Happy Birthday, Vincent!
by Mark Raymond
February events at Millay House Rockland (MHR) and the Farnsworth Art Museum celebrated what would have been Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 133 birthday with poetry and cupcakes.
The Farnsworth Museum’s First Friday of 2025 opened with a “Millay in Love” reading on February 7. Organized by poet Kathleen Ellis and cosponsored by MHR, this annual event again featured a host of Maine poets, each pairing a Millay poem on the topic of love with a poem of their own choosing in response. Along with Ellis, participants included poets François Amar, Carol Bachofner, Ellen Goldsmith, Gray Lawless, Claire Millikin, Judy Kaber, Dave Morrison, and Jefferson Navicky. MHR board member Ann Morris welcomed guests in the museum’s packed auditorium, and refreshments were served afterwards in the Farnsworth Library.
Photos courtesy of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rafi Baeza
As always, Ann and Kathleen shepherded a Farnsworth reading that charted new perspectives on Vincent’s poetry, her legacy, and her evergreen inspiration. The topic, of course, was “love,” and MHR board member Jefferson Navicky’s poem was shared with especial poignancy.
Rockland poet (and MHR member) Carol Bachofner read Millay’s “Ragged Island,” and from her own piece, “Retrospective,” she made a claim for the necessity of love that cuts to the heart of why poetry like Millay’s resonates with life and transcends it, why poets read poetry and why they write:
In retrospect, in the crazy of the rearview mirror, it’s
worthy space where doubts and regrets are not
acceptable excuses. Just say (and it’s true): poetry
is to blame, the words, the rhythms, the metaphors. But
know that such things are sacred beings, it’s
for the souls of saints and sinners alike. What
else could make such painful music in us. I
vanishes and there is only a world of love to do.
photos by Diane Norton
On February 22, Vincent’s actual birthday, MHR continued its longstanding tradition of hosting a celebratory open house in the actual house where Millay was born. Every seat in the parlor was taken as fans of Vincent’s poetry shared their old favorites, newly discovered works, or their own poems celebrating her writing and life. Special Millay Birthday cupcakes were a delicious treat.
Highlighting the informal reading were guests who brought to the party their own editions of Millay, including a volume of sonnets, given as a teenager and still read from and treasured after 70-plus years. Several poets read original work that contended with Vincent’s triumphs in both literature and love. Paul McFarland’s verses “Remembering Vincent” began with the lines:
I trace the steps of this fine day
Of Edna St. Vincent Millay
and continued ruefully
I’m burned no more by passion’s flame;
The dream gone for poetic fame
while Boston-area poet Charlie Gravina read the playful “Un Poema du Mil Lays” from his collection Love Conquers All, that concluding exclaims
You have left to fellas like me, and to posterity
A far more glimmering, and shiny and rich legacy.
Gravina is putting the finishing touches on a play depicting Vincent’s tumultuous years at Vassar.
photos by Diane Norton
Millay’s birthday also marked the opening of our second annual juried Writer-in-Residence program and the announcement that the 2025 competition’s final judge would be award-winning essayist and poet Gretel Ehrlich. MHR is again grateful for the Ellis Beauregard Foundation’s partnership in this program, and we’re excited to work with Gretel in continuing to keep Vincent’s Rockland birthplace open as a house that nurtures literature and the arts.
Partygoers also got a chance to see the latest Millay Poetry Broadsides, our gifts to MHR members who joined at the Sustaining level and above. We’ve been overjoyed to see so many of our members, both old and new, at these February birthday events.
This snowy, frozen February, a bleak season in more ways than one, Millay’s poetry offers a challenge to the storms we face, the threats that speak loud against the possibilities of love. Be it wry, impassioned or bittersweet, her tone and wisdom draw us in, like warm conversations despite the chill outside, reminding us that love, in its intensity or its distance, keeps us alive to the human when the world is given over to winter’s blast and ice.
