Apartment in Leme -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1863) Apartment in Leme 1. Off to the left, those islands, named and renamed so many times now everyone's forgotten their names, are sleeping. Pale rods of light, the morning's implements, lie in among them tarnishing already, just like our knives and forks. Because we live at your open mouth, oh Sea, with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold, like in the fairy tale. Not only do you tarnish our knives and forks - regularly the silver coffee-pot goes into dark, rainbow-edged eclipse; the windows blur and mirrors are wet to touch. Custodia complains, and then you frizz her straightened, stiffened hair. Sometimes you embolden, sometimes bore. You smell of codfish and old rain. Homesick, the salt weeps in the salt-cellars. Breathe in. Breathe out. We're so accustomed to those sounds we only hear them in the night. Then they come closer but you keep your distance. 2. It's growing lighter. On the beach two men get up from shallow, newspaper-lined graves. A third sleeps on. His coverlet is corrugated paper, a flattened box. One running dog, two early bathers, stop dead in their tracks; detour. Wisps of fresh green stick to your foaming lips like those on horses' lips. The sand's bestrewn: white lilies, broken stalks, white candles with wet, blackened wicks, and green glass bottles for white alcohol meant for the goddess meant to come last night. (But you've emptied them all.) 3. Perhaps she came, at that. It was so clear! And you were keeping quiet: roughened, greeny-black, scaly as one of those corroded old bronze mirrors in all the world's museums (How did the ancients ever see anything in them?) incapable of reflecting even the biggest stars. One cluster, bright, astringent as white currants, hung from the Magellanic Clouds above you and the beach and its assorted lovers and worshippers, almost within their reach if they had noticed. The candles flickered. Worshippers, in white, holding hands, singing, walked in to you waist-deep. The lovers lay in the sand, embraced. Far out, saffron flares of five invisible fishing boats wobbled and hitched along, farther than the stars, weaker, and older. 4. But for now the sun. Slowly, reluctantly, you're letting go of it; it slowly rises; metallic; two-dimensional. You sigh, and sigh again. We live at your open mouth, with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold like in the fairy tale no - the legend. -- Elizabeth Bishop

Another glorious poem about the sea.

In the fragments of an essay collected as part of the newly released Edgar
Allan Poe and the Juke Box [1] (from which this poem is also taken), Bishop
writes that three qualities she admires most in poetry are Accuracy,
Spontaneity and Mystery. I can't say this poem is particularly mysterious,
nor does it feel particularly spontaneous to me (though there are a few nice
surprises). But it is accurate, undeniably so.

Bishop, a former protegee of Marianne Moore, has a lovely eye for detail and
her images have that rare quality of being both instantly recognisable and
dizzyingly beautiful ("Pale rods of light, the morning's implements,/ lie in
among them tarnishing already,/just like our knives and forks."). Reading
this poem, you can picture the scene perfectly - first the house near the
sea, its damp, ubiquitious presence; then the pre-dawn stroll on the beach;
then the luminous flashback to the previous night, with its hushed,
flickering imagery, and finally the sun rising and the return to the
everyday singled by the repetition of that second stanza.

It's a humbling thought that Bishop considered so lovely a poem unworthy of
being published.

Aseem

[1] A collection of unpublished (often fragmentary) poems and prose pieces
written by Bishop, put together by Alice Quinn and released recently by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sestina -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem sent in by Mark Penney

(Poem #1799) Sestina September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. She thinks that her equinoctial tears and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to the grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove. She cuts some bread and says to the child, It’s time for tea now; but the child is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother hangs up the clever almanac on its string. Birdlike, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know, says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother. But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove, the little moons fall down like tears from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed the child has carefully placed in the front of the house. Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house. -- Elizabeth Bishop

I was amazed to discover that Minstrels had never run this poem.

Like it says, it’s a sestina; Minstrels has run a couple before, notably the
awesome Shrinking Lonesome Sestina by Miller Williams [Poem #904]. There’s an
explanation of the form there; if that’s not enough for you, you could also
try googling "sestina", which will send you to all kinds of sites that’ll
have you writing them in no time.

