'NONE'

“My dislike of telling future research students anything about myself is intense and profound.”

 

Inhabitants of a confessional age will have trouble comprehending such a sentiment. Gush is the rule, the more squalid the better. Louise Bogan, a furtively autobiographical poet, resisted efforts to compromise her sovereignty. The sentence above opens her response to a questionnaire sent in 1937 by Stanley Kunitz, poet and editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin. He planned to use it as the basis of a profile, which was never published. Bogan probably never returned her answers, which are at once playful and evasive, a mix of vital stats and blarney:

 

“Birthplace: Livermore Falls, Maine, a town on the Androscoggin River, run by a paper mill. My father has often told me about the excellent hard cider made by Billy Bean, the proprietor of the town’s combination brothel and saloon. B. Bean used to add all sorts of things to the original apple juice, including ground up sirloin steak, and the results of drinking this nectar, when it was ripe, were terrific. I often like to think that I bear traces of this firewater in the ichor which runs in my own veins . . .”

  

Asked about influences, Bogan replies: “I think alcohol comes in here.” When asked to describe her “development”: “Slow and unsteady.” Best of all, when “political convictions” are requested: “NONE.” Sometimes the questions sound like Tiger Beat features and Bogan responds accordingly. Under “likes and dislikes” she writes:

 

“I dislike swimming, bathing in lakes or the sea, horseback riding, and dirty fingernails. Also: well-bred accents, loud talk, the professional literati of all ages, other women poets (jealousy!), other men poets, English accents, Yale graduates [nota bene, Mike Juster], and bad writing and bad writers.”

 

Bogan was born on this date, August 11, in 1897, and died on February 4, 1970.

 

[You can find the full questionnaire response in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). And read one of her finest poems, “Simple Autumnal.”]