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

Bill Manhire and a very long cat

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” – Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.

I’m a huge fan of the work of Bill Manhire, New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate and unquestionably the leading New Zealand poet of his generation. Manhire was Poet in Residence at StAnza 2009 here in Scotland and is published in the UK by Carcanet, his most recent collection Lifted came out in 2007. I am shamefully ignorant of all but the most visible of Kiwi writers, and I’m sure I’m not alone here; very little poetry of the antipodean variety makes it to our shores. Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, James Baxter and Auckland-born Fleur Adcock all achieved international acclaim, but there are few contemporary New Zealand poets that have enjoyed similar reach. Manhire’s poetry has made the leap, and deservedly so, it's playful and poignant with an immediacy and availability that draws you in and holds you tight. His writing has a transparency, a smoothness of expression and lightness of touch that is very accessible, he’s not a poet to rage and burn, but he smoulders quietly, even insidiously. I first came across him when I was at a lecture Marina Warner gave at the Edinburgh Book Festival a year or two ago, promoting her really wonderful book Phantasmagoria. She quoted Manhire’s poem ‘Kevin’, the final poem in Lifted, and it’s stayed in my mind indelibly. Have a read here.

Warner was connecting Manhire’s poem to ideas about the emergence of radio – of wireless technology – and the early twentieth century precoccupation with spiritualism, something I’m really interested in. The disembodied voices from the wireless seemed to come from a mysterious “ether”, linking us to a larger, supernatural realm and tapping into the late Victorian longing for a contact with the spiritual world, with something transcendent. Here’s Susan J. Douglas in Listening In:

Wireless fanned long-standing fantasies and, from its earliest introduction, evoked psychic metaphors. It worked, wrote the New York Herald simply, “like magic.” Being able to speak to others through the air in an electromagnetic voice “would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,” concluded one writer in 1902. It seemed the technical equivalent of telepathy. Popular Science Monthly observed that, through wireless, “the nerves of the whole world [were], so to speak, being bound together.”

It might seem strange now, accustomed as we are to technologies that operate invisibly, but if you really stop and think about the way we are connected to each other – by the internet, by mobile phones, making distance irrelevant – there is much to wonder at. “Any sufficiently advanced technology” said Arthur C. Clarke, "is indistinguishable from magic.”

In ‘Kevin’ Manhire wonders where the dead go, and sees the faraway dark spaces within the “heavy radio” as a good a place as any. There’s an eeriness, an uneasiness to that “dark, celestial glow” of the dial, even as it connects us to those distant voices clamouring in space, giving a primal sense of a bond to “the cave, the hive”. It’s a poem about mortality, and uncertainty, both consolatory and disquieting. The idea of being suddenly ‘lifted’, by death, or as a child by parents “we barely know”, is unsettling, but there’s also a comforting side to that image, the child trusting the hands that lift them. There’s a sense in the poem of that longing to be connected to others, part of “the cave, the hive”, but there’s also something more than a little terrifying in that uncertainty and mystery of the far away places beyond us, and the promise that one day “we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio.”

The idea of the radio as a connection to a spiritual realm isn’t a new one, it preoccupied the Modernists and shook up their writing (see the fragmentary, cacophonous style of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Virginia's Woolf's The Waves, Ezra Pound's Cantos and have a read of Kipling’s short story 'Wireless'). I like the idea of poems as voices in the dark, ways of connecting with kindred spirits. A last word from Manhire, interviewed in theage.com.au: “I certainly believe there's a big universe out there and everything that's ever broadcast on the radio is travelling through space – and books and poems are part of that. There are ways in which we survive our own endings.”

And a bonus, here's Bill Manhire reading 'Love Poem', the first poem from his first collection:



Download mp3. Buy Collected Poems here.

//Explore some more radio poems here. // The Scottish Poetry Library website has a great selection of NZ poets introduced by their Scottish contemporaries over here. //

Photo: Bricolage.108.