Elizabeth Bishop and experiencing poetry

When Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) taught at Harvard in the 1970s, she insisted that poems should never be interpreted, rejecting the close reading techniques of New Criticism, prevalent at the time (and still going strong!). Dana Gioia has described how her students would have to memorise a poem before talking about its meaning:

To her, the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense…She wanted us to see poems, not ideas. Poetry was the particular way the world could be talked about only in verse…the medium was the message. One did not interpret poetry, one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary.

Well, I hope that one out of three will do. I completely agree with this idea of ‘experiencing’ poetry, the immediacy of it, the images it conjures up, the way it feels on your tongue.

In ‘The Map’ (click to read) - the first poem in her Complete Poems - Bishop likens the poet to the cartographer, the map-maker creating an image of the real world with his ‘delicate colors.’ Although Adrienne Rich found this poem “intellectualized to the point of obliquity”, I think Bishop is really talking about reading, and the relationship between writer, reader and text. As the poet looks at the map she tries to read it, to interpret it, imagining the excitement of the printer, wondering if the land is “tugging at the sea from under,” and if the countries can choose their own colours. “Topography displays no favourites,” she declares. For Bishop the map-maker, like the poet, must simply describe what is there, and yet must make reality comprehensible, shaping it through words and form.

In the last lines of the gorgeous ‘At the Fishhouses’ (the first poem of Bishop’s I read, and one that I still think is her best) Bishop describes “cold dark deep” water as a “transmutation of fire” and says

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world

Here, knowledge is both “flowing, and flown”. The world is too vast and mysterious to be reflected in what Bishop would later call ‘the geographical mirror’, and knowledge cannot be captured or shaped into words. The poet’s – and the reader’s – purpose is simply to experience.

For Bishop what is important is – to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens – not ideas about the thing but the thing itself. Seeing, for Bishop, is the poet’s work, her leading purpose, it is enough just to notice and record, and in this way 'the thing' is illuminated, is really seen. Writing to Robert Lowell at one point about his poems, she could have been speaking about her own:

They…have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch…when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art…that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.

Audio goodness...

The Fish / read by Elizabeth Bishop

Read it here. Download mp3. Buy Complete Poems here.

Here's George Szirtes on 'At the Fishhouses' // Read more by Elizabeth Bishop here.

Photo by edlyytam