Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
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Amy Lowell
This is a poetry reading by the famous Imagist poet herself. The reading is interlaced with tormented confessions from Lowell’s diary as a teenager, observations on the art of writing poetry, her version of the historic rupture with Ezra Pound, witty rebuttals to her critics, and her notorious demonstration of how to unwrap a cigar as if one were undressing a woman!
More than half the evening is given to the actual reading of Lowell’s works, including her poem “The Sisters,” about Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; “A Fairy Tale,” an expose of her fall from grace as a child when she realized the fate in store for an “ugly, fat” girl; “The Bath,” her aggressive and sensuous celebration of her body and its pleasures; and many of the erotic love poems written to her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer.
Lowell, who did not begin her life work until she was almost forty, waged a tactically brilliant, militant campaign against fat phobia, against ageism, and against the stereotypes of passive female sexuality and sentimental artistic expression. She paid a high price for her rebellion, however, and after her death, her many enemies saw to it that she was treated patronizingly, if at all, in the historical record.
Not a play in the traditional sense, Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words is nonetheless a compelling piece of living history, as well as a stimulating evening of lesbian poetry. Where biographers and critical essayists have attempted to consider Lowell on a continuum with the other two poets (both males) of her famous family—or to locate her among the lesser poets of her day, this theatre piece places her squarely in the tradition of pagan lesbian artists, a tradition with which Lowell strongly identified in both her life and in her work.
One woman
60 minutes
Single set (platform reading)
More than half the evening is given to the actual reading of Lowell’s works, including her poem “The Sisters,” about Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; “A Fairy Tale,” an expose of her fall from grace as a child when she realized the fate in store for an “ugly, fat” girl; “The Bath,” her aggressive and sensuous celebration of her body and its pleasures; and many of the erotic love poems written to her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer.
Lowell, who did not begin her life work until she was almost forty, waged a tactically brilliant, militant campaign against fat phobia, against ageism, and against the stereotypes of passive female sexuality and sentimental artistic expression. She paid a high price for her rebellion, however, and after her death, her many enemies saw to it that she was treated patronizingly, if at all, in the historical record.
Not a play in the traditional sense, Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words is nonetheless a compelling piece of living history, as well as a stimulating evening of lesbian poetry. Where biographers and critical essayists have attempted to consider Lowell on a continuum with the other two poets (both males) of her famous family—or to locate her among the lesser poets of her day, this theatre piece places her squarely in the tradition of pagan lesbian artists, a tradition with which Lowell strongly identified in both her life and in her work.
One woman
60 minutes
Single set (platform reading)
