Saving Millay’s Home
by Adrienne Raphel

In 1925 poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, answered an advertisement for an abandoned blueberry farm for sale in Austerlitz, New York. They bought the property for $9,000 and named it Steepletop after the Steeplebush, a wild plant that studded the grounds with spiky pink blooms. Over the next twenty-five years, the farmhouse and surrounding seven-hundred-acre estate in the Berkshires near the Massachusetts border became Millay’s refuge, a haven where she could focus on her writing surrounded by forests, foothills, and wildlife.

https://goo.gl/images/qYowU1

Today the house is open to the public and is run by the Millay Society, a nonprofit trust dedicated to preserving the poet’s legacy. When Millay died in 1950 her sister Norma moved into the house, and after Norma’s death in 1986 the estate passed into ownership of the society. Since 2010 guests have been welcome to visit Steepletop and immerse themselves in Millay’s life by taking tours of the house and grounds. The estate, however, is in danger of closing after the current season, and the organization has launched a campaign to keep it open to the public.

Millay’s sonnets inverted gender roles, give the female speaker authority. She was pigeonholed as a love poet, even in her lifetime. Now she’s finally being incorporated into the canon. Millay is an important historical figure and an important literary figure, and we’re just now finding out all about it.

https://www.pw.org/content/saving_millays_home

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The Universe as Primal Scream

5pm on the nose. They open their mouths
And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic.
First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally,
They both let loose at once, and I think
Of putting on my shoes to go up and see
Whether it is merely an experiment
Their parents have been conducting
Upon the good crystal, which must surely
Lie shattered to dust on the floor.

Maybe the mother is still proud
Of the four pink lungs she nursed
To such might. Perhaps, if they hit
The magic decibel, the whole building
Will lift-off, and we'll ride to glory
Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what
Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky
Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold,
To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.

Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes,
Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space.
Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father,
Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready
To meet what refuses to let us keep anything
For long. What teases us with blessings,
Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great
Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor,
To sweep our short lives clean. How mean

Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle.
The neighbor chopping onions through a wall.
All of it just a hiccough against what may never
Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it,
Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something
They have no name for has begun to insist
Upon being born.

Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011)