Elizabeth Bishop — On a Passage from the poem “Poem”

I’m often fascinated by the composition of poems, but especially in Bishop’s case because there were only 101 published during her life and she was reputed to spend many weeks, months, or years on each of them. “Poem” has always been a favorite of mine (she remarked when sending it to The New Yorker: “Here is an old-fashioned umpty-umpty nostalgic poem that perhaps you’ll be able to use…”) and rereading it again one June night I became wonderstruck in a completely different way, especially concerning the last twenty-line stanza. Before that point in the poem, Bishop had meted out her descriptions of a small landscape painting by a distant relative in Nova Scotia:

It must be Nova Scotia; only there does one see abled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown. The other houses, the bits that show, are white. Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple -that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground a water meadow with some tiny cows, two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows; two minuscule white geese in the blue water, back-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick. Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow, fresh-squiggled from the tube. The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky below the steel-gray storm clouds. (They were the artist’s specialty.) A specklike bird is flying to the left. Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?

And then she details the conjunctions between their visions, as Bonnie Costello writes, “The little sketch is valued not for its autonomy and mastery over time, but for its power to loosen chronology and link us to the past and future.” The final twenty lines cement this and could also be taken as an ontology of art, the crux — one usually doesn’t get a snippet of art criticism in the midst of a poem, unless it’s by Marianne Moore, an idol of Bishop. It’s these twenty lines that did so much damage, as if I’d never read them with the grit and gristle that my eyes would acquire after I first learnt them. They almost had the visual/aural odor of scripture. The most plain style scripture imaginable, but also the truest and most stunning. A good friend snarkily declared on Twitter that Bishop was not a straightforward writer of subjectivity (though he knew I liked subjective writers) and the end of “Poem” attests to that. After all, why is this poem about a painting and a connection to family named “Poem”? A shrewd move — it is its own ontology. A poem is a few complicated things — or, as Helen Vendler writes: “If it is true from one point of view that a poem is a wasps’ nest (suggesting the human capacity to admire a perfectly beautiful, perfectly useless, petrified and eviscerated structure), it is equally true, from another point of view, that a poem is a voice participating in a very long and very old conversation about life.”

I thought I should re-examine my relationship to Bishop and started reading the poems which I have been circling back to every three years or so for the last fifteen. I also pulled out William Gass’s fine uncollected essay on her in Harpers as a kind of rare amethyst — the essay vying with the poem as a work of art. It reminded me of the time I interviewed him, a day after he participated in a tribute to her at Wash U, reading “The Moose” out loud — this was also a few months after the essay was published. Of the poem “In the Waiting Room,” he writes: “Elizabeth Bishop the person located her poem in a dentist’s office because that’s where it happened; Elizabeth Bishop the poet put it in a dentist’s office because the mouth is where screams come from, and the office is where such screams might be publicly heard.”

Time and again, there is a broken line between Bishop the poet, Bishop the person, and the speaker of each poem. Critics try to reel all three in at once but it’s impossible. Perhaps, on earlier readings, I didn’t grasp what the last twenty lines had to do with the poem itself, or how it broke down the experience of art. The intricacy of the stanza: first, the relations to the landscape in Nova Scotia, the “literal small backwater” and how the two distant relations looked at it. Then their visions coinciding: “one look, two looks,” art copying from life and then the visions of it on the Bristol board, which she eulogizes, in referring to its details: “the little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust. Not much.” Our visions are free. And “earthly trust”? That is our faith in the physical world.

What a gentle voice Bishop’s speakers have (“The Waiting Room”: “…you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth…”) and though she never let herself be included in feminist anthologies, that never negligent touch could only be female…I would think. In examining the words, we have the lulling of the l’s:

this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided-”visions” is too serious a word-our looks, two looks:

Then:

art “copying from life” and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?

How can life and the memory of it so compressed turn into each other? But how could it be any other way? This seems to happen off the page in a netherworld, even if it is common. The two are compressed and cramped.

But then that too aw-shucks line, as if coming from a small-town preacher: “the little that we get for free.” You try that line in thousands of poems and first-person short stories (it could bury itself in a novel and be forgiven) and it would come off the wrong way — soupy and snarly, even smiting, but it comes from this particular “I,” this Elizabeth — that is, “Elizabeth” the speaker of the poem — not Elizabeth Bishop, the poet. Do we think of Bishop, the poet, and her biography, full of all those ups and downs, drinking and then drying out — do we feel that that would matter in today’s “hyper-conflagration of author and work” time? “Filling Station” ends with “Somebody loves us all” — another one of those major pronouncements. A didactic voice one could argue…but soon that argument dissolves and one is left with the stippled lines, the painstakingly salty pattern that Bishop, the poet, has poured into the wound that was the life that invented these lines, these turns of phrases. Again, why “Poem” as title? Vendler, again: “a poem is a voice participating in a very long and very old conversation about life.” This very old conversation is here in this poem that treats memory, aging, love or unlove — and then she defines that little that we get for free as “About the size of our abidance / along with theirs…” Abidance: “the act of complying with, adhering to, or remaining steadfast in accordance with laws, rules, or customs.” “Abidance” is the key word — we get as much as we abide (this doesn’t apply to politicians) and then the sylvan ending: “theirs” being the cows, the iris, the water, the elms, and the geese. In this ending she exemplifies the act of painting and creativity (“Poem”) with the Bristol board and how art doubles life: “Which is which?” — exactly. Costello:

The work of art establishes a repository for memories. In it one finds the place depicted, the painting’s own making and history, and even the particular history that brought it serendipitously to this threshold of contemplation.

It’s a Proustian experience — the poem “Poem” expresses us and art by making us and our history its inside and out. Each time we experience art we re-experience everything associated with our lived and imaginative experience — these are the “parts” no one can take away, that can’t be duplicated by AI, because, to invert Shakespeare, We think what we feel, not what we ought to display. Bishop understood art as uncannily as the vaunted two names in this paragraph (she even once criticized the Bard for his description of a tree in As You Like It while Marianne Moore’s poetry was much more precise) and she did so in a most delicate and counterintuitively unsubjective manner — that little that was her abidance.