BISHOP, THE BEST OF HER GENERATION?

When Elizabeth Bishop died on October 6, 1979, she left behind a substantial and well considered body of poetry. And by substantial I don’t mean large: several volumes of poems, translations, stories, personal essays, personal reminiscences, reviews, and a lot of letters. Take a look at the Library of America edition, and you get a good idea of her work: in a 900-page volume, you’ve got 180 pages of published poetry, and another 80 pages of uncollected and unpublished verse. The remaining 640 pp. are translations and various kinds of prose. So far, she’s the only writer of her generation to be given a volume in the Library of America—no Berryman, no Lowell, no Sexton—and there are reasons for this that I’d like to examine.

 

Bishop’s clarity was a quality that surfaced early in her writing and never deserted her. Here she is as a schoolgirl, writing about being alone: “Why does being alone, when we have a hundred companions most of the time, present such a great trial, or why should we wish to keep the conversation going so endlessly? The fear of a ‘quiet hour’ alone is greater than the fear of all those innumerable quiet hours alone that are ahead of all of us.” This was in 1929 when she was 18 years old. Fifty years later, writing her last poem, “Pink Dog,” to a hairless, dilapidated dog in Rio de Janeir0, she begins: “The sun is blazing and the sky is blue. / Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue. / Naked, you trot across the avenue.” The poem continues for twelve more triplets—an accomplishment in and of itself—and ends with the warning: “Carnival is always wonderful! / A depilated dog would not look well. / Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” Whether writing poetry or prose, Bishop over the half-century that brackets her work never varied from this kind of clean, terse clarity.

 

My point is that clean and terse wear well. While I once loved John Berryman’s work more than I have loved anyone’s poetry outside of John Milton’s, I no longer read him. I have tried. He doesn’t wear well. Ditto with a lot of Robert Lowell. Like anyone my age, I once found Lowell’s brooding and manic eloquence, his addiction to American history, or rather his addiction to inserting himself dramatically into American history, and his astounding ability to move from national history to personal history, I once found these techniques riveting and revealing. Not so much now. His poems seem eloquent, they seem learned, they seem manic, they seem depressed, they seem excited, but they don’t seem essential to my reading life. Certainly this is partly my age—I find myself in my fifties reading things over and over that would have seemed negligible to me twenty years ago—Joan Didion, for example. And Elizabeth Bishop as well.

 

But I’ve always read Elizabeth Bishop, and even secretly read her work when, as a hard-drinking, slow-talking Southern writer who was trying very hard to live up to the Dickeyesque stereotypes, I was supposed to have been reading Faulkner and Tate. She has Auden’s ability to say something well, rhythmically, and memorably. Here’s the first stanza of “Letter to N.Y.:” “In your next letter I wish you’d say / where you are going and what you’re doing; / how are the plays, and after the plays / what other pleasures you’re pursuing.” Auden could do this effortlessly, and the qualities that we might assign to these lines have to do, I believe, with their longevity.

 

Music matters. At the most profound physical level, the iambic foot is central to our heart beating, to our clocks ticking, to our feet tapping. The last two feet of the first line are perfect iambs, and it’s one of the unassailable rules of Latin prosody that the penultimate foot of the line has a lot to do with our overall impression of the line. Bishop breaks that rhythm throughout the rest of the poem, but the bass-line iambic rhythm rumbles all the way through it.  And we feel this, I believe, and we respond to it at a physical level.

 

But music isn’t enough. There has to an argument laid over the melody, a way of looking at the world that profits from the momentum the music provides, but isn’t overwhelmed by it. Bishop mastered this skill from the beginning. “Crusoe in England,” for example, a poem that continually walks a line between nationalist speculation and historical narrative. Or “In the Waiting Room,” a kind of extended treatment of childhood perception. But all done in that rhythmic way that propels the poem through its argumentative paces. Here’s the last stanza, after having read The National Geographic while waiting for her Aunt Consuelo to come out of the dentist’s office: “Then I was back in it. / The War was on. Outside, / in Worcester, Massachusetts, / were night and slush and cold, / and it was still the fifth / of February, 1918.” She manages this transition from the child’s world to the larger adult world of war effortlessly.

