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Gillian White on Elizabeth Bishop ("Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance")
2.6k Plays1 year ago
What if life were like a book that you could open at will and know in real time? Gillian White joins the podcast to talk about Elizabeth Bishop's fascinating poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance."
Gillian is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also runs the Poetry and Poetics Workshop. She is the author of Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Harvard UP, 2014). Her essays have also appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, and London Review of Books. You can follow Gillian on Twitter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am so excited to have Jillian White on the podcast today. It feels like a really special day for me with the podcast. For one reason, I've been trying to get Jillian to come on for a while now, and we finally made our schedules line up. And I think we're both into the summers of our academic lives, which means we have a bit more flexibility and we were able to
00:00:29
Speaker
make it happen. Jillian is someone I've admired and learned from over the years and I think was someone who was sort of present as I bounced around the idea of the podcast in the first place. And so her encouragement meant a lot to me to begin with. So it feels
00:00:52
Speaker
nice and there's the sense of renderer or whatever in bringing her onto the podcast today. But my excitement exceeds that cause.
Kamran's Favorite Poet: Elizabeth Bishop
00:01:02
Speaker
My excitement also comes from the fact that we're here to talk about Elizabeth Bishop, who is
00:01:11
Speaker
You know, maybe the poet, it feels funny to say that she is my favorite poet because that sounds like the way, you know, children talk about flavors of ice cream or something. But when people ask me, finding out I'm an English professor or whatever, well, what's your favorite book, you know?
00:01:31
Speaker
Sometimes I'll say, you know, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. This is the first time those of you who have been with us from the beginning will surely be noting
00:01:44
Speaker
Wow, we're returning to a poet that we've already had an episode on.
Jillian White's Background
00:01:48
Speaker
It's true. I talked to Lindsay Turner in what was an early and really wonderful episode I thought about Bishop's poem, The Shampoo. But I'm happy to revisit a poet, or I should say, if it's time to revisit a poet, I'm happy that it's Bishop.
00:02:07
Speaker
And I'm happy that it's Bishop with Jillian White, who is a real expert. The poem, I should say, that Jillian has chosen for us to talk about is a poem called Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance. And we'll make that poem available to you in the episode notes, the text of the poem, so that you can look at it as we talk about it.
00:02:29
Speaker
The title of that poem is a mouthful and is surely something we will talk about early on. So don't worry, we'll explain if that title leaves you confused. We'll explain something more about it in a moment. But first, let me tell you about our guest today. Jillian is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also runs the Poetry and Poetics Workshop.
00:02:56
Speaker
She is the author of the book, Lyric Shame, The Lyric Subject of Contemporary American Poetry, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2014. And I'll say more about that book in a moment. Jillian's also working on a new book, she tells me, that's loosely about
00:03:16
Speaker
reading poems in the classroom and genre questions that poets take up, which is a wonderful topic, I think, and I'm very excited to see the fruits of that labor soon, I hope. You can also find Gillian's public writing
00:03:36
Speaker
in places like the New York Review of Books, where she wrote a beautiful piece on the poet Bernadette Mer, and the Poetry Foundation website, and London Review of Books.
Jillian's Early Connection to Elizabeth Bishop
00:03:49
Speaker
And I can make links available to Jillian's pieces in those places as well. Lyric Shame, Jillian's first book, is, I think, without question, one of the most important books in my field in the last 10 years.
00:04:05
Speaker
It brings together a deep understanding of genre and of the theoretical and historical developments that have drawn and redrawn genre's boundaries. How do we know? What sense does it make to say we're reading a poem or a lyric poem in particular?
00:04:26
Speaker
She brings together that kind of understanding with what is, to me, an obvious love of her subject, of poetry, of particular poets and of particular poems, including the poet that we're talking about today. So for those of you who will want, after we talk today, to know more about what Jillian White has to say about Elizabeth Bishop, I would send you to her book.
00:04:53
Speaker
And she also has, and this is, I think, maybe among the virtues that I'm trying to sing right now, the rarest, a real kind of curiosity about and attentiveness towards her own history as a reader, her own effective responses to poems and to reading experiences.
00:05:19
Speaker
to her own training and the way that training has had its place in the history that she's describing. So the book gives us a new and vital account of the lyric poetry of the last 70 years.
00:05:36
Speaker
And it does so both on that poetry's own terms and with the kind of critical eye of a real literary scholar. And so it's a book that I have read that has meant a lot to me that is densely underlined if you were to see my copy. It's a book that meant a lot to me at a crucial moment in my own work.
Kamran and Jillian's Personal Reflections on Bishop's Work
00:06:05
Speaker
And that is just one of the many reasons why I'm so thrilled to have Jillian White on the podcast today. Jillian, you're joining us from Ann Arbor. Yeah, how are you doing today? Hi, Kamran. I'm doing really well. And gosh, that was an amazingly generous introduction. As all of your introductions on this remarkable podcast have been, I've started timing how long your introductions go.
00:06:33
Speaker
I go on too long sometimes. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It sort of shows the kind of generosity with which you've taken on this endeavor of creating this wonderful archive of conversations with scholars and writers and readers that you admire. And I just, I feel totally delighted to be here.
00:06:52
Speaker
grateful for your reflection on my book, which is, you know, I've, I've half forgotten it by now. And it's, it's wonderful to be reminded that it's come to use. So thank you. Oh yeah. In lots of ways it has. It's, it's no, it has, you know, it's funny with the introductions, I think when I got, and you and I were talking a little bit before we started recording about my sense that when I started the podcast, I felt a little bit unsure of the
00:07:18
Speaker
You know, it's funny, it's like its own little genre formation or something, right? You do it a couple of times and then you do it more and more and you kind of settle into certain grooves and you think, oh, this is how I start and these are the moves I make and then I do this and then I do that.
00:07:34
Speaker
At first, I didn't really know any of that. I was making it up as I went. It was a kind of organic process. It felt important to me at the beginning to try to keep the intros short. And I felt like I have been feeling a little bit like there's a sort of creep in extending them and extending them. And I'm wanting to kind of trim that down a little bit so that there's more room for talk about the poetry. But I'm glad they've meant something to you.
00:07:59
Speaker
Oh, for sure. It speaks volumes about your generosity. And that's a generosity that I find in the way you read as well. And I've learned a lot from your work as well. And I hope to continue to learn more and more from it as the years roll by.
Bishop's Personal Struggles and Poetry
00:08:17
Speaker
Oh, man. Yeah. Well, that's a really nice thing for you to say. So thank you so much. And I'm glad.
00:08:26
Speaker
in that kind of broad a sense of the term that you and I get to be in conversation, but I'm glad in the somewhat narrower sense that we get to be in conversation today, literally. So I'm really excited to talk with you about Bishop and I'm excited to talk with you about this poem. I know that when I first asked you and then asked and then asked and then asked, I've been bugging Joey in for a while now,
00:08:52
Speaker
for you to come on to the podcast. As that conversation developed, you thought about a few different options and we don't have to enumerate them necessarily, but I'd be curious to know more about what drew you in the end to the choice you've made for us today.