I love this one because it uses the form so gloriously.  Look at the six key
words:  house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears.  Five homey,
mundane, comforting, cozy words, and "tears".  That choice right there tells
you that there’s something going on beneath the surface, that not all is
right with the world of grandmother and child and crayons and tea.  After
the second stanza, the tears aren’t even literal, but we’re still seeing
other things (the rain, the tea, the moon figures in the almanac, seeds)
likened to tears.  There’s an all-pervasive sadness there, even though the
surface imagery of the poem is so very cheery and homey.

And the relationship between grandmother and child is captured so
beautifully, too.

Classic Elizabeth Bishop; you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else.

--Mark

The Fish -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem sent in by Melanie Albrecht

(Poem #1780) The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of its mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --- the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly --- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. --- It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip --- if you could call it a lip --- grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels --- until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. -- Elizabeth Bishop

I just love this poem. I love how she describes the fish without overt
romanticism, but it comes across as beautiful anyway. The fish is homely,
his skin hangs in strips, and he is infested with sea-lice. His eyes turn
towards her, but she doesn't anthropomorphise it: it's just like tipping an
"object toward the light". But still, his ugly skin is like wallpaper with
roses, and his eyes are backed with tinfoil! Lovely.

Through the poem, she moves from describing the fish's physical presence to
seeing human-like virtues in him. The fish is venerable, sullen, grim, wise,
and victorious. His victory over circumstance fills the nasty rented boat
with rainbow - how can she *not* let him go?

Regards, Melanie

Visits to St. Elizabeth's -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1563) Visits to St. Elizabeth's This is the house of Bedlam. This is the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. The is the time of the tragic man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a wristwatch telling the time of the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the honored man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the roadstead all of board reached by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the old, brave man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls of the ward, the winds and clouds of the sea of board sailed by the sailor wearing the watch that tells the time of the cranky man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board beyond the sailor winding his watch that tells the time of the cruel man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a world of books gone flat. This is a Jew in a newsapaper hat that dances weeping down the ward over the creaking sea of board of the batty sailor that winds his watch that tells the time of the busy man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is there, is flat, for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat that dances weeping down the ward waltzing the length of a weaving board by the silent sailor that hears his watch that ticks the time of the tedious man that lies in the house of Bedlam. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to feel if the world is there and flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances joyfully down the ward into the parting seas of board past the starting sailor that shakes his watch that tells the time of the poet, the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the soldier home from the war. These are the years and the walls and the door that shut on a boy that pats the floor to see if the world is round of flat. This is a Jew in a newspaper hat that dances carefully down the ward, walking the plank of a coffin board with the crazy sailor that shows his watch that tells the time of the wretched man that lies in the house of Bedlam. -- Elizabeth Bishop

        1950.

I've never been a big fan of Bishop. She has an incredible eye for images
(describing a baby rabbit fleeing a fire as 'a handful of intangible ash /
with fixed, ignited eyes' -- "The Armadillo") and an almost unmatched
ability to sketch a scene or a sensation so that it's visible / tangible
(consider 'We stand as still as stones to watch / the leaves and ripples /
while light and nervous water hold / their interview' -- "Quai D'Orleans" or
'Hear nothing but a train that goes by, must go by, like tension' -- "Four
Poems") but for me her poems often fail to come together into a coherent
whole. They remain beautiful yet insubstantial, like a loose nosegay of
impressions that withers easily and is forgotten.

The only exceptions to this are poems where Bishop starts off with a conceit
or a clever idea (see for instance, the incredible Gentleman of Shallott or
The Man Moth, which features on Minstrels as Poem #1395). Here Bishop is at
her best - combining an easy playfulness with touches of exquisite yearning
to create poems that are so solipsistic you don't know how seriously to take
them. "Visits to St. Elizabeth's" is an excellent example of this - a poem
of ceaseless and inspired variation that combines some truly heartbreaking
images ('This is a boy that pats the floor / to see if the world is there,
is flat') with a structure that comes out of a children's rhyme. What makes
this poem stunning is the the deftness with which Bishop pulls off that
structure (just try running This is the house that Jack built upto twelve
lines and see how quickly it becomes tedious) making each new stanza more
exhilarating than the last. Minor variations in the lines from stanza to
stanza create the illusion of revelation - each repetition promises more
clues to the poems true meaning, but it is a meaning never quite grasped.
The overall effect is that of an exquisite piece of baroque music - some
Bach variation - that tempts and teases and leaves you gasping for more
while at the same time convinced that there's something you've missed.

Aseem.

Song for the Rainy Season -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem submitted by Dustin Smith:

(Poem #1469) Song for the Rainy Season Hidden, oh hidden in the high fog the house we live in, beneath the magnetic rock, rain-, rainbow-ridden, where blood-black bromelias, lichens, owls, and the lint of the waterfalls cling, familiar, unbidden. In a dim age of water the brook sings loud from a rib cage of giant fern; vapor climbs up the thick growth effortlessly, turns back, holding them both, house and rock, in a private cloud. At night, on the roof, blind drops crawl and the ordinary brown owl gives us proof he can count: five times -- always five -- he stamps and takes off after the fat frogs that, shrilling for love, clamber and mount. House, open house to the white dew and the milk-white sunrise kind to the eyes, to membership of silver fish, mouse, bookworms, big moths; with a wall for the mildew's ignorant map; darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath, maculate, cherished; rejoice! For a later era will differ. (O difference that kills or intimidates, much of all our small shadowy life!) Without water the great rock will stare unmagnetized, bare, no longer wearing rainbows or rain, the forgiving air and the high fog gone; the owls will move on and the several waterfalls shrivel in the steady sun. -- Elizabeth Bishop

In "Song for the Rainy Season," Bishop's celebrated observational and
descriptive techniques -- her famous "eye" -- are trained both on a
cherished, worn house she lives in and on that house's close,
subtropical surroundings. As usual, insight grows subtly from
accumulated details of the physical world; Bishop never thrusts her
meaning into the reader's face. Like the poem's insights, its loose, or
open, rhyme scheme -- a scheme Bishop would develop more and more --
creeps into one's awareness as the poem goes on, and during later
readings. Thumpingly regular, metronomic rhyming is forgotten in favor
of a more flexible and subtle rhyme scheme. The poem's short lines
establish a breathless rhythm. They also insure that every word stands
out by not losing its power in a line crowded with other words: As
Bishop apparently reveres the place she's describing, she necessarily
reveres each word she uses to describe it. (Reading the poem aloud is a
good way to illuminate this notion of breathlessness and reverence via
short lines. Also, the poem's short lines and unexpected rhymes create a
particularly dynamic rhythm when read aloud.) ... One of the greatest
poems by one of the greatest poets. (She deserved that Pulitzer.)

Dustin Smith
Brooklyn Heights, New York.

The Man-Moth -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem sent in by Tim Diggins

(Poem #1395) The Man-Moth Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth". Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. -- Elizabeth Bishop

Reading that poem by McGough [Poem #1335] made me immediately think of "The
Man-Moth" by Elizabeth Bishop, which has a similar "justification" for
starting the poem, but quite a different use and tonality.

It's hard to comment on The Man-Moth, because I have no idea what it means
as a whole poem. Most of Bishop's poetry (with the exception maybe of "One
Art") seems to me like that - where it is hard to come up with an
understanding of the poem in total but instead one has a mixture of
impressions - in this case a sense of human emotional fragility (just the
image of a man-as-moth, the tear, but this is also undercut by various
narratorial attitudes to him: Dwelling on his failures ("he trembles",
"although he fails, of course", "he can't", "he does not dare"...) and the
limitations of his lifeworld ("The Man Moth always..." "he must...", "He
regards it as...", "he has to..."). In the last stanza, the narratorial
voice starts to hint that the man-moth has his own desires and identity ("If
you catch him"... "Slyly he ...")

But it's the last sentance that makes me unsure of how to understand the
poem as a whole. The "However" introduces a turn of the poem to something
different - is it to the purity of nature (as opposed to our man-made
buildings and cracked sidewalks through which the man-moth emerges)? I'm not
sure, but this last turn in the poem coming with its confidence after all
the man-moth's uncertainty, seems as refreshing as the man-moth's tear.

Tim Diggins

Biography:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C01

Casabianca -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem submitted by Ben Morrison,
whose birthday it is today. Happy Birthday, Ben!

(Poem #999) Casabianca Love's the boy stood on the burning deck trying to recite "The boy stood on the burning deck". Love's the son stood stammering elocution while the poor ship in flames went down. Love's the obstinate boy, the ship, even the swimming sailors, who would like a schoolroom platform, too or an excuse to stay on deck. And love's the burning boy. -- Elizabeth Bishop

This Bishop poem isn't one that typically makes it in the anthologies, but
it is perhaps my favorite, and since it is love poetry week, it's entirely
fitting.

It's so simple: four sentences all with the same noun/verb
contraction--"love's".  The image of "burning" love is a cliché, but the
build from the poor boy trying to talk to the ship and all the other sailors
and then back to the burning boy is what makes this poem work. The lens
widens from the poor boy to everything else and then, finally, back to the
boy. This is the enviable boy who gets to stay on deck and burn.

It's not pretty. It's sacrificial. It's about being powerless, not being
able to say ("trying to recite") what you are and where you are. It's not
pastoral. If you actually imagine someone burning, it's downright
horrifying, but I guess that's the point. Even when reading it, the reader
envies the boy and wishes that he/she too was on the deck and burning.

Ben.

[Minstrels Links]

Elizabeth Bishop:
Poem #639, One Art
Poem #734, In the Waiting Room

Love poetry, the week so far:
Poem #997, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love -- Christopher Marlowe
Poem #998, A Blade of Grass -- Brian Patten
Poem #999, Casabianca -- Elizabeth Bishop

In the Waiting Room -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem sent in by Teresa D. Gunnell

(Poem #734) In the Waiting Room In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited and read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole "Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain --Aunt Consuelo's voice-- not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918. I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance --I couldn't look any higher-- at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen. Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts held us all together or made us all just one? How I didn't know any word for it how "unlikely". . . How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave, another, and another. Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918. -- Elizabeth Bishop

  From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by
  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen
  Methfessel.

I love Elizabeth Bishop... to me this poem reminds me very much of being a
child.  You remember detail so clearly, yet the subtlety of what goes on
around you is often lost.  Sometimes things seem so incredible, or
overwhelming... or so simple and easy.  I just can't comment much about
Bishop - she's too profound all by herself.

Teresa

Links:

We've run one Bishop poem: poem #639

Here's a biography:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=7

One Art -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem submitted by Pavithra Krishnan:

(Poem #639) One Art The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. ---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. -- Elizabeth Bishop

 The concept of loss has long been favoured by the poets. In their turns
they have variously bemoaned the loss of beauty, youth, fame, life -- and
love. The poetry of loss is a genre unto itself. Immediately poignant by its
implications of tragedy. Freighted with an irrevocable absence. Often
shadowed by pain, sadness.

 ... yeah, I think loss works pretty darn well in verse. And I'm also
certain Elizabeth Bishop understood all this. Perhaps better than she might
have cared to. There is a courageous pretense built into this poem that I
like. Bishop is wry, funny and flippant and very determined not to sound
weepy-eyed. The fierce repetition of the line "the art of losing's not hard
to master" makes you wonder how far and fast she's had to lose. To me Bishop
is valiantly attempting to make believe for awhile that the experience of
loss may be impersonalised into perfection by practising it as an art (take
a breather). That she succeeds in convincing neither herself nor her reader,
hurts her verse not the least.

Pavithra.