Tag: Robert Lowell
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]