Man in a Boat, by Ren Adams (me!)

In previous Poetry Saturday features, I’ve showed you a batch of beloved free-verse poets; Modernists, post-Modernists, and rule-breaking wordsmiths who defied traditional rhyming structure. This weekend, I am sharing a favorite poem of Robert Lowell’s, who was also a “radical” poet in his own right, even if the structure of his poetry might remind you of older forms. His gritty, hard-edged, often bloody phrases are raw, unafraid, and quite “unflowery,” even when he builds upon rhyme.

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977) came from a long line of educated East Coasters (yes, he is connected to the Lowells for whom Lowell, MA is named), and was deeply tied to coastal culture. Highly educated, well aware of fellow poets (both past and present), and something of a political activist, Lowell was involved in affairs ranging from social change to the renewal of old world values. He listened closely to Ezra Pound’s credo that poetry should be fresh and visual–but that is should also be about history; that it should speak from our experiences, and be about something greater than ordinary.

“The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket” is a gripping, moving work that focuses on the many sailors lost along the Eastern Coast. You might notice nods to the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or “Moby Dick,” and you will definitely feel the sense of history in the “ancientness” of certain words and passages, as well as the horror and mystery of death at sea, the ever-moving cycle of life, and a reminder to remember both the terrible and the “sacred.” His lyrical, old world qualities were in dramatic contrast to the courtliness of Robert Frost (a contemporary) as well as Ezra Pound, and TS Eliot (also contemporaries).

It comes from his second book of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle, published in 1947, a year before TS Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Poetry.

(the following are specially chosen EXCERPTS from the entire poem)

(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

I
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket–
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks it nose
On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea
Where dreadnaughts shall confess
Its heel-bent deity,
When you are powerless
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and then repeat
The hoarse salute.

II

Whenever winds are moving and their breath
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death
In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear
The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall
Off ‘Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash
The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids
For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids
Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush
At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.

A fascinating article on Lowell:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200307/davison

To read the entire poem:

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robert-lowell/13672

‘IN BED, HE SMELLS LIKE A BUTCHER’

I couldn’t help but think of Assia Wevill’s description of Ted Hughes’ ferocious love-making as I wandered through the grounds of Lumb Bank last week. I have been lucky enough to spend a few days working at the Arvon Foundation in Heptonstall. Lumb Bank, a former mill owner’s house, is surrounded by deep walls of thickets, mud, berries, and the silent echoes of a thousand pencils scratching at paper on stone. Lumb Bank holds residential writer’s courses in Ted Hughes’  home. I’m not too sure exactly when he bought Lumb Bank, but he lived there in the 1970s.

Ted’s poetry runs like blood from every open cragg in Calderdale. So much so that I have started a self-imposed ban on reading his work. It’s as though everything that ever needed to be said about this area has already been nailed in stanza.  What does interest me is the thought of Sylvia – and the power of pathetic fallacy upon her during her visits. The desolate, unforgiving wilderness of Slack Top, the carbon charred walls, the suffocating streets trapped in the shadows of Hebden Bridge, all of these images must have been a frightening prospect for Sylvia’s future. She is buried at Heptonstall, overlooking my house. I see her looming every day when I open my front door. She is omnipresent. Perched on the highest point in the valley.

I often wonder how Sylvia managed to gain such widespread acclaim in Britain when the poems of Anne Sexton are just as revealing. Sexton was probably one of the greatest American female poets of the last century – but is rarely mentioned in the UK. Maybe Sexton’s work is too ‘difficult’?  Are people uncomfortable with confessional poetry from women? Lowell was well-loved and respected for his work, yet Sexton is readily dismissed as a ‘feminist’ writer by the literary vanguard, rather than being included in the female poetic canon of the 20th century. Her poems were written as part of her psychotherapy, she was bi-polar, erratic, majestic, and also from similar stock to Plath. Sexton was mentored by W.D Snodgrass, and has a similar bite to Plath’s. By that I mean her tone and inflection have similarities. The Poetry Library at The South Bank have some recordings of her in their tape archives. Well worth a visit if ever you are passing. I’d also suggest Diane Middlebrook’s biography – which has transcripts from her psychotherapy sessions – for a wider perspective on Sexton’s work.

In the meantime I wanted to post some of Anne’s reading that I found on Youtube:

Free downloadable audio tour shines a literary light on the nation’s capital

CHICAGO—The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Washington, DC, Poetry Tour. The interactive tour, freely available at www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour, reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as well as original photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Narrator and inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander leads the tour from the stacks of the Library of Congress to Civil War battlefields to the Capitol steps, from the National Zoo to the U Street Corridor to the Busboys & Poets Café. Archival recordings from canonical poets including Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown, Randall Jarrell, and Ezra Pound chronicle DC’s rich literary history, while contemporary poets such as Linda Pastan, Quique Avilés, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Ayala, A.B. Spellman, and Jane Shore share their experiences, through both poetry and commentary, of national monuments and monumental poets alike.

