April -- Tax season, spring and National Poetry Month

 

PL, dining room at Couchwood

 

 

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR POETS?

 WHO AM I?

 I WAS BORN  ELEANORE MARIE IN 1912 IN BELGIUM, the daughter of a science historian.
 

 We moved to the US when I was four. I grew up in Cambridge Mass., and began writing poetry as a teenager.
 

 After a period of aspiring to be an actress in New York—and failing—I continued to write. I traveled to Europe frequently and met Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden among others.
 

 My writing career took off during the 1930s—while I was in my early twenties. My first volume of poetry was “Encounters in April” and was published in 1937.                   [I hear now that copies are worth $88 on Amazon, and $150 and $200 on ABE books. All I can say is ‘wow!’ And let that be a lesson to you who are hearing this. All sorts of things can happen after you no longer live on this planet.]
 

 I also wrote a novel, which was published. Around this time, I worked as an instructor and lecturer at a number of schools. I even wrote an autobiographical volume at age 47. [Don’t ever think you’re too old to begin writing; you’re not. Why, I hear there’s a 93-year-old Missouri woman who had her first novel published recently!]
 

 I spent my later years in York, Maine, by the sea. I wrote four memoirs all told. My last book of poetry, “Coming Into Eighty” was published when I was 81. [I understand it is much cheaper to buy this volume online—even as little as one cent—plus shipping, of course.] Two years later, during the summer, I took my last breath.
 

 Here is one of my poems:

 

A GLASS OF WATER

 

Here is a glass of water from my well.

It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;

It is the best I have, my only spell,

And it is cold, and better than champagne.

Perhaps someone will pass this house one day

To drink, and be restored, and go his way,

Someone in dark confusion as I was

When I drank down cold water in a glass,

Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,

After the bitter mood had gone again.

~~M. S.