April, your brilliant readings of these Bishop poems have been very pleasing. Each week I look forward to them, each week delving back into the poems trying to glean some of what I missed. So grateful to you as our patient guide through these complex, demanding, endlessly rewarding pieces.
I agree with you, Helen; it is lovely to have a guide, and one of the many things, April's posts have pointed to is the way the speakers in so many of Bishop's poems are generously pointing and guiding. Since you revealed that you met and visited Miss Bishop, I am eager to hear more about what she was like as a teacher. I think I've heard Lloyd Schwartz (or someone else) say that she talked more about subjects. Why do you think that was? She and Marianne Moore talked endlessly about diction and elements of poetics, right; obviously, she could do this. But, she chose not to.
I wonder if that choice reflects her humility. In both Poem and Crusoe in England, the "artists" are regular people: Great Great Uncle George ("very famous", an "R.A.), but the speaker suggests the painting is insignificant, done in "one breath" (which is lovely to think about); and all of Crusoe's creations are homemade, and it is that homemade quality he celebrates in his drunken revelry and misses so much when he is "rescued." "Home-made, home-made, but aren't we all." These poems open out to include all acts of homemaking and island industry. Bishop strikes me as a person who really respected efforts of ordinary people to describe the world, to remember scenes, to get the details down, and to keep talking. Now, I am thinking about the passengers on the bus, going over the tragedies of their lives ... the speaker weaves that talk into her poem and marks it as such with the phrase, "dreamy divagation." It's another moment where she hears something real and hallucinates a different scene ... like the two looks in Poem. I didn't realize until I read along with April's posts that one of the things I love most is her invitation to co-create with her. So ... maybe I'm glad I never met Miss Bishop. Just as she never knew Great Uncle George, they both knew the place pictured. Her work helps us recover so many of our own literal backwaters.
I need and want to think more about April's point that Sonnet offers breakage or rupture as a way out of her "lifelong ambivalences." Somehow I feel she was always working her way out of places of stuckness--"a pity not to have had to stop for gas," or listen to rain ... two hours of unrelenting oratory--to be moved to write or surprised when a moose wandered out of the dark woods.
continuation ... this wobbly quality or see-sawing between possibilities IS at the core of Bishop's poems. Is that what you mean, April, by lifelong ambivalences? Personally, that's the wonderful humility of the exploratory work, work with the world ... . A poem Joan Murray includes in her anthology of poems for troubled times by Yehuda Amichai helps me, "But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mole, a plow." I prefer thinking about abiding in uncertainty and ambivalence as the most natural place to be, a place that observes the tides of everything, and is, therefore, fruitful.
EB was happy to talk about poetics in general, just not in her own poems--not humility so much as privacy and a kind of superstition lots of writers have, to not talk about their own work in that kind of detail. It spoils the private magic. She really didn't go into detail much, not even with Moore and Lowell, her two closest poet friends. My hunch about ambivalence is about a human difficulty that many of us experience; the ability to live with ambivalence is the hallmark of maturity, but it is always painful. I don't think EB was trying to solve life's problems in her poems; she was rather, as Chekhov says, just aiming to ask the right questions.
A lovely opening. Like, the poem itself is a kind of limning of elements of the world that are perhaps at odds, but all present, holding them in suspension where they can be fully seen and felt.
Thank you for another extraordinary reading of Bishop and how wonderful that you knew her personally and came away with a dollar-sized relic! I've been trying to fathom the traditional resonances of those lines "The little that we get for free,/the little of our earthly trust. Not much./About the size of our abidance, along with theirs..." Others will have other associations, doubtless, but I personally think of Wordsworth's line "Little we see in nature that is ours," [from the sonnet "The world is too much with us"] but perhaps even more, Blake, "And we are put on earth a little space/that we may learn to bear the beams of love." [from "The Little Black Boy"] As for abidance, there is Tennyson's Ulysses, "Though much is taken, much abides..." Any one of these ostensible allusions could be mulled over, but they also serves to demonstrate what is original and peculiar in the poem "Poem." I read it as an invocation of "poetic authority," of which the dollar bill is the curious bankrolling token. It's funny to think that a Pulitzer prize-winning poet should need to turn to an obscure great uncle for such reinforcement, but Bishop struggled with lack of recognition from her fairly Puritanical family. It mattered to her that someone in her family was an artist even if that someone's work was neglected, kept in a trunk, and she for her part would honor it and put it on the wall (in the same way that she and Lota made space for the portraits of her mother Gertrude and Uncle Arthur on the wall even though they clashed with their modernist aesthetic), and find in it "the harmony, the community, of shared sight," as April says. But what is this particular heritage? It isn't just any art and memory but a particularly austere form of it. There is the element of smallness ("this little painting...minor...tiny cows...miniscule...specklike...small backwater") but smallness opening up into large insights and perspectives, and the related concept of compression, a key feature of any good poetry. But even more important is the marginal position of human beings in this world of geese, shivering irises, elms and convincing cows. We are at the back of someone's barn whose name is not quite recalled. The willingness of George Hutchinson to embrace this largely non-human landscape (or is non-human too strong?) makes her kin to Bishop, and sets Bishop apart from the traditional poets quoted above, or at least that's my take on it. That surprising turn to "along with theirs"! I love the fact that Bishop won't take the creaturely world for granted. As in "Manners," one says good morning to dogs and horses, too.
A nice phrase: "the curious bankrolling token”! “Useless and free,” says the poem. (“Poetry makes nothing happen.”) I was struck that at the outset she is at pains—when she describes the brushstrokes, the dabs, the squiggle from the tube, the paint colors, her effort to discern—to remind us that the scene is someone else’s and created. There is cold air—but it’s the artist’s specialty. Then we visit her own memory, the trunk, the artist; the diminution of [her quotes] “vision” and “copying from life”; and then, at the close, the “abidence,” the “earthly trust,” comes with the details, “live,” springing into sensual reality: "the munching cows, / the iris, crisp and shivering, the water / still standing from spring freshets."
That's a great point. By the end of the poem, those details spring out at us, no longer just part of the painting but belong to the earthly trust. I also love the way the poem's opening phrase, "About the size of," recurs at this moment. I wonder if Bishop relished the colloquial register, as in, "Yep. That's about the size of it!"
April, your brilliant readings of these Bishop poems have been very pleasing. Each week I look forward to them, each week delving back into the poems trying to glean some of what I missed. So grateful to you as our patient guide through these complex, demanding, endlessly rewarding pieces.
Thank you so much for joining us! I hope you come to our conversation on Thursday! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/elizabeth-bishop-reading-group-with-april-bernard-tickets-966560016027?aff=oddtdtcreator
I agree with you, Helen; it is lovely to have a guide, and one of the many things, April's posts have pointed to is the way the speakers in so many of Bishop's poems are generously pointing and guiding. Since you revealed that you met and visited Miss Bishop, I am eager to hear more about what she was like as a teacher. I think I've heard Lloyd Schwartz (or someone else) say that she talked more about subjects. Why do you think that was? She and Marianne Moore talked endlessly about diction and elements of poetics, right; obviously, she could do this. But, she chose not to.
I wonder if that choice reflects her humility. In both Poem and Crusoe in England, the "artists" are regular people: Great Great Uncle George ("very famous", an "R.A.), but the speaker suggests the painting is insignificant, done in "one breath" (which is lovely to think about); and all of Crusoe's creations are homemade, and it is that homemade quality he celebrates in his drunken revelry and misses so much when he is "rescued." "Home-made, home-made, but aren't we all." These poems open out to include all acts of homemaking and island industry. Bishop strikes me as a person who really respected efforts of ordinary people to describe the world, to remember scenes, to get the details down, and to keep talking. Now, I am thinking about the passengers on the bus, going over the tragedies of their lives ... the speaker weaves that talk into her poem and marks it as such with the phrase, "dreamy divagation." It's another moment where she hears something real and hallucinates a different scene ... like the two looks in Poem. I didn't realize until I read along with April's posts that one of the things I love most is her invitation to co-create with her. So ... maybe I'm glad I never met Miss Bishop. Just as she never knew Great Uncle George, they both knew the place pictured. Her work helps us recover so many of our own literal backwaters.
I need and want to think more about April's point that Sonnet offers breakage or rupture as a way out of her "lifelong ambivalences." Somehow I feel she was always working her way out of places of stuckness--"a pity not to have had to stop for gas," or listen to rain ... two hours of unrelenting oratory--to be moved to write or surprised when a moose wandered out of the dark woods.
