3-9-2000

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite "The boy stood on

the burning deck." Love's the son

        stood stammering elocution

        while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

        or an excuse to stay

The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow

by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.

They have arranged

to meet the rings around the moon, although

within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend

as long on us,

you've been, dear friend,

precipitate and pragmatical;

and look what happens.  For Time is

nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair

in bright formation

are flocking where,

so straight, so soon?

--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,

battered and shiny like the moon.

Here is a coast; here is a harbor; 

here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery: 

impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains, 

sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,

some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, 

and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,

is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world, 

and a better life, and complete comprehension

of both at last, and immediately, 

after eighteen days of suspension?

Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, 

a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag. 

So that's the flag. I never saw it before. 

I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,

and paper money; they remain to be seen. 

And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, 

myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,

descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters

waiting to be loaded with green coffee beaus.

Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!

Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's

skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, 

a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, 

with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.

Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall

s, New York. There. We are settled. 

The customs officials will speak English, we hope, 

and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.

Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,

but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, 

or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, 

the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps-- 

wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter

do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat, 

either because the glue here is very inferior 

or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; 

[Brazil. A friend of the writer is speaking.]

Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)—

a sort of inheritance; white,

in your thirties now, and supposed

to supply me with vegetables,

but you don't; or you won't; or you can't

get the idea through your brain—

the world's worst gardener since Cain.

Titled above me, your gardens

ravish my eyes. You edge

the beds of silver cabbages

with red carnations, and lettuces

mix with alyssum. And then

umbrella ants arrive,

or it rains for a solid week

and the whole thing's ruined again

and I buy you more pounds of seeds,

imported, guaranteed,

and eventually you bring me

a mystic thee-legged carrot,

or a pumpkin "bigger than the baby."

I watch you through the rain,

trotting, light, on bare feet,

up the steep paths you have made—

or your father and grandfather made—

all over my property,

with your head and back inside

a sodden burlap bag,

and feel I can't endure it

another minute; then,

indoors, beside the stove,

keep on reading a book.

You steal my telephone wires,

or someone does. You starve

your horse and yourself

and your dogs and family.

among endless variety,

you eat boiled cabbage stalks.

And once I yelled at you

so loud to hurry up

and fetch me those potatoes

your holey hat flew off,

you jumped out of your clogs,

leaving three objects arranged 

in a triangle at my feet,

as if you'd been a gardener

in a fairy tale all this time

and at the word "potatoes"

had vanished to take up your work

of fairy prince somewhere.

The strangest things happen to you.

Your cows eats a "poison grass"

and drops dead on the spot.

Nobody else's does.

And then your father dies,

a superior old man

with a black plush hat, and a moustache

like a white spread-eagled sea gull.

The family gathers, but you,

no, you "don't think he's dead!

I look at him. He's cold.

They're burying him today.

But you know, I don't think he's dead."

I give you money for the funeral

and you go and hire a bus

for the delighted mourners,

so I have to hand over some more

and then have to hear you tell me

you pray for me every night!

And then you come again,

sniffing and shivering,

hat in hand, with that wistful

face, like a child's fistful

of bluets or white violets,

improvident as the dawn,

and once more I provide

for a shot of penicillin

down at the pharmacy, or 

one more bottle of

Electrical Baby Syrup.

Or, briskly, you come to settle

what we call our "accounts,"

with two old copybooks,

one with flowers on the cover,

the other with a camel.

immediate confusion.

You've left out decimal points.

Your columns stagger,

honeycombed with zeros.

You whisper conspiratorially;

the numbers mount to millions.

Account books? They are Dream Books.

in the kitchen we dream together

how the meek shall inherit the earth—

or several acres of mine.

With blue sugar bags on their heads,

carrying your lunch,

your children scuttle by me

like little moles aboveground,

or even crouch behind bushes

as if I were out to shoot them!

—Impossible to make friends,

though each will grab at once

for an orange or a piece of candy.

Twined in wisps of fog,

I see you all up there

along with Formoso, the donkey,

who brays like a pump gone dry,

then suddenly stops.

—All just standing, staring

off into fog and space.

Or coming down at night,

in silence, except for hoofs,

in dim moonlight, the horse

or Formoso stumbling after.

Between us float a few

big, soft, pale-blue,

sluggish fireflies,

the jellyfish of the air...

Patch upon patch upon patch,

your wife keeps all of you covered.

She has gone over and over

(forearmed is forewarned)

your pair of bright-blue pants

with white thread, and these days

your limbs are draped in blueprints.

You paint—heaven knows why—

the outside of the crown

and brim of your straw hat.

Perhaps to reflect the sun?

Or perhaps when you were small,

your mother said, "Manuelzinho,

one thing; be sure you always

paint your straw hat."

One was gold for a while,

but the gold wore off, like plate.

One was bright green. Unkindly,

I called you Klorophyll Kid.

My visitors thought it was funny.

I apologize here and now.

You helpless, foolish man,

I love you all I can,

I think. Or I do?

I take off my hat, unpainted

and figurative, to you.

ROOSTERS

At four o'clock

in the gun-metal blue dark

we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below

the gun-metal blue window

and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,

then one from the backyard fence,

then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match 

from the broccoli patch,

flares, and all over town begins to catch.

Cries galore

come from the water-closet door,

from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,

where in the blue blur 

their rusting wives admire,

the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare

with stupid eyes

while from their beaks there rise

the uncontrolled, traditional cries.

