Poems
Life Studies (1959)
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street2,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.3,
and made my manic statement4,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz5,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown6,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W.7"
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke8,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections...
Life Studies, 1959
1A twofold reference: West Street' jail in New York, where Lowell was imprisoned for rejecting to join the army in 1943, and Lepke, a famous gangster, who had then been condemned to the electric chair and was sharing the 'cage' with Lowell. 2Name of the street in Boston where Lowell was living at the time. 3Catholic Conscientious Objector. 4This "manic statement" refers back to the letter that Lowell sent to President Roosevelt (President from 1933 up to 1945), where he explains why he rejects joining the army. There is an interesting intertextual process here, starting from a poem titled "In the Cage" published in 1944 in Lord Weary's Castle, and then recovered in Notebook. In 1950 John Berryman published "The Cage", a poem that deals with Ezra Pound's imprisonment in a jail in Pisa. 5An already imprisoned pacifist. 6Willie Bioff. "His name is barely known today, but for almost a decade he was at the forefront of what remains the largest extortion case in the history of American criminal justice, that set the foundation of modern organized crime. When the national depression knocked the bottom out of Chicago's once enormous prostitution racket, Bioff, a pimp, started to shake down Fulton Street shopkeepers, restricting himself to the Jewish stores and thus allowing George Brown, another goon whom Bioff knew only in passing, to work the Gentile side of the street. Since Brown and Bioff collected their payoffs from Fulton Street at the same time of the day, on the same day of the week, they starting talking and soon formed a partnership dubbed B&B, for Brown and Bioff." (For further information, see John William Tuohy's article at: http://www.americanmafia.com) 7J.W.: Jehovah's Witness. 8Lepke Buchalter, head of the organized crime syndicate, Murder Incorporated, had been convicted of murder and was in jail at the same time as Lowell. In prison, Lepke has a private cell with things other men are not allowed to have. Compared to Lowell's home in Boston, Lepke's cell was much larger than necessary.1A twofold reference: West Street' jail in New York, where Lowell was imprisoned for rejecting to join the army in 1943, and Lepke, a famous gangster, who had then been condemned to the electric chair and was sharing the 'cage' with Lowell.
2Name of the street in Boston where Lowell was living at the time.
3Catholic Conscientious Objector.
4This "manic statement" refers back to the letter that Lowell sent to President Roosevelt (President from 1933 up to 1945), where he explains why he rejects joining the army. There is an interesting intertextual process here, starting from a poem titled "In the Cage" published in 1944 in Lord Weary's Castle, and then recovered in Notebook. In 1950 John Berryman published "The Cage", a poem that deals with Ezra Pound's imprisonment in a jail in Pisa.
5An already imprisoned pacifist.
6Willie Bioff. "His name is barely known today, but for almost a decade he was at the forefront of what remains the largest extortion case in the history of American criminal justice, that set the foundation of modern organized crime. When the national depression knocked the bottom out of Chicago's once enormous prostitution racket, Bioff, a pimp, started to shake down Fulton Street shopkeepers, restricting himself to the Jewish stores and thus allowing George Brown, another goon whom Bioff knew only in passing, to work the Gentile side of the street. Since Brown and Bioff collected their payoffs from Fulton Street at the same time of the day, on the same day of the week, they starting talking and soon formed a partnership dubbed B&B, for Brown and Bioff." (For further information, see John William Tuohy's article at: http://www.americanmafia.com)
7J.W.: Jehovah's Witness.
8Lepke Buchalter, head of the organized crime syndicate, Murder Incorporated, had been convicted of murder and was in jail at the same time as Lowell. In prison, Lepke has a private cell with things other men are not allowed to have. Compared to Lowell's home in Boston, Lepke's cell was much larger than necessary.
