| Amy Lowell | |
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Amy Lowell’s poem “Patterns” revealed to me poetry’s fulfilling subversion. A woman wanders her patterned flower garden holding a letter, the letter that holds the news that her beau has just been killed in the war, “Christ! What are patterns for!” is the refrain. It was that “Christ,” appearing in a high school textbook in Bible Belt, Ohio, that was so radical.
Later I would discover other radical moves of Ms Lowell’s: interlocking prose and poetry in a single piece, e.g. Her life, too, in many ways outGertruded Ms. Stein, albeit from a Boston Brahmin locale. And her great battles with Pound, who branded her version of Imagism, “Amygism.”
Joan Joffe Hall read this poem at the great birthday party for Curbstone Press. Here’s the news in poetry: an overlooked minor poet leaps from the page to remind us what it’s all about.
Bob Holman Joan Joffe Hall Of the poem, Joan Joffe Hall says:
Amy Lowell
Amy Lowell, once a beauty,
sat before her mirror at fifty,
double chin, double hernia,
cigar, the trappings of eccentricity,
wealth, and failing glands: a minor
poet with a talent for end rhyme.
As she sat before her
image in the mirror,
brushing her hair,
her companion
trussing the hernia,
she saw one side of her face
sink as if under its own weight
-- eye, cheek, chin, falling falling --
and called out, “Pete, a stroke!”
before she died.
Yes, a talent
for ending: so few look
at the face of death and name it.
In this moment, not
the collapse of the monument,
Amygism, famous
between relatives James Russell
and Robert, nor the loss
of the girl in monumental fat
rivals the beauty of the last look:
the knowledge she could speak
and be cared for,
the image of her lover
and the stroke
both in the mirror.(Originally published in Poets On: Endings)
This poem is based on biographical material. Lowell, who helped found the Imagism movement, in later years was fat, smoked cigars, and had a hernia. Her lover, a woman she called “Pete,” was present at her fatal dressing-room stroke. I have forgotten who called Lowell “a minor poet with a talent for end rhyme,” if I didn’t make it up myself. Was Pound or Eliot or someone else responsible for “Amygism”? I hope it’s clear I deal with both slurs ironically, just as I’m ironic about her bolstering male relatives. In any case, I liked the congruence of Imagism and an image in the mirror and think Amy Lowell’s death about the best anyone could have. I wanted to present an image myself, and also to use a lot of liquid sounds, assonance and some end rhyme to make the poem move speedily along to its (her) end.
Joan Joffe Hall taught for many years at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she coordinated the creative writing program. Her books of poetry include The Rift Zone, Romance and Capitalism at the Movies (AliceJames Books, 1985), and The Cockroach, Like Memory. She also writes fiction.
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