Not sure that you'll find this post useful (or annoying clutter), Brian. And I probably should have just kept it on my own Blog or maybe posted it to the Buf List, where I posted a snippet of this read in an earlier version. RE: Lowell's "Words for Hart Crane."

Here's the poem again, Lowell's "Words for Hart Crane":

"When the Pulitzers showered on some dope
or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,
few people would consider why I took
to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's
phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.
Because I knew my Whitman like a bird,
stranger in America, tell my country: I,
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
(in Life Studies / For the Union Dead,The Noonday Press, p. 55)

Why the quotation marks? Are they Lowell's, Lowell's speaker, or Lowell's "Hart Crane"? I'm suspecting it's the latter.

The speaker (Lowell as Crane?) resents the most recent years' Pulitzer Prize winners. They have "showered [praise and recognition] on some dope / or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap," and this makes the speaker (Lowell, himself, winner of two Pulitzers for poetry -- 1947 Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell (Harcourt) and 1974 The Dolphin by Robert Lowell (Farrar) -- more than a little bit angry). He calls the award recipients dopes and screws. Further, he is compelled to "stalking sailors," and he scatters "Uncle Sam's / phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds." Well, it would have sufficed, I think, to have simply called them dopes, but he must add an additional and distinctly different term, "screw," but before I get to that inclusion, why does Lowell (Lowell's "Crane") describe the lesser recipients as having "flushed our [non-recipients'] dry mouths out with soap? Is the poet/speaker suggesting that their dry mouths thirsted for something more, something to quench a more serious poetic need? And instead they've received soap, as if to wash away prurient desires? I may be misreading this altogether; however, I am, though of a much younger generation, like others quite familiar enough with the universal Catholic boys' experience of having one's mouth washed out with soap. Heck, I grew up across the street from the town's Catholic Church, was raised by an Italian mother and Irish father who were far more "Catholic" than ethnic, and served as primary altar boy. Don't all Catholic boys get their mouths washed out with soap once or twice (usually enough to learn "the lesson," suppress the use of "dirty words and language").

Like "screw," which is one or all or at least some of these things, according to Merriam-Webster:

3 : a worn-out horse
5 : a prison guard
6 : one who bargains shrewdly; also : SKINFLINT
9 a usually vulgar : an act of sexual intercourse b usually vulgar : a partner in sexual intercourse

Yes, it'd be a quite nasty word for a Catholic boy to utter even if he meant "worn-out horse" (the Pulitzer recipients are worn horses?); "a prison guard" (the Pulitzer recipients are prison guards and protect the established poetries?); or
"one who bargains shrewdly" (and thus calculates the risks of his/her poetry being rejected for being too new or untraditional or unsuitable for the given establishment poetry literati?). As for "a partner in sexual intercourse," well that's of course verboten. Go a step further! The partner is homosexual (whether Lowell's 40's and 50's or Crane's 20's and 30's)! Naturally, the poet will be censured just as the young Catholic boy will be reprimanded.

This sometimes humiliating disapproval makes boys and men alike rebellious later in life, especially as they learn, in retrospect, how petty it was, really, and how petty and unbecoming the mouth flushing still is in adult life, as when they regard the same censure applied to minds and spirits quite advanced beyond their mothers' or guardians', applied, for instance, to Whitman:

Because I knew my Whitman like a bird, / stranger in America,
that is to say, unknown in his country, the same country whose people and homespun spirit he immortalizes, draws gloriously. Enough to make a contemporary poet bitterly angry, give reason for what "few people would consider," why he "took / to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's / phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds," even?

I think it fills Lowell with rage that his Crane has not been properly revered, and this is his homage to this particular hero of his, but also to others. He wants that the reader for all time, going back to Whitman and Shelley ("Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age") and Catullus ("redivivus," for "brought back to life") and forward to the country's future readers ("tell my country," the ones who neglected to properly read/revere Whitman) to see that Crane is kin to Whitman (also homosexual and irrepressibly American and both a figurative and literal lover of soldiers) and to Shelley, the original "legislator of mankind" (surely a better judge than those who picked over Crane the dopes and the screws).

