This week on From the Vault we celebrate National Poetry Month with the American poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton recorded at the College of Marin in Cali in1983 by the KPFA Women’s Department.
Born in Belgium in 1912 but raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May Sarton suffered through early attempts at acting and running her own theater, until in 1935 she devoted her life to writing. Producing over fifty volumes of poetry, novels, journals, essays, and children’s books before she died in 1995, Sarton was an open lesbian but rejected the narrow label of ‘lesbian writer.’ Seventy-one years old at the time of this recording, Sarton draws from her entire canon of poetry to explore the theme of the evening: the hazards and joys of being a poet.
Poems featured are Sun Boat, The Beautiful Pauses, At Muzot, Where Dream Begins, Binding the Dragon, The Godhead as a Lynx, Death and the Turtle, The Muse as Medusa, At Lindos, The Frog That Naked Creature, Of Molluscs, The Lady and the Unicorn, Dr Abshchied, and On a Winter Night.
From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.