Tag: Robert Lowell

  • Psychiatrists are Crappy Poets

    Psychiatrists are Crappy Poets

    Don’t get me wrong, I love psychiatry. It has given me the language to understand what happens in my mind when I am sick. Diagnosis is a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, once you diagnose something, you can focus on strategies to confront it. That’s what you get from studying the disease you suffer. But psychiatrists […]

  • Madness, Poetry, and Choosing Not to Die

    Madness, Poetry, and Choosing Not to Die

    Robert Lowell wrote those two lines in his poem “Night Sweats.” It’s one of my faves (the full poem is below). It’s a love poem, about a man who suffers mental illness, and his wife, who keeps him alive. It’s a brutal poem. Lowell suffered from manic depression. These days, people say “manic depression,” and […]

  • My Pulitzer Prediction

    My Pulitzer Prediction

    Okay, I’m going out on a limb here, but, I called it once before. I had a chance about ten years back to interview for radio, the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, for his book, Middlesex. I haughtily (Well, that’s how Michelle called it) proclaimed, “Mr. Eugenides, I’m gonna say it–I believe this one’s going to win the […]