Tag: Robert Lowell
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Dispatches from the Sickhouse
After a remarkably healthy winter our luck ran out: last week Vincent came down with the flu — and believe me when I tell you that this skinny skinny boy really should not do without food for any length of time — and then, as I suppose was inevitable, on Saturday night, Aidan woke up…
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Cal’s Advice? Read!
From Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell: When Philip Booth askes him to look at his poems, Cal suggests he study perhaps “three poets for a month, maybe copying-out poems” to see what he can use to extend his range: “Empson for intellect. Marianne Moore for observation. Frost for how to get a poem…
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Cal & Elizabeth
On [what was] this day [when I began this post but is now yesterday] in 1917, Robert Lowell was born. I’m about a third of the way through Paul Mariani’s biography of Lowell, Lost Puritan, and I’m liking it more than the Hamilton so far — Mariani, while just as blunt about the wreckage Lowell’s…
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Reading Tonight!
I’m reading, along with Kevin Barents and Chloe Garcia-Roberts, at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge tonight as part of their New Voices: Emerging Writers evening. I admit that I’m feeling intimidated by the prospect of reading in this series, at this historical house that has heard the voices of so many major & minor poets.…
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Draft of the Week, #14: Part III
Writing this last cento using poems by both Lowell and Bishop was the most gratifying of work. Putting their voices, these two poets who were such good friends, in direct dialogue with each other gradually took on more and more significance for me. It feels like a Valentine of sorts. Thanks again to Carolee and…
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The Tortoise & the Hare Redux: Lowell & Bishop
Having finished the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, I feel greatly affectionate towards them both. I can imagine how the plotline would get sexed up, but I’m stating here for the record that I think a future biopic should without question cast Robert Downey, Jr. as RL, and for EB, perhaps Meryl Streep:…
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Re: Draft of the Week, #11.
I’ve read various poems by both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, and I have a copy of Lowell’s Complete Prose that, although I haven’t finished it, I’ve read a fair amount of. (I got it for $1 in 2008, what a steal!) But somehow I never realized what true friends they were to each other…
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“The trouble with writing poetry…”
The trouble with writing poetry is that you have readers, and the trouble with readers is that you have to listen to them after they have spent their time reading you. Mine, unless they are young poets or teachers of English, usually say one of three things. If they are relatives, they ask me why…
Marie Gauthier 