Poetry Corner

August

By Dorothy Parker

When my eyes are weeds,

And my lips are petals, spinning

Down the wind that has beginning

Where the crumpled beeches start

In a fringe of salty reeds;

When my arms are elder-bushes,

And the rangy lilac pushes

Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!

Light your tinsel moon, and call on

Your performing stars to fall on

Headlong through your paper sky;

Nevermore shall I be cursed

By a flushed and amorous slattern,

With her dusty laces’ pattern

Trailing, as she straggles by.

This poem is in the public domain.

About the poem: This poem was included in Enough Rope, Parker’s first collection of poetry, published in 1926. It was a bestseller.

About the poet: Dorothy Parker was born on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey. She grew up on Manhattan’s West Side, but her childhood was an unhappy one: both her mother and stepmother died when she was young; her uncle, Martin Rothschild, went down on the Titanic in 1912; and her father died the following year.

She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, and, at age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. Continuing to write poems for newspapers and magazines, she joined Vanity Fair in 1917, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic.

In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Calling themselves “The Vicious Circle”, the group included Parker, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber.

During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times, befriending, among others, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the early 1930 she produced short fiction, and began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. After her marriage in 1934 to actor-writer Alan Campbell, they relocated to Los Angeles, and became a highly-paid screenwriting team. They received an Academy Award nomination for “A Star Is Born” in 1937.

Parker became a socialist in 1927, was called before the House on Un-American Activities in 1955, where she pleaded the Fifth Amendment. On June 6, 1967, she was found dead of a heart attack at the age of 73. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination the following year, the estate was turned over to the NAACP.