The DC Poetry Tour presents the development of the capital’s poetry scene over the last century and a half, from its interplay with musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Ben Webster, to the creation of the office of poet laureate, to the legendary literary salons hosted by Georgia Douglas Johnson, to the multifaceted work of numerous poet-activist groups. Local poets and scholars—including E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the Afro-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University; David Gewanter of Georgetown University; and Kim Roberts, editor of Beltway magazine—provide the framework for understanding the moments and movements that have shaped DC’s literary culture.

Listeners to the tour, which includes 34 stops throughout the National Mall and Northwest DC, learn that Washington is not only our government’s headquarters but an important American literary capital as well. Historical images and artifacts provide a glimpse into DC’s storied past, while photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who was born and raised in Washington, give viewers an inside look at DC’s neighborhoods and people. Poem text is presented along with original audio recordings and archival images, as listeners step into the national arenas that continue to inspire poets today.

“Tracing the history of American poetry against the culture and geography of our national capital helps readers develop a better sense of our shared literary heritage,” notes Anne Halsey, media director of the Poetry Foundation. “Poetry lovers visiting Washington can download free audio tours and maps to take guided poetry walking tours of the National Mall or Northwest DC—but you don’t have to be in DC to explore the city’s literary history. The full multimedia tour can also be experienced virtually at poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour.”

Beginning at the Library of Congress—the home of the first Poetry Consultant, Archibald MacLeish—the tour discusses the contributions of such heralded poets as Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. MacLeish declares, “A poem should not mean / But be.” Later, Williams fashions a modernist American poetry: “Never reverse a phrase that is your language as you speak it . . . Then you’ve started to create a culture in your place as you are.”

Contemporary poets from throughout the Beltway also present poems. Poets such as Brian Gilmore, who relates his personal interest in Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Myra Sklarew, who discusses May Miller, recognize the influence of their predecessors, reflecting upon them as President John F. Kennedy did when he spoke of Robert Frost: “Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.”

The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour, an original production of the Poetry Foundation created in collaboration with Tierra Innovation, was written and produced by Curtis Fox. Special collaborators on the project include Grace Cavalieri, Katie Davis, Patricia Gray, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Beltway magazine editor Kim Roberts.

For more information, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour

Lowell’s and Bishop’s collected letters.

By Michael Hofmann
Poetry Media Service

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that’s absolutely the wrong place. Here, then, are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published, exchanged over 30 years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-20th-century America first met—Robert Lowell just 30, Elizabeth Bishop 36, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some 900 pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print (“I know I’m myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell”), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don’t know where else I’ve been. “Why, page 351,” I would say. “Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?”

But what is it like? How, in fact, do you read it? “I am underlining like Queen Victoria,” Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its 800 pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It’s like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk reread.

It’s an epistolary novel—if not a full-blown romance, then at least, at moments, an amitié amoureuse. It’s a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it’s an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone’s study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It’s an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It’s a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It’s a further episode in Bishop’s increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell’s traditional Northeast seaboard to Bishop’s serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid (“we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don’t know,” writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies ); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other’s perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop’s agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell’s books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop’s difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell’s visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop’s companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop’s uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell’s absence, if you please), and Lowell’s ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late ’70s. It’s social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It’s not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

Excerpted from “The Linebacker and the Dervish,” originally published in the January 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection of poetry, Selected Poems (April 2009), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is currently working on translations of Gottfried Benn. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Michael Hofmann. All rights reserved.

Lowell’s and Bishop’s collected letters.

By Michael Hofmann
Poetry Media Service

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that’s absolutely the wrong place. Here, then, are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published, exchanged over 30 years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-20th-century America first met—Robert Lowell just 30, Elizabeth Bishop 36, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some 900 pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print (“I know I’m myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell”), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don’t know where else I’ve been. “Why, page 351,” I would say. “Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?”

But what is it like? How, in fact, do you read it? “I am underlining like Queen Victoria,” Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its 800 pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It’s like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk reread.

It’s an epistolary novel—if not a full-blown romance, then at least, at moments, an amitié amoureuse. It’s a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it’s an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone’s study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It’s an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It’s a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It’s a further episode in Bishop’s increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell’s traditional Northeast seaboard to Bishop’s serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid (“we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don’t know,” writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies ); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other’s perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop’s agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell’s books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop’s difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell’s visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop’s companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop’s uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell’s absence, if you please), and Lowell’s ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late ’70s. It’s social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It’s not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

Excerpted from “The Linebacker and the Dervish,” originally published in the January 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection of poetry, Selected Poems (April 2009), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is currently working on translations of Gottfried Benn. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Michael Hofmann. All rights reserved.

