The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I finish the PARIS REVIEW 1961 interview with Robert Lowell. It contains a lot of waffle and name-dropping, and some material that could possibly be useful or relevant about writing in poetic forms. It's slightly interesting for instance that Lowell says that when reading poems regularly in public he rewrote them to make them simpler and more direct.

But, a) it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

b) Much more broadly in this long interview what I notice is that Lowell says almost nothing about what his own poetry is about, or why he ever felt inspired to write it. On the last page he does finally talk about trying to render an experience into a poem, and how it comes out indirectly in a detail. But I find it fairly absurd that in a detailed 35-page interview you learn almost nothing about what this poet wrote about or what experience or feeling or belief ever made him want to write a poem. The main exception is something about Christianity, but he airily says that he doesn't know whether his poems are religious or not, which makes me think: if you don't, well, nobody else does.

Another example of Lowell's airy grandeur is his declaration that T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost are, "certainly", "the great New England poets". Now firstly this is banal because Eliot and Frost were practically the best known poets in the world at the time, so he's not having to work very hard to name them. It's like saying "Certainly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now the major Democratic politicians." Secondly, if you think about it, you wonder if it's even true of Eliot - who was from Missouri and who in London was known as "Tom (Missouri) Eliot", who lived in Paris and Oxford, who became one of the great London poets (certainly his most famous poem is not about New England) and more English than the English, and who in the Four Quartets writes most obviously about three English places (and one off the coast of MA, true). Well, you can kick it around and argue that TSE (who did spend some significant time in New England, yes) really was very New England (you can certainly say that most of the first book had New England settings in mind), and people will agree, but it's not a great argument to win given the banality aspect noted above.

That's a digression I admit. Mostly I wish the interviewer would, rather than chattily ask about this or that dropped name, ask what some of Lowell's actual poems are about and try to establish why they might be worth reading.

Maybe he caught on that they’re not worth reading at all, which is the correct opinion afaic

Despite my jest, I will say that Stevens is certainly more a New England poet that Eliot ever was— Stevens is practically the first person I think of when I think of New England poetry

But Lowell was probably jealous that Stevens was nine million times the poet he would ever be :-D

Lowell actually says:

"You hardly think of Stevens as New England, but you have to think of Eliot and Frost as deeply New England and puritanical."

it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

I agree with you that even if he had acquired these qualities through becoming a fascist that would not be a net gain (lol), but this also seems to me like Lowell has no idea what fascism is? It's a cliché by now to call it the aestheticization of politics; certainly there is nothing at all down to earth about ethno-nationalist heroic narratives of the Ubermensch.

i have no brief for lowell -- the times i've tried to read him have not been rewarding! -- but is the hidden stress in that sentence maybe on "puritanical" (with new england as a shorthand for that), making this a cryptic comment on his own poetry (he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

robert traill mixx lowell IV

The River of Rivers in Connecticut
by Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

stevens does not strike me as puritanical but others here surely know his work much better

He resides in a Connecticut of the mind. People exist as muses and intimations.

Mark S: I agree that 'puritanical' is a key word, but what does it mean in relation to Eliot?

The truth is surely that in relation to Eliot, it has its most banal meaning - the thing that everyone would casually think puritanical means - that is: a fear and suspicion of sexuality.

It is arguable that this is present in TSE's most famous poem. Arguable also that it was present in his life, though that's another matter.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

Or did Lowell really mean to say something else about Eliot, by this word? If so, I don't know what it was.

yes i agree it doesn't open things up very much at all, and that many readers will likely reach for the least testing meaning -- tho i'm guessing a boston new englander might have more complex references for it, including even some positive ones? as much as anything it's a religion-based philosophy (what should you do? how are you saved?) and eliot was both religious and philosophical…

the interviewer should have asked him what he meant the word! (i haven't read the interview so i'm just parsing that point) (instead of getting down to my own work)

The interviewer should have asked him a lot of things. A poor job.

I agree that Lowell probably did, indeed, mean it positively, as you say. But again, TSE was not from New England, and was not a puritan - he was raised as a Mid-Western Unitarian and then became an Anglo-Catholic in London. To say he was a New England puritan seems something of a fiction.

I think I should partially withdraw my last statement, as Unitarianism could perhaps be called a form of puritanism.

well i think he's making a provocative rather than a factual claim: TSE is the most "new england" of poets – despite largely being from elsewhere – bcz to be a puritan is above all to be "new england" and TSE was above all a puritan. what did he mean by this tho? we do not find out (bcz the joke or the trolling or whatever it is went over the interviewer's head, and requires ilx to tease it out)

That seems a good reading. The point of the statement is that TSE is "very New England" despite not being from New England.

(he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

Anthony Powell, almost certainly well aware of Lowell's family lineage, used to say that his own surname should be pronounced in just the same way as Lowell's (ie not to rhyme with 'towel').

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

brb developing a hilarious internet meta-joek in which they're pronounced poo-ell and loo-ell and also instead of boo-ie it's boo-urns

I did try to read Lowell 14 years ago. It was a struggle and unrewarding - just as Mark S has said. I seem to have got almost nothing out of them.

Can anyone who remembers tell me, or us, what (some of?) Lowell's poems are about?

