Well, there are poetry-writing classes, and then there’s the 1959 poetry-writing class taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton among the students. Kathleen Spivack was there, too, and she re-creates those heady days in her memoir, “With Robert Lowell and His Circle.” She also recalls her subsequent encounters with Elizabeth Bishop (with whom she regularly played ping-pong) and Adrienne Rich; the mentorship of Stanley Kunitz and John Malcolm Brinnin (author of the classic “Dylan Thomas in America”); her friendship with Lowell’s wives, the writers Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood; and the early brilliance of the critic Helen Vendler. There are, as well, strobe-light glimpses of several contemporary poets in their youth, including Robert Pinsky and Frank Bidart.
It’s quite an array of talent, and Spivack, grateful to count most of these peoples as friends, writes about them with an almost girlish enthusiasm. I haven’t seen quite so many exclamation points in one book in a long time. Spivack, moreover, can be winningly guileless: “I had come to study with Lowell, but I did not understand a word of his early work, Lord Weary’s Castle.” More problematic, however, is her memoir’s tiresome repetitiveness. This results, I suspect, because the chapters originally appeared as separate articles and were never refitted into a single, smooth narrative. Closer editing would have made this enjoyable but ramshackle book into a much better one.
(Courtesy of Northeastern) - “With Robert Lowell and His Circle” by Kathleen Spivack
Spivack was born into a cultivated family that fled Nazi Europe in the 1930s. In America, after considerable early effort, her father, Peter Drucker, eventually made himself into the now almost legendary guru of modern management. Being a wise parent, he naturally sent his oldest daughter to Oberlin College, where she won a fellowship for her senior year. Spivack decided to use the money to study with a major poet.
She was first drawn to Allen Ginsberg, but the beatnik author of “Howl” was totally unacceptable to Oberlin’s English department. Then she wrote to that scion of Boston brahmins, Robert Lowell, who agreed to mentor her. Nonetheless, when she knocked on his office door at BU in the early fall of 1959, the poet was utterly nonplussed:
“ ‘Who are you?’ he queried mildly. He was eating his lunch, and looking abstracted. I had arrived in a rainstorm, in blue jeans and boots. ‘I never take anyone under thirty,’ he countered coldly. He didn’t remember getting my letter, or the arrangement with Oberlin. I was stunned. As I stood in the crowded office, wet and depressed, not knowing quite how to handle his amnesia, Lowell took pity on me. ‘Would you like part of this sandwich?’ he offered.”
As Spivack came to learn, Lowell often chose his female students by their looks and, from the photographic evidence, Spivack was a darkly attractive young woman. In any case, the poet relented and invited her to sit in with his class and even to come by for private tutorials at his home. Despite some flirtation on both sides, the two apparently managed to stay just friends, master and disciple, until Lowell’s death at 60 in 1977.
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