Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature

Angus Cleghorn

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030331795
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030331801
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature brings together the latest understandings of how central music was to Bishop's writing. This collection considers Bishop's reworking of metrical and rhythmic forms of poetry; the increasing presence of prosaic utterances into speech-soundscapes; how musical poetry intones new modes of thinking through aural vision; how Bishop transforms traditionally distasteful tones of violence, banality, and commerce into innovative poetry; how her diverse, lifelong musical education (North American, European, Brazilian) affects her work; and also how her diverse musical settings have inspired global contemporary composers. The essays flesh out the missing elements of music, sound, and voice in previous research that are crucial to understanding how Bishop's writing continues to dazzle readers and inspire artists in surprising ways.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. Cleghorn (ed.)Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Music and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33180-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Angus Cleghorn¹

(1)

Seneca College, Toronto, ON, Canada

Angus Cleghorn

Abstract

Spaces form chambers for Elizabeth Bishop’s music. Sounds reverberate from the pages of Bishop’s poetry, often overtly displaying their sound patterns to readers, while simultaneously intoning external soundscapes. The chapters in this volume meticulously display Bishop’s virtuosity with transforming traditional poetic and musical forms into her own innovative adaptations fitting contemporary experience. Seemingly natural voices become our own in poems that also register dissonances of others. This leads readers to consider cultural conflicts, exclamations both humorous and violent, that ask us to reconsider our contextual living conditions. Beyond playful interrogations of how linguistic sounds define us and what we know, Bishop provides a fluid range of tones to explore difference. Her poetic music from European and North American traditions extends to twentieth-century Brazilian genres. Furthermore, her literature’s musical settings have inspired diverse scores by twentieth-century composers and current songwriters around the globe.

Keywords

BishopMusicChamberVoiceToneRhythm

End Abstract

Whether it be a village, church, ballroom, house with a clavichord, apartment, seashore or poem, spaces form chambers for Elizabeth Bishop’s music. In The Making of a Poem, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland project this idea while discussing “One Art”:

it turns around and around, building an acoustic chamber for the words, the lines, the meanings: The art of losing isn’t hard to master. As the villanelle gathers strength and speed, this coda—the art of losing—moves in and out of irony, grief, self-accusation, regret. … This effect of the villanelle—to make an acoustic chamber for single words—was particularly well understood by Bishop. (20)

This sonic chamber (an abode for the mouth) is the forum in which this book reverberates. The lead chapter by Deryn Rees-Jones on Bishop’s clavichord makes use of this instrument as a domestic companion that mediates between inner and outer worlds, and thereby transforms emotion into harmony. Bishop’s poems resound in readers so that they become our own. Voices inside our heads become treasures “living in the cave of the mouth,” as Robert Frost put it (Cook 223). How the poet manages to achieve this is on the one hand simple, for every decent poet does it, yet Bishop does it with such diverse and dazzling virtuosity that the poems firmly stick; they register so strongly that we need to look into their adherences further.

Eleanor Cook prompts this quest in Elizabeth Bishop at Work with “curiosity about exactly how she did it, this master poet of the twentieth century” (1). And in her chapter eight, it’s the slippery notion of tone that Cook identifies as perhaps the most difficult register to describe and understand. “She can alter the dominant tone like a musician. She can shift tones very quietly within a poem, like the slight altering of a repeating phrase in music. Or she can change tone fortissimo, like a change of key in music” (225). This book grew partly from Cook’s challenge as developed in an American Literature Association (ALA) conference double panel on “Voice, Tone and Music in Elizabeth Bishop’s Writing” in Boston, in May 2017. Two of the papers focused on “At the Fishhouses.” The musical and tonal diversity of this masterpiece was cast in the Symbolist poetic tradition by Lisa Goldfarb, who employs Baudelaire , Rimbaud and particularly Valéry’s musical poetics to observe Bishop’s distinct valences. Then in a meticulous, close reading of the same poem, Yuki Tanaka studies syntactic rhythms to reveal the poetic dynamics of unfolding emotional drama. A similarly acute ear from Andrew Eastman is “Hearing Things in Bishop,” this time through reverberations of others’ voices that echo her own voice as it comes back to her, and by sounding other voices the poem makes a place for the reader’s voice to emerge. This book’s movement from inner to outer voices becomes a cacophony in Christopher Spaide’s “Causes for Excess: Elizabeth Bishop’s Eighty-Eight Exclamations,” in which her inimitable voice depends on the occasional excess that, paradoxically, arrives only in precisely controlled circumstances. Spaide takes note of how vocal practice changes throughout her career. My chapter focuses on “Voice Control in Late Bishop” to show how her poetry develops prosaic utterances to disrupt musical harmony and thereby offer disjunctive cultural commentary through rhetorical voices with recognizable signals for readers.

