Commander Lowell
by Robert Lowell

1887-1950

There were no undesirables or girls in my set,
when I was a boy at Mattapoisett—
only Mother, still her Father’s daughter.
Her voice was still electric
with a hysterical, unmarried panic,
when she read to me from the Napoleon book.
Long-nosed Marie Louise
Hapsburg in the frontispiece
had a downright Boston bashfulness,
where she grovelled to Bonaparte, who scratched his navel,
and bolted his food—just my seven years tall!
And I, bristling and manic,
skulked in the attic,
and got two hundred French generals by name,
from A to V—from Augereau to Vandamme.
I used to dope myself asleep,
naming those unpronounceables like sheep.

Having a naval officer
for my Father was nothing to shout
about to the summer colony at “Matt.”
He wasn’t at all “serious,”
when he showed up on the golf course,
wearing a blue serge jacket and numbly cut
white ducks he’d bought
at a Pearl Harbor commissariat . . .
and took four shots with his putter to sink his putt.
“”Bob,” they said, “golf’s a game you really ought to know how to play,
if you play at all.”
They wrote him off as “naval,”
naturally supposed his sport was sailing.
Poor Father, his training was engineering!
Cheerful and cowed
among the seadogs at the Sunday yacht club,
he was never one of the crowd.

“Anchors aweigh,” Daddy boomed in his bathtub,
“Anchors aweigh,”
when Lever Brothers offered to pay
him double what the Navy paid.
I nagged for his dress sword with gold braid,
and cringed because Mother, new
caps on all her teeth, was born anew
at forty. With seamanlike celerity,
Father left the Navy,
and deeded Mother his property.

He was soon fired. Year after year,
he still hummed “Anchors aweigh” in the tub—
whenever he left a job,
he bought a smarter car.
Father’s last employer
was Scudder, Stevens and Clark, Investment Advisors,
himself his only client.
While Mother dragged to bed alone,
read Menninger,
and grew more and more suspicious,
he grew defiant.
Night after night,
à la clarté déserte de sa lampe,
he slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule
across a pad of graphs—
piker speculations! In three years
he squandered sixty thousand dollars.

Smiling on all,
Father was once successful enough to be lost
in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians.
As early as 1928,
he owned a house converted to oil,
and redecorated by the architect
of St. Mark’s School . . . . Its main effect
was a drawing room, “longitudinal as Versailles,”
its ceiling, roughened with oatmeal, was blue as the sea.
And once
nineteen, the youngest ensign in his class,
he was “the old man” of a gunboat on the Yangtze.

Stephen Yenser on “Commander Lowell”

There is no denying that Lowell’s “study” of his father is not wholly complimentary. A Navy man whose interest in ships is basically academic, whose main connection with Pearl Harbor is that he once bought “white ducks” at the commissary there, and whose way of celebrating giving up naval life for a position with Lever Brothers’ Soap is to sing “‘Anchors aweigh’” in the bathtub, he is bound to appear somewhat ridiculous. The only time he displays a “seamanlike celerity” is when he leaves the Navy—only to squander a small fortune in the less secure civilian world. A revelation of facts such as these constitutes an indictment, and Lowell is not stingy with them.

At the same time, these observations are placed in a context that takes the edges off them and that even manages to return to the Commander some of the dignity that his rank implies. One of Lowell’s resources here is the memory of the characters of the people who surrounded his father, so that the latter’s weaknesses are in part explained and in part transformed. For example, we know from numerous references that his father was not altogether a satisfactory husband, and we may be inclined to read as further confirmation of this inadequacy the comment that “Mother dragged to bed alone, / read Menninger, / and grew more and more suspicious”; but our response to this comment must be qualified by the opening lines of the poem . . . .

The barely suppressed Freudian interpretation of his mother does much to explain and perhaps even to justify his father’s fecklessness. The fact that she read “the Napoleon book” to her son is not meant to go unnoticed; and the very circumstance that a poem purporting to be about his father opens with such pointed remarks about his mother is significant. If it will not do to see the older Lowell as a hapless victim of a domineering wife, neither will it do to view him as the family liability. The situation is too complex to be reduced to such stock explanations; and what Lowell does is to play one character against the other, letting the real situation emerge in the course of this interplay. Much the same thing happens in the second stanza, where the Commander’s inability to mix with his contemporaries is set forth. Not to fit in with the country club set, who incongruously regard golf as the game of professionals, and not to be one of the yachting crowd, who ludicrously see themselves as “seadogs” on Sundays, are almost laudable characteristics. It is easy to think it a blacker mark that he was “once successful enough to be lost / in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians.” Rather than a type of failure, Commander Lowell might be regarded as a type of hero, although a decidedly Quixotic type. But even the humor of condescension that is accorded a Quixote is banished from the last lines of this poem.

