Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century

Reading the New Editions

Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, Thomas Travisano, Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, Thomas Travisano

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813932965
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

In recent years, a series of major collections of posthumous writings by Elizabeth Bishop--one of the most widely read and discussed poets of the twentieth century--have been published, profoundly affecting how we look at her life and work. The hundreds of letters, poems, and other writings in these volumes have expanded Bishop's published work by well over a thousand pages and placed before the public a "new" Bishop whose complexity was previously familiar to only a small circle of scholars and devoted readers. This collection of essays by many of the leading figures in Bishop studies provides a deep and multifaceted account of the impact of these new editions and how they both enlarge and complicate our understanding of Bishop as a cultural icon.

Contributors: Charles Berger, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville * Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame * Angus Cleghorn, Seneca College * Jonathan Ellis, University of Sheffield * Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University * Lorrie Goldensohn * Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University * Bethany Hicok, Westminster College * George Lensing, University of North Carolina * Carmen L. Oliveira * Barbara Page, Vassar College * Christina Pugh, University of Illinois at Chicago * Francesco Rognoni, Catholic University in Milan * Peggy Samuels, Drew University * Lloyd Schwartz, University of Massachusetts, Boston * Thomas Travisano, Hartwick College * Heather Treseler, Worcester State University * Gillian White, University of Michigan

Part I

Textual Politics

Looking into the New Elizabeth Bishop

Alice in Wonderland

The Authoring and Editing of Elizabeth Bishop’s Uncollected Poems

JONATHAN ELLIS

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, was marketed as a new book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, or at least as a new book of “Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.” The book’s subtitle was the first thing to attract Helen Vendler’s scorn in her infamous New Republic review of the book: “This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of ‘Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.’ It should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’ … Students eagerly wanting to buy ‘the new book by Elizabeth Bishop’ should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ as a poet. This book is not” (33). Before assessing the merits of Vendler’s criticisms of Edgar Allan Poe, it is worth remembering that Bishop could be guilty of misleading titles too. Her 1969 volume The Complete Poems, for example, was anything but “complete” since it left out all kinds of poems later to find a home in the “Uncollected” and “Poems Written in Youth” sections of the 1983 Complete Poems: 1927–1979.¹ As Charles Berger points out: “Now that we can easily see the other choices she might have made, as opposed to the comparatively lackluster poems that she included to round out the [1969] volume, it becomes all the more interesting to think about what message she intended to send about the shape of her oeuvre and her career. Was she saving better drafts for a later volume?” (4).

Bishop was always about to complete a new poem or story. One of the unfinished poems in Edgar Allan Poe is actually titled “Something I’d Meant to Write About for 30 Years.” In 1957, for example, she told Robert Lowell about a poem she was working on called “Letter to Two Friends”: “It began on a rainy day and since it has done nothing but rain since we’ve been back I took it up again and this time shall try to get it done. It is rather light, though. Oh heavens, when does one begin to write the real poems?” (OA 348). At the point of writing this letter, Bishop had published two collections of poetry, the second of which had won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet even with this much “real” writing complete, she was still unsure whether she was a poet. Here is the opening section of “Letter to Two Friends”:

Heavens! It’s raining again
and the “view”
is now two weeks overdue
and the road is impassable
and after shaking all four paws
the cat retires in disgust
to the highest closet shelf,
and the dogs smell awfully like dogs,
and I’m slightly sick of myself,
and sometime during the night
the poem I was trying to write
has turned into prepositions:
ins and aboves and upons
[overs and unders and ups]—

what am I trying to do?
Change places in a canoe?

method of composition— (EAP 113)

The poem is remarkably similar to the letter, from the general complaints about rain and writing to her exclamation to the “Heavens!,” “Letter to Two Friends,” like Sylvia Plath’s 1958 poem “Poems, Potatoes,” is a great poem about not being able to write poetry. In Plath’s case, the problem is caused by a gap between the imagined poem, which is “knobbly” and real, and the finished poem, in which words muzzle and murder the original idea (CP 106). Bishop’s dilemma is both less philosophical—she always knows that poems are part unreal—and more practical. The poem she is “trying to write / has turned into prepositions: / ins and aboves and upons.” It reads more like a letter. Reading Edgar Allan Poe, not just alongside The Complete Poems but also alongside One Art: Letters and Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reveals how closely Bishop composed letters and poems and perhaps also how this closeness could sometimes mar her poetic gifts. The second stanza depicts the activity of changing genres (and perhaps changing her “method of composition”) as akin to switching “places in a canoe.” There is a lovely unwritten pun here that Bishop surely implies even if she never writes it down. If you attempt to change places in a canoe you are liable to tip the canoe and end up in the water. By trying to begin a poem like a letter she can muddy the poetic process. The “ins and aboves and upons” that are necessary to help narrative function successfully may affect the flow of a poem. In attempting to write a poem like a letter, therefore, Bishop is able to change artistic perspective, but, like changing places in a canoe, this switch involves a substantial risk, if not to her own body, then certainly to the body of her poetry.