Liebe Leserin, lieber Leser,

In diesem Herbst erschienen ausgewählte Gedichte aus dem Gesamtwerk der US-amerikanischen Dichterin Rae Armantrout bei luxbooks. Ihr aktueller Band “Versed” ist Finalist des National Book Award, dem neben dem Pulitzer Prize bedeutendsten amerikanischen Literaturpreis. Zu den bisherigen Preisträgern des seit 60 Jahren verliehenen Preises gehören u. a.

in der Kategorie Prosa: William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, John Irving, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy und Jonathan Franzen

in der Kategorie Lyrik: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara und Robert Hass

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_p_armantrout.html

Rae Armantrout in Deutschland

Rae Armantrout war vom 12.-15. September in Deutschland und hat im Literaturhaus Frankfurt sowie an der Lesebühne Darmstadt mit ihrem Übersetzer Matthias Göritz aus ihrem Band “Narrativ” (luxbooks, 2009, 978-3-939557-40-1) gelesen. Der Band bietet einen zweisprachigen Querschnitt durch das Werk der Dichterin. Ein Bericht über die Lesung von Florian Balke ist in der FAZ vom 16. September erschienen.

Wir wünschen viel Freude beim Entdecken dieser wunderbaren Dichterin!

Herzliche Grüße aus Wiesbaden
Annette Kühn & Christian Lux
luxbooks
wortfürwortfürwort
www.luxbooks.de

Zur Buchseite auf unserer Homepage:

It is friday.. the LCROSS mission has ended with a little puff… Kind of a dud if you ask me.. but I am sure that is just my perspective playing tricks on me.  So… who cares.. huh…?  Anyway.. it is friday, and I am tired and cranky, and a little too hyped up on coffee to be typing on this damn blog.. I hope it all comes together this weekend… trying for a big push on the novel before I have to break from it for a bit to travel and just relax with the most wonderful person in the world…

However… I will leave you with this:  Many people claim to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel… Upon death they see the light… Well I’ve got news for you Jack, I’ve been dead already, and it was liberating…So in the words of Robert Lowell “The light at the end of the tunnel is nothing more than the light of an oncoming train.”

Be kind to your fellow man, do good work, and make wonderful love.

.

Adelante y atrás, adelante y atrás
va el tock, tock, tock
de la anaranjada, suficiente, diplomática
faz de la luna
que hay en el reloj del abuelo.

Durante todo el otoño
el roce y la agitación
de la guerra nuclear;
hemos matado a golpe de palabras nuestra extinción.
Yo nado como un pececillo
Tras la ventana de mi estudio.

Nuestro fin se va aproximando.
la luna se levanta,
radiante de terror.
El estado
es un buceador bajo una campana de cristal.

Un padre no es un escudo suficiente
para su hijo
Somos como un montón de salvajes
arañas que lloran juntas,
pero sin lágrimas.

La naturaleza alza un espejo
Una golondrina hace verano.
Es fácil ir marcando
los minutos
pero las manecillas del reloj se atascan.

¡Adelante y atrás!
Adelante y atrás, adelante y atrás—
¡mi único lugar de descanso
es el balanceante nido del oriol naranja y negro!

.

Robert Lowell

Otoño 1961

.

não sou eeeeu

(…) estamos com uma nova cozinheira, do ‘Norte’ (o ‘Norte’ é encarado mais ou menos comos nós encaramos o ‘Sul’ [dos Estados Unidos]‘

(…) famílias grandes são o estilo predominante: dez ou doze. Todos os meninos se chamam ‘José’ alguma coisa e todas as meninas se chamam ‘Maria’ alguma coisa. Esses nomes são sempre abreviados em apelidos absurdos que pegam para a vida toda. Conheci um muito elegante, ‘Magu’, para Maria Augusta (…) Bem, eu não me incomodaria com as famílias grandes se ficassem restritas à classe alta (…)

Estou dividida entre os prazeres de ser incansavelmente servida, ainda que de modo displicente, por todos os nossos pequenos negros, ou fazer uns ovos mexidos direito para mim mesma…

(…) a inflação aqui anda mesmo muito ruim – houve duas pequenas quase revoluções. Bem, o homem que fixa o índice de reajuste dos preços foi mandado para o enterro do papa e agora os brasileiros andam dizendo: ‘Ele chegou lá e o papa pulou de XII para XXIII’.

Trechos da troca de correspondências entre os poetas norte-americanos Elizabeth Bishop e Robert Lowell, na Piauí de agosto.

This again is an interim report on Hill’s critical writings. It must be said that there are aspects of Hill’s thinking that are attractive to me. He dislikes Sylvia Plath’s “cruel psychopathologising”  of her dead father and Robert Lowell’s use of personal letters about the break up of his marriage. He makes the arch observation that there is no automatic parity between the depth of the suffering and the quality of a poem.

My issue with Plath and  Lowell is somewhat different, Plath can write about her dead father if she wants to but she should not have infllicted  her mental illness on the rest of us because mental illness isn’t interesting. She may be guilty of cruel psychpathologising but the greater sin is in thinking that the state of her mental health is worth expressing in a poem. It isn ‘t, so I’m arguing on the grounds of taste whereas Hill is using morality to make a similar point.