 

So, music and argument. There’s a third component, diction, and that’s something that replays consideration as well, but we’ll save this one for class. But consider these questions: How would you characterize her diction? American? Latinate? European? And what about the larger cultural and political concerns that often condition diction? The Sixties were part of her stomping grounds. And Vietnam. And Woodstock. And drugs. Where are these kinds of words? How accurate do you find her presentations of American life?  Do we live in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop?

 

 

Think about these things. Think about her readability, and think about her in light of the NEA report.

 

We’ll take it from there on Tuesday, March 11.

 

 

 

Comments

[Margaret Poist]

Better than Cinema: The Reading Experience and Elizabeth Bishop

I must say that when I began reading ELIZABETH BISHOP: THE COMPLETE POEMS I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Of many of the early poems I found myself writing at the top of the page “Why did she write this?” (which for me is the ultimate symptom of defeat when trying to understand a poem: that I can’t even conceive of why the poet deemed this random thought worthy of writing down for herself and possibly the world.) Though I could appreciate the sort of mental puzzle she creates in a couple of lines in “The Colder the Air”: “Time’s in her pocket, ticking loud/ on one stalled second,” I didn’t understand why the content of the rest of the poem seemed important enough or aesthetically appealing enough to write it down and call it poetry. But upon reading onward I began to notice myself becoming more engaged, and thus more willing to put out the effort to discover where she was coming from. The emergence of my engagement coincided with the emergence of Bishop’s distinct ability to create complex, vivid images. For me, Bishop’s evolving aesthetic is an example of how the charismatic power of a poem’s words makes me much more patient than I am when reading poetry that I don’t find aesthetically pleasing (so there Laura Riding Jackson.) In her maturity, Bishop’s ability to conjure striking, lasting, moving images in my head convinced me to try as hard as I might to grasp her conceptual matters.

It was around “Quai d’Orleans” that words became more salient; the precise moment when they caught was when Bishop calls the wake behind a barge “a giant oak-leaf of gray lights/ on duller grey.” For me this was an image I could relate to: I used to be a river guide in North Carolina and would at times find myself staring at the rapids, mesmerized by water’s paradoxical capacity to, on the one hand, create consistent shapes and features on its surface, while on the other hand, flow forward in constant movement. The crafting of this image in my mind, that was at once strikingly new and at the same time companionably familiar got me very excited about Bishop’s capacity to transfer to me her fascination with the minute details of her surroundings. And, indeed, I was not disappointed as the pages turned forward

But what of abstract, intellectual, and emotional musings of the poetry? For me these seemed to take a while to crawl to the surface of her lines as well. (Though upon returning to her earlier poems after deciding that I liked her later poems a lot, I found that I was much more patient to try and find her meaning, regardless of any (perhaps disputable) lack of artistry at the start of her career.) In “Quai d’Orleans”, assuming that the content of her poetry had become clear as its images, I thought I was about to get a great moment of poetic drama:

We stand as still as stones to watch
the leaves and ripples
while light and nervous water hold
their interview.
“If what we see could forget us half as easily,”
I want to tell you….

What a promising moment! But then, in the penultimate and final lines of the poem that immediately follow this moment, she dives into a kind of obscurity that I found quite disappointing:

“as it does itself---but for life we’ll not be rid
of the leaves’ fossils.”

With these abstruse lines, the vivid images of the poem, the leaves that “go drifting by,” the ripples that “extinguish themselves against the walls/ as softly as falling-stars come to their ends/ at a point in the sky,” and the subtle hinting that she is taking in this scene along side someone to whom she wants to reach out (“I want to tell you”), all come to a clunking halt. Go ahead, try and paraphrase these lines to find a meaning that suits the tension that Bishop builds in the verse that precedes them. I can’t do it. Please let me know if you can.

