The start of something small

A few weeks ago, at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, a pale young man, not unhandsome, asked a dealer to pull down a slim volume of Elizabeth Bishop’s first collection of poems, “North & South.” He turned it over in his hands; he looked carefully at the signature on the frontispiece and pronounced it “loose.”

“Probably signed later than 1946,” he mused, half out loud. He barely listened to the dealer. Instead, he handed it back and walked away, trailing an almost palpable presence, as if the poet herself, now dead some 27 years, had whispered her advice in his ear.

It is possible to read Bishop’s poetry lightly, running your eyes across the lines, falling into the lulling meters she so often uses, like a child rolling down a grassy hill. But sooner or later, you must enter her sadness as you would a room, inhabit her joy as if it were a country. There is a feeling, inevitably, of leaving one place and traveling to another (wherever she chooses to take you), learning the language, slipping into the customs and the currency of her world. This explains a certain reluctance some readers feel toward her work; there is a threshold that must be crossed, and one is not entirely sure life will be better on the other side.

Not that there is anything arcane or linguistically complex to Bishop’s writing. In fact, her language is strong and simple, so simple that it can subvert intellectual analysis. Like Emily Dickinson’s, Bishop’s poems seem straightforward, clear as her honest eye. Unlike Dickinson, she rarely gives the sense that she is fooling us. (Wait a minute, this isn’t really about a boat in port!) And yet, in her many poems about nature, there is little of the playfulness, the raw joy of, say, Mary Oliver, who always seems to come around to how astonishing it is to be alive. Bishop’s brow is more furrowed than Dickinson’s or Oliver’s; there is much about her own existence that she does not understand.

“Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box” is a collection of previously unpublished fragments and drafts, culled by New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn from Bishop’s papers at Vassar College (3,500 drafts of poems and prose and hundreds of letters to and from Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Anne Sexton and others). Here, that quality of perplexity, of the furrowed brow, is understandably even more in evidence than in Bishop’s finished work. These pieces give insight into the poet’s forks in the road -- will she take this path or that to say what she means? They also reveal her astonishing precision, her willingness and ability to look at a thing hard (like Dickinson) until it reveals itself, no matter how slight. “Something needn’t be large to be good,” she famously told her friend Lowell. Bishop, it seems, made a willful decision early in her writing life to focus on the small.

Bishop prided herself on her powers of observation and on her patience: These drafts show she often spent decades on a poem. “The Moose,” for example -- Quinn points out in her introduction -- was begun in 1946 and edited by the author as late as 1972. Quinn, whose guiding editorial principle appears to be admirable simplicity, tries bravely to date the drafts of several poems, but much of the endeavor, she admits, is intelligent guesswork. All the interpretive and biographical material is kept to an extensive set of notes at the back of the volume, perhaps to discourage readers from drawing too many lines between Bishop’s life and art. This makes looking at the notes feel a little naughty, as though the reader had opened a locked door and wandered into a room full of dangerous facts.

Quite a number of these facts are startling: Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Mass. Her father died before her first birthday, and her mother was committed to an insane asylum when Bishop was 5 years old. (Bishop never saw her again.) At the age of 3, she was sent to Nova Scotia to live with her mother’s parents, where she was quite happy and stayed for three years. But her father’s parents, who were wealthier, thought she would have a better upbringing with them in Boston, a far more formal setting that Bishop found disturbing and lonely.

Bishop received her bachelor’s degree from Vassar in 1934 and then began a life of traveling in earnest. Already, she was marked by guilt; her college boyfriend had killed himself after she refused to marry him, leaving her a postcard that said: “Elizabeth, Go to hell.” She visited France, Spain, Africa, Ireland and Italy, and lived in Key West, Fla., for four years. In 1951, she went to Brazil, became ill and stayed for nearly two decades. There, she fell in love with a woman, Lota de Macedo Soares. After Soares, too, committed suicide in 1967, Bishop became poet-in-residence at Harvard University. For her nine books of poetry, she received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors. She died in Cambridge, Mass., in 1979.

“Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox” is not for readers unfamiliar with Bishop. Its purpose is to fill gaps, to add information, to act as a collection of field notes through which we can scrutinize the poet’s choices: words and phrases changed or deleted, subjects dropped and taken up again as life provides new clues. The book also offers a chance to understand the dreadful thoroughness of the true writer in a more general sense: Bishop’s poem were threads -- no, lifelines -- by which she pulled herself like a swimmer through rough seas. Not all of them lead to understanding. But many did lead to letting go of places and people she thought she knew.

Life, after all, is full of mysteries that no one poet could ever hope to solve, no matter how many drafts she wrote, no matter how precise and observant she might have been. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop wrote in her poem “One Art.” Quinn includes nine drafts of that poem, which ran in the New Yorker on April 26, 1976. It is, the poet wrote in a letter to Katharine White (her editor at the magazine) “the one and only villanelle of my life. It is very SAD -- it makes everyone weep, so I think it must be rather good, in its awful way.” *