The Tenuous Fragility of Autobiography

THERAPY FOR SELF

..my impression is that the thread that strings it together is my autobiography. But this autobiography is not a tidy, unified narrative. It possesses a tenuous fragility. It is a narrative of a journey of self-examination. Readers will find quick sketches, unfinished, discrete and discontinuous glimpses. What could be held together I held together. With the help of poetry something held. -Katherine Wallingford, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self, , University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988, Introduction.


Yours was a more tortured journey, Robert,
through the labyrinth of tenuous fragility
listening to the secrets of your soul,
seeking relief from hurt nerves,
incessantly writing, incessantly writing
as you sought to discover yourself in poetry:
resurrecting memories,
bring the intensities of the past to bear
on an objectivizing behaviour, self, society.

The analytical experience, shaping
and ordering your psychic burden,
therapy for self,
for your one and only story:
how you feel, what you think and do,
set in a complex interdependence
of everything else, through language,
bearing reality.

Ron Price
21 October 1995`