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Introduction
- Northeastern University Press
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1 Introduction In January 1959 I came to Boston on an undergraduate fellowship to study with poet Robert Lowell as an alternative to my senior year at college. That single act changed my life. I worked with Robert Lowell both privately, in tutorial at his house on Marlborough Street, and in a class with others who were in the first bloom of their careers . As my poems and friendships with these poets set their roots, I continued to work with and to be associated with him until his death in 1977. At the time of this writing, I am one of the very few writers still around from that period. He gave me formal letters of introduction to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and other older women poets of the time. He introduced me to Bill Alfred and Stanley Kunitz, as well as to the British poets Jonathan Griffin and Basil Bunting. These became deep poetic friendships. I met Elizabeth Bishop through him. He asked me to come to his house on Marlborough Street two or three times a week, during which occasions he would read poems aloud to me, and “we”—I would not have dared say a word—would discuss them. Afterwards there were long teatimes at the Lowells’ house. Lowell became in loco parentis for me in many ways. I spent a lot of time there and also used the Lowells’ home as my fake mailing address when I was living with my boyfriend, whom I later married. Lowell was my friend and champion in all this, took me and my husband under his wing, and went to see my parents, who opposed the marriage. We developed a lifelong friendship. My parents, Peter and Doris Drucker, were refugee intellectuals who had come to the States in 1938. They had friends from every stage of their travels . Many were old-style European intellectuals also—mathematicians, musicians, scientists, artists, economists—who had found a foothold in English-speaking countries. Wefourchildrenlivedafamily-centeredlifeinanenclosedandprotected world. It was easy and comfortable for me to be with my parents’ friends, eminent though they may have been to outsiders. Many of them also had children our ages. I made friends easily, even from the age of three, and have kept my close friends all my life while making new ones too. “Friend” is a • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 2 special word, much misused, but if you read this, you will understand the depth of that word and concept. When I ask myself, writing from this vantage point, how it was that I was able to feel so comfortable and at home with Robert Lowell and the other poets at such a young age, it was probably my experience within the family, our confidence in friendship that made it possible and easy. I might have been timid at first with some of these poets and their hospitality, but I never questioned my place in it, my own personal goodwill and kindness, and the reciprocal nature I brought to these relationships. I loved good conversation but was comfortable with silence too. Like my mother, I liked to cook and invite people. Friendship and social ease were in my nature, or perhaps a gift at my birth from some fantasy fairy godmother. “Kathleen will get along with everybody. . . . She’ll always feel at home.” I never questioned it. “Friendship” was a Drucker family trait (along with bad knees), and I had inherited both. I was in a direct genetic line, it seemed from my father, but also from my paternal grandfather. In tutorial sessions Lowell talked to me about issues both personal and professional. I came alive poetically, and flowered in this unique circumstance . I found myself able to laugh and talk freely with him. My private friendship with the man and the more public persona were two different things. When Lowell moved to New York, and then was offered a job at Harvard, he’d ask me to sit in while he personally chose the students for his classes, spend afternoons in long postmortems of the classes, and sometimes go out with him and his friends in the evenings. Later, when Elizabeth Bishop came to Harvard, Lowell introduced me and asked me to look out for her, since she didn’t know many people in the area. I visited her a couple of times a week, played Ping-Pong, had long lunches, and spent late afternoons there too. She introduced me to Octavio Paz and his...