Elizabeth Bishop

[Mirabell]

Completely awesome. Has become, by general critical consensus, the best American post-war poet. Yeah. There is just one major biography of her out now, but it's turrrible. Thomas Travisano is currently writing a new one, which will probably be pretty good.

The book to buy/read is the LIbrary of America edition of her work, which includes her poetry, her prose, letters, and some critical writings. It's MUCH better than the collected poetry, because it includes prose pieces that Bishop published in poetry collections. ANd yes, Bishop is an amazing poet, but she's just as good a writer of prose. For example "In the Village" (click HERE for a reading of the story. Now tell me it's not great.)

And yes, poetry.

Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance

Thus should have been our travels:
serious, engravable.
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
innumerable, though equally sad and still,
are foreign. Often the squatting Arab,
or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,
against our Christian empire,
while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand
points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher.
The branches o fthe date-palms look like files.
The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious, the human figure
far gone in history or theology,
gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,
or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads.
Granted a page alone or a page made up
of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles
or circles set on stippled gray,
granted a grim lunette,
caught in the toils of an initial letter,
when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
the burin made, the lines that move apart
like ripples above sand,
dispersing storms, God's spreading fingerprint,
and painfully, finally, that ignite
in watery prismatic white-and-blue.

Entering the Narrows at St. Johns
the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship.
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs
among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.
And at St. Peter's the wind blew and the sun shone madly.
Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines,
crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants.
In Mexico the dead man lay
in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes
glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing "Ay, Jalisco!"
And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies
splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eyes.
In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening
the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush.
The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the littel pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees,
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,
one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin
open to every wind from the pink desert.
An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
with exhortation, yellowed
as scattered cattle-teeth;
half-filled with dust, not even the dust
of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.

Everything only connected by "and" and "and."
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
--the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
--and looked and looked our infant sight away.

[JTolle]

Completely awesome. Has become, by general critical consensus, the best American post-war poet.

Loaded statement!

Yeah. There is just one major biography of her out now, but it's turrrible. Thomas Travisano is currently writing a new one, which will probably be pretty good.

The book to buy/read is the LIbrary of America edition of her work, which includes her poetry, her prose, letters, and some critical writings. It's MUCH better than the collected poetry, because it includes prose pieces that Bishop published in poetry collections. ANd yes, Bishop is an amazing poet, but she's just as good a writer of prose. For example "In the Village" (click HERE for a reading of the story. Now tell me it's not great.)

Certainly one of our greatest poets, but "post-war" what? she wasn't born after any wars. And since you don't mean born after WWI or II then what about Pound who lived only a few years short of Bishop despite having been born before the turn of the century. Or despite your dislike of him, Ammons, or even Merrill or Lowell or Penn Warren? I don't know if you have specific critics you're referencing, nonetheless Bishop is great, I haven't gotten into her as much I feel I should, one of my professors whom I really respect and admire will practically swear by her and Merrill. The Library of America edition was what I read when I tried to start reading her seriously, all their editions are fabulous, this one was no exception.

The poem I absolutely love by her is "Man-Moth":

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”

Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

--------But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

--------Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

--------Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

--------Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

---------If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

[Mirabell]

Nope, not very loaded, but clearly imprecisely worded. It's WWII, and Bishop qualifies in the sense that most of her poetry was basically published after WWII. So "best American body of poetry published after WWII" would have been the correct formulation. Sorry. And by critical consensus I mean just that. Granted, this may be a deformation professionelle, but I read or skim oodles of new books on poetry, and although smaller alternative canons have other heroes, Bishop has emerged as THE consensus poet among most poetry critics not devoted to alternative canones. There's a very nice short essay by Travisano as to why that happened (if you email me, I can email you a pdf of it, I think. Must be somewhere among my Bishop stuff here), but you'd be hard pressed to find another poet who is currently this universally accepted as important and great. That's certainly in part because she has both been championed by postmodern feminist etc. critics (in the wake of Adrienne Rich's endorsement) on the one hand, and (new) formalists quite generally on the other. It's my impression from looking at recent-ish poetry scholarship/criticism. There are new champions of Berryman, Duncan and even Lowell (Reena Sastri is writing/has written a new study on LOwell that should be good), a new Merrill bio is in the works (written by Langdon Hammer) etc., but across the board, the poet that most critics would get behind today as 'best American post-WWII' is certainly Bishop.

(I don't dislike Ammons. I like him a lot.)

[Mirabell]

i just love "awful but cheerful"

The Bight

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

[JTolle]

(I don't dislike Ammons. I like him a lot.)

Hmmm...

Kinda been on a poetry kick lately...

John Ashbery, A Worldly Country: Expectedly strong stuff from a great poet.
Where Shall I Wander: Again, great stuff but not like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was.

Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours: My first introduction to Carson and, despite taking a break after reading the first couple poems, something that I now recognize as untouchably phenomenal.
The Beauty of the Husband: Stunning, deceiving, pure Carson genius.
Autobiography of Red: Totally overwhelming, gorgeous, establishes Carson as among the top five poets writing in English.+

A.R. Ammons, Brink Road: A man with, at least in his later years (from which time this book largely sprouts), the most absolute and precise control over language. The last poem "Summer Place" is a real crown, long and showing Ammons at his best.

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...8855#post48855

One of my first posts on WLF, and memorable as you are I never forgot how you responded:

Something's really wrong with a list when a mediocre poet like Ammons, or Carson (Jesusfuckingchrist) is rated more highly than Ashbery.

You're drinking, right?

