Back to 1977

This journal is in turn hilarious and heartbreaking. I wish I could do that year all over again.

Among the mulligans:

I would let my boyfriend go instead of making him feel guilty for dumping me at the altar. I would have asked him to explain in great detail what being gay meant, and I would have tried my best to understand. I would have encouraged him to be as honest with the rest of his family as he was with me, even if it meant his grandmother would cut off his trust fund. I am glad he and I stayed friends. I am really really glad of that. I am glad I was with him right before he died.

I would have kept my other best friend from dating her teacher. (I have had two friends who dated teachers, and this has never worked out well. One of my friends became a teacher and dated one of her students from a college class. This is just WRONG. I'm glad that I intuited this back in 1977).

I would have learned to drive sooner and saved myself some embarrassing phone calls when my friends were drunk.

I would never have gone out with one guy to make another jealous. (That has never worked in the history of dating, and I have tried my best to instill this in my children).

If I had known that my perfect match was coming along in 1986, I could have waited 9 more years. I have had 6 boyfriends in my life, and I could have easily skipped numbers 3 through 5, if I'd known number 6 would be Harvey.

I wish I'd gotten a PhD when I was in my twenties. Well, I did but it was Pamela-Harvey-Daniel instead of a doctorate.

I wish I could do last year all over again. I was a good, good wife, but I wish I'd told Harvey more often how much I loved him for showing up every day and doing the hard work of being married, of loving the kids and me. I wish that I'd listened to him more when he told me to take it easy and not worry, because things could be so much worse. (And they are so much worse now). I wish that he'd known how many many people loved him and how many students still e-mail me, 8 months later, about what a good teacher he was. And I wish that I'd loved him, if not better, then more often. I wish I'd sent him to Italy without me, instead of saving the money for both of us to go for our 25th anniversary--a honeymoon we never had. (I had to use this money to pay for his funeral, and I deeply regret that he didn't know I had Venice planned). I wished I'd cooked him pasta a la mara every time he wanted it. I wish my calamari had been better. I wish I'd brought him coffee in bed every damned morning, instead of him bringing it to me.

I am glad that I never tried to make him jealous. (Lesson learned). I am glad that I showed up at the courthouse one Wednesday morning and married him, without any fanfare. (Another lesson learned). I am glad that I told him that he was exactly what I wanted, the very last time we talked, and I am glad that he knew that I loved him with all my Grinch-sized heart. I am glad that the very last time we made love, right before I left for Sewanee, he laughed out loud with the joy of it, and that's a wonderful way to remember him.

And remember him I do.

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SOMETHING OF A DOCUMENTARY: Pamela's Musings, Circa 1977

January: I break it off with the man who left me at the altar in December.

Why did you want me, why did you tell me over and over you loved me, why did you make love to me repeatedly, if you wanted someone else? Were you really more worried about what your family would think if you canceled our wedding than how I would feel? I gave you my heart and you gave it back to me, a handful of confetti.

No more believing in Valentines. No more fluttering pulse when the handsomest boy in the room is at your side, because you have discovered that he is looking not at you, but at the second-handsomest boy in the room.

February: I give up on dating altogether. I fall in love with literature and bemoan my spinsterhood constantly with Pattie, my best friend. (I'll name Daniel after her surname).

There were Pattie and Pamela under a magnolia tree, with a bottle of Jack and the collected works of Keats, reading the letters and thinking that love will be like that. I already know it's not, but as Jake Barnes says, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Sam has Keith, and I have no one. It's Wordsworth, not Keats, who has it right: We have given our hearts away .

March: Kingston, Jamaica.

The palms are horses' heads.

April: Canada.

Rain in the early pearl-grey morning. A red-haired boy offers to share his umbrella with me. We walk over the cobblestones in perfect silent accord. As we part, he looks me straight in the eye, smiles, and kisses me very lightly on the lips. J'adore Montreal! Vive les garcons! Oh, Canada! (To this day I can recall his smile. It wanted nothing but to spread joy. I didn't understand it. I didn't know what joy was, because I never felt it).

May-July: Mayfield for 3 months of tutoring at a school for dyslexic kids, working in the toy department and longing for college.

I caught the little bastard who's been pouring vials of model paint all over the board games. His mother defends him to the store manager: "He's just mis-cheevy-yus." If that's what she thinks--well, he's been into the paint, and she's been into the glue. When I go back to college, will my real life start?

August: Pattie and I take a night class together--creative writing/poetry. James Galvin is the professor. He rocks my world with his insistence that poetry is alive. I start to see the world as image. Pattie falls in love with him. I have no time for love. I just want to understand why guys don't like me.

Maybe Sam didn't love me because I was no good at sex. Maybe boys are naturally better at it....None of my girlfriends will admit that they have sex, much less that they like it. I remember liking it, but I bet I was bad at it. Oh, well, my days of doing THAT are over. (I'm 19 years old at this point and have decided that I will never have a sex life. One guy has sent me running for the nunnery, for the cardigan sweater and the house full of cats).

September: I fall a little bit in love. I buy a red dress. I depledge from my sorority and spend every hour I can with a guy with a camera, a car, and a crooked smile.