Excerpted from Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1975 by the Regents of the University of California.

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“On Poetry”: A short talk given by Jack Foley at Laurel Books, Oakland, 4/18/08 for National Poetry Month

Thank you for coming. We’d like this evening to be a celebration of poetry and a presentation of the kind of poetry Adelle and I write. Since 1996, April has been designated as National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets announced that their goal was to “increase the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture.” That word “accessibility” is problematical when applied to poetry. Many people find poetry “inaccessible”—difficult to understand, at times perhaps infuriatingly “obscure,” full of things which some people may understand but which are opaque to many. Why can’t poets just say what’s on their mind? Gertrude Stein—no paragon of “accessibility”—gave this as an answer. She was lecturing at the University of Chicago and she was asked about her notorious line, “rose is a rose is a rose.” She replied,

Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about ‘I have a garden! oh, what a garden!’ Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘…is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

Now, there’s another problem we need to deal with as well. If we’re going to celebrate poetry, wouldn’t it be a good idea to tell people what poetry is? Surely everyone knows at least more or less what poetry is—but what is it exactly? What is its essence—what are those qualities we absolutely need to see if we’re going to call something a poem? There are “poetry sections” in book stores. What is in them? I have been writing poetry in one form or another since 1955, and I have written many articles and even books about poetry. You’d think I’d have at least a glimmer of what poetry is. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t. If we ask exactly what an automobile is, we can come up with some elements which might apply to any automobile—and without which you would have something other than an automobile. It has to move, for example. But poetry? The problem is that there have been a number of activities over the centuries and they have all been called “poetry.” But very often they are quite distant from one another. Does poetry have to rhyme? In some periods, yes, but in others no. Classical poetry didn’t rhyme. Can poetry be its diametrical opposite—prose? Yes. There exists a creature called the “prose poem.” Does a poem have to have some sort of “form” which can be reproduced by other people?—the form of a sonnet, for example. Yes, but not always. And people have produced 14-line poems which they have called “sonnets” but which have no regular meter and no rhyme—usually defining characteristics of sonnets. The fact is that poetry has no essence. It can be—almost—anything. But if it has no essence, it does have a history. It is a name that has been given to a number of highly disparate activities which are in some ways related but in others not. Rhyme can be one aspect of poetry—but it doesn’t apply to all forms of the art. Further: poetry is created for different reasons and purposes. There are poems which are self-expressive—this is what I feel—but there are also poems which have very little to do with self-expression. (For years people have been trying to figure out exactly who Shakespeare was by reading his poems and plays. Their efforts haven’t been particularly successful. It may be that Shakespeare’s poems and plays aren’t especially “self-expressive.”)  Poetry can be used for idealistic purposes; it can be the conveyor of uplifting thoughts: “Life is real, life is earnest, / And the grave is not its goal,” wrote Longfellow. But it can also be immensely cynical, satirical, like the work of Alexander Pope or certain lines by T.S. Eliot. There have been critics who believed that poetry was essentially irony—saying something like the opposite of what you mean.

So what are we celebrating? An ancient art form with an immensely complicated history which cannot be reduced to any particular definition. The minute you define poetry, poetry slips away from the definition and tells you, “I’m not that because I’m this.” But to say this about poetry is also to say that poetry is free—not only free-floating but free. Any individual poem is a momentary definition of poetry, but the definition belongs only to that moment. The next moment, poetry will be something else. We poets are always trying to catch at the reins of Pegasus, which has its own kind of horse sense and will go wherever it wishes.