The situation with Lowell is a  little more complex. Hill clearly feels that Lowell’s earlier poetry is much better than the later works. I would find it hard to dissent from this and would point to “The  Mills of the Kavanaghs” as his finest poem. The use of the letters is a well-worn battleground and I am surprised that Hill chooses this rather than Lowell’s use of the confessional mode  in general to condemn.  The persistent throwaway references to being unwell belie a man who excuses his sins and then expects te rest of us to forgive him. “Skunk Hour”  is an example of a vastly overrated poem with a malevolent vein running right through it. In short, I’d be happier if Hill had criticised Lowell for being a weak poet and for giving bipolar a worse name than it already has.

The essay ‘Language, Suffering and Silence’ also contains this:

“I would seriously propose a theology of language; and a primary exercise to be undertaken towards its establishment. This would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming a) that the shock of a semantic recognition must also be a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one of its minor but far from trivial types, b) that the art and literature of the late twentieth centur require a memorialising, a memorising of the dead as much as, or even more than, ‘expressions of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed’.

Hill goes on to suggest that the best way solidarity can be expressed is by the giving of alms and quotes Hopkins extolling the virtues of alms-giving to Robert Bridges.

This paragraph took my breath away when I first read it and I was instantly ready to sign up to the G Hill Church of poetic endeavour.  I then read it again and the doubts began to creep in. Semantic shock is very much what poetry should be about because poetry frees us up to inflict these shocks upon the reader and thus to encourage a different was of looking at the world. Semantic shock being also ethical shock is much more problematic, I can only think of Paul Celan who achieves this, and places an immense burden on the shoulders of verse.  As for this being the action of grace, I’m afraid that Hill is ascribing too much importance to the creative  act.

With regard memorialising the dead over expressing solidarity with the oppressed, Hill has written many in memoriam poems in his career and that’s all well and good but I don’t think it should stop the rest of us expressing solidarity if we want to. I’m against the self-pitying misery school of poetry but I have no problem with poems that are politically engaged and engaging.

One more point, in ‘Translating Value’ Hill quotes himself:

“A poet who possesses   such near-perfect pitch is able to sound out his own conceptual discursive intelligence……[He]  is hearing words in depth and is therefore hearing, or sounding, histroy and morality in depth.”

Hearing words in depth encapsulates what we should all be trying to do but very, very few actually achieve. I think Hill here has hit the poetic nail on the head.

It was a Maine lobster town –
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab or rock.
From this distance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

Robert Lowell, 1973

>> [ Acqua

Era una città d’aragoste del Maine
ogni mattino carichi di mani
salpavano per cave
di granito sull’isole,

e lasciavano tetre dozzine di
bianche case legnose incrostate
come gusci d’ostrica
sul pendio d’una rocca,

e dietro di noi, il mare lambiva
quei grezzi piccoli fiammiferi
labirinti d’una chiusa
dove il pesce d’esca era intrappolato.

Ricordi? Sedevamo s’una scaglia.
A distanza di tempo,
sembra color dell’iris,
quando marcisce e diventa più viola,

ma era solo
la solita roccia grigia
che diventa il solito verde
fradicio di mare.

Il mare infradiciava la roccia
ai nostri piedi tutto il giorno,
e continuava a lacerarla
falda per falda.

Una notte hai sognato
d’essere una sirena stretta al pilone d’un molo,
e cercavi di strappare
le conchiglie con le mani.

Sperammo le nostre due anime
potessero tornare come gabbiani
alla roccia. Alla fine
l’acqua era per noi troppo fredda.

trad. it. Cecilia Piantanida ]

NOTE

Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Nato a Boston, a soli trent’anni vince il Pulitzer con la raccolta Lord Wearies Castle (1947). Un rapporto conflittuale con la famiglia e la religione, l’impegno politico pacifista (contro la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il conflitto in Vietnam), una devastante depressione cronica, e due matrimoni disastrosi, sono alcuni dei temi fondamentali della poesia di Lowell. In seguito a diversi episodi maniaco-depressivi— per cui viene ripetutamente ospedalizzato— e l’abbandono radicale della fede Cattolica, nel 1959 il poeta pubblica Life Studies. La silloge, marcata da toni fortemente introspettivi e personali, abbandona i metri tradizionali, in favore di una sperimentazione formale e linguistica che cambierà per sempre il panorama della poesia moderna— così come T.S. Eliot e la sua Waste Land avevano fatto trent’anni prima. I temi e lo stile delle raccolte successive, tra cui For the Union Dead (1964), History (1973), For Lizzy and Harriet (1973), Day by Day (1977), divideranno la critica degli anni sessanta e settanta, fino alla morte improvvisa del poeta a soli sessant’anni. Oggi Lowell è da molti considerato il poeta anglo-americano più significativo del secondo dopo guerra.

(On the train from Rome to Paris, 1950, the year when Pius XII
defined the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption)

Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
in once again and Everest was still
unscaled, I watched our Paris Pullman lunge
mooning across the fallow Alpine snow.
O bella Roma! I saw our stewards go
forward on tipotoe banging on their gongs.
Man changed to landscape. Much against my will,
I left the City of God where it belongs.
There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled
The eagle of Caesar. He was one of us
Only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous
Waste of our grandparent on their grand tours –
Long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,
While breezing on their trust funds through the world.