I learn some things here, a lot of your words. I learn about art, about perspective, about accident, about chance and balance. I learn that when you kiss me, I cannot think. My brain just shuts down. When we make love, my toes really do curl up like little conch shells. This afternoon, as we play outside in the leaves, with your dog, for the first time in my life, I am aware that I am doing nothing and it's okay to be here, right this moment, with you, and to feel good about it, to feel good about myself. There doesn't need to be a future. Right now, I am really, really happy, right now in this moment, and I don't wish for anything else. Just more moments like this and a few more mornings like this one. I now know the meaning of aubade.

November: I get my Grinch-sized heart chipped a little bit, as Mr. September tells me he needs to spend more time on school and art and doesn't have time to see me.

I think this is the big brushoff, and I remember all kinds of other brushes, your hand against mine when you ask for my phone number, your body brushing up against mine at a party, the brush slippery against watercolor paper, you brushing my hair and me brushing yours.

I will try to smile when I see you, and I will always remember kissing you in your car, the rain in on the roof thrumming less loudly than my pulse did.

Someday, think of me, when you see a girl who's not smiling, and smile at her. I'll always remember how you made me smile. I wish you'd told me that you'd stay, but that's a bad Chicago lyric and we liked the Heartbreakers. I have a feeling that I will always like the Heartbreakers--music and men.

Thanksgiving: On the rebound, I meet an actor who'll go on to costar in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. We'll get serious quickly, as I am in love with his parents and want to keep them in my life forever. When he asks me to marry him, I tell him I want to marry his whole family.

J: My parents are just awful. They just want to feed me and give me stuff I don't want and spend time with me. They want to talk to me and don't listen to what I say.
P: I adore your parents. They feed me eggs and give me gloves to wear and were interested in what I was reading and studying.
J: I can't wait to get back to Murray.
P (to herself): Can't I just stay here?

December: I break up with the actor because Mr. September asks me out for coffee. Coffee means coffee, though I was hopeful it meant more.

If you were to touch my hand, if you were to brush the hair from my face, if you were to look into my eyes and say Come home with me...But you don't and I won't ask and the days of scarlet leaves and red dresses and real kissing in cars and doorways are over. There is no such thing as romance.

With this in mind, the next week I meet the man I'll marry. Genetically, he's perfect, so pretty women stop to stare at him on the street. And he's looking back, though he always comes home to me.

I have become resigned to this, a man who'll ignore me for hours and then bring me a rose from a gas station. Not the rose we found growing at the farmhouse, which you cut off and stuck in my hair, but an "I'm sorry baby she was all over me" rose. Don't all men cheat, anyway?

(And whatever lasts six years, and then ends without much passion on either side. Two years after that, I'll meet Harvey, for whom I'll wear a red dress on our first date, when I'll kiss him and he'll wreck his car, and through thick and thin he will kiss only me. He will teach me how to smile again and give me a reason to trust myself, to trust my heart, to write poems, and I will finally learn that your lover can be your friend and you can tell him anything--how you feel, who's hurt you, all the ways you are broken--and it's safe. My heart will be a mosaic of all the moments we have together over the next 2 dozen years. We will be the loves of each other's lives, and I will believe in romance, in happily, and in ever after. In 2010, when he's gone, what will I do?)

In 2011, I'll pick up the shards and confetti of my heart and start to glue them together. I'll search in the attic for a photograph and find that first red dress and that 1977 diary in the bottom of an old suitcase, along with a cassette of the Heartbreakers and the ash-pink petals of a single September rose. I will thank God for early fall afternoons and for letting me know that it's okay to live in the moment. I will be glad I knew him and not sorry that I lost his attention. I will remember the hour I learned to smile and not the petals slowly fading.

I will remember possibility, and I will come back to myself. It's all right if you love me, it's all right if you don't....




SOMETHING OF A DOCUMENTARY


Yes, I remember thick flat brushes,
Glass of water gone grey with color,
Rough white paper, then your deft salvage
Of the smudges I’d made; how you told me
About accident, about chance and balance;
How you bit your lip as you worked, how quickly
We went to bed. Like air, you said. You can
Never get enough. Later, you painted
Me in oils, the fluorescent lights leaching
All color from my skin, my mouth a gash
Of Persian red--which, after you left, I couldn’t
Bear to sell. In my garage now, it leans
Against that pair of Japanese herons:
Red-capped, stilted, the ones that mate for life.

(published in Oranges and Sardines, February 2010)

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Turning, Turning, and Coming Round

I wanted to be married, to have two children, to live in an old Victorian house, to read books every day. I wanted to publish a book. I wanted to get an MFA. I wanted to teach creative writing.

I have gotten to do all these things, but I haven't gotten to keep them. My marriage has ended due to Harvey's death. My children are growing up; Dan has flown, and in four years Raleigh will be flying off. My house is too big, too full of memories and mice for just one person and her cat. I don't have time to read what I want--I'm always interrupted by one of my two jobs or the siren call of student essays for HUM or band candy to sell. I don't think I'm strong enough to keep teaching and working another full-time job for the foreseeable decade.