Indeed, this is a truly dark rage, though it was "once the rage / of the Village and Paris. Again, it prompts the speaker (Lowell's "Crane") to confess to "stalking" and "wolfing the stray lambs," whose "phoney gold-plated laurels" (establishment literary merits?) will then be "scattered" "to the birds," though those same boys also "hungered" for something like love or recognition.

All for what? All for nothing, that is, the poetry comes to nought; "it means nothing" (Spicer), just a drop in the ocean; the poet's "profit was a pocket with a hole"? What is it that Michael McGee writes on the Poetics List:

"There is the Hart Crane connection already mentioned [by Louis Cabri?]: 'there is no money in his work' ["Skunk Hour"] mirroring the line 'my profit was a pocket with a hole' in "Words for Hart Crane" (again, I agree with the objections already raised to this latter poem's characterization of the homosexual writer, but that doesn't mean Lowell wasn't empathizing - Lowell was himself, after all, full of self-loathing)."

No, not for nothing... For Lowell's and, by extension, Catullus', Shelley's, Whitman's, and Crane's respect? Is this Lowell's ideal lineage?

brian,
It's all very refreshing. As my memory awakens, back in early 60s I was paid assistant to both Robert Lowell and Kenneth Koch, as an undergrad matric at The New School. There's a whole side of the poetry ethos at the time that's missing here: both Lowell & Koch, for instance, though probably not reading each other, were reading the Russians, especially Voznessensky & Akhmatova & Mandelstam. Lowell even co-translated them. No one seems to even remember Mandelstam today. And when I was a freshman at 18, Lowell one day brought Robert Duncan's The Opening of the Field, just published, to class. He did not bring the new Don Allen anthology, but it was via the Duncan book that I found my own way to it. So I think what my memory is telling me is that things were much more up in the air then--and interesting--than it seemed after the Hall/Pack anthology came out to mercifully polarize the scene. Yet I like your quote from Hitchens about the necessity of it--of course it was clarifying. I recall how shaky it was to keep Lowell and O'Hara in mind at the same time... But now it may be easier to look back at it--and I will try to eventually catch up with your steady thinking here.
And P.S., when you label Hitchens a "turncoat" you intend some irony, non? I mean, could such a putdown be worth thinking twice about when it comes to critiquing the highminded airheads at The Nation?
A bit further: Brian, I'd like to send you new edition of "See What You Think," just off press--can you send me a good address for this summer? It has several parallels to poets you're bringing up here.
warmly,
david rosenberg

Of interest to Steve might be an earlier version of the Hart Crane sonnet that was on display at the New York Public Library's "Hand of the Poet" (I think it was called) exhibition.

Initially, the sonnet had nothing to do with Hart Crane -- the particulars were added in later to what I believe was probably more a sonnet about the Pulitzer and such things. It eas much more abstract in the earlier draft.

I frankly don't think Hart Crane cared about the Pulitzer, nor did I believe that Lowell thought he did. I actually think Lowell is criticizing himself for having won the prize here, in a way. The voice might have more accurately been ascribed to Berryman, who I'm sure (like Spicer to Duncan) might have been a bit acidic about his friend's NY success.

A unique feature of utilizing different voicings in poems is that ability to parody and criticize yourself quite poignantly, even viciously, while not appearing to be self-hating.

And obviously, the poem also imagines him (RL) being quite the gay sexual predator -- this could almost be words for Allen Ginsberg, who famously had a preference for a macho image of homosexuality, rather than the effete version of O'Hara.

I think of Genet's Querelle when I read this as well -- there's something quite hokey about RL's imagining of what went down at the wharves, just as there is in Fassbinder's film of the Genet novel, but who knows, perhaps it was accurate for the times. (I don't think Querelle had been translated yet.)

A correction: the line is "Because I knew my Whitman like a *book*." Again, a subtle criticism perhaps of Crane's "bookish" understanding of Whitman. There is a spirit of paradox in this entire poem that I appreciate.