Bishop’s canoe analogy also fits in with her general habit of depicting travel as an activity that destabilizes and unsettles human identity. In her early poem about a great-uncle’s “Large Bad Painting,” for example, the speaker concludes her analysis of the painting still unsure what brought the ships there, “commerce or contemplation” (CP 12). In “Arrival at Santos,” another boat trip leaves the speaker craving “bourbon and cigarettes” (CP 90). In her masterpiece “Questions of Travel,” a foreign landscape contains too much to take in at first glance, leaving the speaker disoriented, as if observing the world “in soft slow-motion” (CP 93). In a typical Bishop inversion, the mountains “look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled” (CP 93). The traveler who comes to see the other side of the world literally sees that world as if it were underwater or upside down. Everything foreign is blurred and out of focus, or perhaps too clear and too precise. The point is that the traveler never sees things as those at home see them. They are always objects of potential memory ready to be photographed or recorded in a notebook, never simply things with which one lives. The canoe about to tip in the unpublished poem can thus be seen as part of a sequence of poems in which Bishop depicted travel as an experience akin to being flooded, shipwrecked, or submerged underwater, an experience that obviously might lead to death and certainly to a reevaluation of selfhood. Changing places in a tipping canoe attests to the perhaps impossible task of seeing Brazil, or indeed anywhere, as if one lived there permanently and were not continually blinded by “barnacled” eyes.

To return to Berger’s original question in relation to the 1969 Complete Poems—“Was she saving better drafts for a later volume?” Perhaps Bishop was always saving drafts for later, never-to-be-finished volumes. In addition to this, as Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates, she frequently saved other kinds of writing, such as letters, that might in time have shed enough prepositions to become poems. In fact, I wonder whether Bishop ever considered any poem or poetic statement complete. As numerous critics have observed, her poems never really conclude, particularly not about the relationship of the self to the world. Nevertheless, her nonconclusions do bring her poems to an end. In “The Bight,” for example, Bishop depicts a world of “untidy activity” continuing well after the poem has finished, “awful but cheerful” (CP 61). The speaker’s messy life remains as unruly as the seascape in view of her desk. Yet she can and does impose order on the poem. “Awful but cheerful” is tonally ambiguous but poetically right. It completes the poem even as it leaves the poem and perhaps the reader feeling at sea. How can we survive living in a world “awful but cheerful”? Bishop does not answer these questions. As Gary Fountain points out, “One wonders in what place, in what nation, might the authentic self, a real but not hidden Elizabeth Bishop, reside comfortably?” (“Maple Leaf” 293). Fountain is referring to Bishop’s feeling of being at home both in and on the border between various Atlantic nations and regions, including Brazil, New England, and Nova Scotia, but one might equally apply this notion of her multiplying and at times contradictory identities to the books that have been published by her or in her name. Where is Bishop’s body of work most at home: in individual collections of poetry she cleared for publication or in the different Complete Poems prepared by others?

Vendler asserts that the 1983 Complete Poems remains the book by Elizabeth Bishop that students should be told to buy and also the book “where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known.” This is not strictly true. As the “Publisher’s Note” to the 1983 Complete Poems makes clear, Bishop did not in fact authorize all of its contents:

She would not have reprinted the seventeen poems written in her youth; she was too severe a critic of her own work…. She never reprinted “Exchanging Hats,” a poem that belongs among her best…. The background of “Pleasure Seas,” which appears here for the first time, is odd. Written in 1939, it was accepted by Harper’s Bazaar but never printed; the sole surviving copy was found among her papers. In the group of occasional poems, there are four which she enclosed in letters to Marianne Moore in the mid-thirties. (xi)

Robert Giroux and other scholars presumably spent time at Vassar College looking through Bishop’s letters and papers to locate these poems. Given the amount of new material in Edgar Allan Poe, itself a selection of 3,500 pages of Bishop’s writing now held at Vassar, one can see why a proper assessment of the drafts and notebooks was not possible in the early 1980s. Bishop’s estate must have thought it best to publish a Complete Poems as quickly as possible to maintain and strengthen her reputation. This volume led to important reassessments of her writing by poets like Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, and Adrienne Rich, not to mention critical essays by scholars like Vendler herself. But it is only a version of Bishop’s Complete Poems, not the definitive one. The 1983 Complete Poems does not even reproduce the individual volumes of poetry as Bishop intended. Questions of Travel (1965), for example, was originally published with the short story “In the Village,” but not here. Geography III (1976) also included Bishop’s translation of Octavio Paz’s poem “Objects & Apparitions,” but The Complete Poems exiles it to a section titled “Translations” at the very back of the book. While Edgar Allan Poe may be the most obvious example of Bishop’s wishes being ignored, it is thus not the first or only occasion of this happening.

