In the last week, I have come across two reviews, one in The New Yorker, by Dan Chiasson, and the other in The New York Review, by Helen Vendler, of what sounds like a terrific new book: Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Not that I am likely ever to read it. I have a wife, two kids, a full-time job, and these letters appear to fill a volume the size of Bleak House, which I do mean to read. Nevertheless I have an interest in Bishop and Lowell. I even have a funny story concerning Lowell.
Years ago I quit my job and enrolled in an education program at the University of Minnesota. My goal was to qualify to teach English in the public schools, and the program required me to earn credits in creative writing. A poetry writing class fit my schedule, so I found myself spending one summer evening a week in a small seminar room with seven or eight aspiring poets. During class we performed various writing exercises and read aloud poems we had written in fulfillment of assignments. I formed the idea that the other students regarded poetry as a way of sharing their enthusiasm for life, its beauty and sublimity and spiritual richness, which was not really my idea at all. I'm not saying my poems were better than theirs. After the class had ended, I remember running into the instructor at a bar, and she made my friend laugh by referring to me as "non-lyric Eric." But my poems were different.
Anyway, for the last class we had to read one more poem. This time, however, we could read any poem we wanted--one we had written or any other poem we liked. I chose to read this poem by Lowell. It happened that the student who read just before me, a woman of the sublimity and richness school, had prepared a rather long poem on matrimonial love that had a very strong autobiographical element. She evidently loved her husband, who evidently was good in bed. When she was done, I read Lowell, not excluding the epigraph from Schopenhauer.
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
- Schopenhauer"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
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