Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
From poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, I learned that Amy Lowell from the grand Massachusetts family, whose brother Abbott Lawrence, would become president of Harvard College from 1909-1933, “secluded herself in the 7,000 book library” of her family’s estate in Brookline to study literature at the age of seventeen. She enjoyed early success, publishing in The Atlantic Monthly and other journals, and became a key figure in the Imagist movement spearheaded by Ezra Pound. She was also for many years a central figure at the Poetry Society of America in New York, the nation’s oldest organization devoted to the art.
“The Pike” by Amy Lowell:
In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,
Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,
A pike dozed.
Lost among the shadows of stems
He lay unnoticed.
Suddenly he flicked his tail,
And a green-and-copper brightness
Ran under the water.Out from under the reeds
Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun-thickened water.
So the fish passed across the pool,
Green and copper,
A darkness and a gleam,
And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank
Received it.
(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Flickr user katdaned)
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