Another great enjambment in the first two lines, the second line opening with a very open syllable and, as you point out, that strange, nearly *indeterminate* hinge word "screw."

David, what did RL have to say about RD? That would be interesting to hear about. I know Berryman dismissed Duncan as some sort of Californian product best left unopened, but he was writing from Minneapolis I believe.

[A fuller version of what follows appears at http://pantaloons.blogspot.com]

It's useful to have Steve Tills's ideas on Robert Lowell and Hart Crane, especially as they've prompted Brian to comment on RL's different voicings and textual get-ups, including one as a gay predator. With regard to "Skunk Hour," I'm not interested in countering Brian's solid attention to qualities in RL's poem that he admires, only to sketch my alternative intake that may appear flippant but is, I sorta insist, not so.

Though closely observed insofar as it reports on verifiable data well within the writer's circle of credible experience, "Skunk Hour," I feel, is a text in drag, an inducement to hilarity, and a hideous poem. The piece is hideous because it literally follows RL's 'thirst' for superordinance fashioning his voyeurism: rubbing our noses in another of his signature circumstances, here summering late among the highly placed while granting primacy (the first two of eight stanzas) to the kind of lightweight privilege synecdochically realized in and around the property lines of his dotty Victoriana heiress. A recipient of good fortune, remarkable in only her consorting with power, a bishop's mom and employer of the "first selectman," she is grand majorette of a bland isle, one who is schooled in wintering within her "Spartan cottage" (read as shingle style mansion) and holding on, plunderingly, to "her shore."

"Skunk Hour" is hilarious, however, because, who else could this island dweller be but RL? quel type monstrueux with undepletable resources for minor vices and self-loathing. Note the conventional and attentive third-person pronominals in the first and second stanzas addressed to the hermit (aspirated) who is – careful, now – an heiress (unaspirated), and note, as well, how archly these pronominals shift to the first-person in stanzas III through VIII: "our summer millionaire," "our fairy," "my mind," "my Tudor Ford," "my ill-spirit sob," "my hand," "our back stairs." Hermit / Lowell, she and he can 'buy and sell' or, better, look down on their arriviste millionaire who has, unfortunately, merely, the appearance of seacoast swank ("from an L. L. Bean / catalogue"); and in further descending order, as it were, he and she look down on the fairy decorator whose obsession is with appearance but who, notably, has no money.

It's revealing, for me, that Frank O'Hara gives the offensive "fairy" a pass but chose to attack stanza V that follows with RL's stalking roadside rest spots, oogling couples in "love-cars." Here is an instance, according to O'Hara, of RL's "confessional manner that lets him get away with things that are really just plain bad but you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be so upset."

Lowell reports stanza V and the last three stanzas were composed before the opening four stanzas. In other words, the genesis to "Existentialist night" is voyeuristic shenanigans, pestering kids making out in sedans. That's ok, of course, even if RL was not having any fun ("My mind’s not right"). It's peculiar, though, that Lowell brags of stanzas V and VI coming "alive," as though the first four were staged any differently, were any less or more a thrill.

The full poem evidences RL's narrowed frames of reference. His human subjects, heiress, millionaire, decorator, lovers, the I, are not specified in any way close to living individuals but caricatured at a distance, as though by a Times travel journalist, with a nasty, sociological bent, who phones it in.

The poem has been nicely laid to rest as a "confrontation with death" (Steven Gould Axelrod); a symptom of "pervasive cultural breakdown" (Paul Breslin); an "emblem of secular communion" (Charles Altieri). I wish "Skunk Hour" a good rest, too, under the spar whatevers, and can see it inspiring countless dragsters of the future as they intone its wedge-head shrill and will not scare.

Hi Jack,

Not sure what to say here except you make the poem sound *more*, not less, interesting to me -- was this intentional?

