Foremother Poet: Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Ada Dwyer Russell (1863-1952)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been sitting here trying to decide which of the many women poets I’ve written postings on to listservs and decided I should go with Amy Lowell for the power of her arresting opening and whirlingly plangent, knife edge closing lines and because I find she describes intense moods that keep coming back to me:

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak-tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
     rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the
nbsp;    Canterbury bells.

[I do work all day and late at night I do feel so desperately tired and look about me for someone, something, a book, feel the silence, long for music — and then I don’t manage to put on my itunes]

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

[And why should I ever go away from him, ravage myself on those knives however hidden]

I also like her for the large image she conjures up into which she pours just the right detail:

The Broken Fountain

Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles,
The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lip
An inch below the terrace tiles.
Over the stagnant water
Slide reflections:
Th blue-green of coned yews;
The purple and red of trailing fuchsias
Dripping out of marble urns;
Bright squares of sky
Ribbed by the wake of a swimming beetle.
Through the blue-bronze water
Wavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow.
An arm flashes through the reflections,
A breast is outlined with leaves.
Outstretched in the quiet water
The statue of a Goddess slumbers.
But when Autumn comes
The beech leaves cover her with a golden counter-pane.

[This is like some film adaptation where dreams of what never was are conjured up in these stone places]

L. Luisa Vidal (1876-1918), Untitled (1890)

I like her use of color, stark, simple, and light, flashing, in phases, against water:

Afternoon Rain in State Street

Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls,
Slant lines of black rain
In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.
Below,
Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal,
The street.
And over it, umbrellas,
Black polished dots
Struck to white
An instant,
Stream in two flat lines
Slipping past each other with the smoothness of oil.
Like a four-sided wedge
The Custom House Tower
Pokes at the low, flat sky,
Pushing it farther and farther up,
Lifting it away from the house-tops,
Lifting it in one piece as though it were a sheet of tin,
With the lever of its apex.
The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely,
Scratching lines of black wire across it,
Mutilating its perpendicular grey surface
With the sharp precision of tools.
The city is rigid with straight lines and angles,
A chequered table of blacks and greys.
Oblong blocks of flatness
Crawl by with low-geared engines,
And pass to short upright squares
Shrinking with distance.
A steamer in the basin blows its whistle,
And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings,
A narrow, level bar of steel.
Hard cubes of lemon
Superimpose themselves upon the fronts of buildings
As the windows light up.
But the lemon cubes are edged with angles
Upon which they cannot impinge.
Up, straight, down, straight — square.
Crumpled grey-white papers
Blow along the side-walks,
Contorted, horrible,
Without curves.
A horse steps in a puddle,
And white, glaring water spurts up
In stiff, outflaring lines,
Like the rattling stems of reeds.
The city is heraldic with angles,
A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable
And counter-coloured bends of rain
Hung over a four-square civilization.
When a street lamp comes out,
I gaze at it for fully thirty seconds
To rest my brain with the suffusing, round brilliance of its globe.

[Does it make you remember a city scene?]

H. Turner (1858-1958), Morning News (1915)

**************************

Sevenels and surrounding garden

A brief life and work, and bibliography. All the above poems come from an uncorrected proof (people should get into this kind of book, it comes dirt cheap and is often just missing pictures or has xeroxed hand-corrections which add to its value, not detract): Amy Lowell: selected poems, ed. Honor Moore. American Poets Project. The Library of America. 2004 reprint of an 1984 collection.

As many will know (her poems are reprinted), Amy Lowell belonged to the prestigious New England Lowells. While she was when living a major figure of the early 20th century and imagist movement, she has been swept aside because of the ridicule of
Pound and his male cohort, harassed, accused, even hounded (for “hijacking” his movement). Perhaps he did not like that she was a lesbian. She wrote in free verse but was an adept at sonnets, and her free verse feels like it rhymes, so perfectly musical are its sounds, assonance, half-rhymes. Her poetry is said to be “in the American grain.” Why I can’t say? Perhaps the appearance of optimism in the sheer love of being alive, despite life’s electrifying despair; perhaps this turning to European imagistic aristocratic pasts. She traveled with her beloved friend and companion, once an actress, Ada Dwyer Russell (she admired Eleanor Duse), was a socialite, in her mid-twenties purchased a family home, Sevenels, from which she was an active volunteer type. Having not been allowed to attend college, she collected books (I know the feeling of feeling oneself cut off), and wrote essays, edited anthologies, wrote defenses of friends like D. H. Lawrence, delivered lectured to the Poetry Society of America, and collaborated on translations from the Chinese.

This from Pictures of a Floating World:

Vernal Equinox

The scene of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me
   &nbspand my book;
And the South Win, washing through the room,
makes the candles quiver.
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense
   &nbspand urgent love?

The Letter

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of lovelim
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Mise en Scene

When I think of you, Beloved,
I see a smooth and stately garden
With parterres of gold and crimson tulips
And bursting lilac leaves.
There is a low-lipped basin in the midst,
Where a statue of veined cream marble
Perpetually pours water over her shoulder
  From a rounded urn.
When the wind blows,
The water-stream blows before it
And spatters into the basin with a light tinkling,
And your shawl—the colour of red violets—
out behind you in great curves
Like the swirling draperies of a painted Madonna.

Bright Sunlight

The wind has blown a corner of your shawl
Into the fountain,
Where it floats and drifts
Among the lily-pads
Like a tissue of sapphires.
But you do not heed it,
Your fingers pick at the lichens
On the stone edge of the basin,
And your eyes follow the tall clouds
As they sail over the ilex-trees.

[Women’s erotic poetry to other women that’s what those are]

Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes (1859-1912), Medieval Woodland Scene (1895)

She found she could not write the biography of Keats she wanted to: she could not obtain copies of his letters to Fanny Brawne. She seems to have offended men because she was very heavy. How dare she? I see Shelley in her imagery, and if she was not a feminist, where is feminism to be found? Perhaps she was put off by the types of women who were first phase feminists (suffragettes, women working for leftist causes, prohibition). She had a mind and style of her own. One of her most reprinted poems is said to be anti-war: Patterns, only it takes such a long time before war is even brought up. This poems is so curious with its artifice. Patterns. It does seem appropriate that art deco was the way people with money furnished their houses.

She died at 51. Eight years before she had been in a painful accident (in a wagon) and seriously injured her umbilical muscles, and surgeries did not mend the damage.

This poem is to Ada imagining herself dead:

The old house will guard you
As I have done.
Its walls and rooms will hold you
And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies
As always
From the pages of my books.

Eva Bonnier (1855-1909), At Studio Door

See: S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and The Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975); Claire Healey, “Amy Lowell Visits London,” New England Quarterly, 46 (September 1973): 439-453. Siane Ellen Hamer, “Amy wasn’t writing about flowers,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 11.4 (July-August 2004). Amy wrote on Remy de Gourmont, Émile Verhaeren,

Ellen