Carpe Diem has given a complex challenge this time. It includes some imagined ghost writing by Basho.
As usual there are some inspired haiku to read based on his examples. The subjects are more diffuse than usual, but mainly revolve around spring.
I have followed the trend:
Each day a little
longer than yesterday: spring
grows into summer.
Fascinating stuff about a woman poet I knew little about.
Thank you Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry for posting about her.
I first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in an old high school literature textbook. Parked like a shiny convertible amongst the hearses of early twentieth century American literature, she called to me. Now granted “Renascence” wasn’t a horn-honking kind of poem, and it was certainly death-haunted, but it was written by a woman, one of only twenty at that, and it sang of possibilities.
High school textbooks, of course, would not publish some of Millay’s best works that came later, poems about sexuality, love, and longing, that were certainly ground-breaking topics for a female writer in the early twentieth century. She lived life on her own terms, had many affairs, was openly bi-sexual, went to jail for supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, and traveled extensively.
Today, February 22, in 1892, Millay was born. Her friends called her “Vincent.”
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