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, I came to reading Bishop really young. I'd say that she was my sort of gateway drug for reading poetry at all. I came out of a public high school situation where I had, you know, except for Shakespeare, almost no encounters with poetry, and then arrived at Northwestern University and
00:09:36
Speaker
and was given a handful of poets by the poet Mary Kinsey in a class called Reading and Writing Poetry. And among that handful of poets that really shaped my sense that, wow, poetry is something great, Bishop, I think, was the most important.
00:09:53
Speaker
to me. It's so important in fact that I changed majors, I changed schools. I was in the Medill School of Journalism and after taking this class with Mary Kinsey, I called my parents and said, sorry, I'm not going to be a journalist. I'm going to be an English major. And I double majored in reading and writing poetry and reading and writing fiction at that point.
00:10:20
Speaker
And it was these long poems from this era that I think especially caught my attention, these poems that Bishop wrote in the 40s after her first book came out, including Kate Breton and
00:10:35
Speaker
over 2,000 illustrations and at the fish houses in particular, I think was the sort of other choice I could have made for today. And they just, something about them and I became very identified with Bishop's writing, not necessarily Bishop as a person, but with her writing.
John Ashbury's Reading of Bishop's Poem
00:10:52
Speaker
And this one in particular kind of, I never exhaust my interest in it. So it seemed like a good one to bring to a close reading conversation.
00:11:01
Speaker
Oh, I'm so glad you chose it. I mean, it's like all cards on the table, right? Yeah, Bishop, I think I too fell in love with her in college. And I remember, I think I confessed this to you earlier. It's funny, all this language of confession and disclosure and so on. Maybe it has a role to play in our conversation today as well.
00:11:27
Speaker
No shame. I wrote my senior essay in college on Elizabeth Bishop and its title is a phrase from the end of this poem, the phrase infant sight, which is a phrase we can come back to maybe. So that poem was really important to me and has been ever since. It's a poem I've gone back to and trying to explain to myself certain
00:11:53
Speaker
attitudes or experiences I have and kind of privileged moments of my life or in relationships with other people. And it's been an important point of reference for me. I think I heard you say a moment ago that you identified very strongly
00:12:09
Speaker
with Bishop's writing and you felt more of a sense—I mean, this wasn't your word, but I'll inject it into the conversation here—you felt more of a sense of ambivalence about thinking about Bishop's life or Bishop's biography. And I wonder, you know, we don't have to get into the weeds of biography by any means today, but I wonder if you might
00:12:34
Speaker
Well, A, if I heard you right, and if so, B, could you say something more about
00:12:40
Speaker
the nature of that ambivalence, if that's even the right word. That's great. Yeah, I mean, so I think you did hear me right, and I think it's worth saying that the way I was taught to read poetry was very much as a new critic, where the question of the person's life was not really paramount as we approached poems, right? So the whole endeavor of close reading, which
00:13:04
Speaker
of course, was a term invented by a great close reader, new critic, Reuben Brower, right? Who was Helen Vendler's teacher at Harvard.
Bishop's Influence and Surrealist Leanings
00:13:19
Speaker
The endeavor, you know, involved, you know, not really necessarily looking at anything but the text on the page at first, right, and kind of slowing down. So I think that's the spirit in which I began reading poems and
00:13:32
Speaker
And then as I grew, matured as a critic and a thinker, and also came to wonder more about Bishop, I did find out about her life. But I also found that so much of the criticism of her work involved intense attention to her life in a way that I found...
00:13:55
Speaker
interesting puzzling and one with a history that we can talk about more in a little bit. But just to say that her life, it's not that I don't identify with her life or anything. She had a
00:14:10
Speaker
An interesting but quiet life. I mean she was she was born in 1911 and I think where was she born now? I'm not now. I'm not remembering. Oh in Worcester, Mass and Her father died when she was very young maybe two and her mother was institutionalized when she was very young and
00:14:35
Speaker
Bishop was then shuttled back and forth between two families her mother's family her mother's parents and her And and aunts Various family members took over and she was moved back and forth from Nova Scotia Canada to to Boston and two very different worlds and then went to Vassar College in the 30s
00:15:02
Speaker
and started writing poems at that point. And then because of the loss of the parents had inherited enough money, I think, to live without really having many jobs. And so had a life as a poet and did some teaching. But honestly, when I started thinking about her life, and maybe you can relate to this, I read her letters, right? That was one of the first things that I did. And
00:15:31
Speaker
it was just this terrible feeling of sadness of kind of going from the early excitement and promise of her as a young writer, trying to manage a lot of afflictions that came, I think, from all the loss and sorrow of her childhood, and gradually kind of falling prey to those sorrows, you know, in different ways. Somebody who couldn't, you know, had a lot of illness and a drinking problem and
00:15:55
Speaker
a lot of heartache and loss in her life. It was depressing to learn about her life. I wanted to maintain that textual voice that I had become so attached to, which was a person and not a person at the same time.
00:16:14
Speaker
That's a fascinating narrative you've just given us, Gillian, of your own developing relationship to Bishop. I remember there was a time when I was in one of my own depressive phases or something just after college, and at the time there was
00:16:38
Speaker
There was that series of at first audio cassette, I think eventually they became CD recordings that Sandy McClatchy made called The Voice of the Poet. So there was a bishop cassette that I had and
00:16:54
Speaker
I was feeling badly enough that there wasn't much that I felt like doing, but for whatever reason, I found it soothing to put her tape on and just listen to her read her poems. And we'll talk, I think, in a minute about reading.
Analysis of Bishop's Poem: Structural and Thematic Exploration
00:17:09
Speaker
I don't mean reading silently, but sort of performance styles in the reading of poetry.
00:17:17
Speaker
Bishop was a famously kind of flat and unenthusiastic, often quite reluctant reader. Now, some people who care about Bishop, I think, would describe it just as I have. Some might say that even in the sincerity of that approach, there was its own kind of performance.
00:17:41
Speaker
Her friend, James Merrill, described her modest everyday impersonation of an ordinary woman. There is this kind of performance of modesty that I think is an interesting way to think about Bishop. But yeah, I found her voice soothing. I don't know how else to put it.
00:18:01
Speaker
And her letters did and have and continue to mean a lot to me. I mean, I am someone who cares a lot about epistolary writing, generally speaking, and Bishop is really how that first happened for me. She was perhaps my gateway drug into poetry, but also into letters. And I know what you mean because the life did have, I mean, there was a lot of
00:18:27
Speaker
You know, she was a child to whom a lot of bad things happened when she was little. I mean, the loss of her parents is mainly what I have in mind here in different ways, but the loss of both of them. And who, yes, as you say, had a kind of obviously natural gifts or whatever, however we'd want to describe that, and the good fortune to pursue those gifts in places like Vassar College.
00:18:57
Speaker
some early successes she had in career and people she happened to meet who helped introduce her to other people and so on. And there was a great deal of excitement, I think in the late 30s and early 40s for Bishop. And then she goes to Brazil and falls in love. And there's a great deal of excitement in that. And yet, yes, you're right. A sense of affliction and sadness and sorrow certainly found her again. What I wanted to say about the letters
00:19:28
Speaker
I did find them, and I'm sure this isn't all you meant or even what you said precisely, but I guess I just would say for myself that even as the letters sort of describe and wind their way through the ups and downs of that life, I don't remember feeling depressed by the letters. The letters
00:19:51
Speaker
you know, that phrase that Bishop wanted on her tombstone alone and, you know, awful but cheerful. There's something in the performance of her voice in letters and maybe in poems too that sort of threads that needle for me, that there's a kind of lightness and humor. Oh, I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's really true. That's sort of present all along, yeah.
00:20:18
Speaker
I think that's true. She was a survivor and survived with work, I think, and with cheerfulness of a kind and a sense of sort of...
00:20:29
Speaker
gratefulness and intellectualism and all sorts of things. But I think it's just, I must have wanted her to be a hero of a kind. And I think seeing really her late life kind of unwind into some sadness just felt disappointing. And I think I've always had this strange
00:20:50
Speaker
desire for Bishop to be more heroic, to be heroic in some sense. And I haven't even wanted to admit that that's true. But she's the only poet who's like, I've been to the archive, I've read what I can, I took a pilgrimage to her house and
00:21:05
Speaker
in Brazil. I got to eat lunch in her room for my 43rd birthday on the occasion of her centenary. So I think I sort of have a big crush on her at some weird level that I can't really explain. But indeed, I think that cheerfulness, that sense of survival, her poem about Buster Keaton that was among her drafts,
00:21:29
Speaker
to me feels completely right, that she's somebody who had internalized some image of Buster Keaton, right? Her inner proof rock I've said in print was Buster Keaton, right? So if T.S. Eliot kind of imagined this sad, despairing young man who hasn't made things work, I think Bishop's inner
00:21:50
Speaker
inner Prufrock is actually Buster Keaton. The sort of buoyancy and ability to survive like all kinds of things and stay sort of elegant and funny all at once. Yeah. Oh, that's great. That's great. We must have talked about, you know, maybe virtually talked about this recently, but there's the moment that she describes that it was a point of pride for her. She's telling a story to her great friend, Robert Lowell, in a letter
00:22:21
Speaker
about the first time she met Theodore Rethke, Ted Rethke, who said to her, you're a quick kid and a caper. She helped get him into a cab or something at the end, after a reading or something like that. And she sort of logistically figured something out that he said, you're a quick kid and a caper. And you could tell she loved that idea. And that feels to me sort of related to this Buster Keaton idea.
00:22:47
Speaker
So I think we should listen to a recording of the poem. Now, I don't have, and I don't know whether one exists or not. It doesn't seem to be readily accessible online if it does exist, but a recording of Bishop herself reading this poem. Instead, we have what is in some ways an even more interesting artifact to listen to.
00:23:15
Speaker
So what we'll listen to in a moment is the poet John Ashbury reading Bishop's poem over 2,000 illustrations in a complete concordance. Ashbury and Bishop knew each other. I mean, Ashbury, for those, you know, for whom these dates are slightly foggier, you know, were contemporaries of a sort, though Ashbury was maybe a generation younger than Bishop.
00:23:39
Speaker
they knew each other, and Bishop meant a lot to Ashbury, I think, and to some of the other poets that Ashbury associated with, like Skylar, for instance, James Skylar really loved Bishop's poems. Ashbury
00:24:00
Speaker
having said that, is a very different kind of poet from the kind of poet that Bishop is.
Narrative Shifts and Emotions in Bishop's Poem
00:24:06
Speaker
Or maybe it's more appropriate to say that Ashbury is many kinds of poet and most of the kinds of poet he is are very different from the kind that Bishop is.
00:24:15
Speaker
But I think he's on the record as having said that this poem in particular was like a really important poem to him. And that it, well, we can talk about some of the nature of that performance later. So Jillian, I don't want to give too much away. I'm going to play the recording of Ashbury Reading It. I'll say to our listeners that I have some concern here that the
00:24:36
Speaker
that the volume of this recording might be slightly lower than what you're hearing now from the two of us. So you may need to adjust your volume to hear Ashbury properly. But I think it'll be worth it. And then on the back end of this, we will talk about what we've just heard. So here's John Ashbury. Over 2,000 illustrations and a complete concordance
00:25:04
Speaker
Thus should have been our travels, serious, engraveable. The seven wonders of the world are tired and a touch familiar, but the other scenes, innumerable, though equally sad and still, are foreign. Often the squatting Arab or group of Arabs, plotting probably against our Christian empire, while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand, points to the tomb, the pit, the sepulcher. The branches of the date palms look like files.
00:25:33
Speaker
The cobbled courtyard where the well is dry is like a diagram. The brickwork conduits are vast and obvious, the human figure far gone in history or theology, gone with its camel or its faithful horse. Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds suspended on invisible threads above the site, or the smoke rising solemnly pulled by threads
00:25:58
Speaker
granted a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in caddy cornered rectangles or circles set on stippled gray, granted a glimpse
00:26:09
Speaker
I granted a grim lunette caught in the toils of an initial letter. When dwelled upon, they all resolved themselves. The eyedrops waited through the lines that Burin made, the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, gods spreading fingerprint, and painfully, finally, that ignite in watery, prismatic white and blue.
00:26:37
Speaker
Entering the narrows at St. John's, the touching bleed of goats reached to the ship. We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs among the fogs, oak, weeds, and butter and eggs. And at St. Peter's, the wind blew and the sun shone madly. Rapidly, purposefully, the collegians marched in lines, crisscrossing the great square with black like ants. In Mexico, the dead man lay in a blue arcade,
00:27:05
Speaker
The dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies, and a jukebox went on playing I, Jalisco, and at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies splitting the mosaics. The fat old guy made eyes. In Dingle Harbor, a golden length of evening,
00:27:23
Speaker
rotting hulks held up their dripping plush. The English woman poured tea, informing us that the duchess was going to have a baby. And in the brothels of Macash, the little pot-marked prostitutes balanced their tea trays on their heads and did their belly dances, flung themselves naked and giggling against our knees, asking for cigarettes.
00:27:46
Speaker
It was somewhere near there, I saw what frightened me most of all, a holy grave, not looking particularly holy, and a group under a keyholeed arched stone balled aquin, open to every wind from the pink desert, an open, gritty marble trough, carved salon with exhortation, yellowed as scattered,
00:28:10
Speaker
Cattle teeth have filled with dust, not even the dust of the poor prophet, Painem, who once laid there, and a smart Bernouce Cadour looked on, amused.
00:28:23
Speaker
Everything only connected by and and opened the book. The guilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips. Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old nativity while we were at it? The dark, a jar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame.
00:28:47
Speaker
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw and lulled within a family with pets and looked and looked our infant side away. So that's John Ashbury. And Jillian, I just want you to talk about what we've just heard and what you found yourself thinking about as you listened to it, but also sort of
00:29:13
Speaker
What this performance means to you Wow It's such a performance. I I've I've heard it before I've heard it recorded before And I have this weird fantasy that I heard it in person and I don't know if it's true in my memory the reading was at the 92nd Street Y in the late 90s and
00:29:37
Speaker
when I would have been able to go to see such a reading. And I remember being there and knowing that Ashbury was moved. But I don't know if it's true, which is one thing to know. But what I've heard and hearing it subsequently recorded
00:29:56
Speaker
I can't get through it without feeling moved myself. I mean, at the point when I think his voice begins to break, the poem is in two sections, what I would call two stick-ick sections. In other words, with lines that aren't broken into stanzas.
00:30:13
Speaker
And then there's a break between the first section that ends with watery, prismatic white and blue and turns to a more kind of personal, it's not a first person perspective, it's a third person perspective.
00:30:32
Speaker
No, well, it's a first-person plural perspective. It's a first-person plural perspective. So it gets more personal, even though it's still in the we. And at that point, his voice begins to break and he starts to make some little errors, I think, because he's so moved. Yes. And he just sort of runs right through them or something. Yeah, he just keeps moving. He's taken by the lines. And I do find these lines
00:30:57
Speaker
inexplicably quite moving. And then by the... It's actually a poem in three sections. I take it back. There's another break after In a Smart Bernouce, Cadore looked on Amused, which is one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, and the next line, which is Everything Only Connected by Anne and Diane.
00:31:20
Speaker
And there he really starts to, I think, almost weep out. And, you know, he and she, I think she was important to the New York school poets, which is something that your former guest, Andrew Epstein, has written about, I think, as well.
00:31:37
Speaker
And in the Encyclopedia of New York School Poetics, she gets an entry as somebody who was influential to both Ashbury and Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler in particular. And I can see why, honestly. To me, it doesn't seem like such a stretch. I mean- Yeah, say more about that. What is the connection?
00:32:03
Speaker
I would say she was an early kind of surrealist herself. She was really taken by Gertrude Stein as well. In her papers, there's writing that she did about seeing identity at play in Paris when she was a young woman. I think she had similar touchstones. She was interested in the French poets as he was and the French surrealists. It's only sort of
00:32:28
Speaker
And the visual arts, right? And the visual arts very much. She was herself a painter, a very fine, a fine sketcher and watercolorist and painter. And
00:32:38
Speaker
She wrote in French forms or European forms that he also wanted to try. So her Sestina encouraged him to write a couple of Sestinas himself. And I think there's also something about her propensity to pull out language that's not hers exactly, not expressive, but rather discursive, I would say, public quoted.
00:33:05
Speaker
and to use it in a way that is subtly woven into what seems like straight ahead talking. I think that's where I find the edginess in her work the most interesting, and I relate it very much to Ashbury and what O'Hara learned from her too.
00:33:26
Speaker
Oh, I love that. I don't think many people, it's not often I hear Bishop described as an edgy poet, so I'm so grateful for your having said that because it gives me a new way to think about her or maybe even just a set of words to put to a way that I have always thought about her.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, that sort of mixing of discursive registers and an interest in, because Bishop is often just, especially early in her life and often in relation to Marianne Moore, who is like her most visible kind of sponsoring figure.
00:34:14
Speaker
you'll hear Bishop described as a descriptive poet or as a miniaturist.
00:34:19
Speaker
terrible. I really hate that. I've never liked that as a description. And in fact, I think after college, when I decided to devote myself to studying Bishop more carefully, I kept finding that to be the reputation and feeling like it betrayed my sense of her completely. Or maybe not completely, because I can see that she's a very scrupulous and careful user of language to describe things.
00:34:46
Speaker
But it's not what drew me to her, and it's not what keeps me there. It's not like I go to her to... In fact, I think she's really a theorist of representation so much, somebody who's thinking so much about the history of representation, about its ethics, about its complexities, about its failures. I think dramas of representation and visual interpretation are so often
00:35:14
Speaker
what I find most interesting in the work. And while there are different kinds of representation at work in this poem, and so surely that's something we'll want to get into. Maybe before we leave Ashbury behind altogether, we should just note also as you've reminded me and as the already referred to friend of both of ours and previous guest, Andrew,
00:35:43
Speaker
Epstein has reminded me too that Ashbury not only was on the record as about this poems being important to him. In fact there's more than one recording I can point people to of Ashbury reading this poem that we have so I can make the other link available too.
00:36:01
Speaker
But he specified that this poem meant something to him and was a kind of key text or influence for him with respect to his poem, one of Ashbury's great poems, Sunnis Men did, a poem that he also described as his, quote, one size fits all confessional poem.
00:36:23
Speaker
So that points to a fascinating kind of matter of literary and poetic history that I think you might want to elucidate a bit. Yeah, I think both poems have this kind of easy unfolding toward the personal, right? They take on a form that is not unrelated to what
00:36:44
Speaker
M.H. Abrams called the greater romantic lyric, which is his way of describing a set of poems that came from romantic writers where a writer like Wordsworth or Coleridge is
00:37:00
Speaker
looking at a scene, has a set of associations, goes into a reverie, and then emerges changed, right? And I think there's something about that legacy that gets grafted onto the idea of confessionalism at some point. And I think this poem also takes a little bit of that form. And actually Bishop, at this era of her work, described herself
00:37:24
Speaker
worried that she would be taken as a minor female Wordsworth, right? And yet I think there's no worry there. I think she's doing something that maybe grows out of Wordsworth but also takes it and ironizes it and complicates it and complicates the position of the personal in this poem. It's funny because this poem
00:37:52
Speaker
It's on my very short list of most loved bishop poems, which means it's on my very short list of most loved poems, period. And like you, I think, well, we'll see as we talk more, but I see all kinds of sort of characteristic bishop preoccupations at work in this poem. But I also wanna say that in some ways, this poem seems to me to be rather atypical
00:38:20
Speaker
I think a typical of the kind of poem Bishop herself would have had in mind when she described herself as a minor female Wordsworth like in part because the
00:38:33
Speaker
the first half of the poem. And I agree with your first instinct, which is that the poem is divided into what I would say is like the poem is in two halves and then there's a third, there's like a coda, you know, there's a shorter third section. So if you take the first of its three halves, it's a description of a book.