Practically everything I've posted on my blog has some element of the the "grotesque" (Renee French and Werner Herzog, for example) and even "drag" (Kiki & Herb, bits in Denton Welch) about it. These must be among my minor vices, but they are aesthetic strategies (if that doesn't sound too sterile and high-minded) that I care for. (Madame Sosostris is, of course, Wyndham Lewis in drag.)

I'm really not on a mission to make anybody like this poem, certainly not! But I'm amazed at how much ire it's managed to create among those who purport to *dislike* it -- has there been any single poem published by "us" in the last 20 years to so inspire such disgust? And do I need Charles Altieri to tell me when a poem is "dead"?

(The effect of symbolic castration of your last paragraph, heightened by image of three epitaph-wielding men in a triumphant circle bounding, like Matisse cut-outs, around the corpse, is itself rather "grotesque" to me -- is this the way academics have fun?)

I can think of a few books -- Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge, Kenny Goldsmith's work, Christian Bok's Eunoia, etc. -- and last but not least Jennifer Moxley's two books -- that always bring out strong opinions, but I can't think of a single *poem* that's done this.

In any case, your approach here is to me very interesting, much more than the approach that takes discernment of "lineage" (not to mention plays of reference and polysemeity) as the main object of critical study.

I must say, though, I also see an anxiety, not so much here but perhaps elsewhere in this discussion, to separate us from the "squares", that is similar to that shown in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, which had its enjoyable moments, but certainly one can see the irony of having such a *square* as Lehman himself trying to convince us that O'Hara was hip because he laughed at the earnestness of Lionel Trilling and crew. (This whole debate seems pretty "square" to me, actually, but square is, I hear, the new hip.)

Yes, I love O'Hara too, and his words about anything echo with me always -- especially about poems being "good for you" and "force feeding" causing "effete" -- but the irony here is that "we" -- this is perhaps the crux of my "lineage" critique" -- are so concerned with poems as PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS that paradoxes such as the presence of the "grotesque" and "hilarity" in the midst of a highly structured poem by a "square" are not recognized anymore.

I don't think of poems as pedagogical tools, and to say they are poison, and words are a virus (to echo William Burroughs), is something like a step in the right direction.

I don't believe anything I read in a poem -- in a way, the poet is more like a movie director, even if we are looking at an "I" -- the actor will always be imperfect and bring in whatever accidental features of his or her personality and physicality into a performance. We might imagine Kinski is to Herzog as Hopkins is to Lowell (regarding the tub-thumping of the rhymes that you mention disliking in your longer post on the blog.) These prisms can be interesting, and seem to me rarely absent.

(This is not "lineage" -- one doesn't look at Kinski's performance in Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars more as a hunchback reprobate to help determine whether Aguirre: Wrath of God is any good.)

It is always a perverse, but hopefully engaging, reflection of an author's "intentions" and "personality" -- the critical line avowed by Eliot, of course, thought the latter worth getting rid of entirely.

A little speculation here on my sense (from post yesterday at the "Lowell/Avocados" board) of how the *meaning* of early Lowell's form departs from that of his elders:

In the New Critical tradition, prosody largely functions as mannered *accompaniment*, the cadence and measure through which the motif gets elegantly refracted. Thus (albeit allowing for their interesting differences) the polished and proper wit of Ransom, Penn Warren, Tate, Winters, etc.

But in early Lowell, when he is most intense, it is more like the form is strapped around the poem's body from the start, a kind of exoskeleton against which the tropic excess is constantly straining-- pushing and stretching the prosody out to the point, sometimes, of cartoonish incongruity, so that (much unlike the gracefully laced tensions and ironies of standard New Critical fare) it all seems to want to burst at the seams. Or cartilage, as it were...

Lots of people have written about the revolutionary defamiliarizations of early-Lowell's imagery, its relevance to the opening up of American poetry to "surrealist" influences, and so on. But what I've never seen is a discussion of how a second-level (and perhaps, for the history of post-war American poetry, more important?) "ostranenie" is enacted, in extremis, on the shell of *traditional prosody* proper. And insofar as Lowell brings the contradiction between psychic overflows and overripe forms to a clearly visible crisis in the late 40's, it might be more useful to consider his work in the positive light of having set the stage for the qualitative breaks made (by *our* heroes) from 1950 on, rather than in the negative one of his familial ties to an "official verse" formation.

