It’s the birthday of poet Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), the first woman to serve as poet laureate of the United States. Her poetry often examines domestic life and married love and is witty, precise yet warm, and full of literary references. (NB: the post of poet laureate of the U.S. was officially established in 1985; before that, essentially the same position was called poetry consultant, and a few women had held that position.)

Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and received a B.A. from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942 and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1943, the same year she married Jarvis Thurston. She went on to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and co-founded with Jarvis the journal, Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts in 1947. (You don’t meet a lot of baby boys named “Jarvis” these days. Jarvis needs his binky. Does Jarvis like Legos? Look at the painting little Jarvis brought home from preschool! Sorry. I digress.)

Van Duyn published her first collection of poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, in 1959, a second volume, A Time of Bees, in 1964, and won the National Book Award for her third, To See, To Take (1970). Near Changes won the Pulitzer in 1991. She was 71 years old when she became poet laureate in 1992.

Her poem, Late Loving, about her long marriage to Jarvis, begins:

If in my mind I marry you every year / it is to calm an extravagance of love / with dousing custom, for it flames up fierce / and wild whenever I forget that we live / in double rooms whose temperature’s controlled / by matrimony’s turned-down thermostat. / I need the mnemonics, now that we’re old, / of oath and law in re-memorizing that. / Our dogs are dead, our child never came true. / I might use up, in my weak-mindedness, / the whole human supply of warmth on you / before I could think of others and digress. / “Love” is finding the familiar dear. / “In love” is to be taken by surprise…

(Find the entire poem near the end of this site.)

Have a most acceptable Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.