At our most recent gathering, the Bradford Poetry Circle focused on the poetry of Robert Lowell. 

Much of our discussion focused on “Skunk Hour,” his most memorable, and perhaps most frequently analyzed poem in his book Life Studies which won the National Book Award in 1960. 

Here is the poem:



Skunk Hour
By Robert Lowell 
(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.

And now our fairy 
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, 
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail 
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour” from Life Studies. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell, renewed © 1987 by Harriet W. Lowell, Sheridan Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: Life Studies (1987)

This is a rich and startling poem, one that has often been interpreted as autobiographical and confessional. You can find one such article by Troy Jollimore http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/179983#guide. 

Here’s what Lowell said about it. 
“I found the bleak personal violence [of the last stanza of the poem] repellent. All was too close, though watching the lovers was not mine, but from an anecdote on Walt Whitman in his old age.  I began to feel that real poetry came, not from fierce confessions, but from something almost meaningless, bur imagined."

Lowell on “ Skunk Hour,” in The Poet and his Critics III,  a symposium edited by Anthony Ostroff,  New World Writing 21, 1962, 109-10. from Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona,  U of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 86-87. 

And below is the section of Whitman’s Song of Myself  where some critics argue that  Whitman disguises himself as a woman so as to gaze in secret on a group of naked male bathers and that he is the voyeur of the poem.

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman, 1892

Part 11 

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, 
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; 
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. 

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, 
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. 

Which of the young men does she like the best? 
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. 

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, 
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. 

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, 
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. 

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, 
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies, 
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. 

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, 
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, 
They do not think whom they souse with spray. 


Lowell was an amazingly prolific poet, distinguished for “the astonishing variety in his work.”

In one of his last poems, “Loneliness” the poet reflects on his life and his work.

Loneliness  (from Last Poems, 1977)

A stonesthrow off
seven eider duck
float and dive in their watery commune . . .
a family, though not a marriage –
we have learned not to share.
We were
so by ourselves and calm this summer,
I would wish to live forever,
like the small boy on the wharf
marching alone, far ahead of the others,
still anxiously flapping
their particolored sails in the calm.

On Sunday, September 21, 2014, three poets (Phyllis Katz, Suzanne Nothnagle, and Ann Perbohner) will read together at historic King Farm as part of an annual sculpturefest held annually at this beautiful location. The reading will be held at 2:00 pm. For more information and directions, go to http://www.sculpturefest.org.

This event offers an ideal opportunity to see how the arts constantly complement each other. 
The poem below is one of many that articulate this important connection.

Archaic Torso of Apollo            
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 - 1926   

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, 

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so,
nor could  a smile run through the placid hips
and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. 

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: 

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Stephen Mitchell, Translation

Shipwrecks

In the seas of time
I looked at the soundings
and found
what was --

raft of survivors
from The Medusa
the few not eaten
murdered drowned
cast off
adrift for days
swallowed by greed

& The Lusitania sunk
all its pretty chickens
and their dams
gone down
in minutes
for war gods’ feasts

I checked again
and found  what  is–
swamped, overloaded boats,
drowned & half-dead
refugees unwelcome
in their promised lands

fleeing hunger –
they fed the seas
pearls their eyes,
hollow bones
unburied ghosts
full fathoms deep

    Unpublished poem by Phyllis Beck Katz

I keep this advice from Ruth Stone on my desk:


"You have to take comfort where you can – in the nuthatches coming to the feeder,  in the warmth of the woodstove, in the voices of your lovely grandchildren.  You have to allow yourself to take joy. Otherwise, you are no good to anyone.” 

Ruth Stone, Vermont Writers: A State of Mind, by Yvonne Daley.

 

Ruth Stone lived in Vermont for much of her life.  In 2008 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The poems below are from What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008. In her introduction to this volume, Sharon Olds writes:  “Ruth Stone’s poems, in their originality and radiance, their intelligence and music and intense personal politics, shine in their place within her generation, among the pioneering women (Bishop, Brooks, Rukeyser). Her unusual lack of self-promotion has resulted in her work being slow to find its readers.  But her readers are passionate in their respect and love and amazement over her poems  – the poems’ energy, freshness, and spunk, their speaking to our lives.”



Memory

Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?

Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze –
like a canopy.

But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is –

hanging at the window
of an empty room.


Goshen

For fifteen years I have lived in a house
without running water or furnace.
In and out the front door
with my buckets and armloads of wood.
This is the mountain.
This is the fortress of ice.
This is the stray cat skulking in the barn.
This is the barn with vacant windows
that lifts like a thin balsa kite
in the northeasters,
These are winter birds
that wait in the bushes.
This is my measuring rod.
This is why I get up in the morning.
This is how I know where I am going.

With my poet friend Sarah Reeves, I spent all of the day listening to wonderful poets read their work:  Charles Simic, Mark Wunderlich, Martin Espada, David Ferry, Louise Glück.  A gourmet feast!

Among the poems that especially touched me was Mark Wunderlich's "Coyote with Mange."

Coyote with Mange

O, Unreadable One, why
have you done this to your dumb creature?
Why have you chosen to punish the coyote

rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,
shucked the fur from his tail
and fashioned it into a scabby cane?

Why  have you denuded his face,
tufted it, so that when he turns he looks
like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?

The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low,
and without fur, his now visible pizzle
is a sad red protuberance,

his hind legs the backward image
of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.
Why have you unhoused this wretch

from his one aesthetic virture,
taken from him which kept him
from burning in the sun like a man?

Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,
stopped him there, and turned his ear
toward my warning shout?

from The Earth Prevails, Graywolf Press, 2014.

And, I will never forget Martin Espada's reading of "Alabanza", his tribute for the 43 kitchen workers at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center, who lost their lives on 9/11:
http://www.martinespada.net/Alabanza_UNJT.html

The Annual Frost Day celebration was held on Sunday July 6, 2014 at Robert Frost's Franconia , New Hampshire farmhouse. The site is now used as a center for poetry readings; tours of the house and memorabilia are held daily in the afternoon -see http://frostplace.org/museum/ for the seasonal and daily opening times.

At this year's Frost Day, a dedication for a memorial bench to Donald Sheehan, Director of the Frost Place Poetry Festival for over 25 years.  Sheehan's wife, his two sons and their wives, and his grandchildren were all present, and remembrances of his life and work at the Frost Place were shared by family, colleagues, and friends. My memorial to Donald Sheehan appeared in my January 12, 2014 Blog.