Vendler’s reference to Bishop as a “famous perfectionist” is not above criticism either. This idea took hold long ago and is now present in nearly every critical assessment of her work. For Adam Kirsch, her “insistence on perfection … makes Elizabeth Bishop not just a cherishable poet, but an exemplary one” (4). Gillian White thinks “perfectionism” to be “synonymous with her name” (8). But what does it mean to be a perfectionist, and do perfectionist poets, even ones as good as Bishop, always get it right?

Bishop is perhaps not always the best judge of her poetry. This is not the easiest thing to write. It is perhaps one of the last taboos among Bishop critics. In fact, most reviewers of Edgar Allan Poe begin by asserting the exact opposite. According to Charles Simic: “Unlike just about every other poet whose collected poems are bound to contain embarrassments, she never published a bad poem” (17). I do not believe this is true. I think critics ignore poems like “Wading at Wellfleet,” “Varick Street,” “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,” and “Night City,” to give an example from each of the main four collections, because they appear imperfect in comparison with poems like “Roosters,” “At the Fishhouses,” “Sestina,” and “One Art.” For me, Bishop’s poetry is complex and varied enough not to need perfection as its defining feature. In fact, I think comparing Edgar Allan Poe and The Complete Poems reveals how often Bishop kept back some remarkably innovative writing. Put simply, she did not always publish her best or most finished poems as has previously been assumed. Sometimes she kept such poems to herself. To give a few random examples, North & South (1946) would certainly have been enriched by the inclusion of the surrealist poem written in Spain, “In a Room,” its treatment of love less negative had the literary climate and her own temperament permitted her to publish “It is marvellous to wake up together.” A Cold Spring (1955), arguably Bishop’s weakest collection, would also have benefited from the publication of some of the Key West poems as I have argued elsewhere (“Elizabeth Bishop’s Bone Key Poems” 37–40).

Bishop was not alone in refusing to publish poems that now seem unarguably part, not just of her oeuvre, but of the twentieth-century poetic canon. As Alice Quinn’s notes to Edgar Allan Poe show, poetry editors were just as culpable (Quinn’s own magazine, the New Yorker, rejected several stunning poems) and may even have strengthened Bishop’s self-imposed ban on certain subjects for poetry. She appeared particularly vulnerable to adverse criticism at the beginning of her career in the late 1930s and the 1940s. The central section of Edgar Allan Poe covers little more than a decade of Bishop’s writing life (1937–50) but almost one-third of the poetry collected here. As a general rule, Quinn appears to let very good poems speak for themselves without much or sometimes any editorial comment. The beautiful love poem “Close close all night,” recently anthologized by James Fenton, is dated to the 1960s with a note on its origins as a wedding gift to a friend, but with little further critical commentary. “For Grandfather” and “A mother made of dress-goods” are equally important poems in regard to Bishop’s Nova Scotian childhood, in particular her relationships with her maternal relatives, but again Quinn keeps her editorial notes to a minimum. Fragmentary drafts or slight poems, on the other hand, are normally supported by at least two or three pages of elaborate explanation. Quinn implicitly acknowledges that the former group can make their own way in the world; the latter require some apology and assistance. “Key West,” “The Soldier and the Slot-Machine,” “The walls went on for years & years …” and “In the golden early morning …” are some of the most intriguing drafts in the book but the notes provide very little information on them. “The walls went on for years & years,” for instance, looks like a good first draft of a poem in the main section of the book, although the notes reveal that it is actually only a selection from “thirteen pages of closely related drafts” with “not one word … crossed out” (EAP 281). Quinn admits to having “no idea where the poem as represented fits on the spectrum of drafted material” (281). She could at least indicate why these lines have been chosen above others. My own transcription of the drafts suggests that they are not necessarily the most accomplished. As Frances Dickey points out in relation to Quinn’s annotations to the poem “Villanelle,” her notes are both “indispensable as context for the poems” while at the same time giving “one the sense of being at the editor’s mercy: what did the next page after this poem in the notebook look like?” (81). If the aim of a book like this is to give readers an insight into the composition process—the unedited stage in a poem’s creation—why edit out evidence of the poet’s method of composition?

This brings me to what I think is one of the most important yet unacknowledged elements of Edgar Allan Poe, the presence not of Elizabeth Bishop but of Alice Quinn. Quinn is best known as poetry editor of the New Yorker (Paul Muldoon replaced her in 2007) and as executive director of the Poetry Society of America. I believe that in years to come she will be as known, if not better known, as the editor of this book. Quinn worked on Edgar Allan Poe for more than a decade, and she was also involved in editing and selecting material for other Bishop publications, including One Art. According to the acknowledgments at the back of the book, Robert Giroux first had the idea of asking Quinn “to assemble” the collection (EAP 365). Quinn in turn thanks William Logan for “preparing a manuscript” (365), various Bishop scholars for helping her date and describe the poems, and a number of archivists and librarians for guiding her through Bishop’s papers. In the main notes, she also thanks many of Bishop’s friends for safeguarding and in one case transcribing drafts and poems that ...