However, on second thought, changing my analysis strategy, I think it is possible that she didn’t mean the lines to say anything ridiculously profound, perhaps the profundity of the moment is not in what she wants to say, but rather in the fact that she wants to say it, or say something, perhaps she doesn’t know what it is she wants to say…And on a third reading, only just now, I see that this is quite possibly a poem about memory, which does seem a subject of interest to her, and that the mighty wake that looks like a giant oak leaf may be a metaphor for our general sense of ourselves, built over time and maintained by many formative memories, while the actual leaves that meander behind the wake may be smaller memories, that are more wayward and don’t follow the distinct and obvious path that our broad self concept does. This could lend a clue to deciphering the ending, and justifies the awkward weight at the end of the poem of the word “fossils,” with all of its connotations of the imprints of the past. Even with this interpretation of the poem as a whole, the final lines confuse me in terms of their literal meaning (and whether they have one) and I would be interested to hear what your thoughts are on what the meaning might be or what her tactic is if she didn’t intend the words to have a logical, literal meaning.

Though I loved the complex, moving pictures that “Quai D’Orleans” rose in my mind, I can’t say that I found that poem to possess much musicality to speak of. However, when I got to the poem “Insomnia” I started to notice that Bishop craftily manipulates different forms of poetic structure. Indeed, later in her body of work, she has poems entitled “Sestina” (a form about which I know very little, so I don’t know how much she altered the form in her poetry, but it is a really fun form to read, with its clever cycles of end words) and “Sonnet” (which she certainly seems to manipulate by giving the lines a six beat rhythm that is occasionally interrupted by lines of four beats.)

“Insomnia” has a sing-songy feeling from the start due to the fact that she writes the poem mostly in iambic quatrameter. This lends a lullaby quality to it; but it is a lullaby with minor notes. It was a joy to read this rhythmic poem out loud, and so I did, but quickly realized an intriguing pattern of disruption: the final two lines of both the first and third stanzas lose the rhythm of the preceding lines (read them aloud and you will see that it is impossible to continue the dominant rhythm throughout them:

far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper

and

where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me)

which made me pay more attention to the content of the poem. Of course, that the poem has a lullaby feeling to it, but is called “Insomnia,” offered me a hint that the poem would at some point diverge from the playful rhythm of the first couple of lines. But also, this sense of opposition, which from the start the difference in tone between title and rhythm creates, echoes throughout the poem, particularly in the final stanza, where the speaker describes the world in which she is loved as:

…that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Along with these clever, multiple ways of conveying the poem’s meaning, I’d also like to call attention to Bishop’s deft use of italics in the second line of the second stanza:

By the Universe deserted,
SHE’D (italicized) tell it to go to hell.

Now, I am assuming that Bishop intended this editorial detail, because by emphasizing the word “she,” Bishop deftly sets up a relationship between “she,” the moon, who would tell the Universe to go to hell, and the speaker, who seems herself to be considering telling the universe to go to hell. I enjoyed the efficiency of this simple formatting choice: through it Bishop quietly insinuates another subject (and a conflicted subject at that) into the poem.

By the end of the book, I found Bishop to be a joy to read; continually intriguing me with and then satisfying me by poems such as “The Moose,” and “One Art.” For me the question is not “Do we live in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop?” but rather “In a world that often privileges media forms of expression over poetry, can Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry serve a purpose in the minds of her readers that media cannot?” I say yes. For me, her ability to encourage images and thoughts in my mind, that first seem to be her thoughts coming off the page, but then somewhere become my version of those images and those thoughts, is a unique experience. When I first encountered that image of the wake that looked like an oak leaf, I wanted to call her writing cinematic, because of the detailed scene it created in my mind. But then I realized that it was something more than what cinema can do: though film offers vibrant, detailed, meaningful images, it does all the work for you. In its painstakingly chosen metaphors and tactically insinuated themes, Bishop’s poetry is full of her precise, careful work. But she left a lot of work for me to do, too, which made it a ridiculously engaging experience.

[alschmidt]

Like Maggie, I too was slow to warm to Elizabeth Bishop, but also like Maggie, she eventually hooked me (lodging herself amongst remnants of others' "big hooks/ grown firmly in [my] mouth" ("The Fish")-- I haven't yet decided whether or not she's thrown me back). The lure(s) that attracted me include most of the elements already mentioned, but I was particularly draw to what Maggie identifies as Bishop's "vivid imagery"-- which I think probably is so vivid because of the clarity that Dr. Burris discusses.