Deep from protruding chests

in green-gold medals dressed,

planned to command and terrorize the rest,

the many wives 

who lead hens' lives

of being courted and despised;

deep from raw throats

a senseless order floats

all over town.  A rooster gloats

over our beds

from rusty irons sheds

and fences made from old bedsteads,

over our churches 

where the tin rooster perches,

over our little wooden northern houses,

making sallies 

from all the muddy alleys,

marking out maps like Rand McNally's:

glass-headed pins,

oil-golds and copper greens,

anthracite blues, alizarins,

each one an active 

displacement in perspective;

each screaming, "This is where I live!"

Each screaming

"Get up!  Stop dreaming!"

Roosters, what are you projecting?

You, whom the Greeks elected

to shoot at on a post, who struggled

when sacrificed, you whom they labeled

"Very combative..."

what right have you to give 

commands and tell us how to live,

cry "Here!" and "Here!"

and wake us here where are

unwanted love, conceit and war?

The crown of red

set on your little head

is charged with all your fighting blood

Yes, that excrescence

makes a most virile presence,

plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence

Now in mid-air

by two they fight each other.

Down comes a first flame-feather,

and one is flying,

with raging heroism defying

even the sensation of dying.

And one has fallen

but still above the town

his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;

and what he sung

no matter.  He is flung

on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung

with his dead wives

with open, bloody eyes,

while those metallic feathers oxidize.

St. Peter's sin

was worse than that of Magdalen

whose sin was of the flesh alone;

of spirit, Peter's,

falling, beneath the flares,

among the "servants and officers."

Old holy sculpture

could set it all together

in one small scene, past and future:

Christ stands amazed,

Peter, two fingers raised

to surprised lips, both as if dazed.

But in between

a little cock is seen

carved on a dim column in the travertine,

explained by gallus canit;

flet Petrus underneath it,

There is inescapable hope, the pivot;

yes, and there Peter's tears

run down our chanticleer's

sides and gem his spurs.

Tear-encrusted thick

as a medieval relic

he waits.  Poor Peter, heart-sick,

still cannot guess

those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,

his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,

a new weathervane

on basilica and barn,

and that outside the Lateran

there would always be

a bronze cock on a porphyry

pillar so the people and the Pope might see

that event the Prince

of the Apostles long since

had been forgiven, and to convince

all the assembly

that "Deny deny deny"

is not all the roosters cry.

In the morning

a low light is floating

in the backyard, and gilding

from underneath

the broccoli, leaf by leaf;

how could the night have come to grief?

gilding the tiny

floating swallow's belly

and lines of pink cloud in the sky,

the day's preamble

like wandering lines in marble,

The cocks are now almost inaudible.

The sun climbs in,

following "to see the end,"

faithful as enemy, or friend.

GALOS

PUBLICO, Mil Folhas, 17 de Novembro de 2006

O meu cérebro produzia ilhas

Eduardo Prado Coelho

Saiu agora o livro “Geografia III”, numa excelente tradução de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães, na Relógio d’Água. O leitor pode começar por aqui e verificar como de facto a questão da geografia, das distâncias próximas e longínquas, e das viagens que o próprio poema inventa são o núcleo obsessivo desta poesia

Quando se descobre um autor, é um verdadeiro deslumbramento. A gente tem a sensação de que avança por um continente novo e que o mundo se tornou maior. Afinal, é possível. Aquele sen­timento de que “tudo está dito” e que já não é possível inventar-se nada de novo, (algo que tantas vezes nos assalta) perde sentido. E claro que o que irrompe tem todas as características do absolutamente inesperado. A novidade é o que se não pode prever. Mas ajuda-nos imenso a lutar contra essa ideia pessimista de que chegámos ao fim da histó­ria. Lembro-me de um dia conversar com o prof Delfim Santos, incontestável mestre exemplar, a quem devo algumas das melhores aulas que tive na Faculdade de Letras. Há muito que não es­crevia. E explicava-me numa conversa que um dia tivemos, com alguma melancolia, que tinha a sensação de que tudo estava escrito.

Mas não está nunca está. Um dia, já nem sei em que circunstâncias, veio ter comigo (literal­mente) um poema intitulado “Uma Arte” e que começava assim: “A arte de perder não é difícil de se dominar, / tantas coisas parecem cheias de intenção / de se perderem que a sua perda não é uma calamidade. // Perder qualquer coisa todos os dias. Aceitar a agitação / de chaves perdidas, a hora mal passada. / A arte de perder não é difícil de se dominar.” E o poema continuava, sempre cadenciado por esta ideia fundamental: perder pode-nos parecer uma calamidade, desde perder as chaves a uma pessoa que morre ou a um amor que acabou. Mas não é. A vida é feita de coisas que se perdem. Precisamos é de aprender a perder. E isso é uma aprendizagem interminável.

A autora é Elizabeth Bishop. Nasceu em Worcester, Massachusetts, em 1911. Aos oito meses de idade ficou sem pai. E, quando tinha cerca de cinco anos, assistiu ao processo de enlouquecimento da mãe. Teve de ser criada por pessoas da família, que a levaram primeiro para o Canadá e depois de novo para os Estados Unidos. Formou-se em 1934 e publicou o seu primeiro livro. “North & South” surge em 1946. Com a sua obra posterior recebeu o Pulitzer, o National Book Award e o Neustadt. Esteve no Brasil. E morreu em 1979 em Boston. É um dos grandes nomes da literatura americana. E é sempre uma poetisa surpreendente e desconcertante, duma modernidade assombrosa. Quando descobrimos um autor, queremos ler tudo, no pânico de que não haja mais. Foi isso o que me sucedeu a partir do poema “Uma Arte”.

