Elizabeth Bishop

So in an early meeting, we got one book that was sort of told through the life of a writer.

And Raymond's like, it's always, you know, Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath or someone like that.

I think he just said, he was like, just stop it.

And I was like, I was dying inside because I was like, I had just done this very uncharacteristic thing, which was to be kind of like shot into the universe after writing an LRB essay about Sylvia Plath, where I read all of her work, all of her letters, all of her stories, all of her fiction.

I think each line of the couplet, it's almost like the two legs and sarcoma, I think, often starts in the leg.

And that in part that you pointed out makes me think of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop who would say things and qualify them.

And it was kind of through the qualification, actually, that they would become more impactful, more intense.

We, I think, hear the ways in which there's an impulse in our culture to want to see suffering as something that leads us to a kind of, you know, better self, right? We love to, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

That ultimately gives you populism.

It doesn't give you radicalism, right? And, you know, there's a way of looking at the revolution in art from 1850 to 1950 alongside the revolution in politics and seeing them as parallel but not identical processes, right? And it's like, yeah, like I think that what Mallarmé did with language and what Elizabeth Bishop did with old sonnet forms is important as fucking storming the Winter Palace.

But, you know.

No, I mean, look, I'm on the same page, obviously.

And he picked up the book while we were talking on the phone and started reading to me a very famous villanelle, which is a structure of poetry, called One Art.

by Elizabeth Bishop.

It's a very famous poem and writing about the art of losing.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

You need to be able to see and articulate what you're looking at and take it apart, put it back together.

But that, as Elizabeth Bishop said, only comes after And it's that what I found with my students was that I was much more often encouraging them to go back to the back of their head and reconnect with the imperative that drove the poem in the first place.

I do believe like Coleridge that we're moving between more than usual emotion, more than usual discipline.

And it's easier and safer to stay on the discipline end of the dial, perhaps, than it is to return to and learn how to hold the poem and clarify the poem while keeping that live sense of where it first came from.

This is probably a very silly question, but there seems to me such a paradox about difficulty.

I'm a painter, and often the paintings that look simplest are the most difficult.

And the poems that I love most often appear simple, but I know are incredibly often fiendishly difficult, like Elizabeth Bishop writing The Moose, and it takes her 17 years and she has it on the wall and she changes one word here and there and it's then on the fridge and then it's in Brazil and then it's somewhere else.

I'm still thinking about The Moose.

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

Okay, welcome to part four of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

We are partway through First Death in Nova Scotia.

We just finished the second stanza.