I guess it's just me and my diploma, looking for something new. What do I do? What these days do I want? I know what I want more than anything else: I want someone to love. I want someone to listen. I want someone to see me. I have a candidate for that person: myself. I need to learn how to love myself, to listen to my body, to see what I'm doing wrong and also what I'm doing right. I am going to pour out attention and lavishment and kindness on myself. I don't have to be any prettier, or have a thinner body, or more publications, or a group of scholarly articles about Shakespeare or Borges or Stevenson or Proulx (even though I have great ideas for all of them). I need to love my face as it is, and I need to make my body healthier (and as much weight as I've lost, as much exercise as I've started to crave, these two things are easier). I need to love the craftiness of my craft and not be swayed by the clamor of publication. I need to honor what I read by reading only the best things, the fascinating things, and writing about them as lyrical responses, not footnoted theses. I need sleep and blueberries and salmon and V8 and occasionally the decadent dessert.

If I love myself, will I like being alive more? I hope so, because some days without Harvey I just don't get the point of being alive in the world. I need to relearn how to be alive to the world. Universe, is that possible? Because without attention, I am numb. I pray every day that I will feel something joyous. I pray every day that I can bring joy to someone. I pray every day that I can be still and know.

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Breaking Up Is Hard to Do; Why Can't the Same Be Said for Breaking Down?

I try my very best to stay positive, to remember that I had a great love, with someone who was a genius at love, that I am still someone who is worth the wait and worth the time, that feeling lonely and lost and liquid with tears is normal, but damnitalltohell I am tired of being alone. I am tired of making every decision, working 70 hours a week, (and that's a normal, not a busy, week), of sitting with pen and paper and writing poems that are wretched instead of wrenching, of never getting enough sleep or time to read or time to spend with the few friends I have left. My grief now is a toddler whining See me! Pick me up! Hold me!, and any step I make to avoid grief, to spend time with myself or someone else at something pleasurable is a step into guilt. I am well aware that, despite what well-wishers tell me, Harvey is gone. I can lie and say he's still part of me, still with me. His memory is with me, but he's not with me. I can lie and say that I am content to remember what we had, but that would be a lie, also. I don't want memories. I want sleep. I can either sleep or go to the grocery. I can either sleep or pay bills. I can either sleep or grade papers. Even when I choose bed, I cannot sleep for worrying about these things. I dream of stamps and envelopes with glassine windows.

So it's Greek yogurt and granola, then money for the mortgage, then 70 papers on Macbeth. All this on 3-1/2 hours of sleep. And Saturday I have to work, and Sunday I have to make up a midterm and write yet another letter to the retirement board about Harvey's insurance and his pension (both of which they're stalling). I just want to sleep for hours and hours, but I can't. I have Raleigh to fuss over and students to fret over and writing that's not getting done and Dan to consider and a Himalayan range of laundry and a cat who's peeing in the umbrella plant.

I just want to be bedbound, in a mound of lavender-scented quilts and high-count Egyptian sheets, with a never-to-be-empty cup of lemon tea with honey and a cat curled in the nook of my knees and my little mouse-with-a-book reading lamp illuminating the pages of Our Mutual Friend And someday I want someone beside me. I'll share the cat and share the tea and share the quilts. I'll like the way his eyes crinkle and his brow furrows when he reads something well written. I'll watch his hands flip the pages as he turns to the box scores in the sports section and tells me how the Cards have choked again. He'll ask me the answer to 17 Down: Five-letter word: single line of type at the top of the page. And I won't hazard a guess. He'll say, 15 Across: Another five-letter word: open mouthed, one of 5 or possibly 7. I'll know vowel, not remember widow.

Ace of Cups: Open Door Policy

All right, who is sending me these images? I am very fond of them, and I appreciate getting them, but the fact that I don't know who gifts me is bothering me.

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Le peseur d'ames...

I am one of them. Weighed and weighted and waiting for something. What good is beauty or truth or any art if no one else is looking, hearing, or experiencing it?

Every day, for some reason, I receive a Tarot card. Today, and most days, it's the Empress. Universe, please let me know why you are doing this. I really am curious. I don't think I'm the Empress at all.

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Le jardin d'idees

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Hopper: Nude Crawling into Bed

I think that Hopper must have loved Rembrandt. They both get light and shadow. You can see the influence here--dark, luminous skin, and slippery brushstrokes.

(And there's humor here, too--it's funny how the woman looms over the bed, and how when you stand before this painting at the Whitney, your backside is what the world sees).

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Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

“But now — I am not a writer now. I am not anything now. Legally I am a ‘widow’ — that is the box I must check. But beyond that — I am not sure that I ­exist.” Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

This is exactly how it feels. Something old and something blue versus something old and new. I feel as though I am something borrowed--from a horror film--every time I look in the mirror. I am Munch's Scream.

Thank you for remembering me after all these years. Thank you for believing that I'm worth the wait. Thank you for hoping that maybe means may be.

It definitely isn't no.

Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks ~ Big Love/Landslide ~ Live

Mirror in the sky, what is love?

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When the Stars Go Blue - The Corrs & Bono - Remix 2006

I miss you, sweetheart.

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Dear Valentine: Mousse It Up!

I have made this for decades, and now find instructions for Mousse on All.Recipes! This will get your sweetheart's attention.