Saiu agora o livro “Geografia III”, numa excelente tradução de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães, na Relógio d’Água. O leitor pode começar por aqui e verificar como de facto a questão da geografia, das distâncias próximas e longínquas, e das viagens que o próprio poema inventa são o núcleo obsessivo desta poesia.

Aliás, este livro começa com uma transcrição de um manual, as “Primeiras Lições de Geografia”, com perguntas e respostas. Assim “O que é a Geografia? Uma descrição da superfície da terra. O que é a Terra? O planeta ou o corpo em que vivemos (note-se esta oscilação: planeta ou corpo). Qual é a forma da Terra? Redonda, como uma bola. Do que é composta a superfície da Terra? Solo e água.” E numa outra lição: “O que é um mapa? Uma representação de toda ou de uma parte da superfície da Terra.” Depois, como tantas vezes ocorre nesta obra o poema parece derrapar desliza para uma espécie de delírio (sempre controlado, note-se). E surge um dos temas obsessivos de Elizabeth Bishop: a ilha, as ilhas. “O meu cérebro produziu ilhas.” E pergunta-se: “Em que direcção, partir do centro do mapa, está a ilha? A norte. “E vem a enumeração de alguns dos lugares comuns (no sentido quase literal) desta poesia: o vulcão, a baia, o lago (a circularidade parece ser fundamental), as montanhas, o istmo.

Quase todos os poemas de Elizabteh Bishop partem de situações corriqueiras e de repente parece que começam a levantar voo e a navegar em todas as direcções. Nesse aspecto, vale a pena ler “Na sala de espera”. Ainda pequena, Elizabeth vai com a tia Consuelo a uma consulta no dentista e fica na sala de espera enquanto a tia é atendida. À sua volta “gente crescida”, sentada naquele tédio de quem não sabe quanto tempo tem ainda para esperar. E revistas. essas revistas que têm sempre alguns meses de atraso e que as pessoas folheiam distraidamente. E Elizabeth pega no “National Geographic” e vê as fotografias, viaja nas fotografias que vê. Até que sucede algo. de absolutamente estranho e inexplicàvel. Ouve-se um grito que vem do gabinete do dentista. E Elizabeth  sente que o grito saiu da sua boca e que ela e a tia Consuelo são um único ser. E as duas como começaram a cair, não apenas uma dentro da outra, mas também num “espaço frio, azul-escuro” que é o outro lado do “mundo redondo e giratório” em que estavam. E isso vai permitir dizer que há sempre algo de enigmático que está por baixo daquilo que explicitamente se vê:

“A sala de espera estava iluminada / e demasiado quente . Deslizava / sob uma onda enorme e negra, uma após outra.” Mas há uma acalmia: uma data, um lugar. O poema termina dizendo que estávamos em Worcester, Massachusetts “e era ainda o dia cinco / de Fevereiro de 1918”.

Que se vê quando se olha de cima este pedaço de solo e água? É este o essencial das viagens de Elizabeth Bishop. Os seus grandes temas. As suas verdadeiras obsessões. O que se vê é triste, depressivo, nocturno e frio. Mas é a Terra em que nós vivemos e os mapas que dela fazemos.

Neste plano, um belíssimo poema que se passa a partir de um avião. Nele Elizabeth Bishop utiliza um procedimento que lhe é frequente e que eu designaria como “um efeito zoom”: das visões panorâmicas desce-se de repente vertiginosamente para um pormenor de vida quotidiana.

Existem fogueiras. São “ácidos flamejantes / e diversos sangues”. E “a cidade queima lágrimas. / Um lago enrugado / de um verde azulado / começa a fumegar” Fumos, lava de vulcões extintos, lama, odores fétidos, secreções dos corpos, tudo se conjuga para esta imagem. “linfa diáfana / túrgido sangue vivo / salpicam o exterior / com coágulos de ouro”. Mas ao mesmo tempo (zoom, claro) “um grande magnate / chorava sozinho.// Um outro exaltava um arranha-céus”. E no entanto algo acontece que suspende esta atmosfera sórdida e amarfanhante. “Porém, há criaturas, /cuidadosas, suspensas./ Pousam os pés, caminham / verde vermelho; verde, vermelho”. É a glória das cores nítidas e solares.

June, 9, 2002

'Rare and Commonplace Flowers': The Love of Her Life

By EMILY NUSSBAUM

Elizabeth Bishop -- in person and in her poetry -- was wry, discreet and a little peculiar. A Vassar girl and a disciple of Marianne Moore, Bishop rejected the confessional, politicized bent of her contemporaries. (She refused even to be included in anthologies of women's poetry.) Shunted about unhappily as a child, Bishop chose as her theme displacement, and as her aesthetic self-abnegation: a sometimes arid neutrality, the opposite of attention seeking.

How stunning, then, to learn that the love of Bishop's life was a swaggering Brazilian woman, the aristocratic self-trained architect Lota de Macedo Soares. A bold and funny self-promoter, Soares spearheaded the development of Parque do Flamengo, an elaborate public park in the center of Rio de Janeiro.

