Poetry Xtras » "The Robert Lowell Memorial Bowling Trophy" by Jack Conway

Being a student of the Confessional poems and an admirer of Lowell, especially "Life Studies" (from which I derived the title of my own book) I was trying to pay tribute to Lowell in two distinct ways. The first being an homage to his work and secondly, and more importantly, I attempted to make Lowell more human than what literary history has made him. My contention has always been that writers (poets especially) are somehow mistakenly taken out of the realm of the living and afforded some god-like stature by critics, readers and other poets (myself, included). This poem was an attempt to "convincingly" deconstruct Lowell into a more human form. I took my lead from the Greeks who saw fit to give their "Gods" human characteristics. Hence, I chose the most mundane of sports (bowling) to show Lowell's frailties and foibles. I could have chosen horseshoes, but used that with a poem I wrote about Sylvia Plath.