And please, Where Shall I Wander compared to Three Poems, Chinese Whispers, And the Stars Were Shining, or even (to mention it again) Self-Portrait? I love me my Ashbery, but it was not his strongest work, or even as strong as the other books I mentioned.

I will certainly email you about that essay though, I feel I need to give Bishop another go.

[Mirabell]

Yep. Doesn't mean I dislike him, the point here was: to compare him to Ashbery? Ammons at his best IMO has trouble keeping up with Ashbery at his worst. ANd Where Shall I Wander is not Ashbery at his worst.

I like Carson less, although Autobiography of Red was/is very enjoyable.

Ammons is pretty mediocre if you read his whole work. After a few volumes there's a marked lack of surprise, isn't there? If you look at the early collected poems volujme of his (I think it contains his poems up to the 1970s) you can see where he finds his voice, his shtick, and then sticks with it. Every single later collection I looked at (even those I enjoyed a lot, like Tape for the Turn of the Year) was a reiteration of Ammons-like writing. I think it was Harold Bloom licking his balls that did him in. If Harold Bloom was that tender to my private parts, I certainly would continue doing what enticed Bloom into doing it in the first place.

I know people reproach Ashbery for doing the same, but in Ashbery I don't see it. At all. Maybe it's affinities?

[Mirabell]

More Bishop. This is one of her most famous:

The Armadillo
For Robert Lowell


This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

[e joseph]

Disclaimer: I suck at reading poetry, but am getting better.

Nicholson Baker tosses a few references to her poem "The Fish" in The Anthologist. I paid no attention to poetry before, ever, but Baker's book made me want to change that. I picked up a copy of Bishop's Collected Poems in a bookstore, found "The Fish", read it in store and was floored. Stopped in my tracks. That one is still my favorite of hers, but I keep finding other beauties in there as well. I dislike reading online, so haven't gotten to the poems you cite Mirabell, but JTolle, "Man-Moth" has been one of my favorites I've read by her. Read "The Weed" last night, or the night before. Also amazing.

[Mirabell]

Ah "The Weed", most excellent. Not sure of you knew that, but it is inspired and influenced by George Herbert's poem "Love Unknown" (click here for the poem http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/LoveUnknown.html).

For those who don't know the Bishop poem, cf below

The Weed

I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Suddenly there was a motion,
as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion. Then it dropped
to insistent, cautious creeping
in the region of the heart,
prodding me from desperate sleep.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
(All this was in the dark.)
It grew an inch like a blade of grass;
next, one leaf shot out of its side
a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
The stem grew thick. The nervous roots
reached to each side; the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
(not beat) and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
Two rivers glanced off from the sides,
one to the right, one to the left,
two rushing, half-clear streams,
(the ribs made of them two cascades)
which assuredly, smooth as glass,
went off through the fine black grains of earth.
The weed was almost swept away;
it struggled with its leaves,
lifting them fringed with heavy drops.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(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 stood in the severed heart.
"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."

[Mirabell]

this one is slightly longer

The Moose

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

[Mary LA]

Just sat watching the three-part documentary on Elizabeth Bishop that I found on Mirabell's blog. Here is the link to Part 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4a19gJwIo

I began reading Bishop in my teens and then found David Kalstone's book on her work. I went to Ouro Preto to see Casa Mariana when I was in Latin America and I read everything I can find on her work. She is the most rewarding poet for long-term study. I read George Herbert and Marianne Moore through Bishop as a lens and I reread Bishops poems and writings over and over again.

[Mirabell]

The best book on Bishop is probably still one of Travisano's, or Costello's "Questions of Mastery". That one in particular is most excellent.

[Mirabell]

William Logan's review of the recent editions of letters by Bishop, her prose and poetry

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/bo...l?pagewanted=1


I don't often agree with Logan, but he's fun to read.

[Eric]

I've started reading Bishop for the first time in my life. I read about her perfectionism in the NYT review. Maybe that's what makes her stand head and shoulders above many other poets. The combination of oddity, seriousness, and humour appeals to me. She's not on my reading list - which makes her all the more fun to read.

Just read her "Man-Moth" tonight. A startling poem, built on a misprint in a newspaper.

I think I could even agree with Mirabell about things, if he would allow.

[Mirabell]

As I'm currently writing about The Prodigal again, I thought I'd post the poem, which is IMO one of Bishop's best. This here is a very good reading of the poem http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/kearful121

The Prodigal

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

[waalkwriter]

You do understand that when I posted this picture, it had a meaning, and it still has that meaning, and given this context, it reflects back on you. It said: Eric is a big crybaby. And, miraculously, you managed to use it on a way that conserved this meaning.

So, yeah, I have no problems with people pointing out that Eric is a big crybaby. Thank you.

But I think the point is done. Nobody post pictures as insults anymore, unless on completely off-topic threads and more as a joke then. Find better ways to insult each other please.

[Liam]

Find better ways to insult each other please.

Perhaps Eric can do it in Estonian and M can... hold on a sec, I don't think M knows any language that Eric doesn't know.

[waalkwriter]

French maybe?

[Liam]

Let's put it this way, Eric's German and French are both better than M's Estonian, so I'm not sure who would win...

[Eric]

As Liam suggests, my reading knowledge of several languages isn't that bad. I don't always speak them well, but can read them. Such a knowledge helps you expand your horizons. So let's have a few comments now about the various poems that Mirabell has posted here. When I've bought her collected poems, I'll have them on paper and would like to offer further comment. Now that the moderator has returned, I hope I will be allowed to do so.