Kathleen Spivack has written a memoir, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, about her poetry teacher, the poet Robert Lowell, and two of her celebrated classmates and friends, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Spivack comes from a celebrated intellectual family, particularly her father, the business management pioneer Peter Drucker. Kathleen Spivack is accomplished in her own right. Her poetry has won numerous awards and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, and her short stories have been published in many well-known journals.
Kathleen Spivack talks with Dimitri Keramitas about emotion, sanity, and creation in poetry.
a Paris Writers News Interview
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Dimitri Keramitas: What are you working on now, Kathleen?
Kathleen Spivack: Several projects. An essay on Plath and Sexton, based on new material. A collection of poems and a collection of short stories. Also my third novel.
Do you want to say what it’s about?
I never discuss my work in detail until it’s published.
(Note: Shortly after the interview Spivack received news that Alfred Knopf will be publishing Unspeakable Things, her novel about European intellectuals in New York during the Second World War, in 2014. Asked later about the novel, she only said that it was “dark but funny.”)
Well, your memoir has been published to glowing reviews. The great thing about With Robert Lowell and His Circle is the balance between warm, easy-going intimacy and a more historical, analytical approach. Did that come naturally to you?
I had to work very long and hard at it. It was very difficult to find a way to put myself into it. Humor was a key, the ability to look at things ironically and to laugh at certain situations.
Sexton and Plath were so competitive about who was the best poet. It invites the question: Well, so who was the greater poet?
Anne Sexton. She wrote from both the head and the heart. At that time, Sylvia was mostly from the head, very controlled and cold.
Even in Ariel?
That was her one good book—a wonderful book. That and The Bell Jar. But both Sylvia and Anne developed.
Was Lowell, with his mental problems, a destructive influence on people like Plath and Sexton?
Writers generally have no middle ground, emotionally speaking. On one hand they’re very solitary, needing a private space to create. On the other hand they’re very sociable. All writers are pulled in two directions.
Were Sexton and Plath negative emotional influences on you?
With me they were like big sisters. I used to meet Sylvia once a week at one point, and Anne three times a week. We used to discuss poetry at length, for hours on end.
You seem to have been an island of sanity in that environment. Were you a moderating influence on them?
I had my moments as well. I’d often be with Lowell in his office crying.
Lowell had a very idiosyncratic teaching method, as well as an unstable personality. What did he really bring to you as a teacher?
The idea of close reading of a poem, going beneath the surface.
Did he lead you and the others in a kind of movement? You always hear terms like confessional poetry, etc.
He moved towards openness in his own poetry, and the others moved that way as well.
Openness of form?
Of emotion.
Who was your biggest influence?
My dad. We would read things together. He had a literary side. He wrote a couple of novels, which were horrible. But he also wrote movingly on the rise of Nazism in his native Austria.
What exactly did he write?
A memoir, Adventures of a Bystander He also told me many things that I wound up using in several short stories.
You write both poetry and prose. How do you compare the two, from a writer’s perspective?
Poetry is so concentrated it stays focused on the present moment. Sometimes I need to go beyond that, to deal with the past.
Is Robert Lowell relevant today?
I don’t know. He was so immersed in his times, and in a very particular history, New England and his family. The references aren’t so accessible today. But I hear he’s having something of a comeback.
In writing about this generation of poets you (and others) can’t help but fixate on the prevalence of mental illness and suicide. Was there a particular reason for this?
It might have been genetic to a degree. In the case of Lowell it was a family thing.
Like the Hemingway family?
Yes. It also had to do with community. My generation, which was a bit younger, had a community. We supported one another.
Was academia a source of this community?
Not really. To give you an example, after I broke up with my husband I was left with a large ark of a house. So I invited many acquaintances to come and stay with me, many women poets. For women in the ‘50s, there was also the repression they lived with. In the ‘60s things began to change, and women became more autonomous and accepted.
What do you think of the situation of women writers today?
It’s much better, obviously. There’s a real flowering of women writers. And they’re getting hired!
What did you think of Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize?
Surprising. I was happy for the short story form and for Canada. But there are other Canadian writers.
What Canadian writer would you have awarded it to?
Michael Ondaatje, perhaps.
He’s a very poetic writer, he was a poet first, so maybe as a poet you’re a bit prejudiced?
Munro’s fiction is rather narrow in scope. It’s always the same. Ondaatje’s work is much broader. But you also have Margaret Atwood, and in the short story, Mavis Gallant.
Have you noticed particular trends in American poetry, or literature generally?
The diversity of writing, all the writers from different cultures. It’s a very interesting and exciting time, there’s so much variety.
Is the new technology a good thing?
I’m probably old-fashioned, I’m a book person. Self-publishing has changed everything, but it’s a double-edged sword. There’s such an overload of material now, especially on line..
With all the stuff available out there do you think the cream rises to the top?
No, sometimes the cream sinks!
Which genre is most relevant now?
Film. I recommend that you see the recent adaptation of As I Lay Dying. It’s very interesting.
Who’s your favourite writer?
Whoever I’m reading at the moment.
And the most important writer?
We don’t have those categories anymore. In the old days, novelists like Mailer and Styron were competing to see who would be the Great American Novelist. That’s no longer the case.
Any last words?
So Dimitri, what you writing now?
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Kathleen Spivack is the award-winning author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle (University Press of New England, 2012), A History of Yearning, Moments of Past Happiness, The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow 1986 - nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); The Honeymoon (Graywolf 1986); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood 1981); The Jane Poems (Doubleday 1973); and Flying Inland (Doubleday 1971). Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters amonth others, and she is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award 2010, the 2010 Erica Mumford Award, and the 2010 Paumanok Award. She is currently working on a novel, Unspeakable Things.
Director of a training and translation agency, and a lecturer in law, Dimitri Keramitas also writes film criticism which has been published in literary reviews in the US, UK, and France. He is a regular contributer to BonjourParis.com and Movies in American History. He is currently working on his a novel about a Native-American gambling casino.