Kent

(I had written this before seeing Brian's reply to Jack. Timely..)

If Lowell is in "drag," as Jack Kimball puts it, in what I take as an overly personal but impressively written dismissal, it is the drag of the son wearing the bondage implements [see my other post] of the father. And the son is pissed off and ripping at the get up from the inside. ("If they die, / As Jesus, in the harness, who will mourn?" Lowell says in The Holy Innocents.")

I seem to be extending my metaphors a bit. But I do think there would be some things gained in looking more closely at the dialectic of form and content in early Lowell and the implications of that on surrounding developments.

Kent

Back to Lowell the physical presence: In answer to your question brian, Lowell was mainly curious about Duncan for the Catholic slant. The diction, of course; and which he read as if a bishop in high-hat. About this same time Alice B. Toklas's memoir, "Staying On Alone," came out and explained the poetics of Catholic imagery as never before (she had converted after inconsolable period following Gertrude's death). I found Alice dispelled any questions I had about the affinity between Lowell and Duncan. It's doubtful Lowell even knew that Duncan was gay; he could barely "see" his own sexuality (so pressing were his demons) which was obsessively hetero.
My memory of Lowell reading Duncan is hazy, but you will get the picture if I recall for you my vivid memory of his reading Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra. He began at the beginning with the dramatis personae and read straight through the play as if a long poem, ignoring which character was speaking. He got about 1/3 way through in the class hour, and then continued the next two classes to the finish. He read as if he was Cleopatra come upon this text in another life: surprised, wounded, erotic. So why didn't he read Duncan or other contemporaries in this way? He was most attuned with 15-17th centuries, reading all thru 1rst 2 vols of the Auden/Pearson anthology--but the one living poet (oops, already dead) he read this way was Mandelstam. Of course, it would have been great to hear him read Duncan like this, and vice versa, but both had their high church filters to create some distance from themselves when dealing with those who could talk back.
Further on Mandelstam: he was kind of a cross--so it seemed at the time--between Lowell & Ginsberg, with a leavening dose of straight-aheadness from Jimmy Schuyler. Reading Mandelstam, the polarization of experimental & academic was totally fudged. I, personally, in my extreme youth, chalked this up to the deep shit of Mandelstam's situation (not yet aware of the American version, though getting glimmer of it from John Wieners. And then the running-over of Frank O'Hara brought me to my senses: it didn't matter whether death was brutal or subtle, what mattered was to know he/she was always there. (And that's why Berrigan got hooked on speed without need of any KGB agents on his tail, with Burroughs as forebear. Seeing that, I was already running scared and chose my escape: I would write a doc dissertation on Gertrude Stein (unfinished).)
Next time I get a chance, I'll focus on how Lowell actually read Skunk Hour aloud--does the audio exist anywhere on the web?

for audio of skunk hour see here:
http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/lowell/

i'm listening as i type this

its a very good recording

Interested in the comments from Kent Johnson & David Rosenberg. I've been talking about Mandelstam for a long time. See him less a cross between Ginsberg & Lowell, closer to Hart Crane. The visionary pressure strains against form, or brings form to perfection, rather than, as Kent describes the 50s poets, form as elegant, stilted ornamentation.

But the affinity between Crane & Mandelstam first struck me as something to do with their use of imagery. I think Poe wrote somewhere about the positive quality of poetic "vagueness". In both Crane & Mandelstam there's a kind of beautiful indirection or radiant elusiveness (must be a better way to describe it). The imagery "gives pause" by means of this riddling aspect. Often as not there IS a very specific meaning or set of meanings implied by the imagery, but it works in the first instance as a kind of indefinite musical harmony. I suppose it's something from Symbolism (though Mandelstam would never admit that).

In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?

Believing in God does not require believing in religion.

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.