Slimming for the Beach

Don’t ask me how I found them, but I was idly surf­ing the other night when I found two poetry links which have given me a lot of plea­sure and which I want to share with you now.

The first is a fea­ture by the great Amer­i­can poetry mag­a­zine — called, sim­ply enough, Poetry — which was founded by Har­riet Moore in 1912. The writer (edi­tor?) remarks that,

As it turns out, one of the bas­tions of twentieth-century Amer­i­can verse didn’t have all that much to do with another: Robert Low­ell pub­lished sparsely in Poetry, sprin­kling eight poems in the mag­a­zine over almost twenty years. This seems an espe­cially sur­pris­ing total when con­sid­er­ing Lowell’s prodi­gious out­put (fif­teen of his books were reviewed in Poetry) and the role of “pub­lic poet” he achieved later in life.

Well, Poetry is big about it and presents a beau­ti­ful slideshow of Robert Lowell’s appear­ances in Poetry to mark what would have been his 90th birth­day on March 1

My other find is a sound archive of another favourite poet of mine, William Car­los Williams, orig­i­nally com­piled and pub­lished from Keele Uni­ver­sity, Eng­land, by Dr. Richard Swigg in 1992 and 1993.

Dr Williams — he was a prac­tis­ing med­ical doc­tor — had, it turns out, quite a high-pitched voice, rather like a charm­ing, slightly man­nish old lady. It is quite delight­ful, full of his humour and joy in life, brook­ing no non­sense yet bub­bling with a rich humanity.

It’s hosted by Pennsound Pro­grams in Con­tem­po­rary Writ­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania.

Enjoy.