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175 A Gifted Young Student Peter Kaplan, 1963–1977 There were a requisite number of people who came to Lowell’s classes from mental hospitals, to which they returned afterward. Some of the writers were unintelligible, but one happened to be a young genius, Peter Kaplan, who, at age seventeen, was already as large as a grown man. Peter eventually left McLean Hospital, where, he later insisted, his family had incarcerated him for suspected homosexuality. He moved to Woods Hole and founded a small literary press, the Pourboire Press, and worked as a waiter to support that enterprise. He killed himself at age nineteen, jumping off the Bourne Bridge into the Cape Cod Canal one frozen winter day. One morning in Lowell’s “office hours” I found myself sitting next to a very large, bearded man. He had an earnest look, short stubby hands, and a strong, unwashed odor. The hours went on, and during them I felt a large leg brushing mine under the table. I moved away as much as I could, but the leg followed me. So, too, did the odor. This was Peter Kaplan at first meeting. At the end of the session, as Lowell was packing up and putting away books and papers, Peter handed forward a poem he had written. “It’s late,” Lowell protested. “Perhaps we can look at it next time.” But something in Peter’s persistence made Lowell agree finally to read that poem, and the group stayed past the allotted time to do it. The poem was a dreary sestina, or so it seemed at the end of a long session, about a man in a mental hospital . But it was well written and fulfilled the requirements of the form. It expressed the boredom a hospital patient feels, as well as a muffled despair. Lowell made some quick, kind comment. Writing about mental hospitals was only too fashionable in those days, and poets as well as mentally ill patients were always pressing such subjects forward. No one wanted to get into critiquing the poem. Then Lowell mercifully ended the class. “Who was that irritating man?” he asked me later. At the end of class, that “irritating man” introduced himself. “I’m Peter Kaplan.” He alluded to having wanted to sit on my lap, which he had almost managed to do during the class. Peter was vague about his being and whereabouts. He invited me to have coffee, and we went out and talked a bit. I was wary at first; “another poetry nut,” I thought. In our first conver- • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 176 sation, Peter told me his age. He didn’t tell me much more, but he was, I learned later, staying at McLean Hospital. He was in conflict with his parents , who were divorced. He was close to his grandmother. And—he was vague about this—he had come to Boston because he wanted to be more in touch with the world of poetry. Upon learning my name, Peter began to recite my poems. He had read some in Poetry Magazine, and had memorized them. Needless to say, this was extremely flattering, and immediately my feelings softened toward Peter Kaplan! One of the most striking things about Peter, which no doubt contributed to his difficulties, was the fact that this adolescent looked like a fortyyear -old man. Photographs of him show a man of heft, with a full beard, and an outgoing, well-developed, fleshy face. But emotionally, he had the maturity of an adolescent. He felt unequipped to cope with the world, particularly the homosexual world, which he felt doomed to be a part of. He longed to be mothered, and he sought out women like myself, who became second mothers to him and would include Peter in their families. The poet Blossom Kirschenbaum was one; Meredith Luyten another. Peter claimed he had been sent to McLean Hospital because his parents felt he was a “bad influence” on his younger sister, of whom he spoke tenderly. Later still, we were all to realize the degree of Peter’s suicidal impulses. Peter had been, in his home city of Providence, an admirer of Edwin Honig, and Honig had taken Peter under his wing when Peter was still in high school. Peter had total recall, a photographic memory that allowed him to remember verbatim every work of poetry he read. He was able to befriend many poets with this ability, for he would show up on their doorstep...

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