Had a completely discouraging class today on Robert Lowell’s poetry where I tried to articulate the reasons I really wasn’t feeling him to a room full of people who loved his work and ended up sounding like an asshole who doesn’t properly appreciate anything. Nothing I said was what I meant to say.
What I meant to say was: I’m not disputing that Lowell was a smart man or a wonderful poet. The wide acclaim he gained in his lifetime in a way that no single poet has since already testifies to that. All I’m saying is, his self-absorption really turns me off. Like with the stuff about his mother. I get miffed. She could not have been that bad. She wasn’t locking him in closets or beating him until he bled, she wasn’t eating gourmet meals in front of him while he sat half-starved and watching, she wasn’t even a drunk or a drug addict who couldn’t care for him competently.
If all the bad things Lowell says about her are true, then she was a cold and superficial woman who was dissatisfied with her life, probably in many of the same ways Lowell is. But Lowell is incapable of even beginning to imagine what her interiority must have been. She is dismissed as shallow and unfeeling, and that’s all we get—she is a completely static character in his poems. In real life, people aren’t static. We are all more complex than that. And she is his mother and he doesn’t even care if he gets her right and that bothers the hell out of me and I think that complete self-absorption is a weakness on the part of Lowell. Of course he’s dissatisfied with life! He can’t even TRY to get out of his own head! And, in my opinion, his poetry suffers because of it. It impedes his genius.
I don’t think that’s the whole point of everything. It’s not all that I took from the experience of reading Lowell. I’m happy I read so much of his work. I didn’t hate it as I read it…but it’s also not something I could see myself returning to for pleasure. There is absolutely stuff I can learn from it, and I would never dispute that. But jesus the guy is a downer and so full of himself that it makes me want to punch him, and I do think that’s a legitimate response to reading his work, I really do.
Don’t mean to be so crotchety—I’m just overtired and hating this making-friends stage of things at my new school, the way everything feels constantly misunderstood. I just want someone I can turn to and open my mouth and say whatever and not worry and we will laugh. God I want someone to laugh with in a way that is not nervous.