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Top Five Fictional Telephone Numbers

5. 911
4. 867-5309
3. Butterfield 8
2. Transylvania 6-5000
1. Northside 777

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Ernest Hilbert on The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles (Grove Press)

The byronic images and locales of La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini’s depiction of classically starving artists in Paris’s Latin Quarter, have come to dominate portrayals of young artists, writers, and singers: whiskered rogues in whose unwashed ears the muses whisper. This is too picturesque to be believed, but it is, perhaps not so surprisingly, frequently the case, as much in the outer boroughs of New York City today as Paris of 1880. With the Beatniks, who made a universal event of bohemian activity, this sensibility was magnified tenfold in the Paris of the 1950s and early 60s. Barry Miles, the Boswell of the group, returns with yet another tale of Beatnik idealism and legendary misbehavior.
Miles believes that the Beat Hotel, located fittingly in Paris’s Latin Quarter, is as important a geographic locus of Beat literature as Haight Ashbury and the West Village before it. By all accounts it was Gregory Corso who first referred to 9 rue Git-le-Cœur as the Beat Hotel, pointing some young hipsters back there to meet Allen Ginsberg, the already well-known author of Howl. The Beats were drawn there for its low rents as much as its insouciant artistic milieu. Madame Rachou, the hotel’s matron, enjoyed having artists in the hotel and was very permissive, so long as overnight guests signed the register, a perfunctory police regulation. 9 rue Git-le-Cœur was classified as the lowest grade of hotel by the French government, which meant that it merely had to maintain the simplest of ordinances and was otherwise left alone. Rats scurried through the halls and eminent editors turned back in their quests to locate the Beats after slipping on dog shit in the stairwells. Many of the walls were almost literally paper-thin. The inhabitants of multiple floors shared, sometimes reluctantly, a single bathroom (usually daubed with urine and vomit), and some rooms had a very low-voltage outlet (use of a hotplate, for instance, would often blow the fuse for the whole floor). Patrons came and went at will, so long as they were paid up. Madame Rachou accepted canvases and manuscripts in lieu of rent but rarely kept them, as she was certain that they were valueless (it is likely that she innocently discarded an accumulation that today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars). Three of the principal four Beat authors enjoyed prolific periods at the hotel. William Burroughs, who spent the most time there, was at first reluctant to move from Tangiers, where pliant Arab boys and stupefacient powders were inexpensive and licit. Gregory Corso, the most theatrically poetic and bohemian of the group, relied on it as a base camp for his travels through Europe. Allen Ginsberg, certainly the most famous Beatnik in the world at the time (Jack Keruoac had not yet published On the Road when the Beat Hotel was christened) was feted by moneyed Europeans and thronged by disciples, lecturing his many guests on the ways and hopes of the Beat movement. It was in the hotel that the triumvirate of Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky devised their scheme for the “international Love Brain”, which would be brought about once sexual promiscuity of unprecedented levels dispersed “love” across all borders, thus annulling jurisdictions and nations (this sort of thinking had forceful influence on the following generation of hippies). The Beats, undoubtedly the most enduringly peripatetic literary movement in American history, treated 9 Git-le-Cœur in several ways: first as a bohemian refuge from American drug laws and claustrophobic sexual climate; second as a party den (an aesthete’s fraternity house of sorts); and third as factory and headquarters. There is little question that the three spent a great deal of time writing while there, and this is the real reason that it is of interest (they could have gotten high and laid anywhere, and did). Arts patrons and literati who sought them out expecting to witness a reenactment of the gilded Paris of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce were distressed to find instead a decidedly unsartorial group that sometimes went days without eating and was nearly always drunk or stoned.

Nonetheless, Allen Ginsberg wrote some of his better poems there, including “To Aunt Rose,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave” (he left a copy of HOWL and Other Poems on the grave for Apollinaire “to read in heaven”), and an early draft of what would become the fifth section of his best long poem, “Kaddish.” Gregory Corso wrote “Marriage” and “Bomb” there, as well as most of the other poems that wound up in his most popular collection, The Happy Birthday of Death (still available after twelve printings). Burroughs arranged and edited Naked Lunch (formerly Interzone and then The Naked Lunch) while there. In fact, in the latter days of the hotel, Burroughs spent long hours nearly every day, despite a sometimes crippling addition to various opiates, working on his radical reformulation of language and compositional technique, which he termed “cut-ups,” and later the audio extension of these experiments, “cut-ins,” with Brion Gyson.