When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,
The crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
And listened. His electric razor purred,
His pet canary chirped on his left hand.
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
To Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
Angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?
Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter’s brazen sandal.
The Duce’s lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.
God herded his people to the coup de grace –
The costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,
O Pius, through the monstrous human crush…

Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth.
Tired of the querulous hush-hush of the wheels,
The blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth
lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels
on terra firma through the morning’s thigh…
Each backward, wasted Alp, a Parthenon,
fire-branded socket of the Cyclop’s eye.
There are no tickets for that altitude
once held by Hellas, when the Goddess stood,
prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,
pure mind and murder at the scything prow –
Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain.

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

Robert Lowell, 1959

>> [ Oltre le Alpi

(Sul treno da Roma a Parigi, 1950, l’anno in cui Pio XII
definì il dogma dell’assunzione del corpo di Maria)

Leggendo come anche gli svizzeri avessero gettato la spugna
un’altra volta e l’Everest fosse ancora
intonso, notavo la carrozza per Parigi gettarsi
e vagare fra la neve alpina sul maggese.
O bella Roma! Vedevo le nostre guide andare
avanti in punta di piedi picchiando sui gong.
L’uomo cambiò in paesaggio. Molto contro voglia,
lasciai la Città di Dio al suo posto.
Là un Mussolini pazzo di gonne spiegava
l’aquila di Cesare. Era uno di noi
solo, pura prosa. Invidio l’ostentato
spreco dei nostri nonni al gran tour –
saggi vittoriani dai lunghi capelli accettavano l’universo,
veleggiando per il mondo sui loro fondi fiduciari.

Quando il Vaticano rese dogma l’Assunzione di Maria,
le folle a San Pietro urlarono Papa.
Il Santo Padre abbassò il suo specchio da barba,
e ascoltò. Il rasoio elettrico faceva le fusa,
il canarino cinguettava sulla sua mano sinistra.
I lumi della scienza incapaci d’accendere una candela
a Maria risorta — in un colpo miracoloso,
dall’ali d’angelo, stupenda come un uccello selvaggio!
Ma chi ci credeva? Chi poteva capire?
I pellegrini baciavano ancora il sandalo sfrontato di San Pietro.
Il teschio del Duce linciato, spoglio, calpestato parlava ancora.
Dio pascolava la sua gente verso il coup de grâce –
gli svizzeri in costume inclinavano le lance per passare,
o Pio, attraverso la mostruosa calca umana…

Il nostro treno da scalata era arrivato a terra.
Stanco del lamentoso ssh-ssh delle ruote,
l’ego dagl’occhi velati che prima scalciava nella mia cuccetta
giacque fermo, e vide Apollo piantare i suoi tacchi
sulla terra firma, attraverso la coscia del mattino…
indietro, l’Alpe scarnita, un Partenone,
l’orbita marchiata a fuoco dell’occhio del Ciclope.
Non ci sono biglietti per quell’altezza
un tempo occupata dall’Ellade, quando la Dea regnava,
principe, Papa, filosofo e il ramo d’oro,
pura mente e massacro alla falce di prora –
Minerva, l’aborto spontaneo della mente.

Ora Parigi, il nostro classico nero, smembrata
come re assassini s’un’anfora etrusca.

trad. it. Cecilia Piantanida ]

NOTE

Brazen = ‘sfrontato’, ma anche ‘di ottone’/ ‘di bronzo’.

Hush-hush = letteralemente ‘zitto-zitto’, questo significato va ad aggiungersi, ovviamente, al carattere onomatopeico della parola ‘hush’,

Paris = in inglese, Paris è il nome non solo della città di Parigi, ma anche di Paride, il principe troiano che, secondo la mitologia greca, scatenò la guerra di Troia fuggendo con Elena, moglie del re spartano Menelao.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Nato a Boston, a soli trent’anni vince il Pulitzer con la raccolta Lord Wearies Castle (1947). Un rapporto conflittuale con la famiglia e la religione, l’impegno politico pacifista (contro la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il conflitto in Vietnam), una devastante depressione cronica, e due matrimoni disastrosi, sono alcuni dei temi fondamentali della poesia di Lowell. In seguito a diversi episodi maniaco-depressivi— per cui viene ripetutamente ospedalizzato— e l’abbandono radicale della fede Cattolica, nel 1959 il poeta pubblica Life Studies. La silloge, marcata da toni fortemente introspettivi e personali, abbandona i metri tradizionali, in favore di una sperimentazione formale e linguistica che cambierà per sempre il panorama della poesia moderna— così come T.S. Eliot e la sua Waste Land avevano fatto trent’anni prima. I temi e lo stile delle raccolte successive, tra cui For the Union Dead (1964), History (1973), For Lizzy and Harriet (1973), Day by Day (1977), divideranno la critica degli anni sessanta e settanta, fino alla morte improvvisa del poeta a soli sessant’anni. Oggi Lowell è da molti considerato il poeta anglo-americano più significativo del secondo dopo guerra.

Listening to Robert Lowell read his poem “The Old Flame” is way better than just reading it yourself. Really.