However, Bishop didn't catch me as quickly as it seems she caught Maggie. Not until reading the section entitled "Brazil" that begins with "Arrival at Santos" did I fall prey (somewhere in the second stanza, I gave in completely). Indeed, Bishop's poems written in or about South America resonated with me more than her others, and I think this can be attributed to several different things. One, her portrayal of the Brazilian landscape (both urban and rural) reminds me specifically of Evelyn Scott's very early work, both poetry and a sort of impressionistic prose (written in and about Brazil), though Scott's dates several decades before. (Interestingly enough, while Scott paints similar pictures for her reader, her style of doing so is exemplary of modernist writing, in the sort of William Carlos Williams sense-- thus, a rather different approach and style than Bishop's, causing the similarities between mental images they conjure up to be even more striking). While I slept, ate, and drank Scott's Brazilian writing for a month or more last semester, this similarity I don't think can fully account for my eventual appreciation of Bishop.

So, allow me to return to one of Maggie's more specific points about imagery: that (paraphrasing, of course-- I have a bad habit of this) the images Bishop conveys about what she's seeing ultimately become our (the readers') images, so that they begin to have a quite personal appeal (an idea that reminds me a bit of our discussion about Stevens' "Notes"). I suspect this accounts for my slow warming: while Maggie saw a North Carolina river in her mind's eye while reading "Quai d'Orleans," I'm afraid I didn't see anything dear to my experiences until I started in with the "Brazil" poems, which contain images reminiscent of many I've seen first hand in the Yucatan. I could not only see but feel once again the contradiction between the lush foilage, awe-inspiring landscapes and the poverty that we (as in U.S. tourists) contribute to but also scruitnize (as the tourism industry perpetuates at least part of First World economic exploitation). Other poems, such as "Going to the Bakery," also written in Rio but included in the "Uncollected Poems" section, recalled more pleasant experiences, as some of the best baked goods I've ever eaten were purchased in Mexican bakeries.

While drawn to these Brazilian images, I was impressed by the subtle social critique that weaves its way through Bishop's quite concrete (even simple?) descriptions of her physical surroundings. For instance, this business of urging the "Pink Dog" to put on a Carnival costume (a fantastic image, and idea for that matter) is due to the practice of throwing "beggars" in "the tidal rivers."

Interestingly enough, the poems containing imagery that resonated with me the most were for the most part the only ones I was able to muse abstractly about-- perhaps "willing" is a better word than "able" as I must confess I wasn't as dilligent as Maggie in digging for profundity. At any rate, this suggests that in order to muse about the more abstract implications of poetry, perhaps we first must be able to personally relate to the poem in some way... perhaps. (I always fear that if I can't relate a poem to something in my life, I have no business musing about its "meaning" as I'll be sure to miss it or mis-use it in some way.)

A few more things not entirely consistent with the rest of my comments:
1) In a pseudo-response to Dr. B's question about Bishop's portrayal of American life: I can't believe she was writing at the same time as our friend Allen or as the Black Arts Poets (for whatever reason, I'm thinking particularly about Nikki Giovanni).
2) In another pseudo-response to Dr. B: I can see us smuggling "Filling Station" into the Southern canon (and thus not having to completely hide our appreciation of Bishop).

[jackayres]

Confession: I'm still working through the volume. I'm treading water right now, and am doing what I can to keep my head above water. I'll have the entire collection read by class tomorrow, and hopefully will have something more substantive to say. But, for now, bear with me...

Reading through the posts, I was fascinated by how the discussion was framed. For Maggie, a particular image that sparked a memory was the necessary "hook" to make a connection to Bishop's poetry; for Amy, the poetry's ability to connect to her own personal experience was vital to her appreciation of it. Amy even admits that she finds it important to relate a poem to her own experience. In the past, I've generally held a similar view--but now, I'm not so sure.