They were, by standards then and now, a feral band. They managed to get themselves into ample trouble, and often they seem to have been deliberately glib and vulgar, posing for the international news media (the Parisians resolutely ignored them; they had seen more compelling artistic movements). France had by the late 1950s sunk into a vicious internal conflict over the Algerian bid for independence, with the colonial (known as “colons”) determination to retain the territory under French authority. The colonial position was sanctioned and actively supported by the military, creating a debilitating impasse. The gendarmes had little time to bother with a few shabby American expatriates with a penchant for boys and heroin. There is no dearth of lewd anecdotes extending from this period of expatriation, and Barry Miles has no interest in holding any back; these stories are, after all, the warp and woof of the generation’s legacy. Ginsberg emerges as a very intelligent, if emotionally precarious, poet with considerable ambition, taking advantage of the publicity occasioned by the San Francisco obscenity trial for his first book, HOWL and Other Poems (during which he was conspicuously absent). Deluged with correspondence from overeager acquaintances and remote followers, Ginsberg complained that he rarely had time to write poetry (this condition would persist to the end of his life). LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka’s given name) posted a letter to Ginsberg on toilet paper, asking him to contribute to his new literary magazine; Ginsberg replied, suggesting a number of potential contributors, on French toilet paper, which Jones remarked was far more sturdy and better for writing. Ginsberg very actively proclaimed the putative genius of his friends (and loves), and was responsible for most of the Beat literature that found its way into print (he successfully lobbied for Keruoac’s first book Town and Country with Harcourt Brace, Burroughs’s first book Junkie with Ace Books, and Corso’s second collection Gasoline with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books). One could successfully argue that there wouldn’t have been a Beat generation if it hadn’t been for the emissarial efforts of Ginsberg, who, despite his iconic pre-hippie façade, was a very capable editor and critic, even if his judgment was sometimes fogged by his unswerving dedication to his friends.

It is also during this period that Time-Life increased its love-hate engagement with the constantly self-publicizing Beats. Whatever the merits of their art, they made great copy and scared straight America out of all proportion to their actual activities (J. Edgar Hoover once named Beatniks one of the top-three threats to American national security). Ginsberg was very literary, and he made much of his time in Paris, visiting gravesites and museums, frequenting clubs and cafés, wandering the labyrinthine medieval streets of Paris’s Left Bank. He, along with Gregory, who was always out for kicks when not pursuing women in the Parisian night, would smoke hashish and visit the Louvre or stare at gargoyles at Notre Dame.

Although he spent a short time in Paris en route to New York from Tangiers with an early version of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in his knapsack for a potential French publisher, Keruoac never felt entirely at ease away from his native hangouts and, after the publication of On the Road, rarely ventured far from his mother’s Cape Cod home (readers often forget that the laureled bard of the open road spent most of his time drinking beer in his mom’s living room). He admitted that while among the narrow European streets he longed for Wheaties and the household aroma of pine cleaner in the American morning.
Gregory Corso, who threw himself with glee into the uninhibited Beat lifestyle in Paris, considered himself a poet in the classical sense, as touched by the muse and insulated, in a saintly way, from society at large. He lived primarily on the largesse of young women, usually of good family, who supported his various romps and jaunts around the continent. He once told Art Buchwald in an interview for The Herald Tribune: “I get money from girls. Everytime [sic] I meet a girl I ask her how much money she has and then I demand half of it. I’m not doing anything wrong with money. I just use it to buy food.” He inhabited the attic room of the hotel and strolled the boulevards with cane and cape, declaring himself a poet (at a Joan Miro opening, he shouted to Picasso “I am starving. I am starving” before being removed from the room). He lived the eccentric and generally squalid life that he and others believed suited a poet, with dingy garret, Shelleyan garb, pockets empty save for poems, and presumptuous belief that he, being gifted with the wings of poesy, should be permitted to do pretty much whatever he liked whenever he liked. While they may have caused a great deal of loathing and even fist-fights at the time, his exploits are amusing to recount.

William Burroughs, the elder of the group by more than a decade, is, without question, the most inexplicable and mysterious member of the Beats. He undertook his most important work while at the hotel. It is there that the bizarre Routines, originally written into letters to Ginsberg (with whom Burroughs was at that time infatuated), were revised and arranged into the manuscript of Naked Lunch for littérateur and pornographer Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, which published primarily DBs, dirty books (usually written by quite literary, if impecunious, figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire). Girodias only agreed to publish the book after the scandal it produced in culturally-hidebound Chicago, where several chapters intended for the Chicago Review were suppressed and then later seized when published in the magazine Big Table (although he had nothing to do with the publication itself, the name of the magazine was Keruoac’s; when petitioned for a suggestion, he glanced around his desk and saw a note to himself reading “buy big table”). Burroughs also first began with the technique of cut-ups and fold-ins at the hotel. Along with a small group of other authors, he developed a method of composition that incorporated an element of chance with an almost painterly degree of relational deliberation: sections from a newspaper or book would be cut apart and rearranged to “get at” the hidden meanings behind the original syntax. Burroughs approached this system with a gravity approaching that of science or occultism, both of which appealed to him (John Ashbery, who lived in Paris during the Beats’ stay there, applied the technique of cut-ups and collage in his most difficult and critically-disputed book, The Tennis-Court Oath; despite this affiliation of technique, there is no record of Ashbery having encountered any of the Beats). His second novel, The Soft Machine, was also written (assembled) in this manner and published by Olympia while he was at the hotel (though he was forced to make it more accessible for American publication by Barney Rossett’s Grove Press).