There was a fairy-tale intensity to the women's romance, which began when Soares nursed Bishop back to health during what was intended to be a brief visit to Brazil. Instead, Bishop stayed on, and the couple nested happily together for 12 years, spending much of their time in the ultramodern home Soares had designed in nearby Samambaia. But the love affair that began blissfully ended in sorrow: alcoholism, depression, adultery and, finally, suicide. ''Rare and Commonplace Flowers'' is an account of this romance, and in its mix of novelistic techniques and biographical reportage, it might well have appalled the more introverted of its two subjects.

''Art just isn't worth that much,'' Bishop wrote disapprovingly to Robert Lowell after he used his wife's letters in his work. A reader, she said, couldn't tell ''what's true, what isn't . . . how much has been 'made up,' and so on.'' Carmen L. Oliveira (*) shrugs off such warnings (her background is as a novelist). As readers, we are made privy to private conversations, as well as to the comments of a gossipy Greek chorus of pseudonymous Brazilian friends. Oliveira is hardly alone in this sort of genre bending: the past several years have witnessed many fiction-inflected biographies, most notably Edmund Morris's ''Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.'' But while ''Rare and Commonplace Flowers'' blurs lines, it is really not especially radical; mimicking a chorus of scandalized friends, after all, is not the same as making them or their opinions up. And Oliveira's sources are fairly straightforward: much of her description of the women's private lives, for example, derives from the recollections of their maids. In fact, the book is at its best describing some of the most subjective sequences: for instance, the private bliss of the Samambaia idyll, the ''house and rock / in a private cloud.''

In any case, Soares was a character made for a novelistic treatment. She was charismatic to a fault -- the type of person all Rio wanted at their parties -- but also bullying and monomaniacal. Where Bishop tended toward paralyzing self-criticism, Soares possessed a grandiose ambition that was both admirable and, when she was thwarted, painful. Even while enmeshed in the bureaucratic tangle that would eventually defeat her, she had the chutzpah to send the governor of the state of Guanabara (basically Rio de Janeiro), who was her biggest political ally, an outrageous letter proposing herself as his successor and wryly comparing herself with other candidates. Politics is the art of conquering, she pontificated: ''After five years in government I hope to have all the members of the House, if not on my side, then at least incapacitated and impotent.'' (She also promised to finish all the governor's projects ''except for those that don't please me,'' and to replace his statues of thin women with statues of fat ones, both because the thin women were an ''unpatriotic allusion to the state of our underdevelopment'' and because fat women better resembled Soares herself!)

''Rare and Commonplace Flowers'' has become a Brazilian best seller, and one can see why. For although the book is superficially an exploration of a love affair, it is also deeply concerned with national identity, the nature of the Brazilian character and the effort to build Brazilian cities. Much of the latter half dramatizes Soares's doomed attempt to gain control over her park project. To an American reader, unfortunately, these hyperdetailed political wranglings quickly become confusing; they are, at heart, the notes of urban-planning meetings. And despite the novelistic sheen, and the intrinsically dramatic elements of the story being told -- Bishop's drinking binges and eventual infidelity, Soares's drastic descent into depression and suicide -- the book becomes surprisingly sketchy as it progresses. (In an introductory note, the translator, Neil K. Besner, describes his difficulties with the more florid rhythms of Portuguese, and perhaps these gave the original more dramatic tug.)

Still, despite these weaknesses, ''Rare and Commonplace Flowers'' performs an invaluable service: unforgettably memorializing the remarkable Lota de Macedo Soares, and in the process filling in a crucial gap in Bishop's biography. Elizabeth Bishop may not have been a confessional poet, but like the narrator of Emily Dickinson's ''I'm Nobody!'' she wrestled throughout her life with a tension between discretion and self-assertion. This book helps put that struggle, and her writing, in useful context. It honors a deeply moving love between two brilliant women: each highly public, a celebrity in her own nation; each deeply private, and happy (for a time) in the fragile heaven of their home. Author's Query

For a book about Emily Post and the 1922 publication of her best-selling book ''Etiquette,'' I would welcome information -- memories, anecdotes, references -- concerning that event and Post herself. Laura Claridge 99 Park Avenue Suite 325 New York, N.Y. 10016 e-mail: Lclar210@aol.com

Emily Nussbaum writes frequently for Slate.com and other publications.

(*)  Oliveira, Carmen L. Flores raras e banalissimas: a historia de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1995. 

Looking-glass world

Elizabeth Bishop's poems reflected her concerns with social injustice in whatever form, wherever she settled - from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South and Brazil, writes Anne Stevenson

Saturday March 11, 2006
The Guardian

The second world war profoundly affected Elizabeth Bishop, who by then had found a home in Key West, Florida. Yet the war, which brought the US Navy to Key West, makes only a tangential appearance in her 1946 collection, North & South. So little attention did her poems give to it that when her first book was published, Bishop insisted on offering her readers an apology: "The fact that none of these poems [deals] directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach. The chief reason is simply that I work very slowly. But I think it would help some if a note to the effect that most of the poems had been written, or begun at least, before 1941, could be inserted at the beginning say, just after the acknowledgments."

