Someone suggested this photo MIGHT be from a Swedish lookbook for Spring ’11. Understandable!
But it’s my father, Frank Parker (left) and his childhood friend Robert Lowell, taken when they were camp counselors during the summer of 1934. Â And it accompanies this essay I wrote about their friendship for The Poetry Foundation. The two were close until Lowell’s death in 1977.
For decades Lowell has had a very two-dimensional public image of having been difficult and crazy and generally not nice. But my father and many, many others who knew him well didn’t think of or remember him that way.
There’s also an accompanying audio podcast–an interview with me about the piece–that’s called Re-branding Robert Lowell. The tape I write about at length is in there: so please click, read and listen!