“Poetry: High praise for Elizabeth Bishop's artistry and humanity - Oregonian”

Poetry: High praise for Elizabeth Bishop's artistry and humanity - Oregonian

Posted: 24 Dec 2010 01:39 PM PST

Published: Friday, December 24, 2010, 1:39 PM

All year I've been highlighting the ongoing dialogue among poets in English from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Today's column will mark the final entry in this series. Beginning with Philip Sidney and George Herbert, moving through John Milton and Anne Bradstreet and Alexander Pope, then to William Wordsworth and John Keats, to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, we have watched poets talk back and forth across the centuries about the meaning and role of the imagination and poetry.

We've seen: Philip Sidney's poems suffused with the heart's desires, George Herbert's poems about the physical pleasures of faith, Alexander Pope's poems about society's foibles, William Wordsworth's poems about the emotional centers of experience, John Keats' poems about the perfection of art, Walt Whitman's manifest cosmic ranges and Emily Dickinson's fierce domestic stances. Last month, we saw Wallace Stevens write about the supreme fictions of the imagination. This month's poet, Elizabeth Bishop, writes about the sturdy facts of human existence.

One side for art, the other for life. One side for the dominance of language, the other for the dominance of experience. One side for responding directly to humanity, the other for inventing a mask to vivify human consciousness. These dichotomies detail the give and take poets have engaged in for hundreds of years and across multiple generations.

American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) falls on the side of responding directly to humanity. She has become one of the most widely praised poets of our era as a chronicler of the fusion of self and culture. Critic David Orr could not contain his praise in 2008 when he wrote in The New York Times: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces -- Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray -- but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop. That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan -- none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, 'a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.'"

Where Wallace Stevens' method is to be inventive, Bishop's is to be attentive. She never once affects a rhetorical flourish, never affects a voice that is anything but conversational, never confesses the chatter of her life. Instead, she writes with distilled, shy discretion.

She is a poet of restraint, subtlety and manners -- so unlike Alexander Pope's crassness and Walt Whitman's bombast and even, at times, Emily Dickinson's sharp-tongued retorts. She is a poet who holds back -- holds back herself, the forces of nature and the burdens of her times. In this sense, she is more like George Herbert striving for poise in the face of spiritual chaos or William Wordsworth offering the insights into the "spots of time / Which with distinct pre-eminence" enliven and define our consciousnesses.

Below is the opening stanza of her masterpiece, "At the Fishhouses." Bishop's best poems run long. The entire poem is printed at oregonlive.com. Notice the immersion into fact, the trust in knowledge and the sharpness, clarity and fine filigree-made imagery of a poet in the thrall of what exists right in front of her eyes.

-- David Biespiel

Excerpt from "At the Fishhouses"

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

--Elizabeth Bishop

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Fiction

Jumat, 24 Desember 2010