch wrote at the age of 12, found in her estate, contains a lengthy, rather gloomy poem ("Please don't read!" she jotted on the inside part of the page). These lines appear on the first of the poem's three pages:


And the time here passes in quarreling / In melancholy, murky loneliness ... And my life here is sorrow and tears / And sadness prevails here.

Even at that early stage, Ravikovitch attests, poetry had become her solace and avocation. At the end of this poem she makes a wish:

To create even one / Work that will light up the world ... / To immerse myself in creating / To contain my soul within it / And do not return to the body / And let not my fire go out / A work even if only one / That will cast light for all time to come / And to remain thus forever / Thus, always in the heights / Let it come only once / Let the tide come / I will express myself / And after will die ...



Dahlia left Kibbutz Geva at the age of 13 with her mother's consent. After completing high school, while going through five foster families in Haifa and continuing to write constantly, she entered the army. Military service made it possible for her to read and write, she related, but after eight months she was discharged for psychological reasons.


She liked to tell about her first visit to the home of the renowned poet Lea Goldberg, to show her poems she had written. How she arrived early and waited outside, tense and thrilled, for the appointed time. Goldberg chose three poems, which were published in the paper.

A scholarship enabled Ravikovitch to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied Hebrew language, and both English and Hebrew literature. To make ends meet she worked as a high-school teacher. She pursued her studies for three years, but did not obtain a degree. In 1959 her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange," drew critical praise. The critic Baruch Kurzweil, known for his rigorous standards, wrote in Haaretz that her poems "bear the seal of originality. And even the recalcitrant exoticism of her poetry ... is an integral part of her poetic world, of her singular reality which rises to true poetry."


At the age of 24 Ravikovitch married the playwright Yosef Bar Yosef; they separated after three months. Two years later, in 1962, she married Yitzhak Livni (later the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority). The marriage ended in divorce three years later, but the two remained close friends until her death.

In 1964 her second book, "A Hard Winter," appeared and drew another laudatory appreciation from Kurzweil. "Sometimes I have the feeling," Ravikovitch said that year, "that my poems are better than me. I very much agree with the things I write. They do not surprise me, but they have the power to lift me above myself."

Among her other books of poetry [in Hebrew] are "The Third Book" (1969), "Calleth Unto Deep" (1976), "Real Love" (1987) and "Half an Hour Before the Monsoon" (1998). Interspersed with the poetry were short-story collections: "Death in the Family" (1976), "Winnie Mandela's Football Team" (1997) and "Come and Gone" (2005). She also wrote song lyrics and poems and stories for children, and translated poetry and children's books.

Prizes were for her a type of essential economic remuneration, as there were periods in which she found herself in dire economic straits. She was the recipient of the Bialik Prize (1978), the Shlonsky Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers (2005), and also was accorded the country's highest honor, the Israel Prize (1998). The prize's judges noted in their citation: "Ravikovitch is one of the pillars of Hebrew lyric poetry."

In 1978 Dahlia Ravikovitch gave birth to a baby boy; the father was Haim Kalir, a lawyer, with whom Ravikovitch lived for about 13 years. After they separated, her son, Ido, was placed in the custody of his father, by court order. The boy's relations with his mother, which suffered ups and downs but also saw some wonderful moments, engendered no few poems.

She wanted a C-section, because "the thought that I will lie on my back and scream, while being completely dependent on outside help, seems to me nightmarish. As Momo, the hero of Emile Ajar's book 'A Life Ahead,' remarks, the laws of nature are not such as to make it possible to rely on them," she wrote in a short article, excerpts from which are here published for the first time:

Apparently at 9:40 (because this is what the birth certificate states) I heard the crying of an infant in the room. A view of the room was blocked by an opaque curtain, as is undoubtedly the custom when the person undergoing surgery remains conscious. I might have been able to understand that the infant was mine, but because of that burden of thought, like bad hashish, I didn't really think thoughts. The flow of time was weird, too - both fast and slow.

I don't remember how many minutes passed until a diapered infant was placed on my bed next to my head and I only hoped that someone would take him from me quickly, because I was totally helpless and an infant must not be left for a second in the responsibility of a helpless adult. I was not curious to know what the boy looked like, because I had complete trust in him. A week later I received the birth certificate. It said: 'Male child born weighing 3.300 kilograms.' I never had a wish in my life that was realized in full and in a form that is absolutely the epitome of beauty (and I do not mean the beauty of the boy, about which there is also nothing to complain about) like that child, whose eyes were brown and whose head was covered with fairly long hair ...