The book came out at last on August 20, 1946, when Bishop was visiting friends and family in Nova Scotia. Five years later, a number of literary awards helped the poet to escape from the Eastern Seaboard of North America and start a new life in Brazil. Yet it was not until several years after that, when she was settled with Lota de Macedo Soares in Petrópolis, that Bishop, on the advice of her publishers, brought out a reprint of North & South with the addition of 20 new poems she had completed for a second collection, A Cold Spring. It was this second book that won her the Pulitzer prize in 1956 and, later that year, a Partisan Review fellowship of $2,700.

All this time, Bishop was worried about her poetry's lack of social consciousness, fearing she would be condemned as insufficiently serious. No doubt she felt the pressure of contemporary events and wished to write about them, yet her active imagination, while it responded angrily to perceived acts of cruelty or inhumanity, was too interrogatory and, above all, too reflective to feel comfortable with polemical arguments. At Vassar, she had concerned herself unwillingly with politics. As she grew older, a resigned realism bordering on fatalism led her to despair of the human condition. "My outlook is pessimistic," she wrote in January 1964. "I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives ... but I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy - to make life endurable and to keep ourselves 'new, tender, quick'." In her poetry, though not always in her life, Bishop did her best to be "gay in spite of it". Sometimes she played the child: "Drop the silly, harmless toy." Sometimes, as in the witty "Cirque d'Hiver", she allowed herself to become gently sceptical of progress: "Well, we have come this far." But most often she tried to show that in hopeless human situations something can be salvaged; something can be found, usually in the minutiae of a landscape or in the heartwarming, sympathetic details of a domestic scene, to make life, in George Herbert's words, "new, tender, quick".

In 1955, Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring came out in one slim volume and was reviewed as a single book. Yet it represents 20 years of Bishop's fastidious self-revision and consists, really, of three books, or three distinct parts.

In the first part - set in the north of North & South - 20 poems consider, from various angles, the nature of imagination. They relate to Bishop's outlook (and inlook) as a young writer in New York and as a traveller to 1930s Paris. Many of these take place in a twilight zone between sleeping and waking, and Bishop would have agreed that their mood and general ambience are surrealistic.

The poems of the second section are for the most part set in Florida - the title's south. Their unstated, unifying preoccupation, however, has subtly to do with vulnerability, with the apparent contingency of humankind to the natural world. In the third section, intended to be a separate book called A Cold Spring, Bishop broods over and explores ideas introduced in the first two, moving away from "The Map" and its map-makers' aesthetic into the more literal, personal geographies of "A Cold Spring", "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance".

Bishop's first visit to Florida in the winter of 1936-37 was a matter of a few weeks' fishing, but after a second trip to Europe the following summer, she and Louise Crane decided to buy a house in Key West. At the time, Key West was a semi-paradisiacal, quasi-colonial settlement inhabited by an assortment of artists, writers, retired people, hangers-on and alcoholics who mixed cheerfully with an easy-going Cuban population who immediately won Bishop's heart. Writing to Marianne Moore in January 1938, Bishop took pleasure in describing the tiny houses with scrolls like paper cutouts, whose huge flowering plants seemed to have "sapped the strength of everything else in town".

Bishop was furiously upset by what she saw of racial exploitation in America's Deep South, as she was later by the inhuman treatment of the poor by the privileged rich in Rio de Janeiro; yet she rarely permitted herself to give vent to her anger directly. "Jerónimo's House", "Faustina" and Part IV of "Songs for a Colored Singer" beautifully convey the poet's pity for and empathy with the poor black population of Florida. The popular ballad, "The Burglar of Babylon", with the more subtle lyric, "Squatter's Children", carry that sympathetic empathy to Brazil. But in all these poems, strong discipline in the writing stiffens the sentiments displayed, as though the poet were afraid of giving offence through condescension.

"Squatter's Children" is one of 10 Brazilian poems Bishop completed between July 1955, when Houghton Mifflin in Boston published Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring, and November 1965, when the New York firm of Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out her third collection, Questions of Travel. Like the 1955 collection, the original edition of Questions of Travel divided naturally into three sections. The first consisted of 11 poems written and set in Brazil. The second, modelled on Robert Lowell's Life Studies, republished Bishop's autobiographical "In the Village", the story pivotal to all her work. A final section, "Elsewhere", consisted of three important poems relating to Bishop's childhood ("Manners", "Sestina" and "First Death in Nova Scotia") followed by five further poems connected by the thread of her travels and her process of self-recovery through memory.

For any other poet, 19 poems and a short story would have seemed a poor show for 15 years' labour; and indeed, as Lota de Macedo Soares too often reminded her, Bishop was unable to keep up the pace of more facile writers. The entire corpus of her work has to be understood as the record of one hypersensitive person's cautious, watchful, self-conscious inching towards the truth. It asks to be read as autobiography, but as an autobiography told from the "inside looking out". Instead of a year-by-year chronicle of a life, we are given a series of impressions or "looks" - a slide-show of places, people, creatures and small events, all of which have been seen, enacted and carefully noted down to be carried ever afterwards in the clear mirror of the writer's memory: "As if a river should carry all / the scenes that it had once reflected / shut in its waters, and not floating / on momentary surfaces." ("The Weed")

A factor at least as inhibiting to Bishop as her relentless truth-seeking was her apparent inability to write very much without pursuing the line of ontological-cum-epistemological questioning she had laid bare "in the waiting room" of childhood. This line we can see multiplying and extending itself in "Squatter's Children", running back through "Questions of Travel", and "Arrival at Santos" to "The Bight", "At the Fishhouses" and "Cape Breton", among other major poems. It must be confessed that any bestowing of abstract terminology on Elizabeth Bishop is, to say the least, risky. She claimed to have been weak in philosophy, and rarely, in any case, favoured "grand, all-out efforts". In many ways, such a disclaimer was a form of self-protection masquerading as snobbery. Bishop didn't, in general, approve of academics who tried to explain or take over poetry, and she positively loathed aesthetic arguments, agreeing with Wordsworth that if you can't say something in everyday words, it is probably not worth saying. Conversely, categorically unanswerable questions such as what is a human being?, what is knowledge?, what choices are we given in this life?, what is there in the world that makes it it, and people people? must at some time, she thought, occur to everybody. Why muddy deep waters with useless discussion? Why not just look?

