Introduction: The Quest and the Quarrel of the Poetry Prize
by Mark Raymond
There wouldn’t be a Millay House Rockland without a poetry contest prize.
Edna St. Vincent Millay would have still gotten born in a bedroom of a double house at 198/200 Broadway, but who would have shrugged when the building fell into disrepair, as buildings do, and who would have made a peep when the place was sized up for demolition, as happens to old houses, if back in the day a young Vincent hadn’t been entering poetry contests? It takes a lot of prize-winning for fans to put a plaque on a birthplace, and, even then, people need to care enough about something more than just the house or what happened to the poet who lived there. Prizes shape the future in unaccountable ways. They’re about a potential story going forward, and not recollective, or retrospective. They pay it forward, and don’t look back.
So this is not a story about historic preservation. It’s not about dusting off a trophy in some glass case. Maybe it’s not the story we already think we know. Would I be here, writing about Vincent and the Millay House Rockland, if Saint Nicholas magazine hadn’t been running its monthly contests for young readers? If famously, in 1912, Millay hadn’t been left out of the prize money for The Lyric Year poetry prize, would I be telling her story differently? (NB: Poetry contest judges, be transparent about your selection process.)
The Lyric Year, edited by Ferdinand Earle, was a sort of proto-Year’s Best anthology of new writing. This wasn’t a contest for kids, a place to sift for juvenilia at best. Millay was going up against Vachel Linsdey, Louis Untermeyer, and Sara Teasdale, along with other names that haunt the anthologies. Getting “Renascence” included in The Lyric Year itself as one of the top hundred poems (out of “ten thousand submissions” the editor claimed) was already a coup for 20-year-old Vincent. And the prize money she didn’t get—adjusted for inflation, that $500 top award would be worth more in 1912 than the $15,000 a Pulitzer winner gets today.
The prize controversy is the story that blew everything up for Millay, that invented her, in a way—not out of nothing, though, as pieces of her Maine identity, pieces of every place she would call home, Camden, the West Village, narrow 75½ Bedford Street, Steepletop, Ragged Island, are repurposed in the poetic persona she creates. The story of “Renascence” is an ongoing story, literally one of continual “rebirth.”
To realize our vision of carrying forward Millay’s legacy and being a birthplace and beacon for generations of writers to come, this issue of Millay House Rockland’s Third Fig Review opens its doors to The Quest and the Quarrel of the Poetry Prize, celebrating the winners of our inaugural Vincent Poetry Prize, and starting a conversation about the places of winning and losing in the stories we tell about our lives as writers.
“Quest” and “quarrel” come from the opening of Millay’s poem “Weeds” (Second April, 1921):
White with daisies and red with sorrel
And empty, empty under the sky!—
Life is a quest and love a quarrel—
Here is a place for me to lie.
It may feel strange to celebrate prize-winning poems by drawing on lines from a text whose subject is “weeds,” unwanted plants, “ragged” and “bastard” flowers, as Vincent puts it, but notice how uncannily Millay returns to the position she put herself in at the start of “Renascence”: “empty under the sky,” “a place for me to lie.” Obviously, the rhymes are precisely the same as the couplet from “Renascence”: “here upon my back I'll lie / And look my fill into the sky,” although in “Weeds” the speaker’s position is “empty,” while in “Renascence” she risks the effort to perceive her “fill.” Still, there might be a key in the word “here,” as if this were a place, an orientation, she goes back to in her imagination, a birthplace, a place of rebirth.
Why would Millay return to the youthful vulnerabilities of “Renascence?” What had the foregoing decade of life and love given her to see things now in terms of quarrels and quests, bounded by such uncertainties, each implying a sense of a struggle unresolved?
“Weeds” ends with the speaker choosing to rest, however fleetingly, in an unheralded, weedy spot:
And here a while, where no wind brings
The baying of a pack athirst,
May sleep the sleep of blessèd things[.]