I did it!

…finished the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, that is.

It took me four months (800 is a lot of pages, and I am easily and often distracted), so now that I’ve finished, I feel sort of adrift, and abandoned. This large, hardback book from the Worthington Public Library has been a constant feature on my desk since before Christmas.

I read these letters with only the barest exposure to the poetry of either writer, and in total ignorance of their biographies – which turned out to be a fascinating way to dive into people’s lives. There’s so much that you miss, but it’s such an interesting way in. Plus, these two in particular were so in love with each other! And reading each of their letters, I couldn’t help but fall in love with them both, as well.

So encountering, at the end, “North Haven,” by Elizabeth Bishop, in memory of Robert Lowell, after a perfectly cheerful letter from Elizabeth to Cal (as she called him), was somewhat shocking. And then to jump to the footnote and see that Lowell died, in a cab, on the way back to Elizabeth Hardwick, his estranged wife…

well, I read the poem, and tears welled.

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,

afloat in mystic blue . . . And now–you’ve left

for good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange,

your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)

The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

The words won’t change again. All of the sadness is right there, in the word won’t, and in the finality of the simple sentence, the ceasura in the middle of the line.

So sad to see them go.

It’s time. Sylvia Plath vs Anne Sexton.

Both women were brilliant writers, “confessional poets” (the original oversharers, they’d probably both love Twitter if they were around today), and both suffered from severe mental illness, the kind that turns people into brilliant writers. When Sylvia killed herself in 1963, Anne felt like Sylvia was trying to steal the spotlight. The two women studied under male oversharer Robert Lowell in Boston. While Sylvia was educated at Smith College and was a Fulbright scholar; Anne was a model and spent a lot of her life in a mental hospital, where she was encouraged to write. Both women killed themselves by carbon monoxide poisoning, about 11 years apart leaving their children behind. Sylvia’s son commited suicide last year and Anne’s daughter wrote a book about her mother’s sexual abuse of her. They’re both Pulitzer Prize winners, Sylvia getting hers after she died; Anne getting hers in 1967.

Lady Lazarus

by Sylvia Plath

Burial ground for Union soldiers who died at Andersonville Prison

Memorial Day

was first observed in 1865 as Decoration Day by liberated slaves, who independently set up, decorated and proclaimed an ad-hoc graveyard – a field of “passionless mounds” – to honor dead Union soldiers.

In 1868, General John A. Logan issued the original order for Memorial Day.

Learning about the history of Memorial Day put me in mind of a poem by Robert Lowell, who was a conscientious objector during World War II and did time in federal prison for resisting the draft. Later, he was involved in the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement during the 1960s. He was arrested at the famous peace march that surrounded the Pentagon in October, 1967. This protest is described in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night.

For the Union Dead

Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!- a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

Robert Lowell

  Confessions of a Manic Depressive

           We, just as human, can not find it easy all the time to cope with life. We become happy, we become sad, we cry and we sometimes feel like the world on our shoulders, too heavy to carry, to go on…And at those times, most of us try to find something to reflect what we feel, what we think just to escape from the responsibility of keeping it only for ourselves. And we know that we will feel relieved when the words come out of our mouths. By sharing them, it will reach to the others who also feel by the same way as we feel which will let us know that we are not the only ones, we are not totally alone facing with all difficulties of life, but with the others… However, there are times, and there are things that we can not share with anyone, which are private for us like a secret. Like all above, it is not easy to keep a secret totally as a secret forever. Thinking on and on about it can even make us schizophrenic if it is such an important case of our lives like one’s homosexuality, phobias, madness, drug usage, being an alcoholic and so on. The easiest way to handle with the responsibility of our secrets is writing them… Because when you write a work, everybody thinks that you create or you imagine something and you write it down. But what if these are all the truths? Bare confessions? Things that you can not say aloud but write them down in silence as if all were the characteristics of your hero or heroine. Then, writing is the cunning style of uttering confessions. Moreover, many poets use this style in their works which is called as ‘‘confessional poetry’’.

          It can simply be defined as the poetry of one’s, actually the poet’s, reflection of the inner world and privacy to the reader. It reveals the poets’ feelings deep inside frankly, anything like private experiences, traumas, death of a beloved or a platonic love. So, we can say that confessional poems are so intimate and closer to the reality. However, according to some critics, sometimes they may be mostly schizophrenic, unflattering and even embarrassing. If we look at the date on which that style emerged, we can briefly say that it coincides with the America’s depression era during the early 1960s. Confessional Poetry is mostly associated with the great poets of the era like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. Among these poets, Robert Lowell is the most outstanding one and also is thought as the founder of the ‘‘confessional poetry’’. One of his most important works is the Life Studies in which he gathers many of his poems in that book which serve as the guide of his own personal life for us. We learn more about his problems, his conflicts and dilemmas. Before that, he was not writing such personal poems. But hereafter, the changing American life style and the Beat movement forced him to change his way. By the way, his manic depression which was the heritage of his family started to trouble him more as a result of the crisis and the wars that the era was in. His mental problems are also important components of his poems. To understand his poetry, you have to understand him first.