And I - I had no further wishes for him. I did not hope that he would grow up and discover a cure for cancer or circle the world in a hot-air balloon or be a gifted child or the director general of the National Lottery, which is a far less prestigious job than the aforementioned ones, but nevertheless pays pretty well. I wanted that in all the days of his life to come, he would know satisfying contentment so that I would be pleased that he had been born, and that I would be a sufficiently good mother to contribute my share to that contentment, and henceforth begins a story which is already not mine and I have no right to tell it, and I trust my son to have enough words to tell his story.

But along with the moments of grace, depression battered Ravikovitch from an early age - the death of her father, life on kibbutz, the loneliness in Haifa, her distinctive personality make-up, the endless hunger for love. Ravikovitch suffered from depression during much of her life and gave this expression in her writing, which deals not only with love and motherhood, but zeroes in also on the bereavement, the suffering and the despair, which in her case was existential.

In interviews she talked about the depression and the hospitalizations and the suicide attempts. Dahlia Ravikovitch died on August 12, 2005, in her home in Tel Aviv. Her death was sudden and came as a shock to many. The initial conjecture was that she had committed suicide.

Her fragility and vulnerability were a central axis of her poetry and her life. But the coroner's report found that she had not taken her own life; the autopsy did not find an unusual quantity of medicines in her body. The conclusion was that "her death was probably caused by acute failure of the heart." She was only 69. Wise, beautiful, versed in suffering. Revered poet, writer and translator.



One of the poems in the estate is "Leaving Home," which describes the difficulty of meeting the expectations of a "normal" family woman. The poem was to have appeared in her collection "Real Love," but Ravikovitch left it in the notebook, probably because it was not fully polished. An excerpt: (Courtesy:Haartezz.com)

An Ultimatum for Poetry

Wallance Stevens

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard as a special student from 1897 to 1900 but did not graduate; he graduated from New York law school in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904, the year he met Elsie Kachel, a young woman from Reading, whom he married in 1909. They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book.

Stevens became interested in verse-writing at Harvard, submitting material to the Harvard Advocate, but he would be 36 before his first work was published in 1915. He soon was contributing to Poetry (Chicago), and his first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the distinguished firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Though he was always much admired by his contemporaries ("There is a man whose work," Hart Crane wrote of him in 1919, "makes most the rest of us quail"), Stevens felt that the reviews of his 1923 book were less than they should be, and discouraged, wrote nothing through the 1920s. For a second edition of Harmonium, published in 1931, he added only eight new poems.

If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named Vice President of his company.

All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

When Stevens began to write poems with renewed fluency in the 1930s, he arranged for them to be printed in limited editions at the same time as trade editions were prepared by Knopf. Ideas of Order (1935) and Owl’s Clover (1937) were limited editions by the Alcestis Press, while The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) and Parts of a World (1942) were printed by Knopf, and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du Mal were deluxe volumes issued by the Cummington Press in 1942.

In 1939, Stevens was sixty – an age when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves. But Stevens’s best writing still lay before him in the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative wanderings but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples. In the loosely connected stanzas of these sequences, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "Esthetique du Mal" (1945), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1947) and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1950), Stevens perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been producing all along – a metapoetry that took lavish delight in commenting upon its own making. At the same time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on aesthetics together in prose sentences, essays he collected in 1951 as The Necessary Angel. And there was one final, magnificent turn to his development. Entering his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly austere, solemn, and strange even to its author.

Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on "the imagination." (His prose essays were useful allies in this strategy.) But the sheer verve of local moments, the sumptuous texture of outstanding passages, simply dissolves as pretense the notion that a philosophical enterprise might be underway. Few poets have so fully enjoyed not just their indulgence in their own language but also the game that elaborately insists no such indulgence is occurring.

Heather McHugh (Poet)

I know he's too abstruse for many... and it's true that he's more interested in ideas than many people think is proper for a poet. But he's a stunningly sensual thinker... and that sensuality always wowed me... had the power to move me well before I was as avid for ideas as I am now... As a child I could FEEL the power in lines like "The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down"—those lines were power lines: they thrummed with image and music—they trembled with palpable sensuality.

I grew to love his cool-eyed poems, too, his drive to see without swamping the seen in gluey attachments. And so he kept pace with my own capacities to love:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind...
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(The Snow Man)

I came to love his literalness, his taste for letters and signs; his turning the poem into its own object (blurring of the distinction between object and subject); his sense of the magnetic attraction between word and word, between meaning and means. When I first read him I was dazzled by his audacities.

Who ever ended a poem with a sentence like "The the."? That's how "The Man on the Dump" ends: "Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the." My god, in my teens and early twenties, I couldn't stop re-reading that ending! The astonishingly questionable, downright definiteness of that article! The hammer blows of those grammars!