Yeah, if Lowell meant puritanical and/or Brahmin related, then Stevens could not count, as he had to actually work for a living (horrors!) in the most dreary of professions, too.

mark s and the pinefox, he wrote what I would call historical confessional works that mostly involved the relation of the self to history as perceived in the present. “For the Union Dead” is an emblematic poem— blank verse, the intrusion of modernity and the (here literal) excavation of history, the way personal memory imbues a place with a certain subjective personal history as adjunct to objective history, a healthy dose of racism.

https://poets.org/poem/union-dead

I should say, i just woke up so “blank verse” not the term as it’s usually utilized— I meant free verse.

He wrote one poem that I love unreservedly— otherwise, meh.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

This made me laugh out loud.

His dense Tate/Eliot-indebted early work is about the only Lowell I can stand.

He lived in a tent on Allen Tate's lawn!

the only kind of influence i recognise

Poster table, thanks for your description of Lowell's work. This is helpful and clear. Apart from the racism, you do not make the poetry sound bad.

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

Hardwick. I like Blackwood too.

Hardwick's criticism, her fiction not so much.

Lowell really loved the "n" word, among the reasons why I dislike him tbh.

Trust was a fitting title as far as the first book because it calls into question the basis of finance and common knowledge (and presuppositions about behavior and mutual ties and obligation). When something is backed by nothing other than trust, what happens?

So did Tate. Cal learns from masters. xpost

"During Fever" by Lowell (thanks ILX for restarting my interest in poetry)

Blackwood, Hardwick, Stafford: excellent literary taste in choosing his abused wives (note related imagery of names too)

Now into the second book about Bevel, I am thinking that this novel reminds me of Buddenbrooks and Thomas Mann in general when it seemed possible to associate business with goodness and solidity that later dissipated into anxiety and fret manifest as care about linens. Wealth buys freedom from care which can turn into freedom from responsibility which I see can engender resentment. The ideal middle class would be exempt from privilege and want and be sympathetic to expansion (i.e., sociable or socially minded if introverted).

There are also strange ideas about (women and) health and frailty perhaps labeled Victorian or hypochondriac or melancholic.

I picked up a book that I got as a gift, Clark Coolidge’s “This Time We Are Both,” written in 1989 when he accompanied the ROVA Saxophone Quartet on their album tour of the same name in the USSR. It was published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Among the qualities I admire in Coolidge is that one has to re-learn how to read him with every book, and this book no different. It took me two sections to understand and flow with his basic strategy, which involves interrogatives answered by seeming non-sequiturs that eventually wind their way back to the question at hand. There are a lot of references to jazz, of course, as well as what was obvious even then as an eventual collapse of the Union. Super interesting and rhythmically complex book, the latter being a hallmark of Coolidge’s poems, as he is/was a jazz drummer.

I am glad there was more to Trust. I need to read the last book again with a piano around, even though I am probably tone deaf.

Regarding Lowell, or more generally, I am not sure if a line by line reading expands or constricts interpretation.

Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children.

Nearly finishing this novel (discussed around it a bit here: Like the 20th Century Never Happened), its a memoir of sorts from Stead -- who grew up with a step mother and had many step brothers and sisters -- and writes so well about the chaos in her early life. My first book by her and I hope to read a couple more.

I envy you. Read I'm Dying Laughing next.

Picked up Hazel Rowen's Christina Stead: A Biography at the library to give it the totally unfair Random Read Test, and was immediately pulled into Stead & hubbie's international escape from his prosecution for financial shenanigans, also description of her father as inspiration for The Man Who Loved Children: he wrote letters to his offspring and their pals in Uncle Remus "dialect" and signed off as "The King of the Kids"---also resented, challenged Christina for doing well in high school, like she was going above her raising/his level---on the other hand, was a pioneering polemicist, pushing his fellow Australian adults toward recognition of their environmental despoilation---a hundred-odd years ago.

Speaking of Hardwick, did yall read that New Yorker excerpt from Darryl Pinckney's forthingcoming memoir, here recalling his relationship with her, student/teacher/friends? Also scandalizing her some of her older white friends when they were seen in public together, going somewhere for actual recreation, enjoyment of an occasion, rather than tucked away working, or her out alone, trudging to or from the classroom, and no doubt still pining for the evil Lowell, poor thing. In Pinckney's take, she was taken for an interracial cougar (though he's gay, and they were taking a break from writing-critiquing). Not much she says here about writing tells me anything I didn't know, but she's a compelling presence---can't wait to see what else he says about her and others. Are his other books good?

The Man Who Loved Children is so extraordinary. Sam Pollit is like the inverse of Livia Soprano, inasmuch as he works against that dictum that whoever created the character must have really hated them. He continues to inhabit the outer rim of my imagination (for good, for ill). And hell, that closing section, with the line I have gone for a walk around the world. Take me with you.

A formal exercise for playwrights or copy editors if they ever had to line up as candidate typists and stenographers for job interviews as in Trust: screen or stage play of advertising copy lines as in Pierrot Le Fou or Ubik with extra points for penny magazine copy, obscure local dailies, etc. and imperceptibility / plausibility

Not sure whether to give up Vigdis Hjorth. Why does Norwegian literature seem state funded (not propagandist)? Started Crying in H Mart while deciding whether or not to continue.

I read my fourth Ross Macdonald: THE GALTON CASE (1959). My first in the 2012 Penguin reissue series (which only comprised a few). I can see why it merited that. It's probably as good as any of the other 3 I've read so far. The usual qualities: crisp dialogue, crisp thought and observation, large cast of minor characters, terrifically intricate plot, poetic flashes of description. This one has the additional theme of identity, whether a character is who he is said to be, making it slightly more uncanny.