          ‘‘Skunk Hour’’ can be seen as the most famous poem of Robert Lowell which is apparently dedicated to his platonic love, Elizabeth Bishop and which is also a striking example of ‘confessionalism’. Because we witness his daring love for Bishop throughout the poem though not directly. Before starting to analyze the poem in detail, we should better divide the poem in two parts. The poem starts with a clear description of the era which is clear within the first four stanzas. That description seems to show us simply scenery, but it is more than that. It actually forms the image of a slowly declining sea town. “Her farmer / is first selectman in our village; / she’s in her dotage.” With the usage of the word “dotage”, it clearly reflects that the town is in its declining years. To understand its poor state better, we should take into consider the lines between 7-12 which are, ‘‘Thirsting for the hierarchy privacy of Queen Victoria’s century/ she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore/ and lets them fall.’’ That stanza shows that the town is in need of help because it is even longing for the status of Queen Victoria, who was the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland for a long time. We also see an heiress who “buys up all / the eyesores facing her shore, / and lets them fall” and who misses the old times. Moreover, there is a millionaire who lost all his money, a decorator who tries to adorn his shop to attract the attention of the tourists. Though he is not interested in women, he wishes to marry for money. ‘‘there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry.’’ With these words, he tries to show us the negative sides of the depression and more or less the fakeness of the great ‘American Dream’. At the end of the first part, he says “the season’s ill” which actually will refer to his own sickness, depression later on.

                  The second part of the poem turns out to be even much more personal. It can be briefly said that it is the part of the poet’s own confessions. With the line “One dark night”, he directly addresses us, the reader in order to capture us also within the story he is about to tell. The first confession of the poet comes when he says “my mind’s not right”. In that line and afterwards, he talks like a peeper while he is secretly watching the lovers in the car park; “I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down/ they lay together, hull to hull/ where the graveyard shelves on the town…”  He is aware that he does something wrong and accepts it by saying; “my mind’s not right”. Furthermore, within these lines, we become aware of the isolation of the poet from the outer world. Although the lovers in the cars are for real, they are not vivid rather artificial not like humans but robots. The poet becomes disappointed: “my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell/ as is my hand were at its throat/ I myself am hell/ nobody’s here”. In these lines, we apparently witness his thoughts and alienation. The only thing that matters is the skunks hanging around on the streets in search of food. They do not care about anything else just trying to move on unlike Lowell does. They are neither torturing nor pitying on themselves. Also the lines; “She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream/ drops her ostrich tail/ and will not scare.” refer to Lowell’s former life. According to some critics, last stanzas can be seen as Lowell’s self criticism of his existence as a questioning part.

          Without going into details,” Skunk Hour” can be seen as a normal sample of poetry and Lowell as the founder of a new form. However, when we go further and further, we realize that there is something more behind the curtains and he dared to do only a few people could think of. His awareness, his reality, his inner world and even his aberration are hidden within the lines. That is why it is important to read between the lines to catch up ‘the confessions of a manic depressive’.

ays

Two Lovers in an Hourglass

What makes us grow to wish these days away,
content to spend our hours combing sand?
The grains between our toes have much to say
to those still clinging grimly to our hands.

Encased in glass, we’re safe from fortune’s touch
as subjects in our own menagerie.
Though trapped inside we cannot hope for much,
the risks we face are minimized this way.

In time the coarse precipitate will fade
and facing us will be a question, too:
do we attempt to flee this cell we’ve made
or flip our fragile hourglass anew?

Well there is one thing history has shown:
The choice is not one I should make alone.

@NBF 5.13.2009

Los Angeles, 2008

——————–

Notes

This poem is an English Sonnet, the form employed by Shakespeare when he wrote his collection. Like blank verse, the English Sonnet is written in iambic pentameter. In addition, it uses an end-rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, upping the challenge a bit. I invite any serious masochists or poets (or both) out there to give an English Sonnet a try. The balance of narrative, rhythm, rhyme, and originality is very tough to maintain, but the satisfaction level of creating a great sonnet cannot be overstated.

The sonnet, though less popular today, has evolved over time and many twentieth century poets experimented with the form, including Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

The New York Times Magazine released “A Journey Through Darkness” last week, an article Daphne Merkin wrote about her depression. Merkin takes us, in a melodic prose, through her experience at 4 Center, a treatment hospital in Washington Heights, New York City. Here she describes the onslaught of a depressive mood:

Surely this is the worst part of being at the mercy of your own mind, especially when that mind lists toward the despondent at the first sign of gray: the fact that there is no way out of the reality of being you, a person who is forever noticing the grime on the bricks, the flaws in the friends — the sadness that runs under the skin of things, like blood, beginning as a trickle and ending up as a hemorrhage, staining everything. It is a sadness that noone seems to want to talk about in public, at cocktail-party sorts of places, not even in this Age of Indiscretion.