This book unsettles Bishop’s old reputation for quiet reserve. Thomas Travisano charts “A Very Important Violence of Tone” in “Roosters ” and other poems. From her early verses and prose to late lyrics, Bishop carefully prepares for moments of violence that flash out from a seemingly calm or settled verbal environment. Physical place is always key—from Newfoundland in “The Map” and “Cape Breton” in that Nova Scotian poem to the startling geographical range found in Brazil. Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins attends to “Bishop and Brazilian popular music: from anonymous sambas to contemporary composers.” In Brazil Bishop wrote, “I suspect [sambas] are some of the last folk poetry to be made in the world,” and this study discusses the cultural and political implications, and resonances of Brazilian popular lyrical forms such as cordel, choro and bossa nova in her own poetry. Lloyd Schwartz extends Bishop’s music further by showing how her diverse musical settings have inspired global contemporary composers in an array of musical genres. By the end of this small book we will notice huge range from Bishop’s youthful and internal “need for music,” her wandering cultural outreach and the numerous reverberations from musicians paying tribute to her ear through theirs.

Bishop’s early musical foundation was made from the hymns she sang and heard in Great Village, Nova Scotia, piano and harmony lessons at Walnut Hill School in Massachusetts, as well as her studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she planned to major in music and took a senior course in Music as a Literature (Marshall 36), which inspired this book’s title. Bishop’s reading of other poets cannot be underestimated in her carefully formed ear, and experiments with formal poetics from sestinas to sonnets to Romantic ballads to the sprung rhythms of Hopkins , prose poems of Baudelaire , Rimbaud and Stein, the innovative Modernist techniques of Eliot , Stevens, Moore and Auden, as well as contemporaries such as Swenson , Lowell and Rich. See Bonnie Costello’s chapter on “Bishop and the Poetic Tradition” in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop for thorough exploration. In her adulthood, Bishop listened to the blues-jazz of Billie Holiday, Brazilian sambas, the folk songs of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and in the 1970s she attended orchestral concerts and chamber music by the likes of Elliott Carter in Boston.

Many tones spring from Bishop’s poetry. Her voice manages to control them so tightly that as readers we are sometimes taken aback by the musical interpretations of others, whether that may be a complex modern composition or just a different extrapolation from another reader. As Gillian White has written, Bishop creates “space in art” where together we can hear things. And yet we may hear different things. As Rachel Trousdale suggests in a forthcoming essay on humor, one reader will hear “Filling Station” as crude class snobbery, while another will register love. Bishop’s tones enable us to see both perspectives and more, as Trousdale explains in a paper recently presented at the 2019 ALA annual conference in Boston:

Her humorous asides, wry ironies, and satirical critiques help her hold competing ideas in double exposure: her levity presents varying viewpoints without necessarily taking sides. Her humor fuses empathy with judgment, as her subjects’ and speakers’ frailties are to be both rejected and felt as our own.

In the case of “Filling Station,” some readers identify with the greasy family, others laugh along with the speaker’s snobby judgments, and others do both. The poem itself appears to form this latter kind of fusion with its last words, “Somebody loves us all” (PPL 123).

The mystery is how accurately Bishop’s words ring spontaneously in our heads. It is different music from the steady sonorities of Yeats, the philosophical meditations comically punctuated by Stevens , the busy clamor of Eliot’s polyphony or the firm control of Moore . I suggest that we hear Bishop’s music in a more pronounced way that sticks in the ear largely because of her careful narrative guidance. The poetic voice takes readers into “The Map” so that “[w]e can stroke these lovely bays,” and the same reliable narrator gradually and momentarily morphs into “the printer here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause” (PPL 3). This storytelling leads us on a stroll of the map’s tactile peninsulas grasped “between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.” In a way, Bishop’s poetic narrators resemble Whitman hooking the waist of the reader so he can point to democratic vistas and new horizons. Moreover, Bishop often amalgamates the senses into a synesthesia of bodily music that is felt and conceptualized simultaneously. Yet this power is fleeting and provisional, often through her use of simile, but also due to her modulating, revisory narrators. In “The Map,” just after we feel “the smoothness of yard-goods,” the next stanza begins with an intellectual step back from sensory immersion so that we trust the balanced narrator: “Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,” and it almost does not matter whether her actual statement makes sense; the authorial tone has us believe it. We become pawns for her voice to lead us through the land and water of “The Map” on which “Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,” which is comic fancy we can picture.

Similar modulations permeate the narrative of “The Monument,” which we view from the tour guide and tourist’s voices until the old statuary form is deconstructed so we can begin to put it back together again—as any evolving artform. Music here is not just what we hear from the voices; it’s in the undulating, modulating, revising, adding, subtracting, qualifying, asserting and demonstrating. Bishop goes a step further than Stevens’ “poem in the act of the mind” by taking the poem out of the mind to see it functioning in the social wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. “I am in Need of Music”: Elizabeth Bishop and the Energies of Sound and Song
• 3. Music of the Sea: Elizabeth Bishop and Symbolist Poetics
• 4. The Rhythm of Syntax in Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”
• 5. “Hearing Things”: Voice and Rhyme in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
• 6. Causes for Excess: Elizabeth Bishop’s Eighty-Eight Exclamations
• 7. ‘A Very Important Violence of Tone’: Bishop’s ‘Roosters’ and Other Poems
• 8. “Spontaneity occurs in a good attack”: Voice Control in Late Bishop
• 9. Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian Popular Music: From Anonymous Sambas to Contemporary Composers
• 10. ‘In Need of Music’: Musical Settings of Elizabeth Bishop
• Back Matter