Four (thousand) holes

Sorry about the silence, I have been whelmed in deeper gulphs than formerly... (3. and 4. below are from today's feed; they reminded me of 1. and 2., there are probably other instances of this conceit out there...)

1. Derek Walcott, "The Schooner Flight" (I'm quoting more of this than necessary, I know, but I like it a fair bit):

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning grey in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbour sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
"Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard",
but the bitch look through me like I was dead.

2. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Man-Moth":

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.

3. Louis MacNeice, "Star-gazer":

it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky

4. Anon, quoted by Guy Davenport:

Carnation milk is the best in the land.
I’ve got a can of it here in my hand —
No teats to pull, no hay to pitch:
You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

Elizabeth Bishop on rioting

I googled the first line this morning and was surprised to find no search results; surely I can't be the first person to think of this particular parody? I apologize for the badness of it, I am not as patient nor as competent as I was five years ago so it is very half-assed/hurried. Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting how closely one could follow the original...

Another Art

The art of looting isn’t hard to master.
Shop-windows all seem built with the intent
to be smashed, so their breaking’s no disaster.

Loot something every day. Accept the fluster
of fleeing cops, of nights unsafely spent.

The art of looting isn’t hard to master.

Then practice looting farther, looting faster:
cafes, and homes, and where it was you meant
to drink next. None of these will bring disaster.

I snagged some marble busts (or were they plaster?),
destroyed some churches and a monument:
the art of looting isn’t hard to master.

I knifed some bitches, stole their shit; I glassed a
photographer or two. In the event
they tased me, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even stuck in jail (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of looting isn’t hard to master,
though it may end (spray-paint it!) in disaster.

(with apologies to Elizabeth Bishop and a vague nod to Dice)

Poets as vending machines

I like this conceit from Michael Hofmann's piece about Bishop in the new LRB:

Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball – sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, like ‘An acre of cold white spray … Dancing happily by itself’. Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell; it has something parodic and clanking about it, as the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets. Lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it isn’t demoralising, somehow doesn’t affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.

[Also cf. "little worlds made cunningly."] The review is otherwise very good (I always want to describe these reviews as "awful but cheerful" -- sadly the tag never fits). As Hofmann says, for instance, "Things in Bishop are anarchically themselves. Her shoes clack in different keys." And "One Art" is indeed "a poem so stifled in its compressed clamour I’ve never cared for it." Marina's favorite line about "a mind thinking" makes its inevitable appearance. And this is really fodder for a later, more thought-out post, but I was intrigued by Hofmann's remark about the pronoun thing:

Bishop is [...] a poet of ‘eye’ and not ‘I’, or even of ‘eye-and-tears’ and not ‘I’, and also of ‘we’ and not ‘I’. Both the ‘eye’ and the ‘we’ are ways of not saying ‘I’, of getting around it or playing it down. (It’s not that Bishop never says ‘I’, but she seems almost to ration it, in a militant modesty, to no more than its statistically probable occurrence among the other pronouns.) She makes that very change, movingly, in a fragment called ‘A Short, Slow Life’:

We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows & elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.

Originally, that read ‘I lived in a pocket of Time’ (and ‘tumbled me out’) – a little nightmare of scale and vulnerability and the end of cosiness, alongside the pocket plays on ‘close’ and ‘seam’ and ‘fluff’. But no, that wouldn’t do, too much pathos, too much drama of self, too much contemplation of the ungainly blunt fingers (what is their rude gesture?), and so the ‘I’ is scratched out and becomes a ‘we’, and the poem loses its identity and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.

Not clear on the extent of Bishop's interest in/acceptance of Puritanism, but this reminds me among other things of Frank Kermode on Cowper's "Castaway" (in The Uses of Error):

Calvinism suited this poet's dementia almost exactly; but it was not only mad but theologically incorrect for him to suppose himself singled out from the rest of humanity for both election and reprobation.

PS Hart Crane as claw crane? 

"No -- seals do"

Calista's tumblr is really quite marvelous, consider, for instance, this new post, quoted in full:

W. H. Auden (from “Shorts”)

  Many creatures make nice noises,
  but none, it seems,
  are moved by music.

in the margin, E. Bishop:

   no — seals are

[ed.] The context here is Bishop singing to the seal in "At the Fishhouses":

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.

Moving snouts

One of my favorite Bishop poems:

The Prodigal
Elizabeth Bishop

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten, the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid his pints behind a two-by-four),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red;
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern -- like the sun, going away --
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make his mind up to go home.

---

Misc. other. 1. While looking for moving snouts, I came upon this Youtube video. Potentially NSFW. 2. Also pig-related is this amazing correction in Australia's Morning Bulletin (The Media Blog via Language Log):

Bishop centenary linkage

The Elizabeth Bishop centenary is on Tuesday, and twitter has been abuzz with Bishop linkage. So here are two of Bishop's translations of stories by Clarice Lispector (via Jenny McPhee via the indispensable seventydys on twitter). Here, via Bookslut, is a Bishop short story at the Library of America. (I wish she'd written more!) And, at the same place, a post by Lloyd Schwartz that quotes that beautiful late unpublished aubade of hers:

Breakfast Song

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I've grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it's true.
It's just the common case;
there's nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.


---


Despite my fondness for her work I remain puzzled by Bishop's popularity and, as Schwartz says, centrality in American literary culture. Her direct influence seems to me limited to two types of poet -- the maximalist New York school descendants who picked up her habit of writing superficially inconsequential poems, and formalists of all kinds. Perhaps both schools are over-represented in academia/mags? The poems themselves, I think, are more uneven than is generally admitted; even the very best ones, like "At the Fishhouses" and the "Concordance" poem, have some clunky transitions, and far too many have an annoying habit of going transcendental on you at the end. ("The Fish" is the canonical example here.) This is one of many traits Bishop shares with Philip Larkin, another anti-confessional perfectionist. Perhaps what is most interesting about Bishop is the peculiar relation of her poems to speech: she is like an amorphous George Herbert at times, a voice almost defined by quietness and reticence; there is never much rhetorical drive, the climaxes have to be processed higher up in the brain than in most other writers. The only remotely similar writer in this sense is Stevens, but his reticence comes off differently because of the Christmas-tree plenitude of the language... None of this seems likely to help someone become popular, though.

Addenda. 1. Cynthia Haven has a centenary post. 2. Someone pointed out on twitter that superbowl can be parsed as superb owl.