It is, of course, one thing to ask "big" questions in language plain, another to answer them. No more than any other inquiring stoic could Bishop articulate her idea of being in the abstract. She could only speak truthfully about being somewhere, at a certain time. At their most convincing, Bishop's geographical poems begin in a lowkeyed mood, pointing at this and that. They go on so long, pointing and looking so intently that, by the end, some more abstract impression has to be felt. Only rarely, however, is this abstract idea identified, and even then it is often formulated as a question or a set of questions.

It is, in fact, precisely the juxtaposition of personal, geological and historical perspectives in these Brazilian poems that, in setting up a drama of opposites, gives them life. Written as monologues, they point to situations that are in themselves dialectical. Furthermore, all these poems are addressed to somebody. Like George Herbert, Bishop casts herself in the role of interlocutor, and her wonder at nature was not unlike Herbert's apprehension of God.

It was while she was visiting Nova Scotia in 1946 that Bishop first struck upon the phrase "the geographical mirror". She was making notes at the time for "At the Fishhouses", describing "the dark icy, clear water - clear dark glass" as "my idea of knowledge, this cold stream, half drawn, half flowing from a great rocky breast". In her biography of Bishop, Brett Millier inferred from these jottings that the poet had begun looking for herself in the mirror of the landscape. And it is probably true to say that Bishop's geographical poems are essentially exercises in selfplacement.

Mirrors, however, throughout her work pretty consistently stand for the imagination. Her New York poems of the 1930s and 40s conceive of a looking-glass world that corrects or reverses the real one. In "The Gentleman of Shalott", "From the Country to the City" and "Insomnia", mirrors represent aspects of a divided consciousness; in "Love Lies Sleeping" and "The ManMoth'", they feature as alien eyes or tears; in "The Weed", they retain memories in drops of river-water. But with "At the Fishhouses" - and even earlier, in "Florida" - a shift of emphasis grants geography the central position formerly occupied by glass. Immediately, the question arises: which is the mirror in these geographical imaginings, the poet or the geography? Did the poet looking for herself in the landscape of "At the Fishhouses" expect to find an image of herself "out there"? Or did she realise that the act of looking is always reflective? No matter how intently she searched nature for an identity, she could see only what her eye and mind perceived. Geography could provide her with no more than a reflection in the transparent glass of her own polished window.

This is an edited extract from Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop by Anne Stevenson (Bloodaxe).

April 2, 2006

EDGAR ALLAN POE & THE JUKE-BOX
Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.
By Elizabeth Bishop.
Edited by Alice Quinn. 367 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Rough Gems

Review by DAVID ORR

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, "a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever." The publication of "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box," which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.

Just don't expect that change to be announced with a fanfare. In a tribute to Bishop, James Merrill famously noted her "lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman," and the observation applies to her writing as much as to comportment. From the beginning, Bishop's work was descriptive rather than assertive, conversational rather than rhetorical and discreet rather than confessional. (It was also hard to come by: in her lifetime, she published only around 90 poems.) This was surprising for two reasons. First, her approach was completely unlike the modes favored by her more flamboyant peers — Robert Lowell, John Berryman — as well as the guts-spilling styles they helped inspire. Second, if you believe art mirrors life, reticence is the opposite of what you'd anticipate from Bishop, whose biography contains enough torment to satisfy St. Sebastian. An abbreviated list: her father died when she was a baby; her mother vanished into an insane asylum when Bishop was 5; her college boyfriend committed suicide when she refused to marry him and sent her a parting postcard that said, "Go to hell, Elizabeth"; and the great love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she spent many years in Brazil, fatally overdosed in Bishop's apartment. From a writer with a history like that, we might expect announcements like Lowell's "I hear/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell." We don't expect to be told "I caught a tremendous fish."

This curious restraint has been admired by many critics (Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), but it also explains why she so often has been identified with words like "quiet," "charming," "scrupulous" and, above all, "modest" — all of them perfectly useful adjectives, but none that would tip the reader off to the harrowing nature of her life or (more important) the colossal ambition of her poems. Even her admirers sometimes struggle to forgive her for seeming so remarkably . . . unremarkable. Dana Gioia, a longtime Bishop advocate and current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gets only a few paragraphs into an essay on her reputation's dramatic rise in the poetry world after her death before asking, almost apologetically, "Is Elizabeth Bishop overrated?" "Perhaps a bit," he answers, which presumably is what you say when you've gotten in the habit of thinking about poetry so much that you forget Bishop's poems are less well known to many people than the lyrics to "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