“A Journey Through Darkness” puts us in a place where the literary world and the world of medicine so often coincide: the psychiatric hospital. Underneath the monotony of her descriptions of the day-to-day life in the hospital, sits the fear that the cure for her depression may be the thing that takes away her personality, her memories and her sense of self. She writes: “the patients I saw returning from ECT acted dazed, as if an essential piece of themselves had been misplaced.”

The fear brings to mind The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but other than a passing line about Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Merkin avoids the literary analogies. Maybe she avoids it because those stories end badly. Maybe she avoids it because this experience is about her. Maybe she avoids it because that’s her point, that in the modern age there are options. There is choice. There is hope.

The tension propels the story forward, and despite its lethargic tone the philosophical questioning pulls you through to the end of the sixth page. Merkin also finds in the midst of the melancholy, displays hints of humor, such as the advice Merkin received from her sister: suicide can wait, try the hospital.

Merkin’s essay is self effacing, but that’s what saves it from preachiness. She envies the anorexics at the clinic because they can blame part of their condition on society and fashion icons. She does not pretend to believe in psychotherapy or in a solution drug. She does not feign to be cured. Instead, she does what we all do. She thinks of her family and her loved ones and continues to work.

An interview with Brian Culhane, winner of the 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award for a poet over the age of 50.

By Tim Appelo
Poetry Media Services

Tim Appelo: Your poetry is grounded in the classics. On your way to writing about that subject, did you go through other distinct literary phases?

Brian Culhane: A Miltonic one in my 20s. His sonnets led me to write early poems that were gnomic and dense. One falls under the spell of these great presences. I wrote a long poem called “The Bridge” in allusive, crabbed lines on a metropolitan theme and handed it to my roommate. He said, “Didn’t Hart Crane write a long poem called ‘The Bridge?’” Stanley Kunitz was my thesis advisor. He’d scrawl on a poem, “This is Lowell. The worst of Lowell.” I also had the good fortune to have James Wright as my teacher: a puffy face and slit eyes and big thick glasses—a minatory presence, even though he was a gentle man. I’d written an exam on a typical Wright question: “It has been said that poetry is no better than push-pin. Explain.” Wright was quoting Jeremy Bentham, who argued that both poetry and push-pin, a child’s game kind of like the modern pick-up sticks, are equally valuable if they produce the same degree of pleasure. On my exam, Wright wrote, “Cool-hane, no one will ever take your ideas seriously until you learn how to spell.” I’d gone to Manhattan private schools when they didn’t teach spelling.

TA: “The King’s Question” refers to Croesus, who (Herodotus says) asked the oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The oracle said he’d destroy a great empire—only he didn’t realize it’d be his own, not Persia. But in your poem, Croesus’s question is lost; we don’t know what it was. Why?

BC: The past throws out to us lifelines, messages. What is left out is interesting. The poem imagines that we didn’t ever hear that story, and that would make sense—Sophoclean dramas were all lost, except for a handful. Why did I change what we know from Herodotus’s story of Croesus? Most of his history is taken from oral tradition, which can easily change in the retelling. Maybe Herodotus got the story wrong. Was that really the question Croesus had in mind? Is that what we would ask the oracle in our own lives? How many questions do we have in us, great ones?

Today, we’re not writing questions and sticking them into the wall at Delphi anymore. In the Manhattan neighborhood I grew up in, the correlative for the priestess talking with the vatic utterances was the psychotherapist.

TA: I love that the shrink is knitting.

BC: That brings up Clotho.

TA: One of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, spinning the threads of life. Spinning your fate. Your fate seems to have been spun by libraries.

BC: I like libraries, and tend to do my best research when I’m not researching. I spent years in a library researching a dissertation on the epic. Once in a while I’d simply wander the library and pluck a volume, and become inspired—it was one of those aleatory combinations of time, place, and book. All first lines are accidents.

TA: Many of your poems read like a scholar’s reverie. You write in “Library”:

That fable
Of an infinitely circular Library of Babel
Borges saw as self-referential: nooks
Corridors, dead ends, twisting stairwells:
Bibliographic cargo cults and infidels.

You go on to compare libraries in this poem to the supernatural cargo cults formed by remote Pacific islanders awed by World War II GIs dropping crates full of wonders from afar.

BC: I’m misconstruing, comically from one perspective, tragically from another. What we cast off, what washed ashore because of the wars we fought with machines, these people could make no sense of. I’m also alluding to the coming tide of change, which the islanders can’t do anything about.

TA: How old or new is the work in your book?

BC: “Estrangement in Athens” is my first published poem, which makes it about 30 years old. About a quarter of the poems were written in the last four years. I’m happy that no book came to fruition until now. The book is a lot better for being winnowed. There’s a pressure on poets to publish too early.

TA: Now that you’ve done this, does that change your practice?

BC: No. The muse is an intermittent visitor. If I could speed up the process, I would. Maybe when I’m 75 there’ll be another prize—for the second book of a poet who’s not published a second book until he’s 75.

Tim Appelo has been an editor at Amazon.com and a contributor to the Washington Post and the Timeses of New York, LA, and Seattle. This article first appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Learn more about Brian Culhane, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Tim Appelo. All rights reserved.