Submitted by David Havird, Aug 15, 2007 12:45

I read Mr Kirsch's article with great interest, since I'm one of those readers to whom he refers that read DAY BY DAY when it first came out--and some of the poems before then, when they were appearing in periodicals. And I basically agreed with his assessment. A couple of things, though: first--and maybe he implies this in his last paragraph--the "negligence" in Lowell's sonnets is only apparent; it's willed--very much the result of deliberation. After all, Lowell not only rearranged the sonnets as the books evolved (from the first NOTEBOOK to HISTORY and FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET to the sequences in his SELECTED) but also reworked individual sonnets, sometimes extensively. Second, some of the distinctive stylistic techniques of DAY BY DAY derive from the rhetoric of the sonnets: the disconnection (which Mr Kirsch points out) between observations and the epigrammatic phrasing. However different in tone the sonnets and DAY BY DAY may be, the style of the latter seems to me as "rhetorical" as that of the former. Which leads me to ask: what does Mr Kirsch mean exactly when he contrasts the "transitional" style of DAY BY DAY to that of earlier books: "Lowell's style, at its best, is a rhetorical style -- that is, he uses language deliberately and artificially to communicate a feeling of power"? Don't poets typically use language deliberately and artificially to communicate something? How often, I mean, is a poem really spontaneous? And what about that "feeling of power"? Power over observations--a style of writing that allows Lowell to yoke together disconnected observations from experience? Power over the recalcitrant elements of language? That's a kind of power that poetry typically manifests--or am I wrong? And beyond this, the persona that lots of Lowell's "rhetorical" poems project is a vulnerable one, a persona lacking power--someone holding, as in LIFE STUDIES, a "locked razor." I wish that Mr Kirsch would clarify what I want to regard as a valuable characterization of Lowell's style.

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