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14/6/05 22:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bronze_ribbonsSangria mixed. Ginger cookies baked. Some writing done.
Finally started reading Robert Lowell's The Dolphin. I'd expected to be (guiltily) fascinated, but instead, I've found myself muttering you son of a bitch almost every time I see a quotation mark -- I knew he'd quoted extensively from Elizabeth Hardwick's letters, but I hadn't realized that there are entire "poems" in there between quotation marks. (No wonder Elizabeth Bishop took him to task for cribbing from -- and changing -- the letters to suit his artistic vision.)
Also, I can't help measuring the verses against Thomas Wyatt's and finding them wanting.
Still, there are moments. For instance, "Truth" intrigued and then amused me:
As it happened, yesterday I looked at a poem by Lowell's ancestor, James Russell Lowell:
And last night I came across this cheerful bit by Galway Kinnell:
On a lighter note, I am done with the indigestible Richard Jefferies and his passionate, interminably ecstatic tributes to the wind of Wiltshire. Another book I picked up during tonight's library visit was Thomas Lux's Half Promised Land, and in it he offers this advice:
Finally started reading Robert Lowell's The Dolphin. I'd expected to be (guiltily) fascinated, but instead, I've found myself muttering you son of a bitch almost every time I see a quotation mark -- I knew he'd quoted extensively from Elizabeth Hardwick's letters, but I hadn't realized that there are entire "poems" in there between quotation marks. (No wonder Elizabeth Bishop took him to task for cribbing from -- and changing -- the letters to suit his artistic vision.)
Also, I can't help measuring the verses against Thomas Wyatt's and finding them wanting.
Still, there are moments. For instance, "Truth" intrigued and then amused me:
Downstairs the two children's repeating piano duet,
when truth says goodmorning, it means goodbye. . . .
. . .W.B. Yeats was not a gent,
he didn't tell the truth: and for an hour,
I've walked and prayed--who prays exactly an hour?
As it happened, yesterday I looked at a poem by Lowell's ancestor, James Russell Lowell:
Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in.
-"Not Only Around Our Infancy"
And last night I came across this cheerful bit by Galway Kinnell:
. . .But if the darkness finds the graves where we
Were buried under sillions of our past
Still pointing gloomy crossses at the east,
And thinks we were niggard with our bravery,
Our ghosts, if such we have, can say at least
We were not misers with our misery.
- "Meditation among the Tombs"
On a lighter note, I am done with the indigestible Richard Jefferies and his passionate, interminably ecstatic tributes to the wind of Wiltshire. Another book I picked up during tonight's library visit was Thomas Lux's Half Promised Land, and in it he offers this advice:
If the wind touches your cheek
in a manner that pleases you,
then to it give something back.
Give some dollars, a good slice
of bread, a phrase from a woman
who loves you; open an ampule
of joy and wave it, out loud. . . .
. . .And if, after furious sleep,
the room is windy
and cool air slides across the blank
dunes of your sheet, then thank
the night for the day
and the day for what
it is: liable to be.
- "Give It To The Wind"
