with all hands lost. Write back—it will just take a minute.
Harry
“Man marks the earth with ruin—his control stops with the shore.” —Byron
Harry Borawski January 4, 12:27 a.m.
Did I ever tell you my dad was in the army? For three years when I was a kid I lived in a tiny seaside town in the Philippines called Olongapo where my dad was stationed. My dad, my mom, and my three sisters, and I lived in family housing about fifty paces from the sea. I haven’t thought about it in years. They were great times, with hordes of us kids running around the city and the seaside, nobody giving a crap. White kids and Filipino kids. Nobody cared. By the time I was ten I could speak Tagalog but as you might imagine, there wasn’t much Tagalog spoken in Bridgeport Connecticut in the ’60s. So it all faded. I grew up and I wasn’t good at any sport and I didn’t really fit in and wasn’t strong academically so I was perfect for Vietnam. I signed right up. For a millisecond, even my dad was proud of me.
What I didn’t realize until I got back from ’Nam was that I didn’t sign up out of patriotism or even loyalty to my dad, I just wanted to get back to Olongapo. Dumb shit! But there it was, right there across the South China Sea. And if you shut your eyes you could smell it. The grasses made the same sound in the wind. Too bad I was busy crawling through tunnels and shitting in bushes. I might have even enjoyed myself. That’s how poor white kids traveled back then. It was our version of study abroad. I’ve always thought maybe I’d go retire down there. I’ve heard of vets doing it. It’s like they were born and died in ’Nam and they’re just ghosts anywhere else. The Filipino kids used to make me eat peppers so that I would turn red. Get the little round-eye to turn red. I didn’t know that ten years later I’d be shooting people who looked just like them in the face.
Every winter I still can’t believe I’m still here dealing with rock salt and bronchitis and liberal fascism but I never leave. Glad you’ll be back before too long. I miss having you around. I’d like to tell you stories I’ve never told anyone.
Harry
“Man marks the earth with ruin—his control stops with the shore.”—Byron
Harry Borawski March 7, 2:05 a.m.
There’s real urgency now because I can’t stay here anymore. Yesterday I saw a boat coming up the mouth of the river and guess what. It was called the Tagalog. And then, some things I ordered online arrived and by the time I got home the package was gone. I tracked the package and it said it had arrived. I called FedEx and I said it wasn’t there and they said yes, it was. It was scanned and delivered. Well. I couldn’t sleep that night. I would really appreciate if you wouldn’t tell anybody what happened next. The package showed up. It had been opened and re-taped poorly. Well I think you and I both know what’s going on. Anybody who has an opinion that doesn’t fit the Statist agenda is being surveilled. I am one of many. You and I saw this coming. I might not write for a while. I think it’s much safer to speak face-to-face. As they say, it always gets deeper before it gets shallower.
Harry
“Man marks the earth with ruin—his control stops with the shore.” —Byron
The “confessional school” of poetry was first delineated by M. L. Rosenthal in his 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. According to Rosenthal, the author’s “private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems” are central to the confessional poem. The label “confessional” stuck, but in retrospect it seems to have emphasized the wrong thing, treating the poems as rising from shame, not self-knowledge.
For Sexton, the poem was a wholly appropriate vehicle for exploring the ways in which, as Diane Middlebrook writes, “family life gave permanent, empowering, and also deforming structure to individual experience.” The confessional poet did not restrict this tension to her own