Skunk Hour
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Skunk Hour is one of Robert Lowell's most famous and frequently anthologized poems. It is regarded as a key early example of Confessionalism.
'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.' He began work on the poem in August 1957.
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."
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."
[edit] 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 2005
