Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop

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 (The Complete Poems: 1927-1979) – but the ones she DID write – resonate, reverberate – they’re classics.

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 – 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. An amazing symbiotic relationship – the two influencing one another, loving one another – while living separate lives. 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 I am SO pleased to see that she is having a bit of a renaissance, she is one of my favorite poets.

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). 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 moments. He upended his psychology, pouring passion and unrequited feeling into his poems. They worked FOR one another, over decades.

It was a highly passionate relationship, and you ache reading some of their letters.

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 “The Dolphin” (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick — “Art 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.

Her influences were Marianne Moore and Gerard Manley Hopkins. 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 … 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 but by excavating the meaning and grace and import in things, objects, nature. Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ stands out – it is different from her other poems. In it, she speaks in an “I” voice – rather than a detached narrator, or observer. You can feel the influence of her soulmate Robert Lowell – 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 … And yet she is as deep as the ocean. I love her stuff so much.

It’s a toss-up what is her best-known poem. There are two that seem to consistently make it into the anthologies “At the Fishhouses” and “One Art” (which I mentioned above). If you read these poems one after the other it is very difficult to not be in awe of her versatility with language. They are both truly great poems – and yet 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 just 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.

And then there’s “One Art” – which has a blunt open-faced honesty – and I love the last line – with the italicized word … She expresses something I know, on a cellular level, which is the “art of losing”. Disaster. She’s marvelous.

Here are both poems:

At the Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

But in my opinion – it is “The Moose” that is her greatest poem. Somehow I had missed that one, I was not familiar with it – and for whatever reason, recently, my Dad brought it to my attention – saying, “Have you read “The Moose”? You have to read it.”

So I sat down and read it. Its greatness speaks for itself. Breathtaking.

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.