5-Minute Mousse

Ingredients
* 9.35 ounces (265 grams) bittersweet (%70 cocoa solids) chocolate, chopped (preferably Valrhona Guanaja--I use 3 dark chocolate Godiva bars, which is about 10 ounces)
* 1 cup (240 ml) water
* 4 tbsp sugar, optional--(I don't think this is optional, but you be the judge)

Method

1. Place a large mixing bowl on top of another slightly smaller one, filled with ice and cold water. The bottom of the large bowl should touch the ice (As opposed to hovering inches above it? I wonder about these fancy cooks sometimes). Set aside.

2. Put chocolate and water--also sugar--into a medium-sized pan and melt the chocolate over medium heat, stirring occasionally. (I use a double boiler, but then I'm weird that way. This is also delicious with an orange or raspberry liqueur and you may add it here, or add some to yourself, which I highly recommend).

3. Pour the melted chocolate into the mixing bowl sitting on top of ice and water (which is also known as the top bowl, or the empty bowl--sheesh) and start whisking with a wire whisk until thick. Watch the texture as you whip and make sure not to over-whip as it will make the mousse grainy. If the mousse becomes grainy, transfer it back into the pan, reheat until half of it is melted, pour it back to the mixing bowl and whisk again briefly.

4. Divide into four serving cups and serve immediately.

(NOTE: You can also cover the larger bowl and put this in the refrigerator. It's perfection in between the layers of almost any cake).

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Lilies, Lilies, & Red Red Roses: Garden Gate

I have always collected single hands--pin trays, ashtrays, jewelry holders. This beautiful image is my valentine this year. Who is offering me the sun and the star?

Red roses--three dozen of them. This card...I am so mystified.

Godiva chocolate and Applebee's with the kids (Raleigh, Dan-Amy) tonight. A long-anticipated reunion tomorrow. Work, work, work.

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Apples of Discord, Apples of Accord

Of course the apple is temptation, is seduction, is ruination. A is for apple--that illustration begins the primer, and you're on the way from receiving what you're told to discovering for yourself what others have said. Knowledge will be yours, as soon as you're immersed in Alphabet. You bite into the fruit, eat from the Tree of Knowledge, as soon as you learn an A. (When I open my mouth for A, it is very wide, they say. This was the first line of poetry, in first grade). You open your mouth and take A in and let it out, and it is articulated breath, it is music, it is the desire for music and breath, it is the first move toward poetry, a knowledge that's subterranean and also celestial. (The apple's root, the apple's carpeled core...)

Of course the apple is alluring, is vivid, is violent. All that biting, all that white flesh waiting under its flimsy red shirt, that constellation of seeds inside, that pentagram. The whole idea of sunder, and of render. The apple's also the size and the shape of a fist, and when you grasp the apple in your hand to take that first bewitching bite, your fingers become talons instead of tools. Think ballast, think bite, think blow. It's a roll of quarters inside your fingers. Think roundhouse. Think gravity: An apple falls and fells you.

Of course the apple is damning. The apple in weight and outline, in its beautiful scarlet to crimson to garnet hues, in the heft and the handful of it, is the size and shape of the human heart. When you bite into an apple you bite into the heart of things. Desire woos you, and you wormlike enter in. You become the worm and the food for worms. The apple is with you and is in you. No sin is original.

I have eaten my heart out. I have gotten to the heart of things. Inside my chest there are blossoms and seeds.

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E Is for Etruscan, E is for Excavation

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I hold a mirror in my left hand, and I lift my veil with my right. I wear my best white dress and my finest jewelry, and I lie in wait. Am I Etruscan or Miss Havisham? Am I living or is E for Effigy, as well as Etruscan?

(Someone broke my heart, all right, and I still have the wedding dress I didn't wear. Maybe Raleigh will want to see it some day, feel its velvet bodice and finger the layers of its tulle skirt. I would have been a dahlia, a white dahlia, in that dress.

Someone else salved my heart and saved me and bought me the jewelry I wear and the mirror I hold and the bed on which I recline and the lace dress I will wear in the spring, and the MAC on which I type. And then he left me, too, but not by choice.

I have to believe it's not by choice Harvey died. I have to believe it's by choice that I live. I don't want to live some days--and maybe this is one of them--but I can't do that to my children, to my parents, to my friends, scattered as they are).

Who knows the Etruscans? Who knows Miss Havisham's heart? Who knows mine?

Maybe E is for Excavation. Someone unearthed that sarcophagus on which the beautiful woman displays her vanity. I had to dig out my car this morning from many inches of snow, and I have to dig out of depression today, too. I am so damned lonely. Why? Why Not? I just pulled these interrogatives from a bag of candy, red-letter words on chalky pastel backgrounds.

Dig deeply into your Valentine candies and see if you find Lonely, Lonely, Lonely on any of those conversation hearts. See if you find Heartbreak, the way I did.

"Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance"

Everything only connected by "and" and "and."
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book...

I'm posting these lines by Elizabeth Bishop to encourage a wonderful writer who is engaged in deep and dangerous play. I wish her concentration and continued success. She is writing something of great consequence, and I believe she is doing most important work--creative work, courageous work. Godspeed, (or, as she'd write, bogspeed), Rebecca Loudon.

