Skip to content
{ 2003 10 31 }

Curveball and Slider: Jim Behrle on Robert Lowell

     “At first I thought you couldn’t really be a poet unless you’d killed yourself,” recalls one of the liveliest blog poets in our town, Jim Behrle.  “So I was very interested in Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and they led me to Lowell,” without whom young Jim says he might have been just a troublemaker forever.  Robert Lowell was first a local hero, a poet of places Jim Behrle knew well, like the railroad tracks in “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.”  On the North Shore of Boston, Beverly Farms is a high-WASP beach town where Jim Behrle was a Catholic altar boy at St. Margaret’s Church.  “I rode that train into Boston,” Jim remembers, knowing that “there was a poet who wandered around here.  His father died here.  It made me feel connected to a new world that was peopled with poets.”  Lowell fortified the fancy, Jim says, when he became a poet, that “I was joining the brightest ring of angels.”  Lowell’s writing about his own mental illness was another liberation.  “Maybe people like Lowell gave us the bravery to admit we were crazy.”  The Lowell poems Jim Behrle chose to read are all about poets and place: “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” “For John Berryman I,” “Robert Frost,” the end of “For the Union Dead,” “Red and Black Brick Boston” and  “Art of the Possible.”  Listen here.

Posted by lydondev on Friday, October 31, 2003, at 6:43 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

{ 13 } Comments

  1. zxevil137 | March 3, 2008 at 7:07 am | Permalink

    6TpAbB r u crazzy? I told u! I can’t read!

  2. fatty | August 19, 2008 at 9:04 am | Permalink

    hihi sorry i spammed ):

  3. RickVallen | March 13, 2009 at 9:15 am | Permalink

    Nice post and blog
    Thanks for sharing

  4. learn bass guitar | October 26, 2010 at 10:31 am | Permalink

    What a great guy!

  5. Effective Diets | October 26, 2010 at 10:32 am | Permalink

    “At first I thought you couldn’t really be a poet unless you’d killed yourself,”

    Great quote!

  6. ameublement cuisine | November 18, 2010 at 5:51 pm | Permalink

    prix cuisine

  7. Canon TonerCartridge | March 18, 2011 at 8:40 pm | Permalink

    Great post. When I write poetry I use aCanon CartU cartridge for printing it out.

  8. Angelcare Monitor | March 18, 2011 at 11:25 pm | Permalink

    I love poetry, simply the best way to put pen to paper.

  9. Mercado de Divisas | April 8, 2011 at 9:52 am | Permalink

    Exccellent, thanks. Great post, thanks for sharing, it is very good for me. Mercado de Divisas

  10. Curso Forex | April 11, 2011 at 9:56 am | Permalink

    Exccellent, thanks. Great post, thanks for sharing, it is very good for me. Curso Forex

  11. dizi | May 15, 2011 at 11:14 am | Permalink

    Curveball and Slider: Jim Behrle on Robert Lowell

  12. Internet Marketing | February 1, 2012 at 4:13 pm | Permalink

    I can’t find this book of poems anywhere in bookstores!? Can I get it online anywhere that you know of?

  13. yemek tarifleri | April 9, 2012 at 9:12 am | Permalink

    nice blog and thanks for sharing (: