The Books: The Redress of Poetry: ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets (a post about her here). A treasured memory is telling my dad I was getting into her, and how much I loved her, and he asked if I knew her poem “The Moose.” I didn’t. He pulled out a book (he always knew where the right books were), and read it out loud to me. My father had a gravelly voice, unforgettable, warm and grumbly, and he was wonderful when reading out loud. As much as I love “The Moose” (and I DO, it’s now in my Top Bishop poems), what I really love is that when I read it now, I still hear it in my father’s voice.

Bishop’s early life was harrowing, but she had been left financially solvent through some kind of trust fund set-up. She never needed to have a day job. It ended up giving her enormous freedom, to travel, to settle down in places that interested her (Key West, Brazil), and to work and work at her meticulously observed and beautifully constructed poems. She was not prolific. She did not pour forth in a tsunami of expressiveness like Yeats, or like Heaney or Plath. She was cautious. She had stuff to say, but it took her a while to get to it. She was a masterful observer (after her poem on, say, sand pipers, you will never see them in quite the same way again.) She carried on a friendship (and rich correspondence) with Robert Lowell, a friendship that enriched and informed both of their work. They were kindred spirits, unlikely soul mates. But there was madness in Bishop’s family line (her mother had been institutionalized, she was raised by relatives), and Lowell was famously mad himself, so there was a kinship there. Their correspondence has been published (Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell), which I have not read, but will some day. It’s a gorgeous volume. (A play has been written about their relationship.)

Heaney’s appreciation of Elizabeth Bishop’s perfect eye for detail, and her ability to stay on the surface, to describe what she sees, until the descriptions reach a kind of transcendence (the most famous example of this being her, perhaps, 2nd best-known poem, “At the Fishhouses.”) So much poetry today is description only. See The New Yorker. Ugh, I don’t care about the green leaves or the white china teapot: show me something ELSE, this isn’t a photo-journalism class. Bishop takes what is description, and works it, polishing it, sometimes during the course of the poem, whittling it down to its essentials, going back to images that matter, circling and circling over what interests her until the mere fact of her laser-eyed attention is the main perception. Not many poets can help you SEE better. Elizabeth Bishop does.

She fell in love with and lived with women, on occasion, and the relationship with her main flame was extremely serious. However, the thought did cross her mind that she and Lowell were so simpatico that … what if … what if … It crossed his mind. He was deeply involved with another woman, eventually marrying her, but he was haunted by the thought that Bishop really was “the one,” even though she was, for the most part, only interested in women. Regardless, the friends worked it out, somehow, continuing their chatty correspondence over the course of their lives, cheering one another on, providing frank reactions to one another’s work, it was a very fruitful friendship. Bishop preferred a life out of the limelight, far away from literary centers. She did not live in New York. She lived in beach houses on Key West. She moved to South America. She wanted peace and quiet and freedom.

She was not a forgotten genius or anything like that, but her stature has definitely grown since her death. Her reputation seems more monumental now than it did when it was unfolding in real time.

Her poems remind me of Yeats’ words on Jonathan Swift: “Imitate him if you dare.”

People try to imitate Elizabeth Bishop’s voice, and what they end up with is a shallow list of descriptions. They miss … the “thing” … that Bishop “thing” – the moment of sudden expansion in the final stanza – but still mysterious, meaning not being the point … “The Moose” is the best example of that, but “At the Fishhouses” have it too. And so Bishop’s imitators are many but they should have heeded Yeats’s warning.

The excerpt from Heaney’s lecture (he’s wonderful on “At the Fishhouses” and other poems) has to do with Bishop’s most famous poem, the one most commonly anthologized, “One Art” (posted below). “One Art” represents a departure for her, an explicitly personal poem, spoken by an “I”. She was surrounded by confessional poets, including her BFF Robert Lowell who took “confession” to such a level that he basically changed the course of American poetry, helping to open up the boundaries of acceptable speech and topics. Bishop found a lot of Lowell’s poems to be unseemly, not worthy of him, and she was open with him about that in her letters, cautioning him to go deeper than just “what happened”. In other words: “So this happened to you … so what. Is it a good poem? Work harder, my friend.”

Bishop did not write about her life’s events in her poems, but you can tell a lot about her. You can tell she lives at the beach, mostly. You can tell that she is outside a lot.

But in her poem “One Art”, Bishop lays herself out there. And yet there’s a protective quality to it, because of its strict rhyme scheme and formal structure. It’s like she NEEDS that structure in order to be brave enough to just “come out with it.” I wonder if it is her most well-known BECAUSE it is “personal”: we live in a self-obsessed day and age when people value something highly if they can “relate” to it.

Still: nothing can take away from “One Art”‘s awesome power and universality (poem posted below). I love how she has to FORCE herself to admit what she admits in the last line. She doesn’t want to go there! She tries so hard to not go there, to take a jokey tone, to be a good sport. But honesty must win out. Still, though: She has to COMMAND herself to come out with it.

Following the poem, I’ll put up the excerpt of Heaney discussing “One Art.” It’s lovely analysis!

And, to show that I’m not above “relating” to a poem or a work of art (it’s only when that’s the ONLY arbiter of value placed on a work that I get annoyed) I’ll speak personally for a moment. If confessional writing ain’t your thing, skip the next part, and don’t blame me. Blame the poems that speak to us so palpably, so viscerally.

In 1994 something ended. A romance. It happened almost invisibly, the two of us approaching the cataclysm, peeking over, and then backing off. He wasn’t fully aware of what had happened, I don’t think, it was an extremely confusing time, a hothouse as well as an ice-plant, the two of us colliding in a way that threatened to tear us both apart. For real, yo. He seemed blindsided by what was happening, and confused. That would change. But in the first wave of it, he was trying to stay calm, while I found myself flailing through empty space. I’m just going to be real frank. That thing ending was a disaster for me in the truest sense of the word (which I’ll get to, because it’s related to Bishop’s poem “One Art.”). I am not saying my life would necessarily have been better if he and I had worked out, there are no guarantees, and something that burns as hot as that can also flame out into ash pretty damn quick, although I STILL wonder: “what the hell WOULD have happened if we had said ‘Yes’ to this thing? Would we have made it?”

(My latest theory – because theories are the way one tries to understand disaster – is that if he and I had gotten together, it would have been so inherently crazy-making and fun – let’s not forget – fun as HELL – and it would have involved me moving to Milwaukee? or him moving to Chicago? UPHEAVAL all around … I was 26 years old and he was 40, a hell of an age difference, although it seemed irrelevant at the time. I loved him. Anyway, all of that upheaval may very well have ended up with me in a psych ward due to the stress and excitement. Looking back I know that I should have been in a psych ward ANYway in the late summer and early fall of 1994 – but it may have been hurried along by the consummation of this feverish relationship – which meant I would have been diagnosed way back then. It might have saved me the trouble of those many many harrowing years afterwards when the illness entrenched itself, nameless, dangerous. This, though, is pure speculation, obviously. We may have devoured one another like the two raging fire-balls that we were … all kinds of Bad things might have happened if we had gotten together. But I just don’t know. That’s the “What If” of it.) I don’t have too many What-If’s with men. Most of them have been obviously not appropriate as mate-material (the main one being my long-time Chicago-and-for-years-afterwards flame, the man who ultimately knows me best, who was hilariously fun and wild in a Dada-esque kind of way that I found supremely relaxing – the last quote in that post I linked to was something he said to me once at 3 o’clock in the morning while we were playing cards, watching the movie Tap. Yes. Gregory Hines Tap. We were playing cards, and out of the blue, this big tough grumpy Chicago guy came out with that line to describe our relationship. And I agree with him still. I loved the Milwaukee guy but I TRUSTED the Chicago guy). Or the other men have been obviously bad for me because they were controlling abusive dick-heads, or, recently, charming sociopaths, guys it is easy to walk away from once their nature is revealed. But Milwaukee-guy …. It took YEARS for the smoke to clear from that one, and in a lot of ways, there’s still smoke. I don’t walk around in mourning like I did in my late 20s, those days are long long gone, but still … there are echoes. I live with them. He does too. This thing ended in 1994! That’s some long-lingering shit right there. In Before Sunset, Celine (Julie Delpy) tells Jessie (Ethan Hawke) that she resists getting involved with men now, because the breakups hurt her too much: “I never fully recover.” I never fully recovered from that guy. Life moved on, but I was forever altered. In many ways, it remains unresolved. For both of us. It’s a road not taken. You don’t have too many of those in life, at least not so obvious.

It was such a disaster (or at least perceived as such by me) that I was thrown into an almost completely wordless state following its dissolution. I could not speak. I lost my words. I couldn’t make sense of anything. In the immediate aftermath, a week or so later, I went to the movies with a friend of mine, who also knew the guy pretty well. We had had a good time that night, talking about other things. But when we pulled up in front of my apartment, my friend brought it up. He said, “So. We haven’t talked about it. But you’ve just experienced a massive train-wreck, haven’t you. Is that what this was for you? Is it that big?” Something like that, it was a long time ago, but he was saying, “Uhm … this feels massive to ME as a bystander … how ya’ doin’ there?” I said, “Oh, you know, I’m hanging in there … I miss him so much I can’t breathe” (literally: I found it hard to breathe in the week following the backing-off or whatever it was we did.) “but … it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” Reassuring myself. But honestly it wasn’t okay. It was so bad I moved to New York, I moved less than a year later, which may seem like a good thing, but in retrospect, I am not so sure. And he married someone else less than a year later. Once it wasn’t a “go” with us, we went catapulting off at breakneck speed in opposite directions.