00:38:53
Speaker
It is, yeah. So it's a description of the of the Bulmer family Bible, in fact, which, which, you know, was an illustrated Bible, you know, the new devotional and practical pictorial family Bible.
00:39:09
Speaker
that included both the Old and New Testaments, which I think is pretty important actually, and Apocrypha, and a concordance, and Psalms in meter, and a dictionary of the Bible. The concordance describes a grouping of words that would be arranged in alphabetical order and lead you to the places in the scripture where those words appear. This is something to note about the poem for those who aren't seeing it at home.
00:39:37
Speaker
There are a lot of words in the poem that are capitalized, and I think this refers us to the organization of the concordance. For instance, seven wonders of the world, but also tomb, pit, sepulchre, well.
00:39:54
Speaker
I did a little toying around on concordances and found indeed that these are words that would be repeated and the site, S-I-T-E, which of course is a homophone for site. But yeah, there's a claim that the poem starts with about the inadequacy of travels by comparison to this object that's being thumbed through, which is this family Bible.
00:40:22
Speaker
So we should imagine the title, I guess, as part of the—sorry, let me say this precisely as I can. The title of Bishop's poem is
00:40:40
Speaker
meant to be understood, I think, as though it were excerpted from the title given to a certain kind of Bible. So it's a Bible that comes with over 2,000 illustrations and a complete concordance. Right. And indeed, the Bulmer Family Bible has, as part of its title page, the phrase published with over 2,000 fine
00:40:59
Speaker
scripture illuminations, or illustrations. I can't read my own writing, but yes. So she's taking something from her own past. She's not foregrounding that. I mean, this isn't a poem, in other words, that says like,
00:41:16
Speaker
my grandparents' Bible, blah, blah, blah, she doesn't get into that here. Instead, it begins in this, like you say, in this sort of discursive mode, almost an essayistic kind of mode, thus should have been our travels is the first line of the poem. So what's being announced, I think, is that the first long section of this poem is going to describe
00:41:45
Speaker
the serious and engravable nature of the book's representations of various things that our own travels, whatever those were, and she comes back to those in the second half of the poem, right? Fall short of. Right, so she makes a contrast, right, between the images from this Bible, which, you know,
00:42:06
Speaker
could have ranged from historical sites of importance to the Christian story, to the Old Testament story. And the fact that it's old and new suggests a sort of typological interpretive vibe about this text, which is always going to be using whatever it has at hand from the world to tell a Christian story.
00:42:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I want to stop you there because I think I know what you mean, but I think maybe listeners would benefit from hearing a bit more. So when you say typological, there is a kind of way of reading the relationship between the Old and the New Testament that would suggest that Adam, for instance, in the Old Testament is a kind of
00:43:00
Speaker
version of Christ in the New Testament. Or Noah's Ark, which is an Old Testament story, becomes a kind of figure for the church, the Christian church and its struggles, or old Hebraic texts.
00:43:18
Speaker
are secretly telling the story of what will come. And so one of the things that the sort of New Testament will want to do is to say to all those stories that you know, they are the kind of literal or manifest version of something which you should now understand spiritually. Right.
00:43:41
Speaker
And this whole book would have been like this. It would have been like a one-volume encyclopedia of all kinds of things, like the plants from the Holy Land and things like this. And so it's a kind of wonder, but it also has this agenda. It's
00:43:58
Speaker
it has an agenda, which I think is important. I mean, we do end the poem, as we'll talk about, with an image of the incarnation, right, of the birth of Jesus, you know, the incarnation of Christ as a man, as a person, right, in the world. But it's not described that, I mean, it's not that those terms don't appear, but yes. They don't appear, but I think to me it feels, you know, given the context of the Bible and all of it, you know, it seems
00:44:24
Speaker
it seems to lead us. I mean, maybe I'm being typologically. No, no, no, no. Well, right. You're encouraged to. And in fact, to be fair, she says this old nativity, right? This old nativity. And she capitalizes nativity, so it becomes one of the terms from the Bible. Yeah, we'll come to that. And we also have our Christian empire, right? And we have, you know,
00:44:43
Speaker
the seven wonders of the world, which are mostly items that precede the birth of Jesus, right? The pyramids or the hanging gardens or, you know, all these different wonders of the world that are in this Bible as well, right? So we have this strong sense that she's doing something with the discourses of history, right? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I don't think we'll
00:45:11
Speaker
I mean, the poem is probably too long for us to attempt a kind of line by line reading of it, but I think your structural description of it makes sense and that it can serve for us as a guide. So Jillian, kind of standing back for a moment from the first line of the poem up through watery, prismatic, white and blue, the sort of description of the book, the artifact that is the Bible.
00:45:39
Speaker
Are there lines that you would want to take us to that are representative?
00:45:46
Speaker
to you, for you, of the poem's interest in the object or the poem's way of establishing its own relation to the object. What is it about this book? I mean, you've already said some of this, but now I guess I want for us to focus a bit more on particular lines and moments in that first half of the poem that get at something essential in this poem for you.
00:46:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question, Kamran. There's so much in this opening that I could attend to. I mean, I think for me, there's the wavery sense that
00:46:29
Speaker
that we're looking at something that is also transforming. Whatever effort there is to sort of stay with the object itself, that task is getting complicated. Always. Give us an example. That sounds great.
00:46:48
Speaker
I mean, I don't want us to not think about often the squatting Arab or group of Arabs plotting probably against our Christian empire. It's such a fascinating line. While one apart with outstretched arm and hand points to the tomb, the pit, the sepulcher, I mean,
00:47:08
Speaker
The probably has always fascinated me. I take this, I mean it's hard, I probably have a stronger reading of it than is fair to insert already, but to me it feels like sighted speech at some level. Like it's not straight ahead. There's something ironized here.
00:47:28
Speaker
Sorry, and you say cited speech, you mean cited with a C, so it's as though the speech is, it's as though she's quoting from something or she's imitating a way that people talk or a way that someone has written something.
00:47:41
Speaker
Right, and a way that the Bible has been arranged probably, or something in Christian discourse that given the Crusades, given a history of a lot of violence in establishing Christianity in the Mediterranean and in Africa and the Arab world, right?
00:48:03
Speaker
there's something interesting there to me about her own attitude towards this history or the poem's attitude or something. Probably points to a kind of explanatory framework, which is implicit but not insisted upon. It's as though there's a kind of
00:48:24
Speaker
We know how this story goes. You see a still image and you can construct before and after it a kind of set of motivations and probable outcomes, and all you need is the image in order to render that narrative.