So why do we feel compelled to elevate Bishop while simultaneously worrying that we're raising her too high? In large part, the answer has to do with the difference between difficulty and subtlety. Difficulty is a beloved concept in the poetry world, because it's the crux of an old but cherished argument: Are poems too obscure? Or not obscure enough? The debate is a canned one, of course, but it lets all parties make their favorite points, and everyone is therefore happy to argue over "difficulty" at the drop of a hat. The reality, though, is that most readers and writers aren't actually made nervous by "difficulty," at least as the term is usually meant. For one thing, difficulty is straightforward — you either figure out what's difficult, or you don't. You might fail, but you aren't going to be misled. (In this sense, and in its implicit endorsement of hard work, difficulty is a concept that has long been central to our shared identity as Americans). Subtlety is different, though. Subtlety wants to be missed by all but the chosen few; it is aloof, withholding and aristocratic — sometimes manipulative and always disguised. It has less to do with theory and technique, which can be learned mechanically, than with style and sensibility, which require intuition. It wants to be looked at but not seen. It's unnerving.

It's also exactly what distinguishes Bishop's greatest poetry, which is why it's so hard to be entirely comfortable with this writer, or to know where she belongs. To begin, there is the peculiar Bishop voice, which is often called faux naïf, but is probably closer to faux normal (the imitation isn't of innocence, but stability). On one hand, she can seem perfectly straightforward — no poet, for instance, starts a poem more matter-of-factly: "In Worcester, Massachusetts, / I went with Aunt Consuelo / to keep her dentist's appointment." And of course, no poet is as enamored of local color: "The ghosts of glaciers drift / among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack — / dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors, / each riser distinguished from the next / by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge." Yet no one else moves as easily or abruptly into the uncanniest registers of our literature: "The iceberg cuts its facets from within"; "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and' "; "More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." None of this is difficult, but it's astonishingly subtle and strange. The more one reads a Bishop poem, the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check — like currents pressing heavily on the glass walls of some delicate undersea installation. It doesn't seem as if the glass will break, but if it were to do so, we'd find ourselves engulfed by what Frost (her truest predecessor) called "black and utter chaos."

"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box" allows us to see the cracks that could form on those crystalline surfaces. It's no criticism of this collection to say the virtues of Bishop's finished poetry — style and poise chief among them — are often missing from the writing gathered here. These are, after all, pieces that Bishop herself chose not to publish, but found valuable for some reason; as this volume's editor, Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, noted in a recent interview, "A big part of the pleasure and understanding to be gained is in knowing what was on her mind during those years and in discovering new phrasing of hers, new avenues of vision." In addition to drafts of poems — some accompanied by photos of the manuscript pages in question, all following Bishop's often handwritten versions as closely as possible — Quinn has gathered several prose pieces, including an intriguing series of notes that begins, "Writing poetry is an unnatural act." Essentially, this is a book for two groups of people: Bishop fans (most of the poetry world, that is), and the increasingly tiny group who still think this poet was an unambitious and slightly chilly minor writer. The former will be grateful for the insight into her meticulous process; the latter will have to acknowledge the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry. Lest you think that's overstating the emotional content of these drafts, consider the presence of such decidedly un-Bishopian lines as: "I have suffered from abnormal thirst — / I swear it's true — and by the age / of twenty or twenty-one I had begun / to drink, & drink — I can't get enough."

That shouldn't, however, be taken to mean that the poems here are all unformed, lesser efforts. If some of this work is mostly of interest because of what it tells us about Bishop's published writing, other pieces can stand alongside anything The New Yorker got its hands on back in the 1950's or 60's. "Vague Poem" plays on a confusion between rock roses and rose rocks; it concludes:

Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex —

This openly erotic approach is actually more successful than much of her published love poetry, which is considerably less forthcoming. Equally strong are several of the poems intended for a sequence called "Bone Key," and parts of the later poem "Keaton," which has one of Bishop's finest, saddest openings — "I will be good; I will be good." Quinn's notes throughout are superb. In glossing "Vague Poem," for example, she meticulously connects a particular phrase to a speech given by Bishop in 1976, discusses the poet's interest in crystallography and includes another, earlier erotic fragment that recalls the more finished poem she is annotating. This is the devoted editing this material needed and deserved.

A few days after her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop's obituary in The New York Times noted that she "enjoyed extraordinary esteem among critics and fellow poets" but was "less widely known than contemporaries such as Robert Lowell." One can only imagine how Lowell and Bishop, lifelong friends, would have thought about the comparison. In any case, though, things have changed. The world of contemporary poetry can be a fractious place, but one thing almost everyone agrees on is the significance of Elizabeth Bishop — and that's as it should be. Our greatest poets aren't monuments to be looked at but grammars to be absorbed; however long it takes, we speak through them and they through us. "When you write my epitaph," Bishop once wrote to Lowell, "you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived." Lonely? Maybe once, but not anymore — and never again.

David Orr writes the "On Poetry" column for the Book Review. He is a lawyer with Trachtenberg Rodes & Friedberg in New York.

April 1, 2006

New Elizabeth Bishop Book Sparks a Publish-After-Perished Controversy

By MOTOKO RICH

They may not be household names, but in the insular world of poetry, they could not be more powerful. And now, in a literary clash of titans, one has squared off against the other.

In a scathing review that appeared in the April 3 issue of The New Republic, Helen Vendler, arguably the country's most prominent poetry critic, takes on Alice Quinn of The New Yorker, arguably the country's most prominent poetry editor, for editing "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments," by Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most respected of American poets.

