Tag: Robert Lowell

Unexpected events

Posted on by Meryl in Events, Poetry

On Friday, I took a dawn hot tub steam curling tranquilly around the sweet peas, heading towards the bay just visible between oak branches. Then I noticed that the electric fence, which guards my chickens from predators, was not blinking, which meant it was shorted out somewhere. I dressed and went down to find a sizable oak limb had split off and crashed through the chicken run, rupturing the bird net and the fence.

Luckily both the tree guy and the handyman were able to come right away, and by noon the fence was secured and the confused chickens all in place.

Then my grandson and I decided to try to trap the cheeky squirrel who has been pilfering the chicken and bird food despite lacing it with hot pepper. We got out my old trap, set it with peanut butter, and scattered a trail of sunflower seeds up to and into it. By evening, the sunflower seeds leading right up to the trap were gone, but no squirrel.

“Maybe he’s too smart for us,” I told my grandson. We decided to leave the trap baited overnight, and this morning I woke to find a skunk in it.  I’ve had a lot of experience with skunks from the time our house backed onto a large open space in Lafayette. The county used to drop off traps and then pick up trapped skunks. Those traps were very narrow, so once caught the skunks couldn’t raise their tail to spray. My trap has plenty of room for the skunk to spray, so it was a problem. I got an old towel and held it in front of me as I approached the trap. The skunk sprayed and sprayed until his little spray reservoir was depleted. Then I covered him with another old towel, put the cage on a rubber mat in the back seat and drove the trap to Tilden Park, where I propped the trap open and let him flee.  The car smells only a tiny bit skunky, as does my right arm.  The towels and cage are out in the sun, waiting for time to reduce the smell. Continue reading “Unexpected events” →

A little perspective

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

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” →

The British first

Posted on by Meryl in Stuff Larry Sez

Looking at my post yesterday about Robert Lowell’s book, Imitations, I commented that the first edition of that book was for sale for $35. Larry looked at the picture and said, “That must be the British first edition.” I checked the source, and it was. “How did you know that?” I wanted to know. Continue reading “The British first” →

Books that change your life

Posted on by Meryl in Philosophical, Uncategorized

lowellI’ve been reading some essays by C.K. Williams (who wrote last week’s poem). In one essay he talks about reading a book by Robert Lowell, Imitations, which broke open a new way of thinking about poetry.

Imitations was influential and controversial. Lowell took poems in other languages and rather than translate them, he created his own poems in English inspired by them. Many deplored this technique, finding it arrogant and disrespectful. But it definitely gave poets something to think about. For Williams, it “released something in me I hadn’t grasped had been keeping me from moving ahead in my own work.”

How amazing it is that books can crack you open, can shed light into your own struggles and world view. Continue reading “Books that change your life” →

The problem with Lowell

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I woke from dreams of not getting where I needed to be in a foreign country of endless lines and confusing roads. Somewhere there was a cafe, somewhere a bay. But I couldn’t find them. And for some reason, I took out the brick of Robert Lowell’s collected poems for my morning reading.

Why has Lowell, once so well-known that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, dropped so out of favor? Was he unlucky to be adorably handsome, from a fine old Boston family, and talented? Perhaps the volume of his work is overwhelming. Coming to him cold, one would be daunted long before finding the handful of marvelous poems that still vibrate with the pain of the human condition. Every poem seems to tackle the big problems, and as with most (all?) poets, most of them fail.

Still, Life Studies, published in the late 1950’s had a huge influence on poetry. I remember reading it, stunned by its intimacy–it was like nothing that came before.  The personal, confessional tone from an academically acclaimed poet legitimized the personal as a subject for poetry. Sylvia Plath was his student, and took the next step.

Despite true madness, excess drinking, smoking, and three marriages, Lowell lived 60 years, and wrote and wrote and wrote.  Rhyme and meter were the water he swam in–they seemed natural to him, not forced or added. He could write a sonnet in his sleep.  Here’s one of my favorites, written late in his life. He nicknamed his third wife “dolphin,” and the first four lines seem addressed to her. The rest of the poem contemplates life as a poet. I always think they are about Berryman, who famously arrived drunk for readings, but they could be about Lowell himself, or many others I guess.  Regardless, I especially love the final four lines:

Fishnet

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,
your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish. . . .
saying too little, then too much.
Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,
The archetypal voices sing offkey;
the old actor cannot read his friends,
and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,
genius hums the auditorium dead.
The line must terminate.
Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime
knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;
the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Lowell is not an easy poet, but he’s one who whose stature will rise again, when others have faded.