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Happy 100th Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop!

Happy 100th Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop! Your poems are wonderful, and so are your letters and short stories. (Here's a link to one of those short stories: http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/02/was-it-in-his-hand.html
)

____________
Here's an article about Bishop's life from today's Wall Street Journal, which is linked above.

WHEREVER HOME MAY BE--Dana Gioia,

One hundred years after her birth in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second-half of the 20th century. She is admired in every critical camp—from feminists to formalists—who agree on little else. Her work also attracts a wide general readership. Taught and studied in high schools and universities, Bishop is, for the time being at least, the most popular woman poet in American literature after Emily Dickinson.

Such immense regard would have astounded the author. Bishop (1911–79) had a high regard for her own work, which she crafted with scrupulous care, but she never courted a broad public. She wrote slowly and published little. She disliked giving readings or interviews, and she generally avoided public literary life. (When she won the National Book Award, she skipped the ceremony.) For most of her career, Bishop was, in John Ashbery's only slight exaggeration, "a writer's writer's writer."

What makes her pre-eminence particularly remarkable is that she wrote so little. She published only five volumes of verse and a short illustrated book on Brazil. Her final collection, Geography III (1976), included only 10 poems. Indeed, the contents of all five books, excluding translations, total 88 poems. If one gathers in all her other uncollected original verse, the published oeuvre rises to 105 poems. In other words, across her adult life Bishop wrote, on average, only two or three poems a year.

But what poems!

Critics have a hard time describing the special quality of Bishop's poetry. We tend to fall back on adjectives like "reticent," "meticulous," "restrained," which make her work seem dull and slightly mechanical. The quiet perfection is hard to express without making it sound like a Swiss timepiece. Bishop simply wrote so well that she never needed to raise her voice for emphases or effect. While poets such as Allen Ginsberg shouted slogans or rumbled with prophetic noise, she spoke to us calmly as equals.

What animates Bishop's poetry is the deep authenticity of a writer who knew exactly what she was and never tried to seem otherwise. Her work is never pretentious or inflated. Preternaturally observant, quietly inventive, detached but compassionate, Bishop created poems that seem unnervingly real. We see the place, the person or the thing as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn't state overtly but slyly awakens inside us.
Poems

One reason that Bishop's work feels so real is that most of it grew directly out of her life, though she characteristically presented it indirectly. The author rarely stands center stage in the poems. Bishop acted mostly as a surrogate for the reader, underplaying her own emotions and inevitably viewing the scene with provocative ambiguity. Her celebrated poem "Questions of Travel," for instance, ends not with answers but deeper questions:

'Is it lack of imagination that
makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay
at home?

Or could Pascal have been not
entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's
room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and
never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should
we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?'


Notice that the lines rhyme. "I have always been an umpty-umpty poet with a traditional ear," Bishop told Anne Stevenson in 1963. Most of Bishop's poems employ rhyme and meter, though she used those techniques with enormous freedom. She could write with equal ease in free verse and occasionally published prose poems. Her imagination was disciplined but inclusive, and she could make a good poem from a nursery rhyme, a samba or a surrealist sculpture. But her characteristic poem has an iambic beat and unfolds in a clear narrative line, like a story.

There is a special irony that Bishop has come to be the signature poet of late 20th-century American literature, a period stereotyped by free verse and experimental forms. Bishop admired Modernism, but she resisted being drawn into its endless arguments about stylistic innovation and the radical transformation of human consciousness. She was, in the highest sense of the word, a prosaic poet, who like the supreme prose masters—Flaubert, James, Nabokov —could create a verbal fabric so fine that nothing was lost to it. Never trying to be merely modern, she succeeded in becoming perpetually immediate and contemporary.

Bishop's early life was a chronicle of loss and dislocation. She was the only child of a wealthy American contractor and his Canadian bride. Her father died before her first birthday. A few years later her emotionally fragile mother was institutionalized, never to recover. The young Bishop was allowed to visit her mother only once after her confinement.

She was raised first by her poor but affectionate maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia. Then the 6-year-old child was moved to her wealthy but remote paternal grandparents in Worcester. She soon developed asthma and eczema and was transferred to an aunt's. The orphan continued to be shuffled among well-meaning relatives in both countries until she was packed off to boarding school as a teenager.

It was at Vassar, in the early 1930s, that Bishop began to write seriously and co-founded an "advanced" literary magazine with fellow student Mary McCarthy. In her senior year she met the poet Marianne Moore, who became a lifelong friend and the first of her many literary champions—these would eventually include Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Octavio Paz and James Merrill. Bishop had a gift for friendship, which proved a saving grace in her rootless and nomadic life.

A small inheritance from her father gave Bishop a freedom few artists enjoy. She never had to work regularly, except at writing until late middle age, when inflation reduced her income. What she did mostly was travel, constantly seeking a real home. She tried to settle in New York and Key West, Fla., and spent time in Paris and Washington, D.C. In 1952, having embarked on a trip around the world, Bishop took ill in Rio de Janeiro. There she met Lota de Macedo Soares, an architect, who became her lover. Bishop quickly settled in Brazil, and the two women lived together for 15 years—the one extended period of domestic stability in Bishop's life. Then in 1967 the Brazilian idyll was terminated by Soares's suicide.

