Two Poems - The London Magazine

Two New England Poets

Now in my seventies, I spent most of my twenties in New England. I made friends with older poets – Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley and John Wieners – and some of my own generation.

Frank Bidart and I met as fellow members of Robert Lowell’s writing class at Harvard. Frank became Lowell’s collaborator, in effect, for the poems written between 1970 and his death in September 1977. Lowell liked endlessly to revise (Elizabeth Bishop’s elegy teases him, posthumously, about this) and Frank was his sounding board, his amanuensis. Later, with David Gewanter, he edited Lowell’s Collected Poems, the completed work. Lowell was succeeded at Harvard by Elizabeth Bishop. Frank befriended her also (a great woman but a nervous and alcoholic one who needed much looking after) and he is the subject of a charming poetic sketch by her. His own poetry is among the most admired of his generation, certainly by me. It is all the more impressive for being written in an accent more contemporaneously ‘American’ than Bishop’s or Lowell’s. As a result, these two are more widely read in Britain. Bidart won the Bollingen Prize in 2007. In spite of the contemporary accent, he reminds me of three nineteenth century masters: Whitman, Browning and Meredith. His poems are revelatory, self-dramatising, unflinching.

William Corbett and his wife Beverly were for forty years the most celebrated salonistes of modern Boston. They lived in ‘Southie’, traditionally the Irish quarter. Every writer of consequence visited them. This fame has slightly obscured Corbett’s own affectionate and laconic poems. I find their beat wholly musical, with the immediacy of the best modern jazz. No point, in your seventies, dodging the elegiac.

Queer

Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.

Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will

lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.

For each gay kid whose adolescence

was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial

scenario

forever is coming out –
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.

Involuted velleities of self-erasure.

Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative

designed to confer existence.

If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not

me, but herself.

The door through which you were shoved out
into the light

was self-loathing and terror.

Thank you, terror!

You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life

were not, for you, life. You think sex

is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.

–

Of His Bones Are Coral Made

He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own
past, searching not just for

ideas that dissect the mountain that

in his early old age he is almost convinced
cannot be dissected:

he searched for stories:

stories the pattern of whose
knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:

what is intolerable in

the world, which is to say
intolerable in himself, ingested, digested:

the stories that

haunt each of us, for each of us
rip open the mountain.

the creature smothered in death clothes

dragging into the forest
bodies he killed to make meaning

the woman who found that she

to her bewilderment and horror
had a body.

As if certain algae

that keep islands of skeletons
alive, that make living rock from

trash, from carcasses left behind others,

as if algae
were to produce out of

themselves what they most fear

the detritus over whose
kingdom they preside: the burning

foundation is the imagination

within us that ingests and by its
devouring generates

what is most antithetical to itself:

it returns the intolerable as
brilliant dream, visible, opaque,

teasing analysis:

makes from what you find hardest to
swallow, most indigestible, your food.