Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     “At first I thought you couldn’t really be a poet unless you’d killed yourself,” recalls one of the liveliest blog poets in our town, Jim Behrle.  “So I was very interested in Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and they led me to Lowell,” without whom young Jim says he might have been just a troublemaker forever.  Robert Lowell was first a local hero, a poet of places Jim Behrle knew well, like the railroad tracks in “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.”  On the North Shore of Boston, Beverly Farms is a high-WASP beach town where Jim Behrle was a Catholic altar boy at St. Margaret’s Church.  “I rode that train into Boston,” Jim remembers, knowing that “there was a poet who wandered around here.  His father died here.  It made me feel connected to a new world that was peopled with poets.”  Lowell fortified the fancy, Jim says, when he became a poet, that “I was joining the brightest ring of angels.”  Lowell’s writing about his own mental illness was another liberation.  “Maybe people like Lowell gave us the bravery to admit we were crazy.”  The Lowell poems Jim Behrle chose to read are all about poets and place: “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” “For John Berryman I,” “Robert Frost,” the end of “For the Union Dead,” “Red and Black Brick Boston” and  “Art of the Possible.”  Listen here.