Bishop wanted to stay in Brazil, but it proved impossible to manage alone, especially given the animosity of her lover's friends. Reluctantly, she left her exquisite historic home in Ouro Prêto, Brazil's baroque mining capital, and returned to the U.S. She lived briefly in San Francisco and settled, finally, in Boston in 1970 to teach at Harvard. Bishop liked her students (as I learned personally 36 years ago), but she disliked teaching, which she did only from financial necessity. In these last years, Bishop's fame began to grow. In 1976, she won both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Academics suddenly discovered her work. But the public recognition came too late to make a meaningful difference to the author—though she had the personal comfort of a new relationship with a stable and successful younger woman. In 1979, she died.

Since Bishop's death, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published nearly every surviving scrap of the poet's work, including unfinished drafts, paintings and much private correspondence. These five posthumous volumes were then supplemented by a large Library of America compendium. The fiercely private and self-critical author, who had so fastidiously edited her own lifework down to less than 100 poems, has gradually been unveiled to public scrutiny.


Now two new volumes, simply titled Poems and Prose, have been culled from this editorial abundance to celebrate Bishop's centenary. They essentially contain everything the author published or drafted near completion. Taken together, they provide a compelling record of a great but unusual writer.

"Poems" is one of the indispensable books of modern American poetry, presenting a writer who can bear comparison with her own masters: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. There are no bad poems. One finds a few weaker ones in her first collection, but even early in her career she achieved a consistently high standard—frequently interrupted by masterpieces such as "The Fish," "The Map," "The Moose" and her heartbreaking late poem "One Art."

The only problem in Poems is the publisher's desire to bulk up the necessarily slim volume. It seems reasonable to include her unpublished drafts and fragments as an appendix, though few of them add much to her reputation. The best is probably "It is marvellous to wake up together. . ." a discreet but overtly lesbian love poem. But does the reader really need 27 pages of photographs of journal pages and typescripts?

Bishop has received less attention for her short stories, essays and memoirs, which were never collected in her lifetime. Her best fiction and memoirs are almost on a par with her poetry. Indeed, they are all spun from the same autobiographical cloth, presenting similar settings (and sometimes the same characters) with similar concision and evocative detail.

The stories are mostly early work and mostly somber. Set in the hardscrabble Nova Scotia of her childhood, they present small, stark dramas of anxiety and loss. The real treasures of "Prose" (admirably edited by Lloyd Schwartz) are the memoirs. Bishop's fiction uses its energy to control the dark material it explores, but her memoirs luminously unfold, casting light instead of shadows.

Bishop had a particular genius for sketching memorable characters in a few perfect sentences. In a memoir of her mildly dissolute uncle, she sketches his formidable wife in a few sharp phrases: "If Uncle Neddy was a 'devil,' a feeble smokey-black one, Aunt Hat was a red, real one—redheaded, freckled, red-knuckled, strong, all fierce fire and flame." Once again it is the sheer physical presence of her writing that astonishes. Most authors try to achieve verisimilitude by slowly piling on des criptive details. Bishop achieves it swiftly by offering just the right details. Here, for example, she evokes a desolate and barren store in rural Brazil in one short sentence: "A glass case offered brown toffees leaking through their papers, and old, old, old sweet buns."

Even in her memoirs, Bishop rarely makes herself the central subject but focuses her imagination on the people and places she encounters. Balancing humor, pathos and compassion (with a touch of innocent wonder), these pieces capture the emotional complexity of daily existence. The best of the memoirs—such as "The U.S.A. School of Writing," which describes her brief stint working at a shady correspondence school—have the resonance of short novels.

The critical selections in Prose are quite minor by comparison. Abstract speculation bored Bishop, and she had no gift for intellectual argumentation. Her best pieces are short and idiosyncratic, though brightened by flashes of wit, as when she calls e.e. cummings "the famous man of little letters." A painstaking writer, who agonized over every sentence, Bishop lacked the necessary facility of the professional critic. In 1970, the New Yorker appointed her their new poetry reviewer, and she took on her first assignment. Three years later they were still waiting for it.

The New Yorker played a central role in Bishop's career. She published the vast majority of her work in the magazine, whose editors had recognized her special talent from the start. Already in 1946, just as her first book appeared, the New Yorker offered her the elite status of a "first reading" contract—giving Bishop a higher per-word rate and the magazine right-of-refusal on all her poems. Her editors adored her, especially Howard Moss, who eagerly accepted almost every poem she submitted, usually with lavish praise and a prompt check. "I love your flattery," Bishop responded, "and wish I could believe 25% of it."

Bishop's long and affectionate relationship with the magazine is thoroughly documented in Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. This ample volume presents 400 pages of letters between Bishop and her editors, most notably Moss and Katharine White, and covers 45 years of dealings: from 1934, when the magazine accepted an anecdote from the new Vassar graduate for its "Talk of the Town" column, to a postcard written shortly before the poet's death.

