Rating: - the portrait of the artist as a conscientious wordsmith
Shampooing With Liz:
Elizabeth Bishop's Personal Accountability

18 April 2007

Of course, you will discuss his poems--
but talk about his beauty, too,
the delicate beauty we loved.
--C. P. Cavafy
"For Ammonis, Who Died At Twenty-Nine, In 610,"
from The Collected Poems Of C. P. Cavafy:
A New Translation (2006), trans. Aliki Barnstone
_________

Their constitutional inability to talk about gay in any context at all--the editors were men's men--precluded even a pretense of compassion.
--Paul Monette
"Getting Covered," from Last Watch Of The Night: Essays Too Personal And Otherwise (1994)

_________

`Deny deny deny'
-- Elizabeth Bishop
"Roosters," from North & South (1946)

Elizabeth Bishop's complete poetry, that small mound amounting to no more than 300 pages, contains a kind of grandeur and "natural heroism"--a veritable Kilimanjaro in the form of verse. Shy, one-of-a-kind and not very prolific (though she was a prodigious letter writer), Bishop's poetry is remarkable for its sensitivity, wit and a forceful reticence. It is this last quality that I want to discuss in detail.

Against the backdrop of Confessionalism--a literary "movement" with Robert Lowell, a close associate of Bishop's, at the helm--Elizabeth Bishop draws into her personal and unique psyche and a life rife with travels to give relief to a body of work replete with deep feelings. One characteristic that distinguishes Bishop from the confessional poets is, although intimate and personal, her poetry is not marked with messy autobiographical facts that oftentimes colored the works of, say, Lowell 's. Bishop, however, does reveal, to my mind, the accidents that make up her autobiography in subtler ways.

Chief of these accidental facts is her homosexuality. Although Bishop did not care to align herself with sexually, racially and class-based categorizations, especially when it came to her poetry, Bishop is one of our poets who is truly conscious of these issues. (I don't blame her. Trust me--I've had my fill of the R.G.C. [Race Gender Class] police-teachers in college so I understand Bishop's stance.) In light of this, a poet worth her salt naturally knows that every word counts and a wordsmith is instinctively aware of the effects of his employment of a word or phrase--both are conscious and conscientious in their "insidious intent," in their word's worth. And a look at the witty ways evident in her first two books of poems (North & South and A Cold Spring) demonstrate clearly her stealth design.

I found five instances where Bishop employs the word "queer"--

"He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers" ("The Man-Moth")

"queer cupids of all persons getting up" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"`But that queer sea looks made of wood,
half-shining, like a driftwood sea..." ("The Monument")

"On the east steps the Air Force Band
in uniforms of Air Force blue
is playing hard and loud, but--queer--
the music doesn't quite come through." ("View Of The Capitol
From The Library Of Congress)

"and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves" ("Letter To N.Y.")

--two instances of the word "gay"--

"but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay." ("A Cold Spring")

"And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not be his green gay eyes." (`III / While Someone Telephones'
from "Four Poems")

--two instances of the word "flit" (I first encountered this word and its "shadow side" (to borrow a funny and smart term Anne Carson uses to describe her modern-day Geryon in her celebrated Autobiography Of Red), from reading The Catcher In The Rye, a book with characters trying to come to grips with their sexuality--

"Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him." ("The Man-Moth")

"Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back" ("Cirque d'Hiver")

--two instances of the term "invert" in its many forms (a consultation with the dictionary reveals the fabulous etymology of this word, with its common meaning of being upside-down, but also an archaic "sexual condition" in the field of psychology [Freud employed this word in his diagnosis again and again], and its Latin root vertere meaning to turn--or, in effect, poetry!)--

"the city grows down into his open eyes
inverted and distorted" ("Love Lies Sleeping")

"So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right" ("Insomnia")

There must be many other examples where Bishop accounts for her English.

In a recent Writers' Colloquium at The New School, during the question-and-answer period, Paul Muldoon talks about the ways a poet is held liable for the words he uses. His example: If one were to use a word like "skunk", one had better know that word's history.

Though not forthcoming about her personal life, there is no denying that Elizabeth Bishop has done her share of etymological-archeological legwork. On the surface, some of the words she uses, in their various contexts, have a direct meaning to that context. I hope the exhibition above is but a small sample of the poet being aware of not the surfaces but also the multitude of layers a word wears.

Of course, we shall talk about her poems--the beauty, the delicacy that constitute her body of work. But if we are at once deliberative and open, perhaps we may derive an alternative--no, an additional--insight into the complexities of the poems we so cherished?