Is some sort of personal connection important to our reading of poetry? I'm not talking about an emotional response--that should occur--but an impulse to use the poetry as a springboard to our memories, rather than the poet's arguments. Personal connection as a criteria for the evaluation of poetry: on the one hand, it allows us to make associations, experience the poem at a deeply personal level, and, perhaps, bring the words into "the real world"; on the other hand, it reinforces the notion of art as *purely* subjective--which kind of strikes a blow to the business of literary criticism--and it takes the poem out of the poet's hands and into the readers. At some level, this exchange always happens--especially if you subscribe to reader response theory--but taking it too far can be problematic.

As Dr. Burris points out, Bishop's poetry is full of both clarity and argument. Surely, a poet who made the effort to clearly present her specific point of view would be a bit distressed to have that perspective lost amidst memory recall. Or would she?

I have not (so far) been enrapture by Bishop, but I do enjoy and appreciate her work, especially coming off of Ginsberg. I think there's something admirable in her adherence to form, and a deceptive simplicity to her work. It's not showy or self-conscious; it's well-crafted and intelligent.

Something I'm interested in addressing is the issue of voice. Bishop's poetry seems dimetrically opposed to Ginsberg & "Howl" in this repect. The presence of Ginsberg is palpable in his poetry--he dominates it (in fact, the cult of personality surrounding Ginsberg contributes to my frustration with "Howl"). Bishop, on the other hand, seems to recede into her words, often writing through a distinct persona. Yet, at the same time, her poems often begin with dedications, quotes, or prefatory notes. Of note, before the poem "The Bight," the reader is told the poem is "[On my birthday]". This practice is curious to me, as it seems to be building a personal rapport with her audience, even as the poetry itself removes itself from Authorship. Agree? Disagree?

I realize I have not answered *any* of the questions raised by *any* of the previous posts, yet have still added questions of my own. Apologies. Hopefully I'll be able to formulate some responses for class once I've finished the volume...

[Chris Hayes]

Hi,
I'm an outsider peering in from the public sphere (an MFA candidate at Ole Miss) & I just wanted to give you all something to consider in you Bishop discussion if you haven't seen this already. The poem below was written by one of my mentors at Ole Miss: Beth Ann Fennelly. I think this poem does a great job of putting Bishop's work into perspective, historically and aesthetically.

7. On Reading Bishop's "The Fish"

Influence ends somewhere; forgive me.
For you, Ms. Bishop, benediction of rainbow--
twenty-three years since your death, and it echoes--
for me, your greedy, showboat mentee,
if I hooks fishes,
delicious.

One of the important aspects of this poem is that it sheds light on the question of virtuosity in Bishop's poem. By the end, Bishop delivers what she promises, and while I'll agree that the speaker does a great job of staying out of the way (unlike Ginsberg in Howl) "The Fish" inevitably ends where it seemed to have been headed all along. For me, this poem used to be a real eye-opener. Now it's just another example of the fact that Elizabeth Bishop could write one heck of an Elizabeth Bishop poem. Though I will say that her influence outlasts Lowell for good reason. After a while, his mania becomes virtually non-translatable. It just doesn't lift off the page and dig into your chest like some of Bishop's work does. I was once told that the vast majority of people cite Bishop as their favorite poet when applying for creative writing jobs. I suppose there's a reason for this, but as Fennelly's poem points out, influence can and/or should only carry you so far before you decide to filet the fish and serve it with a nice glass of Pinot Grigio.

[alschmidt]

With our comments on Bishop echoing still in my brain (our discussions of poetry illuminating our own experiences and of my hesitant asking of “so what”), I read most of Ted Hughes’s collection from a deck overlooking a portion of the Gulf that is relatively free from tourist trade– a rather appropriate scene for digesting Hughes’s recurring glorifications of the natural world. On the particular afternoon I came across “Ghost Crabs” (I think originally collected in “Wodwo”), I was coincidentally recovering from a late night of crab-hunting. My Daddy and brother, two righteously committed sportsmen, pass up no opportunity to hunt down anything in their environs that might be tracked, caught, and either put to good use or released back into the natural habitat. And they convinced me to (uncharacteristically) join their expedition for crabs, particularly ghost crabs as they had spotted several already but were unprepared to capture them. Thus, with a trained labrador retriever leading the way, we set out with nets, and other implements they assured me would be necessary, to hunt down crabs by moonlight. Ultimately, we succeeded in catching only one– such a minuscule catch that everyone else deemed our effort a failure. Reading “Ghost Crabs” the following afternoon, however, I felt the hunt much more satisfying than the poem.