This book of letters is not for every taste. Poets and New Yorker aficionados will find it irresistible. The rest of humanity will rightly find it baffling. Although the letters address many topics, their central concern, their ruling passion, is punctuation. The dash, hyphen, parenthesis and especially the comma have never inspired greater emotion and imagination than among the old New Yorker editors who could —and regularly did—discuss small matters of punctuation for weeks.

"Commas in the New Yorker," quipped E.B. White, Katharine's husband, "fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim." Yet reading this volume, noting the meticulous attention brought to each poem and story, one realizes how skillfully the editors helped focus and clarify every detail of the text. Bishop would sometimes complain, but she rarely discarded the changes when her poems appeared in books.

The letters also document the scrupulously polite etiquette that prevailed at the old New Yorker—a ritualized kindness worthy of a Victorian parsonage. Bishop would submit poems (many of them now famous anthology pieces) to Moss, her most devoted fan, with self-deprecating comments such as, "I doubt you will be interested in this." Moss would quickly accept the poem with lavish praise. Then in the next paragraph the editing began—not stopping until the final proof. The exaggerated politeness clearly helped ameliorate the annoyance of the magazine's protracted copyediting and factchecking process. But as these letters so copiously prove, the editors never tried to change the author's intentions, even in the smallest matters, only to realize them. For a woman without a fixed home, family or even country, the New Yorker provided a sense of stability and continuity. It adopted her early and gave the consistent support that allowed her to develop her idiosyncratic talents into genius.

Elizabeth Bishop's future reputation will surely fluctuate slightly according to the currents of taste, but she has indisputably won a permanent place in the American literary canon. An independent and honest writer who never chased fashion, joined groups or struck public poses, she labored at the art's perennial task—to communicate the joy, sorrow and wonder of being human. She took her time about it, and it shows.

—Mr. Gioia, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has just been appointed professor of poetry and public culture at University of Southern California.

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BRRR BRRR BRRR

S is for Sinden smothered in snow.

Today's flakes are big as coconut macaroons. Stay safe, stay warm, stay inside!

Hollywood Animation Archive Features Rackham

Please, please click on the link above! It's from the Hollywood Animation Archive, one of my favorite web sites. You'll be astounded at the beauty of Rackham's illustrations from a 1909 volume of fairy tales.

Harvey and I own two prints from this volume; they are among our most beautiful of art treasures. I saw a Rackham exhibit in Louisville when I was 22; I have never forgotten it.

Go enjoy--and write the poem, a haiku or a blog post one of these lovely illustrations inspires!

Here's the text from the article:

Arthur Rackham

Arthur Rackham is probably the single most influential children’s book illustrator. His delicate watercolors define the image of fairy tales in many people’s minds.

If you aren’t familiar with his work, see Bud Plant’s great capsule biography.

These scans are from a rare first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from 1909. This beautiful book is jam packed with fabulous color plates and ink sketches.

Rackham’s style merges an organic line and earthy color palette with fantastic imagery. He often slipped faces into trees and clouds, adding an extra layer of wonder to his images. His pastoral subjects often seem to be nostalgic for an earlier time, perfect for bringing fairy tales to life.

Walt Disney admired Rackham’s watercolor and pen & ink style, and instructed Gustaf Tenggren to work with Claude Coates and Sam Armstrong to adapt it for use in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In animation backgrounds however, the sinewy Rackham line was overly busy, distracting from the characters; so Tenggren evolved towards the more dimensional painting style in Pinocchio, which set the standard for Disney cartoons throughout the 1940s.

At the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive one of our projects is to document the images that acted as inspiration to the artists who created the first animated features. No artist fits that bill better than Arthur Rackham. We’re very fortunate to be able to bring the illustrations from this great book to you. I hope you enjoy them.

From the Archives, May 2005: There'll Always be Theo and Walt

I have a favorite poem--"I Knew a Woman," by Roethke. Occasionally, I cheat on it with "Crusoe in England." (My only monogamous commitments are to my husband and Milky Way candy bars).

Well, at least I still have a Milky Way in the house. It's in my freezer, unless the daughter has eaten it (which would make me kind of happy). It was the last candy bar Harvey bought for me, and I left it there instead of eating it on the way to Sewanee last summer.

Giving away Harvey's stuff--light box, paintbrushes, Mars Staedtler pens, kiln, clothes--is so hard. I know that some day (when Raleigh marries, when Dan marries, when I sell this house), bigger losses will ensue. I'm not good at letting go, and I've discovered that I'm not good at alone, either. Although I love to spend time by myself, I don't want to BE by myself, and Raleigh's leaving scares me. (I miss Dan but am glad he and Amy are on their own). When Raleigh goes in four years and it's just the cat and me, then What will I do? Where will I be? (May Sarton's "Question" comes to mind).

I don't do alone very well. (I do not do, I do not do....Shades of Sylvia, who didn't do alone very well, either, but for different reasons).

I think I'm going to go search for that frozen Milky Way. Or at least go outside and look at the stars.
_______

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

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Straight From The Writer's Almanac Archives

It's the birthday of the novelist William S. Burroughs, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1914). His family was wealthy — his grandfather had gotten rich inventing an adding machine. His mother was the author of a popular book called Flower Arranging: A Fascinating Hobby. He later described his hometown as: "Bare clay of subdivided lots, here and there houses set down on platforms of concrete in the mud, play-houses of children who look happy and healthy but empty horror and panic in clear gray-blue eyes."

