I stole a friend’s New Yorker this weekend (or he came to my door, bearing a pound of saltwater taffy and a refrigerator magnet emblazoned with my name and a Cape Cod scene; gifts out of a 1940s photobooth stuffed with buttered popcorn and sticky treacle—and the magazine he left behind was a bonus round) and found my eyes glued to Dan Chiasson’s gorgeous piece about the long and tumultuous correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. They barely ever met, and yet wrote to each other for thirty years, he the younger, manic poet, and she the older, seafaring one, but they were both at the top of their respective games—a Pulitzer winner and a Poet Laureate. A rare correspondence, an unbroken dialogue between two equal, firehot braniacs who know words from words.
Chiasson is such a beautiful writer, he really is. Like this: “Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn’t mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so “life” is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art.”
In any case, it made me think that the greatest casualty of the Internet age may not be talking—I hear more talking, chattering, clattering, now than ever—but the writing of great, long letters, with no gmail tag indicating whether or not there will be a response. The Collected E-mails and Texts just doesn’t have the same ring or the same sense of promise. The promise that when you scribble some words on paper and drop them in a box that they will go somewhere, fly through the air (literally!) and may or MAY NOT land in the right hands or fall right on the reader’s eyes. It’s all so dangerous and faith-based and interior and gutsy.
Anyways.
I’ll write you a letter. Really. Tell me where to send it.