00:48:39
Speaker
Right. The narrative surrounds it already and kind of dictates how it should be read. With that in mind, is there something to say about the internal rhyme that happens at that moment? So often the squatting Arab or group of Arabs plotting probably. Plotting often and plotting. Well, no, sorry, the squatting and plotting. Oh, the squatting and plotting, yes. The squatting and plotting and often and probably, which is a kind of semantic rhyme as well. Yeah, that's right.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, or a kind of chiasm. I don't know, some sort of tension there in an interesting way. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we feel like it's all sewn up in a weird kind of way. That's right. Although the stitches are hidden, right? Yeah. It's not an end rhyme. It's sort of somewhere in there maybe. Yeah, I like it.
00:49:24
Speaker
And there's an us and a them that's established that I think Bishop's going to play with and has it at concern the entire poem at some level. I think I heard you say earlier on that there were moments where there was a kind of
00:49:42
Speaker
Well, to use her words now from the second line of the poem, serious or engravable kind of fixed image that's being described. But then you use the word, if I heard you right, wavery. There's a kind of feeling. I love that word. Does that mean it sort of has the quality of wavering? It sort of flickers? It's wavering. I'm thinking of like the heat over sand in a place. Yes, perfect.
00:50:08
Speaker
And the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, God spreading fingertip, and painfully finally that ignite in watery, prismatic white and blue. I mean, we're being asked to look at this engraved still image that is somehow coming apart and shimmering
00:50:27
Speaker
That's so good. My response to the bishop as descriptive poet thing has always been, I mean, it's led by, there's this very famous letter that Bishop writes to Anne Stevenson about Charles Darwin. She says that Darwin was her favorite prose writer or something.
00:50:45
Speaker
And she says that what you love about, I should have it at hand so I could quote it exactly. I thought about looking it up. It's okay. She says something like, you know, what one admires about Darwin is the kind of image of the young scientist kind of closely, minutely focused on some, I'm now paraphrasing.
00:51:02
Speaker
detail here or there, and then suddenly there's a kind of error or a slip, and what one sees is the artist sort of sliding, the writer sort of sliding giddily off into the unknown, and that what one wants in art is the same thing that's necessary for its production, a perfectly useless concentration, right? So sorry, so that she does want to sort of look closely at and describe something,
00:51:31
Speaker
But what she really, it seems to me to be into, to use a weird kind of language, is she likes to look at it and describe it so intently that it starts to look strange and it starts to sort of shimmer or come alive or wiggle or waver, as you've said.
00:51:48
Speaker
I think so. I think that's part of it. And then to me, the other part of it is that I think that's absolutely right. But I think the other part of it for me is her ever awareness of how mediating is already looking is already mediated rather. I love it. So that always the silence
00:52:05
Speaker
the gesture, the specs of birds suspended on invisible threads above the site. It's a little bit like a stage set. We know the birds are there because the birds are always there. They're part of the scene. They're part of the set of what this is supposed to look like. So
00:52:23
Speaker
She's looking at the scene which is engraved and kind of not only seeing it for what it is as an image, right, with these burin lines and stuff, but also understanding that it is part of a system of representation that feels a little bit
00:52:41
Speaker
produced, right, where the looking isn't innocent, where the thing that you're looking at isn't just sort of by chance there, it's been arranged. And I think, to me, this feels related to the question of typology and of sort of interpretive force, but I'm not sure I've made sense there, but... Oh, I think you have. And in a way, to connect it again, I keep doing this, but to the second line of the poem, the serious engravable, right? It's as though what's being asserted is that, you know,
00:53:11
Speaker
our travels, and we'll come to those in a minute, whatever that refers to, but take it for now as just like our own touristic adventures in the world, lack something that these engraved scenes have, which is this kind of over-determined
00:53:33
Speaker
already present narrative coherence, and even more the narrative coherence, like a kind of ideological coherence. A concordance, right? A concordance, an ideological concordance, right? Because a concordance is, you know,
00:53:49
Speaker
harmony, right? It's agreement and harmony. That's the other meaning of a converse is something that comes perfectly around to become whole, which makes some of this language really interesting to me. First of all, the human figure far gone in history or theology, which if you look up far gone in the Oxford English Dictionary, it gets its own entry, which means
00:54:15
Speaker
beyond help, but also can mean in this context, somewhere. One distance. One distance, right? So she's sort of playing around with things that mean two things. And the best of those, I think, is they all resolve themselves. Granted, a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in caddy cornered rectangles were circles set on stippled gray, granted a grim lunette
00:54:44
Speaker
caught in the toils of an initial letter when dwelt upon.
00:54:48
Speaker
they all resolve themselves, right? And I was thinking, do I know the meaning of the word resolve? And I think of resolve as something like what you're saying, like something that comes together or falls into place or begins to make a kind of sense, but the word actually- You think of the resolution of a story or something like that. Right, like the end, right? Like now we sew it up and it's done, or the problem was insolvable, but we've solved it and now everything's resolved, right?
00:55:15
Speaker
But it actually means something more like liquefaction, dissolution, a loosening or unfastening, an unraveling, and a release, right? So there's- Like dissolution. Like dissolution, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it has this strong history as a word that meant kind of breaking the knot apart, basically, or letting it fall apart kind of.
00:55:43
Speaker
And that seems to happen at the end of the section to the book she's looking at, right? Yes, yes. Where this wavery thing that you've described now literally is what's happening on the page. It is such a wacky series. The syntax is really thorny. It's wacky. If you try to track what's actually happening there, I think my undergraduate self just kind of gave up at some point with trying to sort of track what is actually happening here.
00:56:10
Speaker
because the subject of granted a page alone or a page made up, you're not sure if what's being granted is the scene or the page itself, right? The syntax confuses you at that point. And the lines that the Burin made, so that are now looking at the page as though it were a page that had been engraved,
00:56:40
Speaker
those lines move apart like ripples above sand, which is the kind of scene that had been depicted elsewhere and is depicted elsewhere in the book. So there's a kind of swapping of kind of figure for ground here.
00:56:55
Speaker
Yes. And then the dependent clauses keep heaping up. We don't know exactly whether the ripples in the sand are also like dispersing storms or if there's something else doing that dispersing there that's the subject of these. The syntax is really complicated and it just keeps growing, God spreading fingertip. And there you get this feeling of
00:57:24
Speaker
God's fingertip must be big. His fingerprint must be big. It must really take over. It's spreading. She couldn't have known about the expanding universe yet, but it sort of feels like it. It's just really wonky. This thing that's supposed to be serious and engraveable and resolved is actually pretty unresolved for me as an image.
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I would say that you stare at anything too long and what had formally tied it together might suddenly seem to come apart. When that happens for her,
00:58:03
Speaker
here, the eye drops away. Maybe it almost sounds like whoever's looking at the book is falling asleep or something like that. It becomes sort of dreamlike, but also alive. It's as though the book is coming to life somehow. And then that sort of cuts off at its climax. There's a kind of section break and an abrupt shift
00:58:33
Speaker
into this other mode that the poem then, for most of its course, enters in on. Entering the Narrows at St. John's, the touching bleed of goats reach to the ship.