He went on to Harvard but he didn't fit in there either. He kept a ferret and a .32-caliber revolver in his dorm room. He started writing, but when a piece of his was rejected by Esquire magazine he was so disappointed that he didn't write again for six years. He tried to enlist in the military, but he was turned down by the Navy, he failed to finish flight school, and when he got into the Army infantry, his mother arranged for him to be given a psychiatric discharge.

So, at 30 years old, he moved to New York City and got involved in a bohemian scene. It was there that he was introduced to two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was attracted to their ideas about literature and society, and they were impressed by his wisdom about the world. But Burroughs was also drawn to the criminal subculture in the city, and he wound up getting hooked on heroin. He said, "You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default."

Though he already suspected he was gay, Burroughs married a woman named Joan Vollmer, and the two moved to Mexico City, where Burroughs planned to begin his career as a writer. He began writing a memoir of his experience as a drug addict. One night, he was entertaining some friends when he and his wife agreed that he would demonstrate his marksmanship with a gun by shooting a glass off the top of her head. Everyone had been drinking, and no one seemed to think this was a bad idea. But Burroughs missed the glass and his wife was shot dead.

Burroughs later said: "I am faced with the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death. … [It] brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice but to write my way out.''

He eventually finished his memoir, Junky, which eventually came out in 1953. It was marketed as a "true confessions" paperback for 35 cents a copy, and it sold more than 100,000 copies. Burroughs traveled around South America and then moved to Tangier, where he sank deeper into alcoholism and addiction. He began writing a novel, and his friends said they would hear him typing away in his room laughing hysterically, and they'd find him surrounded by yellow pieces of paper covering the floor of his office. He claimed that the book had no structure and he called it "the endless novel which will drive everyone mad." But Jack Kerouac showed up and helped him edit a rough draft from all the fragments, and they settled on the title Naked Lunch (1959).

_____

What is it about St. Louis? Besides William S. Burroughs, it was home to T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, my beloved Marianne Moore....

Further investigation reveals it's the hometown of Kate Chopin, Stanley Elkin, Eugene Field, Jonathan Frantzen, William Gass, William Inge, my beloved Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov (and I guess Diane Arbus, his twin), Jane Smiley, Sara Teasdale, and Maya Angelou.

Wow. From The Awakening to Freedom.

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Sign on the Clubhouse of Poetry

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.

William Carlos Williams, "Dedication for a Plot of Ground"
_______

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Sometimes I Dream I'm in This Painting

And sometimes I dream I've painted it. Last night, I was the painter.

Happy Birthday, James Joyce!

He lived, he loved,
he laughed, he left.

That's James Joyce's epitaph, a wonderful example of polysyndeton. He was born on this day in 1882. I love his writing, especially Dubliners and the Molly Bloom section of Ulysses. Here's a poem I wrote that features Ms. Bloom speaking. I offer it up as a birthday card to Mr. Joyce:



It's also Candlemas, celebrating the light of the world and eating crepes (perhaps because of their tapering shape?). So, let's bless the candles, bless the crepes, bless the one who lights them and the one who lights into them.

From Rob Brezny's Astrology Newsletter

(Gertrude Stein by Andy Warhol)


"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense," said writer Gertrude Stein many decades ago. Isn't that about a thousand times truer in 2011? It takes rigorous concentration not to be inundated with data. But that's exactly your assignment. It's absolutely crucial for you to be a beacon of common sense in the coming days. To meet your dates with destiny, you will have to be earthy, uncluttered, well-grounded, and in close touch with your body's intuition. If that requires you to cut back dramatically on the volume of information you take in, so be it.

I think it's time to take a break from news alerts, RSS feeds, and magazines. How many recipes do I need to receive, when I just now have a working kitchen (with a beautiful 50s look, I might add)? How many poems daily do I need in my inbox? I crave some sense of peace and order. As I divest my house of this hoard of art supplies and encyclopedias and the stuff that once we saw as treasure, and now I see as clutter, I see I don't need so much stuff. I need more breathing room. Psychically, this is true, as well. I don't retain so much photographically as I once did. I need to edit what I take in. This includes what I read and what I watch. I love mysteries but it's time to concentrate on my own mysteries. I love memoir, but I need to stay away from others' problems and solve some of my own. I love sports, but I can TIVO this. (Don't worry; I'm not going to quit reading your blogs or savoring your poems or studying your homework or supporting my beloved Louisville Cardinals).

It's time now for revising, condensing, writing, teaching, and reading. It is not time for watching TV or reading merely to fall asleep. It's time for something else--cleaning house and spring-cleaning my thoughts, as well.

I keep dreaming of the Empress. I keep dreaming of the Knight of Cups; for some reason, though the Knight has 10 cups--one to crook from each finger? I wonder what this means...

Pieta

"Women pure in soul and body never grow old." Michelangelo, on the young Mary in his Pieta.

Yes, no, maybe? This is purely (sorry!) a theoretical question. I don't qualify as Ivory Soap, unless that 0.54% that doesn't float is Kryptonite.