The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Elizabeth Bishop

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

I’ve moved on from the “Modern” volume, and am now in the “Contemporary” volume. Elizabeth Bishop is the first poet in the Contemporary Anthology.

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets, and she actually didn’t write all that many poems throughout her life (not compared to other poets who lived as long as she did). She was meticulous, picking and choosing every word she wrote with the utmost care (it is similar to Joan Didion, who literally agonizes over punctuation, and works on one sentence for weeks at a time). This, naturally, slows her down, in terms of output. But the poems of Bishop: wow. If you have not encountered them, all I can say is: do yourself a favor. She was not hugely famous during her lifetime, but since her death her reputation has skyrocketed. She is very much in vogue now, and I am so happy to see that.

She had a harrowing childhood. She was independently wealthy. She traveled the world. She was best friends with Robert Lowell; they had a kinship that can only be described as intimate. A symbiotic artistic marriage. She lived all over the place, and finally settled down in Key West.

“It took me an hour or so to get back to my own metre.”

Elizabeth Bishop wrote that to Robert Lowell, after reading one of his poems. I am most interested in how the work affected each other. Lowell was much more famous in his own day than Elizabeth Bishop was, although now, as I said, I am SO pleased to see that she is having a bit of a renaissance. Lowell’s stuff, confessional, shocking at the time, doesn’t hold up as well, ironically enough, as Bishop’s, which can seem more descriptive, more distant, until you really read them, and get inside the poems.

Bishop and Lowell kept up a correspondence for the 30 years of their friendship, and while some have already been published (in a collection of Bishop’s letters) – now a volume has come out with their correspondence – Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – 459 letters in all! Here is a great review in the NY Times.

They never married. Lowell had many lovers, and a wife. Bishop stayed with one woman for many many years (sadly, this woman committed suicide – yet another plot-point in the tragic story that was Bishop’s life, she was surrounded by mental illness from a very young age). But theirs was a soulmate kind of connection. Lowell did ask her to marry him, and her cooler head prevailed. It seems, though, that they were each other’s “perfect reader”. Every writer needs one. Not a critic, not a gushing fan … but someone who is able to really hear not just the words, but the intent. Who can speak to the theme, the greater picture. Last summer I read one of my pieces out loud to Rachel and Mitchell – it was one I had been struggling with. As we settled in for my reading, Rachel said, “What do you want us to be listening for?” Now THAT is a good reader. It helped me to focus my own intentions and goals – and it helped me to think about the piece in a larger way, so that I could work on that LARGER element, not just the language or the progression of events.

Bishop and Lowell were two very different poets – it is hard to imagine their rapport. She was solitary, with a tiny literate following. She wrote about fish houses and the beach and small observational moments. He upended his psychology, pouring passion and unrequited feeling into his poems. They worked FOR one another, over decades.

William Logan writes, in the NY Times piece:

Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop’s dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. The only time Bishop took exception to Lowell’s poems was when, in €œThe Dolphin€ (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick. ” €œArt just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop exclaimed. She flinched when poets revealed in their poems too much of themselves, once claiming that she wished she “could start writing poetry all over again on another planet.”

These poets, in short, inspired each other. Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking “Life Studies” (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as “The Waste Land”); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them. Bishop was loyal enough to admire, or pretend to, even Lowell’s mediocre poems.

If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each other’s, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century’s Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike — so delightfully in concord — the reader at times can’t guess the author without glancing at the salutation.

For a long time she was known as a “poet’s poet”, but I think her appeal is much broader than that (although her works may not be as well-known as those with more populist appeal). In my opinion, she’s up there with Robert Frost. She’s in the same continuum. Her work has that grandeur, and also that homeliness. She writes about “small” things – the look of waves, a moose in the darkness, fishing rods, in the same way that Frost writes about “small” things – an axe, a snowfall, an apple. Yet nobody could ever say that these are trivial poets, or “surface” poets. They plumb the depths of the human condition itself, not by focusing on their experiences with electric shock therapy, or their family psychodramas (and some of the confessional poets are terrific, my faves, this is not an either/or proposition), but by excavating the meaning and grace and import in things, objects, nature. Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ stands out as different from the others, in voice, theme, and context. It is directly personal. In it, she speaks in an “I” voice, rare for her. You can feel the influence of her soulmate Robert Lowell in “One Art”, even though the expression, the poem itself, is all hers. People who know about poetry love Elizabeth Bishop – and rightly so – but her work is not inaccessible, you don’t need Cliff Notes to “get” it. At the same time, she is as deep as the ocean.

Marianne Moore was also a huge influence and early champion of Bishop’s stuff. Moore wrote in re: Bishop:

Some authors do not muse within themselves; they ‘think’ – like the vegetable-shredder which cuts into the life of a thing. Miss Bishop is not one of these frettingly intensive machines. Yet the rational considering quality in her work is its strength – assisted by unwordiness, uncontorted intentionalness, the flicker of impudence, the natural unforced ending.

Moore said that Bishop was “spectacular in being unspectacular.”

It takes great restraint to NOT go for the big effects, if said effects are not right, not essential to the poem itself.

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, writes:

Few poets of the century are as candid as Elizabeth Bishop. We know more about her from her poems, despite her reticence, her refusal to confess or provide circumstantial detail, than we do of Plath or Lowell or Sexton, who dramatize and partialize themselves. Bishop asks us to focus not on her but with her. Her disclosures are tactful: we can recognize them if we wish. Her reticence is “polite”. Given her vulnerability, she could have “gone to the edge”, as A. Alvarez likes poets to do, praising Plath and Lowell for their extremity. Instead she follows where William Cowper led, using language not to go to the edge but to find her way back from it; using poetry – in an eighteenth-century spirit – as a normative instrument. Even in her harshest poems, such an art is affirmative.

It’s a toss-up as to what is her best-known poem. There are two that seem to consistently make it into the anthologies “At the Fishhouses” and “One Art”. If you read these poems one after the other it is very difficult to not be in awe of her versatility with language. The voice used in each is so completely specific, and perfect to the subject matter.

I love “At the Fishhouses” (I suggest reading it out loud to get the full effect). Maybe I love it because it is familiar to me, as an East Coast girl who grew up 10 minutes from the vast heaving Atlantic. The fishing industry is a part of the landscape of my childhood, and there’s something about it that Bishop captures – and it’s in the images, yes – but … more than that … it’s in the language. Bishop is truly a master. She makes it look so easy that it is hard to remember just how good she is.

But in my opinion – it is “The Moose” that is her greatest poem. Somehow I had missed it, I was not familiar with it (it’s not as commonly anthologized, first of all) and for whatever reason, a couple years back Dad brought it to my attention. I think it was re-published in The New Yorker, and he sent me a note saying, “Have you read “The Moose”? You have to read it.”

So I sat down and read it. Its greatness speaks for itself. It also is a connection with my father, so I love it especially.

Poet Randall Jarrell said a great thing about Bishop:

All her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.”

Yes.

THE MOOSE

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.