Join us tomorrow, Thursday, May 17, at the New York Public Library to hear Paris Review poetry editor Robyn Creswell in conversation with James Fenton.

Winner of both the Queen’s Gold Medal and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, Fenton has given readers some of the most memorable lyric verse of the past decades, from the formal skill that marked his debut, Terminal Moraine, to the dramatic and political monologues of The Memory of War and Children in Exile, through to the unforgettable love poems of Out of Danger.

The conversation will be followed by questions from the audience.

When: 7 P.M.–9 P.M.
Where: Stephen Schwartzman Auditorium, The New York Public Library, 42nd Street & Fifth Avenue, NYC

To reserve your free seat and for directions, click here.

The Paris Review Foundation
62 White Street
New York, New York 10013

]]> http://www.everseradio.com/paris-review-interview-live-with-legendary-poet-james-fenton/feed/ 0 http://www.everseradio.com/paris-review-interview-live-with-legendary-poet-james-fenton/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=paris-review-interview-live-with-legendary-poet-james-fenton http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EverseRadio/~3/5a7g_Gog4pQ/ http://www.everseradio.com/the-drunken-fisherman-by-robert-lowell/#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 13:05:27 +0000 Ernie http://www.everseradio.com/?p=20784 Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit’s foot—
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale’s spout—
The fisher’s fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale’s rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.