You remind me that the knife in Crusoe loses its “living soul” when it loses its usefulness. I hope you join us for our conversation on Thursday! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/elizabeth-bishop-reading-group-with-april-bernard-tickets-966560016027?aff=oddtdtcreator
continuation ... this wobbly quality or see-sawing between possibilities IS at the core of Bishop's poems. Is that what you mean, April, by lifelong ambivalences? Personally, that's the wonderful humility of the exploratory work, work with the world ... . A poem Joan Murray includes in her anthology of poems for troubled times by Yehuda Amichai helps me, "But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mole, a plow." I prefer thinking about abiding in uncertainty and ambivalence as the most natural place to be, a place that observes the tides of everything, and is, therefore, fruitful.
A couple of quick thoughts, Mary Jo--
EB was happy to talk about poetics in general, just not in her own poems--not humility so much as privacy and a kind of superstition lots of writers have, to not talk about their own work in that kind of detail. It spoils the private magic. She really didn't go into detail much, not even with Moore and Lowell, her two closest poet friends. My hunch about ambivalence is about a human difficulty that many of us experience; the ability to live with ambivalence is the hallmark of maturity, but it is always painful. I don't think EB was trying to solve life's problems in her poems; she was rather, as Chekhov says, just aiming to ask the right questions.
A lovely opening. Like, the poem itself is a kind of limning of elements of the world that are perhaps at odds, but all present, holding them in suspension where they can be fully seen and felt.
Yes! The formal elements that April describes—the half-poem, the coming and going of partial rhymes—seem to mitigate against the absolutes of closure.
Thank you for another extraordinary reading of Bishop and how wonderful that you knew her personally and came away with a dollar-sized relic! I've been trying to fathom the traditional resonances of those lines "The little that we get for free,/the little of our earthly trust. Not much./About the size of our abidance, along with theirs..." Others will have other associations, doubtless, but I personally think of Wordsworth's line "Little we see in nature that is ours," [from the sonnet "The world is too much with us"] but perhaps even more, Blake, "And we are put on earth a little space/that we may learn to bear the beams of love." [from "The Little Black Boy"] As for abidance, there is Tennyson's Ulysses, "Though much is taken, much abides..." Any one of these ostensible allusions could be mulled over, but they also serves to demonstrate what is original and peculiar in the poem "Poem." I read it as an invocation of "poetic authority," of which the dollar bill is the curious bankrolling token. It's funny to think that a Pulitzer prize-winning poet should need to turn to an obscure great uncle for such reinforcement, but Bishop struggled with lack of recognition from her fairly Puritanical family. It mattered to her that someone in her family was an artist even if that someone's work was neglected, kept in a trunk, and she for her part would honor it and put it on the wall (in the same way that she and Lota made space for the portraits of her mother Gertrude and Uncle Arthur on the wall even though they clashed with their modernist aesthetic), and find in it "the harmony, the community, of shared sight," as April says. But what is this particular heritage? It isn't just any art and memory but a particularly austere form of it. There is the element of smallness ("this little painting...minor...tiny cows...miniscule...specklike...small backwater") but smallness opening up into large insights and perspectives, and the related concept of compression, a key feature of any good poetry. But even more important is the marginal position of human beings in this world of geese, shivering irises, elms and convincing cows. We are at the back of someone's barn whose name is not quite recalled. The willingness of George Hutchinson to embrace this largely non-human landscape (or is non-human too strong?) makes her kin to Bishop, and sets Bishop apart from the traditional poets quoted above, or at least that's my take on it. That surprising turn to "along with theirs"! I love the fact that Bishop won't take the creaturely world for granted. As in "Manners," one says good morning to dogs and horses, too.
A nice phrase: "the curious bankrolling token”! “Useless and free,” says the poem. (“Poetry makes nothing happen.”) I was struck that at the outset she is at pains—when she describes the brushstrokes, the dabs, the squiggle from the tube, the paint colors, her effort to discern—to remind us that the scene is someone else’s and created. There is cold air—but it’s the artist’s specialty. Then we visit her own memory, the trunk, the artist; the diminution of [her quotes] “vision” and “copying from life”; and then, at the close, the “abidence,” the “earthly trust,” comes with the details, “live,” springing into sensual reality: "the munching cows, / the iris, crisp and shivering, the water / still standing from spring freshets."
That's a great point. By the end of the poem, those details spring out at us, no longer just part of the painting but belong to the earthly trust. I also love the way the poem's opening phrase, "About the size of," recurs at this moment. I wonder if Bishop relished the colloquial register, as in, "Yep. That's about the size of it!"
Nice!