Robert Lowell, _Notebook 1967-1968_; Laynie Browne, _Daily Sonnets_

READING JAMISON'S BOOK made me want to re-read some Lowell, and I went with this, the original publication of the sonnets later refashioned as Notebook (without the dates) and then as History and For Lizzie and Harriet. I had not much liked it when I first read it, which must have been in graduate school or shortly thereafter, but I wondered what I would make of it now, with a better understanding, thanks to Jamison, of the titanic struggles Lowell underwent to write anything at all.

Well, I liked a lot of it. There are any number of great lines, and some great poems. What I found myself most thinking of, though, was Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets, from 2007. I don't think I thought of Lowell at all when reading Daily Sonnets back in 2008 or 2009 (and Browne does not ever allude to Lowell, so far as I can tell), but now all sorts of parallels occurred to me.

They both involve the poet establishing the discipline of writing every day or almost every day, for one thing, and then the discipline of the sonnet itself, which both poets are only loosely tethered to, but which both of them honor in their own ways.

Lowell writes often about his spouse and his child; Browne writes often, though a little less directly, of her spouse and children.

They both include a few translations.

They both includes tributes to fellow writers (Lowell's a bit more tart).

They both address contemporary events in the world.

For all the parallels, though, they seem utterly different. A lot of this (I think) is down to Lowell's ambition. He sees "the poems in this book as one poem," he writes in an afterword, almost as if the book were an epic, or the kind of epic Wordsworth's Prelude was, in which he views his subjective experience through the lens of history and history through the lens of his subjective experience. Given ambition of this scale, it's hardly surprising that the book is an arduous read. That it is readable at all is evidence of Lowell's strength as a poet.

Browne's book is not easy to read--its WTF score is probably as high as that of Notebook ("cutaneous young swan / Prolong an omen or prone quotidian")--but there's more air, more light...maybe it's more of a success. It feels less effortful, in a way that illustrates a significant shift in American poetry over the last fifty years, I think.

Browne is willing to try homophonic translation, for instance, or "dictionary poems," in which all the words of the poem come from the entries on a particular page of a dictionary, and other kinds of invention strategies that involve trust in the aleatory. There's a Taoist relinquishing of desire for control. Browne notes in an afterword, "I have drawn from devotional practices the sense of the poem as an offering--it is beyond ownership--what may be given now."

Lowell's book feels like heroic struggle, as in our received idea of Jackson Pollock, say, locked in existential struggle with his canvas...a great thing about Jamison's book is that we realize there is nothing at all ironic in the phrase "heroic struggle" applied to Lowell, given what he had to stare down in order to write anything at all.

But Browne's book gets airborne more often, I think...maybe just because she's willing to trust the air currents, and Lowell is always flapping his arms.

It's not so much that Browne's book is unambitious as that it has renounced a certain kind of ambition. And that's one difference between poetry in 1967 and poetry in 2007.

I sometimes fe