00:58:47
Speaker
Right. We've switched tense too, right? We're now in the past, whereas before looking at the book was the present. The seven wonders of the world are tired. They are tired and they're touch familiar. So it's a scene of present tense narration of what's happening. And this is memory of what has happened.
00:59:10
Speaker
Oh, that's a nice way to put it. Memory of what has happened. So to the extent that Ashbury or anyone else maybe wanted to take this poem as an example of bishop writing in a kind of personal register, I mean, there are different ways to think about what that would mean, even in the space of this poem.
00:59:28
Speaker
So, though, I don't know if Ashbury would have known it, but that I guess we can say, especially given the evidence that you cited earlier, Gillian, that in the first half of the poem, she is doing something personal. She's describing this family heirloom. We could say that she's doing it very differently from, say, like the way her friend Robert Lowell would have done it in a poem about, say, a Lowell family Bible or something. Yeah, absolutely differently, quite impersonally. And now in the second section of the poem,
00:59:56
Speaker
I mean, one way, surely insufficient, but I think nevertheless with some accuracy to it, to describe what the second half of the poem is, is it's a travelogue or something. It's like a slideshow of trips we've taken.
01:00:17
Speaker
So what's interesting to you about the nature of the description of those travels? I suppose we should take it, given the way the poem is set up rhetorically, that whatever they are, they're not going to be serious or engravable. Right, right. And what strikes one, I think, about this is the
01:00:41
Speaker
the shifts from place to place, right? But there's no narrative order to these things. Everything only connected by and. And sometimes not even by and, which is like the most weekly hypotactic thing in the poem, right? It's the thing that makes some logic, at least in logic of and, and that's even missing. So
01:01:08
Speaker
So if the first half of the poem begins thus, there's a big difference between a poem that begins thus and then and. Right, right. I mean, thus has a really strongly logical set of moves to make, thereby this. And is just one damn thing after another.
01:01:28
Speaker
And so we start in St. John's, which I understand to be a part of Canada, right, of Nova Scotia, and just this lovely description.
01:01:46
Speaker
just a glimpse. I mean, right away, the question of visibility is presented as insufficient and partial, just a glimpse. There's a sense of kind of censeriness, right? Hearing and feeling the touching bleed of goats.
01:02:04
Speaker
And there's also an interesting kind of visual rhyme between white and blue from the last section and butter and eggs from the next section. Oh, that's nice. Butter and eggs being a flower that looks sort of like a Snapdragon mixed with a daffodil that you find in meadows in that region. I love it. And then we have an and, and then we're suddenly in Vatican City, I assume at St. Peter's. Yeah, I think so. All right.
01:02:34
Speaker
colloquial line and at St. Peter's, the wind blew and the sun shone madly, which feels like it's very much of its time. I think people would say madly about things normally. And then there are collegians and we're not even sure we're still at St. Peter's, I assume we are, but it's not entirely clear. I think so.
01:02:54
Speaker
I think I've seen that glossed as like they must be members of the College of Cardinals in that sense. Right. And so they're wearing black. I mean, Cardinals wear red, but but maybe there are some level of there's all these like different levels of St. Vatican studiers and they all have different outfits to wear that are color coded. But it's quite it's quite sort of sacrilegious the way they're described crisscrossing the great square with black like ants.
01:03:18
Speaker
Right, right. It's not at all reverent and it also is at a distance, right? And then boom, we're in a new place in Mexico and it's the dead man and we're just really not able to catch up to where we are. It's told in the way that children often tell stories where they assume you know all the context. In Mexico, the dead man lay in a blue arcade
01:03:44
Speaker
And there's the repetition of dead, you know, it feels full of affect but without it being stated, right? The language suggests a kind of trauma of having seen a dead person somewhere on your travels. The dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies, which of course brings us back to Christi.
01:04:01
Speaker
Christianity and resurrection. And this horrible detail of the jukebox going on and playing this very popular song of the day, which was in a Disney movie of the era and also a song that was important to Mexican nationalism and Elisco being a
01:04:24
Speaker
estate and it's directed to Guadalajara, which is actually a place that Ashbury writes about in the instruction manual. But so there's this disjunction between the sort of way we feel, the music that's on in the background, what we're seeing, it's as though it's all coming apart.
01:04:41
Speaker
right? It's all coming apart. It's all happening simultaneously. There's no order. And then we're at Volubilis, which is a site of Roman ruin in Morocco, I believe, a Berber, Roman site, beautiful place.
01:05:01
Speaker
where the old built world is being punctured by new nature in a way that completely breaks up the world.
01:05:12
Speaker
It's beautiful Poppy's line break, splitting the mosaics. It's so great. It's so great. And then I've always loved the phrase that follows that, the faddled guide made eyes. I love that. I love that too. There's this other person there, which generically puts this poem possibly in the realm, as I think Kedore does later, of dramatic monologue, where whatever this moment of lyric expression of
01:05:39
Speaker
of feeling about these travels that happens once we get to the eye or all these moments that are being collected. They've been observed by someone there who's in a different place and has a different set of feelings about what's happening, which puts the personal in a kind of
01:05:59
Speaker
I don't know, limited space. It's not a totalizing space. We're not supposed to inhabit the same space as this lyric speaker entirely.
01:06:11
Speaker
As you pointed out earlier, for most of its duration, not for all of it, there's actually an interesting departure towards the end. And it's one of the first places I really heard Ashbury's voice begin to break, interestingly, too. For most of that second section, we're in the first person, but we're, as you say, in the first person plural. So this is what we're doing. This is what happened to us.
01:06:36
Speaker
The we and the us, whoever comprise it, never specified, but the traveling party, as it were. I mean, I don't think it's trying to establish a kind of solidarity from speaker to reader or something like that. It's like the members of our group or the couple that's on the trip or whatever. Right. Do you think the first part does try to establish a solidarity? Is that a different we, a different our?
01:07:05
Speaker
Do you mean in the very first line, or do you mean throughout the first section? Throughout the first section, I mean our, you know, plotting against our Christian empires. Yeah, no, I think that's like you said, that cited speech or something. That's, you know, yes, that's establishing the kind of... The in-group.
01:07:25
Speaker
the readerly community, which is made up of, you know, this is funny for me to say, as somebody who is, you know, from the other side of the crusading world. But yes, the poem sort of hails you as a kind of member of our Christian world. And you could be confused about it, I think, until you get to this section, right? I mean, maybe, I don't know, I hear it as sighted speech, maybe because I know the poem so well, but I wonder. Yeah.