As with all of Millay’s strongest poetry, whose virtuoso lyricism keeps us at first only indirectly aware of the hard complexity of her argument, we need to get into the weeds. Whereas “Renascence” powers its way to rebirth through a faith-based acceptance of religion, the years since show Millay taking what she can get, a more skeptical acceptance, yet one still empowered by biblical allusion, although they may be layered and indirect. “Sleep of blessèd things” evokes this, as does the parable-like attention to weeds and “damnèd seeds,” which in turn should recall Millay’s “Figs from Thistles” poems, the ones that helped her get her Pulitzer. Wherever the “here” of this poem is, it’s a poetic respite from the quests and quarrels of love and life, much like “Ragged Island” would be at the end of her life and her loves (notice how there is no “here” in “Ragged Island,” only a repeated “there”).
The “baying of a pack athirst” identifies the speaker as a hunted thing, like a deer pursued by hounds. It’s a literary trope, yet it expresses a vulnerability that Millay allows her poetry to open into repeatedly, starting even in “Renascence,” to engage life and love fully, a radical vulnerability we might say, which keeps her poetry alive and readably contemporary, while the stilted pathos of many of The Lyric Year’s money poems feels deadenly inscribed only in the past.
Millay deserves her prizes, her $1,000 Pulitzer a decade after losing out in The Lyric Year. What do prizes do, then, aside from the money, which, granted, can come in pretty handy around here? I like to think of Millay as a perpetually emerging voice (that’s why we still read her). Maybe there’s an echo of “Renascence’s” rebirthing in everything she wrote, always a bit of that birthplace, carrying forward the agency of who she was as part of a transformative performance, the story that poetry allows her to tell between the here and the there, the now and the then, of her life and her loves.
Our Third Fig Review writers deserve their prizes too. In this issue of The Third Fig Review we hear from two winners of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Vincent Poetry Prize winner Isabel Neal and Maine poet Pamela Alexander, honored 41 years apart (a span that would have aged out a younger poet, who until 2015 had to be under 40). Neal is a humanities instructor at Maine’s Bridgton Academy, which reminds us again that prize-winning shines a pay-it-forward light on emerging writers and reflects back on the position of teachers and mentors, so important in helping young people recognize what’s possible. At 20, Millay was too old for St. Nicholas magazine. Essays by Lucia Graves and Marla Miller explore the formative (and performative) role of prizes in modeling and validating the ways emerging poets orient themselves towards creative careers, with Vincent serving as a key exemplar, a type of beacon to show the way. From other Maine poets, writers, teachers, and editors, we hear of their personal quarrels with the quest for prizes, how losing is sometimes better for the poet, and how the winner isn’t always the “best,” the poem readers are most passionate about, but rather one that survives like some ranked-choice candidate who ticks enough boxes to cross a consensus threshold yet maybe isn’t the voice that shifts the horizon of our expectations.
The Third Fig Review is especially excited to share the voices of Maine’s recent poet laureates, outgoing laureate Julia Bouwsma as the final judge of our new Vincent Poetry Prize and Maine’s newly named poet laureate, Dawn Potter, who in an interview looks ahead to her five-year term. And we look ahead as well by looking back at “Renascence” Revisited, asking poets, especially young writers, High School and College age, to put themselves in Millay’s place and see how they would judge her poem, how they experience her experience, after a span of well over a century. Our poetic, readerly horizons undoubtedly shift as the years accrue, but Millay’s prospects from the top of Mt. Battie remain a beacon and place for rebirth, not simply because it’s a postcard view of mountains and woods and islands in the bay, but because it has the hindsight advantage of Vincent’s own struggles, her quests and quarrels. Every writer makes themselves radically vulnerable in feeling the need to be seen and heard and to share, from laureates to school kids.
This past June, the Millay House Rockland presented two $500 scholarships to local High School seniors, Mary Oakes from Oceanside and Burke Sabatini from Camden Hills. Mary Oakes also contributes to “Renascence” Revisited. $500 doesn’t go as far as it did in 1912, but, as the MHR mission and vision affirm, prospects look good. One can’t predict what you’ll get out of life in a humble working-class home in Rockland, or what quarrels you’ll have about prizes you didn’t win, but revisiting “Renascence” shows what’s possible going forward, how quests can show us the things we love and give us faith in ourselves to take risks.
Mark Raymond was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in Rockland and Owls Head. He received his PhD in English Literature from New York University and now teaches for the UMaine Honors College and serves on the Millay House Rockland board.
