May Sarton: A Self-Portrait
By May Sarton
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In June of 1979, May Sarton answered the questions of two filmmakers and read to them from her poetry. This four-day “jam session” ultimately became an acclaimed documentary about her life and work.
For Sarton, the muse has always been female, and the writer says that her own poems “tell me where to go.” In this rare and inspiring window into a singular woman’s soul, Sarton speaks candidly about everything from how a single image opened the door to writing about her mother to the importance of transparency in art and life. She shares insights into her very personal art, including the unusual people and events that provide inspiration, how creativity can grow out of pain, solitude as a two-edged sword, the difficulties of being a female poet, and the ways love can open “the door into one’s own secret and . . . frightening real self.”
Featuring sections entitled “On Inner Space,” “On Nature,” and “On Love,” this revealing volume is also about the need go on, even when up against overwhelming odds. May Sarton: A Self-Portrait pays tribute to an artist’s vision and serves as a revealing window into a fascinating life.
May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.
Read more from May Sarton
At Seventy: A Journal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As We Are Now: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Journal of a Solitude Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The House by the Sea: A Journal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Shower of Summer Days: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5At Eighty-Two: A Journal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collected Poems, 1930–1993 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEncore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After the Stroke: A Journal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writings on Writing Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Faithful Are the Wounds: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Novels of May Sarton Volume One: Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, A Shower of Summer Days, and The Magnificent Spinster Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Small Room: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Journals of May Sarton Volume One: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Recovering Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Recovering: A Journal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coming into Eighty: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Reckoning: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inner Landscape: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kinds of Love: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crucial Conversations: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Magnificent Spinster: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anger: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Education of Harriet Hatfield: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Book preview
May Sarton - May Sarton
May Sarton
A Self-Portrait
May Sarton
Edited by Marita Simpson and Marta Wheelock
PUBLISHED
TO
HONOR
ON THE
OCCASION
OF HER
SEVENTIETH
BIRTHDAY
CONTENTS
Publisher’s Note
Preface
Transcript of the Film
World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton
On the Poet and Poetry
My Sisters, O My Sisters
The Muse as Medusa
Prisoner at a Desk
We’ll to the Woods No More, the Laurels Are Cut Down
Proteus
On Love
A Light Left On
Because What I Want Most Is Permanence
In Time Like Air
Myself to Me
The Autumn Sonnets
#2
#11
On Nature
June Wind
After the Storm
Easter Morning
The Olive Grove
On Sarton’s Parents
A Hard Death
My Father’s Death
On Inner Space
Dutch Interior
A Biography of May Sarton
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.
Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type,