At age 83, Virginia Hamilton Adair has raised three children, enjoyed a loving marriage, dealt with her husband's unexpected suicide, and has now lost her eyesight. The joy and struggle of her life shines from the pages of her first published book of poetry, Ants on the Melon. After an introduction to her life, Elizabeth Farnsworth engages Adair in a conversation about her work.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you for being with us, Virginia Adair. You've been writing poetry since you were six years old. Why? What do you love about poetry?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: I think I just the sound and the rhythm and the playing with words.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What is the first poem you remember hearing?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Well, I have a distinct recollection of looking through the bars of my crib and Daddy reading me a translation of the Iliad, and my saying, "Fifty sons and daughters?". I was an only child, and this was an impressive number for a four-year-old.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So he read you the "Iliad" when you were that young?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Well, he read parts of it, and he particularly like to read rhymed verse, and he got so he would stop before he got to the second rhyme and wait for me to say it. And I made some strange guesses, but it was good training.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I read somewhere that you wrote you first poem when you were six. Can you remember what it was about?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Well, it was in defense of Woodrow Wilson. My father was a Republican who always voted Democratic, and we had a visiting cousin who despised Wilson. And this is my defense of Wilson because I was sure my father must be right.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Your first poem was in defense of Woodrow Wilson?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: It was the first one that anybody bothered to type. And, in fact, it was sent to the White House, and duly acknowledged by some bored secretary.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But you won two awards at Mount Holyoke. I believe they were Ivy League awards, the best poet in the Ivy League, is that right?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: It was an annual poetry reading that usually involved three young men and three young women coming to Mount Holyoke and reading before very distinguished judges. We had some wonderful judges. Robert Frost frequently judged for us, and the Benets, and people of that caliber.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So they judged you the best poet in those readings, twice, right?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: That's right.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And then you published some poetry in your twenties in the Atlantic and the New Republic and elsewhere.

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Well, I was so naive that I just assumed the Atlantic would be happy to receive a visit from me with my poems, so I went into Cambridge and went into the "Atlantic" office and, umm, Edward Weeks, I guess, was--wasn't he the editor then?-- was amused and tolerant and actually took a couple.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You had all the success as a young student. Then you wrote poems that magazines accepted. And then, as I understand it, you stopped publishing. Why?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: I was quite competitive. And I either wanted to be very good at it, or just to let it alone. And I was doing a lot of other things. I was enjoying teaching tremendously. I taught for about 25 years in, I think, five different colleges or universities. And that was a full-time job, and I had a full-time husband and three full-time children, and there just wasn't--wasn't time to think.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But you never could write it. You--although you weren't publishing, you were churning out poetry all the time, weren't you?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Well, it becomes a way of life.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You mean turning your experiences into poetry?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: It's--I think my poetry is a journal that I never kept. I never had enough perseverance to keep a journal.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm going to read a poem right now--"Slow Scythe--on page 145--and have you talk to me a little about it, if that's okay. "Slow scythe curving over the flowers in yesterday's field where you mow. My cool feet flick the dew from the daisies, hours, hours ago, ages and ages ago they flicked the dew from the yellow and snow-colored flowers you leisurely mow."

VIRGINIA ADAIR: What can I say about it? It's one of those poems that writes itself. And I don't think often I know what a poem means, and so I've lived with for quite a while.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: When did you write it?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: I was a teen-ager, I have to admit.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: That goes back to your teen-age years? How many poems would you say you've written if you put them all in a pile somewhere, how many would there be?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: I really have no idea. All I know is that since I've been blind, I've written, oh, I would say between two and three thousand. I've written more since I became blind. It's given me more time to write.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Has it changed the way you write?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: It's changed it very much. For one thing, I find rhyme is a handle on which to hang an incomplete memory. If can remember the rhyme, sometimes I can reconstruct the line. Otherwise, I tend to have forget what I have written as soon as I write it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I assume when you wrote your poetry before, you wrote it out, you revised, you marked it up, you revised a lot. How do you write now?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: It's difficult because for me the feeling of a black felt pen in my hand was a very provocative or evocative experience. I just wanted something to flow from the pen as well as my mind, but now it has to be--it has to be on an old portable typewriter. I usually get up about 5 in the morning and have a cup of coffee and meditate for a while and then usually I'm impelled to write. It's a wonderful feeling to sit down and wack off something, whether it's just an epigram, a couple of lines, or a page or two. After that, the process is rather complicated because I have--people have to come in and try to read what I've written, and often they will say, well, this line says "trytrytryrytytf" and one time I just said, well, leave that in, we'll just have that part of the poem.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What brings a line to you? Do you get the first line like some poets say? What do you get as the inspiration for a poem?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: I think generally it's a situation or an emotion concerning a person or a place, and it's just something that has to come out. I remember a time I wrote probably when I was, oh, maybe 10 years old that did have a line that seemed magical to me. Nobody else found it interesting, but it was, umm, an idol speaks. I was stolen from a temple in an oriental city and the hundred thousand pilgrims--before my shrine. You see it was a kind of tom-tom beat that appealed to me, and I can't remember any more of it. I'm sure it was a real dud, but I got so much pleasure from that line at the time that I wrote a poem about it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: A section of your book is called "Exit Amour," which is about your love for your husband and family and the loss of your husband to suicide. I'd like to read something from that. "One ordinary evening, lying entwined with you on the long sofa, the hi-fi helping Isolde to her climax. I was clipping the coarse hairs from your ears and ruby nostrils when you said, ‘Music for cutting nose wires,' and we shook so the nail scissors nicked your gentle neck, blood your blood. I cleansed the place with your tongue, and we clung tight, tilted with Teutonic cries as the player lifted its little prick from the groove, all arias over, leaving us in post-Wagnerian sadness. Later that year, you were dead, by your own hand, blood your blood. I have never understood. I will never understand."

VIRGINIA ADAIR: We had so much I couldn't understand how he could leave it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: In time, you somehow made peace and worked in your garden and found a way to live through it. It's all in this poetry. Did the poetry help you?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Yes, it helped me, and also my father, at that time, was living with us, and he was a great help. He had unfailing wit and humor.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You now have a book that's in its fourth printing, which is something of a phenomenon in poetry publication, I'm told, and I hear from your publisher that you're being called for many interviews. It suddenly hit the pages of the major reviews and newspapers. How do you like it? After avoiding this for 83 years, how do you like it now?

VIRGINIA ADAIR: Oh, I really love talking with people about poetry, and such interesting, nice people call or write, and I--I just appreciate very much that they like what I've written.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Virginia Adair, thank you very much for being with us.