In my heart (if not in my brain) I understood

...shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The ABC of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

(lines which are so full of SIGNage, brands, demands, letters, kisses, chromosomes, forges, and forces... ).

What reader wouldn't love a title like "Large Red Man Reading"? It begins "There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases" (an ordinary enough poetic set-up) but ends:

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

The lines spoke the feeling for them! Take that, o you who do not feel.

Later I grew to love his capacity for balancing high philosophical seeking with low comedy, pure preposterousness, outright hilariousness, and daring artifice:

The Ultimate Poem is Abstract

This day writhes with what? The lecturer
On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself
And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

And red, and right. The particular question—here
The particular answer to the particular question
Is not in point—the question is in point.

If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.
One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one
Of the categories. So said, this placid space

Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,
There must be no questions. It is an intellect
Of windings around and dodges to and fro,

Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,
Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present
Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole

Of communication. It would be enough
If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed
In This Beautiful World of Ours and not as now,

Helplessly at the edge, enough to be
Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense,
And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy.

Do you notice how he permits himself to have fun with words? "Writhings in wrong" can't help suggesting lurking understudies like "writing" and "right"... and the curved line of the question mark itself, which comes to its point.

If you really want to have some fun, take a look at the pseudo-critical art-history talking points and psychotherapeutic sleights-of-hand, even the ultimate Jimmy Durante lowbrow stage-jokiness at the end of So-and-So Reclining On Her Couch:

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her heard there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

"What should we be," writes Stevens in "Men Made Out Of Words," "without the sexual myth,/The human revery or poem of death?//Castratos of moon-mash—"

Castratos of moon-mash??? Where else will you find language like that, I ask you???

Add to all of these his wildness and urbanity; his willingness to haul into the comedy of aesthetics a bald-faced outright reference to popular art's sturm und drang and stagey sentiment. Stevens is a stage magician; and always, behind his skepticism about the distortions of nature by human senses, his underlying persistent impulse to return to natural events and objects for his metaphysical reflections:

Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter....

The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

The thunder is thick for the same reason that the eyes were "dripping blue"—because they are painted. This is art made of art: Behind it all is his drive to feel his way, with art, through art: to see THROUGH human senses (doomed enterprise, he knows) to the underlying dilemmas of consciousness; its sayings and seemings; its love affair with fact and foolings around; its heights and downfalls; its farces and foibles; its self-constructions and its self-delusions...

I love him for supplying the best response of all, to those who would tear down the music hall in which he does his études:

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of future,
The unclouded concerto...
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

That's my boy. He's fiery and icy; he's whacky and wise. I can't say I always understand him, inside out, but I do love him, through and through.

(Please visit http//Englizona.blogspot.com for powerful poems.

Patterns and Metaphors

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout was born in 1947 in Vallejo near San Francisco. While she was studying in Berkeley and San Francisco she was very active on the literary scene from which the group of "Language Poets" emerged. She participated in the establishment of many different cultural projects in the California Bay Area, and she has been teaching literature and writing for more than 20 years at the University of California, San Diego.

The "Language Poets" are considered to be the most prominent group of American post-modern poets, with Armantrout as their most lyric representative. Her poems deal with the phrasal nature of the symbolic system of language, which she encounters with cautious suspicion because it reproduces and confirms a morally dubious reality.

"I think that if I didn't write against norms, I wouldn't be writing", says Armantrout, who also describes her work as a "focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness".

At the same time the poet scrutinises her own language and thereby performs a deconstructive process. In her short and meticulously combined poems she mixes different levels of language, alienates quotations, stages provocative coincidences as well as linguistic accidents, and composes very obvious punchlines.

As a result of this style, her texts are jolty, heterogeneous and opaque. The surprising changes in the short lines of the poems, which are written in everyday speech, also inhibit the readibility and lead to a challenging ambiguity. Her first volume of poems "Extremities" (1978) has so far been followed up by seven further collections concerned with the construction of femininity and the question of beauty, and the themes of time and memory.

In 1998 her prose memoir "True", which demonstrates Armantrout's narrative talent, was published. In "Veil" (2001) new poems are combined with poems from previous collections such as "The Invention of Hunger" (1979), "Precedence" (1985), "Made to Seem" (1995) and "The Pretext" (2001).

Armantrout has been awarded the Fund for Poetry Award twice. She was given a California Arts Council Fellowship and was Writer in Residence at Bard College, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies including: "Best American Poetry" in the years 1989, 2001 and 2002, "Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology" (1994) and "Poems for the Millennium" (1998).

