Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky

Author:Robert Pinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

XIII

Moving Around

LIFE STUDIES is Robert Lowell’s best-known and most influential book. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. I read it in 1962 and I hated it. In a shallow way, my dislike was a matter of social class. I said aloud to Lowell’s book, “Yeah, I had a grandfather, too.” Like my fellow would-be urban Beatniks at Rutgers, I preferred the manners of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”—the poet reading the Hebrew prayer for the dead while listening to Ray Charles and walking the streets of Greenwich Village.

A year later, when I arrived as a graduate student at Stanford, I entered a culture more bucolic than what I had known at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey—the home state of Ginsberg, with urban New Brunswick about an hour from those Village streets. Surrounding the sleepy Palo Alto of those days, an actual village, the future Silicon Valley was still a place of horse ranches and apricot orchards. Leland and Jane Stanford had founded the university on their ranch, in 1891, and the school’s affectionate nickname for itself was “the Farm.” In Palo Alto, too, as in the quite different literary and urban terrain of Rutgers, Robert Lowell’s poetry was not held in the first rank of importance.

But five or six years later, in 1970, I took a job teaching at Wellesley College, not far from Boston and Cambridge, where I met poets who considered Life Studies a major work of art. For my impressive new friends Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur and Lloyd Schwartz, Lowell was the great living model of a poet. Life Studies had been transforming for them. A book I didn’t like, and for years ignored, had opened new possibilities for people I admired.

Rejecting Life Studies on first encounter was partly a conventional reflex, an automatic dislike for inherited privilege. But the resistance I felt goes deeper, involving qualities of idiom and imagery, and—even more—their cultural implications. In the personal narratives and declarations of Life Studies, many readers valued a directness that for me lacked an antic, disjunctive quality I prized in American life and poetry. Lowell’s autobiographical poems felt humorless and foursquare. They were not enough like the movies of Mel Brooks or the eruptive comic strips of Walt Kelly.

It was not just social class. Leaving aside laugh-out-loud comedy, an example in poetry of what I mean is the work of Marianne Moore. The social voice in her poem “Silence” is not exactly working class or ethnic. On the contrary, that poem begins:

My father used to say,

“Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow’s grave

or the glass flowers at Harvard . . .”

After quoting her father’s distinctly upper-middle-class assertion, Moore presents a memorably outlandish, inexplicable image for self-reliance: a cat with “the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth.” The image comes from left field, mixing different registers of attention (Longfellow, glass flowers, shoelace) with an insouciance I find inspiring. Lowell, I thought, would never come up with that cat.

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