It’s hard not to feel that things are worse now than they’ve ever been. But looking back at the fifties, I remember feeling they were pretty terrible then. This poem, from that period by Robert Lowell, gives a good description of that feeling:
Skunk Hour
(for Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. Continue reading “A little perspective”
I read about Bette Howland and her memoir/novel Blue in Chicago in the NY Times obituaries last month. According to the obituary she was a a protege (and perhaps lover) of Saul Bellow and had a troubled life.
There is nothing to say about this poem–just buy the book.
I have a system for New Year’s resolutions that works well for me: Aim small and succeed. I’ve discussed this 
It’s that season–all the old cliches brought out with music and glitter. On that note, there are very few poems that contain angels that are not overwrought, too fanciful or just plain schmaltz. But this, by B. H. Fairchild, avoids all that:
“This is absolutely the best time for CPAs in my 35 year working career. I was in my 4th year when the 1986 tax act was passed. It presented many less opportunities – mostly due to a thoughtful, bi-partisan, nearly 13 month effort that ultimately passed 93-6 in the senate. 
I went to hear Rita Dove, a former US Poet Laureate, read at the UC Berkeley Lunch poems series this week. Here is one of her poems:
In case you didn’t happen to use Google today, they are honoring Gertrude Jekyll, famous British gardener of the late 19th, early 20th century. She is very quotable; here’s an example:
On a less earthy path to enlightenment, I have been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish religious leader born in Germany, who famously met and marched with Martin Luther King. This quote seems particularly apposite today: 
In the shape of a human body
This morning, Larry was reading Greg Mankiw’s NY Times editorial on 45’s tax plan. Mankiw is an economics professor at Harvard. To familiarize me with Mankiw, Larry played a country western economics song, Dual Mandate for me. I guess he was directed to this from reading Mankiw, and I incorrectly reported it as Greg. An alert reader (thanks, Dan) caught the error, but the video is still worth 
We are back home, and happy to find that David Juda has completed a wonderful project of posting poems and music from For Jazz on his website,