Brion Gyson’s experiments with visually-stimulated alpha brain wave manipulation took place at the hotel as well, resulting in his creation the Dreammachine (a device consisting of a band with exposures revolving around a light at a speed between eight and thirteen times per second in order to excite dream-waves). The second half of the hotel’s existence as Beat center of operations, after Ginsberg returned to New York to enjoy his celebrity, is centered on the collaborative work of Burroughs and Gyson, with some attention give to their co-conspirators, Cambridge mathematics undergraduate (and Burroughs’s paramour) Ian Sommerville and South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who went mad not long after indulging in the reintegrative (and at times disintegrative) endeavor of cut-ups (Burroughs attributed Beiles’s insanity directly to revelations issuing from his cut-ups). These “experiments” continued until the hotel’s closing in the spring of 1963.

Much as David Lehman’s friendship with members of the New York School poets attributed greatly to the authority of his The Last Avant Garde, Barry Miles had the good fortune to have known many of the Beats personally and so has been able to make use of privately recorded interviews and even bits of personal conversation. His association also provided him with unprecedented access to manuscripts and other artifacts. Though the Beat Hotel period predates his involvement with the Beats, he resides in France and is qualified where matters of geography and French language are concerned. Though he falls prey to some of the myth-making that so often clouds hagiographies of the Beats, this is actually a benefit in the case of The Beat Hotel, as it mirrors the boyish hyperbole with which the Beats approached their surroundings and themselves (the book, being a history, is, however, in drastic need of an index). Miles’s intimate history is also attractive for its coverage of the brief contact the Beats had with other figures of artistic importance, such as W.H. Auden, Günter Grass, and Marcel Duchamp. These meetings are fascinating, and they throw the conduct and aspirations of the Beats into relief against a broader historical canvas. Like Miles’s other books, his biographies of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, The Beat Hotel rewards those seeking the clamorous ghosts of America’s most famous prodigal sons in all their exilic glory and unpolished beauty.

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Adam Kirsch on poetry and National Poetry Month:

April is National Poetry Month, the poetry world’s annual effort to soothe its bad conscience about practicing a minority art in a democratic culture. Institutional attempts to make more people read poetry always have something forlorn about them, because they are based on a basic error in economics: They try to address a shortage in demand by creating a glut in supply. But if no one likes to read poetry—or so it can often seem to the discouraged poet—then putting poems in hotel nightstands or on subway cars only multiplies the public’s opportunities to ignore them.

More troubling than the indifference of the public, which has never loved poetry and never will, is the indifference of what Samuel Johnson called the common reader. Why is it that people who read novels and biographies, who go to operas and art museums, and who even read the poetry of the past, so seldom open a book of contemporary poetry? Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, was haunted by this question in a recent poetry-month feature in Slate magazine, where he parried a series of imagined objections: “Half of the time I can’t figure out what [a new poem] means.” “How come modern poets don’t write in rhyme?” “How come real poetry—in our great-grandparents’ time or, anyway, some other long-ago time—was easy to understand and great?”

Rather than silence such objections by pointing out that, in fact, old poetry is often hard to understand, it is better to meet them by introducing the common reader to living poets who offer the kind of civilized pleasure he is looking for. Civilized is a tricky word in current literary criticism. Ever since the modernists launched their demolition raid on Victorian decorum, “civilized” has sounded like an alibi for bloodlessness or hypocrisy. But if the vice of 19th-century poetry was overrefinement—willingness to shut out too much of human experience, in the name of a wan ideal of beauty—our own literature has different vices. Today, when poetry is usually formless, unintelligent, or overly theoretical, it is a rare achievement for a poet to be truly civilized: that is, to write as a human being speaking to human beings, out of a generous desire to enlighten, move, and delight.

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