On The Death of Robert Lowell

Oh, I don't give a shit.
He was an old white haired man
Insensate beyond belief and
Filled with much anxiety about his imagined
Pain. Not that I'd know
I hate fucking wasps.
The guy was a loon.
Signed up for Spring Semester at MacLean's
A really lush retreat among the pines and
Hippy attendants. Ray Charles also
Once rested there.
So did James Taylor . . .
the famous, as we know, are nuts.
Take Robert Lowell.
The old white haired coot
Fucking Dead. —Eileen Myles

What ever happened to all those middle-of-the-class kids from high school. You only spoke to them once or twice. Born to be losers, you thought, if that element of young-adult fiction was to be believed. Or obliterated. You forgot their names. Now and again when you look them up on LinkedIn you are always surprised to find them alive . . . and employed. And when you chance to encounter them again, in the strange context you imagine, in which they find themselves born instead in the 1940's, it's possible that they would continue to inhabit, even now, that time nearly fifty years ago which was their heyday, and to continue to talk, repetitiously, about the famous people they had known and the women they had fucked, such that you would perceive, for a dull moment, that they had not yet managed to write themselves out from under the weight of their previous novel. ( )

unbelievable. must be read in small doses. ( )

I read this because I heard it had a lot of sex in it, and due to some kind of error the publisher sent it to me for free. Other times I tried to read Eileen Myles I couldn't get past the feeling that she was full of it in the bad way, but in this book she seemed more sympathetic because there are parts about being young and not knowing a lot, and there is that great line about being an old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking a book. There wasn't as much sex as I was hoping but still some pretty good parts. Lots of it was true in the way that you know things are true but you feel like you aren't allowed to say it like maybe it is embarrassing but she just says it.