The book, published last month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, features nearly 120 pieces of Bishop's unpublished work. She published just 90-odd poems in her lifetime.

For many readers, these manuscripts and fragments provide an important window into Bishop's creative process while also feeding a hunger for more of this spare poet's work. In a review to be published in The New York Times Book Review this weekend, David Orr, who regularly writes about poetry, calls the new volume "part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life," and praises Ms. Quinn's work as "the devoted editing this material needed and deserved."

But some people believe that Bishop, who had a reputation for perfecting poems over many years and refusing to publish those that did not meet her exacting standards, never intended for this work to be published. Bringing it out now, more than 25 years after her death, is unfair to her legacy, they say.

That is exactly what Ms. Vendler argues in her review. "Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified 'No,' " she writes.

In a parenthetical remark, Ms. Vendler, who has written reviews for The New Yorker, says, "I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts."

In some ways Ms. Vendler's argument reflects a long-running debate about what to do with the unpublished work — ranging from manuscripts and drafts to letters and diaries — of dead writers, from Keats to Kafka and beyond.

In the review, Ms. Vendler, who was traveling and could not be reached for comment, disputes the value of publishing work that she describes as the "maimed and stunted siblings" of Bishop's published poems. Her complaint extends beyond the book to include some of the poems recently published in The New Yorker and other journals under Bishop's name.

Ms. Vendler writes of one such poem, "Washington as a Surveyor," that it is "a rhythmically awkward and semantically inert Petrarchan sonnet." Making its publication "reprehensible," Ms. Vendler says, is the fact that Bishop had crossed out the entire poem in her notebooks. "Maybe it should have been printed in The New Yorker entirely crossed out," she writes.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said in other cases in which the magazine printed Ms. Bishop's unpublished work, it ran an author's note explaining that she died in 1979 and that the book of uncollected works was forthcoming. But in the case of "Washington as a Surveyor," there was no such note. "We should have been clearer," he said.

Ms. Quinn, in an e-mail message, said she wasn't entirely surprised by the reaction to the book: "I knew that this perspective on it would be registered and probably more than once, and I even felt that Helen would very likely be the one to express it first. I was surprised by the vehemence, but she clearly feels passionately, and that's her prerogative."

Robert Giroux, who was Bishop's longtime editor and asked Ms. Quinn to edit the book, said he had originally opposed suggestions that the unpublished works be brought to light. But then he started reading the material, which was in the archives of the Vassar College Libraries, and was riveted. "I told Alice Quinn to be prepared for attacks," he said. "Some people think that fragments and incomplete work should never be published, but that's ridiculous."

"No one's claiming it's finished work," he added.

Ms. Vendler's review, not surprisingly, has people in poetry circles buzzing. "Elizabeth Bishop is so beloved out there, so people are really excited about this volume," said Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. "Who wouldn't want more poems from one of your favorite poets who is no longer alive? But a lot of people have thought that Elizabeth would be turning over in her grave because her poems are so crafted, so polished, so worked and reworked and reworked, and she was also an enormously private person."

Few poets are willing to go public with their complaints. The New Yorker is one of the few general-interest magazines that still publishes poetry, and appearing in it is a major coup. "Alice is a very important person in the literary world," said Ms. Swenson, who had a difficult time finding a poet willing to talk to a reporter about the contretemps. "I'm not surprised that some poets would not want to be critical of a book that she edited."

In the book's introduction, Ms. Quinn acknowledges Bishop's perfectionism. But she also points out that the material is all "work that for one reason or another she chose not to publish but did not destroy."

Frank Bidart, a poet and friend of Bishop's who is thanked in Ms. Quinn's acknowledgments, said: "Believe me, Elizabeth was perfectly capable of destroying things. If she had never wanted these to see the light of day, she would have destroyed them."

In an interview with The Atlantic Online (www.theatlantic.com) in January, Ms. Quinn said the book helped readers understand Bishop and her creative process. "Everything in the book is of interest either biographically — as it reveals terrain largely unexplored in her published work — or because it shows the kind of scene, image, or insight that provoked her to start a poem. And all of this material gives us more of what was filtered through her brain and heart, which is hugely valuable."

Even those who may oppose, in theory, the publication of such material may nevertheless find it irresistible. "Even people who may have disapproved will read with fascination what they might intellectually have second thoughts about," said J. D. McClatchy, a poet who has published five volumes of poetry.

Some working poets admit to being squeamish about the book's publication because they would not want their own first drafts and rejected manuscripts to appear in print.

Billy Collins, the former United States poet laureate, often destroys his drafts with the click of the delete button on his computer. "I don't save my drafts," he said. "I just press delete, so the early work just vanishes into cyber void. A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried."

While he admitted to being fascinated by the drafts of "One Art" — a poem that Bishop published, which Ms. Quinn included in an appendix to the book along with all of the remaining drafts — he questioned the validity of letting the public see the work behind the curtain. "I think, in a way, we have her collected poems, and that was Bishop at her very best. Maybe that should be enough."

LINKS - poems

Famous Poets and Poems

O         O         O         O         O

HUMANITIES

THE MAGAZINE OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 

__________________________________________________________________

A Poet’s Inner Eye

Humanities, March/April 2009
Volume 30, Number 2  

BY CAROL FROST

READ THIS ARTICLE HERE