As any “good” graduate student would/does, I of course had to consider why, what accounts for this effect (or lack of it), and what are the implications of it, etc. Again, I was still mulling over Bishop so decided to use my response to her collection as a point of comparison. As you all know, Bishop’s poems I like best are those of South America (and also, “Filling Station” as I’m sure I’ve been to that exact one) because I can “see them better,” drawing on my own personal experiences to make sense of hers. This logic, however, doesn’t in any way account for my response to Hughes (Ted, not Langston), who produced a number of poems I can “see” without much effort but still left me asking, “so what” (though I’m certain I learned a little something about the reproductive habits of sheep and other livestock, and the mating rituals of insects). This set me about contemplating the inadequacy of language to convey our experiences to others: I would rather hunt for crabs myself than read Hughes’s poem about them (similarly, back to Langston, much as I adore his work, I would rather be on Beale Street than to read his poem about it). It seems that with Hughes (Ted) this inadequacy of language becomes particularly emphasized because of his subject matter.

Indeed, the (constructed) tension between the natural world and the written language we (not just Ted) try to impose upon it is introduced immediately with “The Thought-Fox” (at least this is the first selection in my edition, yes?). (I’m aware that this dangers on setting up a dichotomy between nature/culture, or something along those lines, and I don’t think that this is always the case. For all of my grappling with Bishop, she seems to reconcile the two adeptly; and of course the imagined presence of such a tension is a very “Western” idea.) Okay, so Hughes’s inspiration comes from nature, but is he caging it, or trying to, in the same manner he describes the effect of a zoo on the very next page (“The Jaguar”)? Hughes seems to be aware of this conundrum, as evidenced in “The Man Seeking Experience...” and “The Crow’s First Lesson” in which God’s attempts to teach the crow to speak result only in its vomiting. Hughes also often describes a sort of feeling-out-of-place-ness when fishing or engaging in some other outdoor activity (“Recklings,” “Earth-Numb,” “A Cormorant”). Significantly, in “Go Fishing” as Hughes/the speaker is describing a sort of transcendent union with nature, one of the effects of “Join[ing the] water” is to “lose words.”

But, interestingly, Hughes has the natural world speak (thistles are like “the gutturals of dialects” (“Thistles”), dandelions and cinders “cry” “‘Do not go’” (“Song of a Rat”)– though the rat can only “screech,” and of course the speaking produce, fowl, elements, etc., in “Leaves”– but with the addition of a tractor(?); similarly, the river has a conspicuously italicized speaking line in “Salmon Eggs,” and whale-speak occupies several stanzas in quotation in “Little Whale Song”). Other times, Hughes speaks for nature– assuming the perspective/persona of a hawk in “Hawk Roosting” or of a crow in “A Flayed Crow...” (There also seem to be an awful lot of poems entitled “Such and such’s Song” (replace the “such and such” with any animal you can conceive of), especially in selections from “Crow.”)

Despite his recognition of this tension, Hughes continues, over a period of thirty-plus years, to attempt to invoke it, evade it, resolve it, and I’m not sure he ever accomplishes the last– an issue which recalls this business about Eliot (T.S.) setting himself a task, accomplishing it, and then no longer feeling a need to write poetry. In other words, never reconciling the (constructed) tension between nature and language, perhaps Hughes couldn’t put the pen down so to speak.

Ultimately, I must confess that all of this prattling about Ted’s inability to reconcile a tension (I don’t necessarily even believe exists) between language and the natural world is mostly an attempt to evade another one of this themes– his presentation of gender and sexuality and an apparent fascination with Adam/Eve mythology. I wanted to give Ted “his due,” so I’ve avoided this last matter for now, though I’m sure I’ve a better understanding of why Sylvia put her head in an oven.

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