Rae Armantrout

" Many teachers see poetry as containing specific ingredients -- deeper meanings, symbolic meanings, they can ask questions like "Here's a symbol, what does the symbol mean?" Many teachers want their students to be able to identify known literary devices and ask how those known literary devices are working in the poem. And that's understandable, because it's something that we all know how to do -- we've been trained to do that.

"Poetry like mine maybe doesn't contain those expected literary devices. While I think my own poetry contains a lot of metaphor, it tends to be as much anti-metaphor as metaphor. It's kind of like I'm setting two metaphors off against each other, or just seeing how far you can stretch a metaphor before it breaks. When I teach a more experimental work, I ask the question "What is it doing?" more than "What does it mean?"

"I ask "What patterns do you see?" I think that's a good way to begin, with anything unknown. When I give my students a text, especially a more experimental text, I start by asking "What do you notice?" Avant-garde doesn't have to be scary -- it can even be populist. Think about Ron Silliman, who would chant his poems on the public bus system in San Francisco...nothing snobby or inaccessible about that!

Honararium:1

Gregory Orr

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.

He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).

He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).

He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines

In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."

In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted Genoways writes: "Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration."

Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Asked about recent inspirations and sources, he owns up to an "eclectic grab-bag of reading. I've always read six books at a time, seldom finishing any. Reckless and restless searching of the sort you'd expect from the short attention-span of a lyric poet."

That "reckless and restless" genius has demanded expression beyond writing poetry. Orr is also a Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia; he was the 2000 Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Violence; he edits Sacred Bearings, A Journal on Violence and Spiritual Life.

I can't see any real reason why we'd have to associate the project of the personal lyric with a human time-line for several reasons. When I was young, they used to mention lyric poets when they discussed a notion of how certain 'professions' peaked early-in their late adolescence, early twenties-they used theoretical mathematicians and physicists, athletes, and lyric poets.

I think we lyric poets have been removed from that dubious list, but who knows? The association might have had to do with intensity of passion, and passion is one of the human forms of disorder. So, when you are young the disordering and vitalizing passions are stronger, and you could argue that the poems are therefore more exciting or whatever.

On the other hand, as you get older as a poet, you learn more about what disturbs you in a way that leads to poems, and what was passion in your youth might become theme in your maturity. As long as it's still authentic, still real to you.

My thinking about disorder and order has to do with a feeling for the two forces and their interplay in our consciousness and on the page. And remember that 'disorder' can be vitalizing as well, a positive quality like 'joy' or 'freedom'; likewise, 'order' can be oppressive as it is felt by Blake in the form of state and organized religion; or by Whitman as the constraints of civilization, the tight collar and tie. So, I guess I'd say I don't accept any notions of timeline.

"To me poetry is both Quest and Craft. The quest aspect: what poetry means to you as an individual who has decided to orient her life in relation to this thing called 'poetry'—no one can really solve that for you. You search for guides and poetic forebears, but it's a personal search and struggle. Craft is easier than quest and less lonely.

"You can learn craft; you can improve, you can utilize your intelligence to master it. Why not call poetry Craft and forget Quest, or give the quest aspect short-shrift? That's the temptation that workshops breed. We know that. I guess the main defense would be to be forewarned. To tell yourself, "yes, this workshop response matters, but what is it that I personally need to learn or understand that poetry is trying to teach me?" An anecdote, about sources.

" When I was eighteen, I had worked briefly in Mississippi for the Civil Rights Movement as a volunteer in the summer of 1965. I'd been jailed and beaten in Mississippi, then kidnapped at gunpoint in Alabama and held in solitary in a rural jail for a bit over a week.

That political activism was aberrant for an introvert like myself and many of the experiences I had there were violent and traumatic, life-threatening. The upshot was that I knew these things had happened, but I never talked about them and gradually some of the odder facts began to seem as if, perhaps, since I was the only one who knew about them, maybe they hadn't happened in the real world.

Specifically, the two vigilantes who kidnapped me outside Selma—one of them, two months after I was there, killed a Rights worker in broad daylight with a shotgun.

" By then, I was living in New York City, feeling a bit fragile, but functional. One afternoon, I opened the New York Times and saw a photograph of this guy who had held a pistol to my head by a highway not two months before, was the killer. I was totally stunned.

"Cut to thirty-five years later, when I decide to see if this could possibly be accurate and I'm in a library basement scrolling through an old microfiche of the newspaper from that summer and suddenly, there is the photograph and the story and it's all true, just as remembered. Obviously, it's not always that way. Memory is notoriously unreliable, though traumatic memory less so. Hazy also. The more you work on memoir, the more you remember."

Courtesy: Poets.org& Folio(Magazine)

Visit the site http//Englizona.Blogspot.Com for Topical poems