- Skunk Hour
'Skunk Hour' is one of
Robert Lowell 's most frequently anthologized poems. It is regarded as a key early example ofConfessional poetry .Composition
'Skunk Hour' was the final poem in Lowell's book "
Life Studies ", but it had been the first to be completed. 'The first nut to crack really was "Skunk Hour" — that was the hardest.' [Robert Lowell in conversation withAl Alvarez , printed originally in "The Review" #8, August 1963, pages 36 – 40, and then collected inIan Hamilton 's "The Modern Poet" (1969), also included in "Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs", edited by Jeffrey Meyers, University of Michigan, 1988.] He began work on the poem in August1957 .He describes the writing of it thus: "I began writing lines in a new style. No poem, however, got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. ... When I began writing 'Skunk Hour', I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance. The dedication is to
Elizabeth Bishop , because re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner. Her rhythms, idiom, images, and stanza structure seemed to belong to a later century." [Ostroff, Anthony, "The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic", Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1964. pages 107 – 110, quoted in "Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art", edited by Lloyd Schwartz, Sybil P Estess, University of Michigan, 1983.] The poem was in part based on Bishop's poem 'Armadillo'.Publication
The poem was first published, alongside 'Man and Wife' and '
Memories of West Street and Lepke ' in the January 1958 issue (Winter) of the "Partisan Review ". It was collected in the book "Life Studies".Reaction
Frank O'Hara objected to the content of the poem: "I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty. Why are they snooping? What’s so wonderful about a peeping Tom? And then if you liken them to skunks putting their noses into garbage pails, you’ve just done something perfectly revolting. No matter what the metrics are."Sources
* "Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art", edited by Lloyd Schwartz, Sybil P Estess, University of Michigan, 1983
* "Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs", edited by Jeffrey Meyers, University of Michigan, 1988
* "Twentieth-Century American Poetry" by Christopher Beach, Cambridge University Press, 2003
* August Kleinzahler: 'Living on Apple Crumble: Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91', in London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 22, 17 November 2005Footnotes
External links
* [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/skunk.htm Modern American Poetry site with many excerpts of criticism of the poem]
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