SO. All of that being said. “One Art” is one of those poems that people turn to in such moments. It is jokey and sincere, at the same time, it is cynical and self-deprecating, and that last line … it validates the sense that you have been traumatized and destroyed.

“Disaster” has an interesting Latin root. “Dis”, “aster”: “separation from” “the stars.” Take it literally. The world has gone awry, the sky has lost its familiarity, one is lost in space. The connection in subject matter to Auden’s “The More Loving One” and its brutally difficult final line is clear. That’s what disaster actually feels like – to be separated from the stars, and all that they signify.

Bishop NAILS it. It’s difficult for her. It’s difficult for those who are traumatized (those who also have some rectitude, that is). To say, “This has been a disaster” is an enormous concession to chaos, something that one naturally resists.

I also love how Heaney points out that the word “write” in the context of that last line is actually a pun. You could also hear it as “right”, as in RIGHT THIS SITUATION INSTANTLY.

Anyway. Enough. On to Bishop and to Heaney.

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.

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop’ by Seamus Heaney

In this poem, Bishop’s ability to write plainly and at the same time reticently manifests itself in extremis. This is wonderful lyric writing; it is impossible to separate the poem’s reality as a made thing from its effect as a personal cry. It is in one way, of course, entirely formal, preoccupied with its technical procedures, taking delight in solving the challenges of rhyme, in obeying (and disobeying) the rules of the highly constraining villanelle form. At the same time, it is obviously the whimper of a creature who has been hard done by; or, to be more exact, it is a choked-off whimper, the learnt behaviour of somebody who, without the impersonal demands of an art and an ethic of doughty conduct, might have submitted to self-pity. In fact, the conquest of a temptation to self-pity is what the poem manages to effect: wit confronts hurt and holds a balance that deserves to be called wisdom. The writing itself could be called deadpan-ironical or whimsical-stoical, but it is not exactly either. It is, to quote another famous line of Bishop,s “like what we imagine knowledge to be.” By its trust in poetic form and its abnegation of self, it bears a recognizable relationship to the work of that seventeenth-century English poet-priest whom Elizabeth Bishop so admired, George Herbert. Like Herbert, Bishop finds and enforces a correspondence between the procedures of verse and the predicament of the spirit. She makes rhyme an analogy for self-control. The first time “master” and “disaster” occurs, in stanza one, they are tactfully, elegantly, deprecatingly paired off. It wasn’t a disaster. The speaker is being decorous, good-mannered, relieving you of the burden of having to sympathize, easing you out of any embarrassed need to find things to say. The last time the rhyme occurs, however, the shocking traumatic reality of what happened almost overbrims the containing form. It was a disaster. It was devastatingly and indescribably so. And yet what the poem has not managed to do, in the nick of time, is to survive the devastating. The verb “master” places itself in the scales opposite its twin noun, “disaster,” and holds the balance. And the secret of the held balance is given in the parenthesis “(Write it!)”. As so often in Bishop’s work, the parenthesis (if you have ears to hear) is the place the hear the real truth. And what the parenthesis in ‘One Art’ tells us is what we always knew in some general way, but now know with an acute pang of intimacy, that the act of writing is an act of survival:

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.

The pun in that nick-of-time imperative – “Write it!” – is in deadly earnest. The redress of poetry is called upon by one of poetry’s constant votaries, the poem is asked to set the balance right. Losses of all sorts have caused the mind’s scales to tilt drastically and so they desperately need to be evened out by a redistribution of the mind’s burdens – and the act of writing is depended upon to bring that redistribution about. The throwaway tone of the thing is recognizably the tone that accompanies a throw that risks all. In the pun on the word “write”, therefore, and in the harmony which prevails momentarily in the concluding rhyme, we experience the resolving power of deliberately articulated sound in much the same way as the narrator of “In the Village” experienced it. There, the scream was subsumed in the anvil note; here the “disaster” is absorbed when it meets its emotional and phonetic match in the word “master.” Bishop’s “one art” does not after all fail her. For all her caution about over-stating its prerogatives and possibilities, she does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to endure it.