June 14, 1992--Mona Van Duyn is named first female U.S. Poet Laureate

"I believe that good poetry can be as ornate as a cathedral or as bare as a pottingshed, as long as it confronts the self with honesty and fullness. Nobody is born with the capacity to perform this act of confrontation, in poetry or anywhere else; one's writing career is simply a continuing effort to increase one's skill at it."

Today, we celebrate the life and work of Mona Van Duyn, our first female U.S. Poet Laureate, whose accolades also included receiving the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry magazine, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Van Duyn's quest to "confront...the self with honesty and fullness" is a goal to which we, too, can aspire as we strive to live meaningfully and to pursue deep gladness and fulfillment. Her oeuvre includes the following poem, The Delivery, which stands out to me for its honesty and its awfulness, as it describes in narrative form an example of this self-confrontation.

I'm five. The petals of my timeless play
can unfurl while Mother hoes out other gardens.
the next-door child and I, alone with my toys,
confine to the dining room our discreet noise.
From the doorway: "Betty, come here!" The uprooted flower
falls dead with no warning. What had my friend done,
rolled a dimestore car over the table top,
stood on a chair to wave the little dustmop?
I will never know. She is tethered to Mother's hand
and Mother's voice begins the long scolding.
I start a soldier's march around and around
the table, stomping each foot to stomp out her sound.
Faster around I stomp until it is over,
Betty is gone and Mother takes hold of me.
"What's the matter' with you? Why is your face so red?
Why you're crying, your whole face is dripping wet!
Well, if that isn't silly, I'd like to know what is!
I wasn't scolding  you, I was scolding Betty."
She laughs. "Go wash your face." The room blears.
My hand wipes and finds all the unfelt tears.

Soon it is supper time. In the kitchen they feed
and talk, while I, invisible as I was
in high-chair days, silently sit on Sears,
wearing the weight of my big and bigger ears.
"Well, you'll never guess what your crazy kid did today--
if that wasn't the limit!" The story swells
into ache in my stomach, then Dad's laughter and hers
slice and tear like knives and forks and a worse
hurt is opening in my middle, in familiar
smells and muddle of voices, mashed potatoes,
dimming light, hamburger, thick creamed corn,
the milk-white chill, a self is being born.

And is swept away through seething clots of minnow
in the nearly hidden creek that weeps through the meadow,
smeared with mud from its suckling roots of willow,
to tributary, to river, deep and slow,
whose sob-like surges quietly lift her and carry
her unjudged freight clear to the mourning sea.
And there they are, all of the heavy others
(even Mother and Father), the floundering, floating or
sinking
human herd, whose armstrokes, frail, awry,
frantic, hold up their heads to inhale the sky,
which gilds the tongues of water or soothes them to stillness
with white silk covers strewn with onyx and pearl.
She is with them, inept dog-paddler that she is.
The heavens whirl and drift their weightless riches
through streaky splendors of joy, or bare unending
lodes of blazing or ice-blue clarity.
With them all, all, she is scraped by crusted rock,
wrenched by rides untrue to heart or to clock,
fighting the undertow to shapelessness
in smothering deeps, to what is insufferable.
If those she can reach go under she cannot save them--
how could she save them? Omnipotent dark has seized them.
She can only sink with each one as far as light
can enter, meet drowning eyes and flesh still spangled
with tiny gems from above (a sign of the rare
her watered eyes never need), pointing to where,
up, in the passionate strain, lives everything fair
before she flails back to the loved, the illumined, air.

Mona Van Duyn, 
Firefall, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993