01:07:51
Speaker
if it could be mistaken anyway. But to me, the fact that there's a guide there making eyes kind of breaks the illusion for just a second, maybe just a second, right? I also just find making eyes such a funny phrase. It is, right? And what is the content of that, right? I mean, this is something I think O'Hara does a lot where a gesture happens in a poem and you don't know how to read its meaning, right? Like it could be taken as a sexual thing or it could be taken as like
01:08:19
Speaker
you know, tourists, you know, making eyes could mean a lot of things, right? He could be just joking around. He could, you know, it's an interestingly, I think, ambiguous gesture. But whatever the particular content or context of that gesture, what making eyes relies upon is a kind of in-group, out-group communication, right? So
01:08:44
Speaker
in the way that if a child is saying something and its two parents are present, they might communicate something with their eyes without the child's awareness. Or if you're traveling, more to the point maybe,
01:08:58
Speaker
with a friend and you're in a kind of foreign country or something odd is happening to you, there's a moment of recognition that happens through eye contact. So there are those kinds of hierarchies that one encounters in travel that are politically inflected
01:09:22
Speaker
here too. So I think of a line like, the English woman poured tea informing us that the duchess was going to have a baby. Where you're sort of like, who cares, right? But if you're an American, you might not be as enthused about that, or it's just this little glimpse. Yeah, and then that sits right next to, and in the brothels of Marrakesh, the little pockmarked prostitutes balance their tea trays on their head. So the tea,
01:09:49
Speaker
again is in both. I'm starting to get a real sense of a globe that is crisscrossed by all kinds of things, Christianity, tea, commerce, tourism. This is 1948, I think, or 47 that she's written this. It's just a post-war moment where I think Bishop felt
01:10:15
Speaker
like many Americans, like, wow, the worlds are oyster, but then quickly realized like, wow, all these places are complicated and bombed out and look at the damage we've done. And I mean, it's a really complicated moment historically. And she was rich enough to be able to do it, which is
01:10:34
Speaker
something that I think she was aware of as kind of problematic. And I think that comes through in moments like flung themselves naked and giggling against her knees asking for cigarettes. She becomes a GI there almost, right? Yeah, right. So the moment that follows that, I think things really take a turn. And this is what I was saying that where I thought I heard Ashbury's voice really sort of falter and break.
01:10:58
Speaker
And it's also where we get a first person singular all of a sudden. It was somewhere near there, I saw what frightened me most of all, a holy grave, not looking particularly holy. And in that moment, I mean, there's so much that's interesting to me in that moment, but one of the things that's interesting about it is like we've been saying, largely, I think, led by that wonderful line, everything connected only by and and.
01:11:26
Speaker
which I've always sort of thought, oh, that line in particular must have meant a lot to Ashbury. I think he's interested in that kind of connection. But anyway, that this is just sort of
01:11:37
Speaker
jarringly random scenes from travels. But at that moment, when she says, it was somewhere near there, I saw what frightened me most of all. The most of all is doing an interesting kind of work there. I mean, it suggests, in other words, that everything I've been telling you about has frightened me a little bit. But this is the thing that frightened me most of it. So now it's not just a kind of random list. It's a list of things that frightened me to a greater or lesser extent.
01:12:04
Speaker
And this is interesting to me that you say this. I mean, I know that I've heard that reading before, and I think it's true that there must be something about that most of all that's meant to signal fear. And it makes it interesting to me the way things are knitting up in the poem.
01:12:20
Speaker
or attempting to knit up. I mean, the poppies almost rhymes with eyes and evening and dripping and plush and us, right? There's sort of near rhymes and these sort of efforts at an all and Baldachan and there's like this kind of loose stitching
01:12:40
Speaker
and the repeated words, holy, holy, and that's happened through the poem so far. I mean, you could read it a number of different ways that there's this desire for things to come to order, thus should have been our travels, but there's also a kind of recognition that
01:12:58
Speaker
the things that will make them come together are kind of happenstantial, just about what juxtaposes. Yeah. I mean, I think it's holy. This is going to sound really dumb, but I think it's holy in the sense of, you know, like sanctified or whatever, but it's also holy in the sense that it's a whole.
01:13:17
Speaker
It's empty. It's empty, it's happenstantial, it's forced or whatever. I mean, exhortation is that word. An open, gritty marble trough carved solid with exhortation. There's been real effort here to make this thing
01:13:36
Speaker
real, right? But it's yellowed now as scattered cattle teeth, which is a really hard line of the poem to read correctly because all the adards come together. A half filled with dust, not even the dust of the poor prophet Panim who once lay there. And then we get to that line you love. So I want you to talk to us about the ending of that second section.
01:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, also the fact that it's a holy grave, and here we're back to the illustrated Bible, too. It's a holy grave. And some people suppose like the Saint John with the Baptist was somehow the
01:14:17
Speaker
buried, I don't know, somewhere in that region. It always calls to mind to me the story of Jesus and the grave, the sort of stone and so forth. Right. I mean, but it's interesting because
01:14:32
Speaker
It's a holy grave, but it was once a panem, which the only meaning of panem is non-Christian or pagan, but he's also a prophet. So this is like this weird
01:14:51
Speaker
this weird moment where different cultures have coalesced in the poem, different religious histories have coalesced in the poem. And also, I think it's a reference, I'm sure other people have said this too, it must be to some degree a reference to Ozymandias, right? Where that sonnet by Percy... She's vast and trunkless legs of stone.
01:15:17
Speaker
right, where I guess Shelley had seen a statue of, is it Ramses 2 or this Egyptian pharaoh and describes a person narrating an encounter with another person who saw this
01:15:35
Speaker
this wonderful statue that says, look on my works, you mighty and despair, that's become halved and falling apart in the desert and has no meaning anymore. It's like triply ironized. Triply ironized, but also meant to be kind of a sublime, like this telling of something that somebody experienced as sublime. And this is yet further ironized by the fact that
01:16:02
Speaker
whatever poetic trope she's trying to kind of enter into here is failing, you know, even in the poem, because right next to her is her guide. You know, presumably, Kedore, another guide,
01:16:17
Speaker
who is just amused and probably has seen this kind of thing before, right? This is a site of pilgrimage where people have sublime encounters and they must seem sort of dime-a-dozen to Khadur. And I love the language of in a smart produce, right? Like it brings the cosmopolitan in, right? Like that Khadur has another life and it involves wanting to look smart and be out in the city or something like this. And
01:16:45
Speaker
to me anyway, like I suddenly this this novelistic, I have this whole image of Kondora's life, you know? Yeah, it also it seems to me to have the kind of tone or the language of like, the kind of British colonialist kind of travelogue or something, you know, the sort of
01:17:07
Speaker
familiarity that's mixed with exoticism and sort of assumption of mastery or something. Yeah. Indeed. Oh, totally. I think that's exactly right. And I also think that Ashbury picks up on this in the instruction manual, which is just a complete fantasy of Guadalajara that has literally nothing to do with the real Guadalajara. But it's
01:17:28
Speaker
It's all told in this kind of completely, it's not Orientalism, but it's whatever the same thing would be for exoticizing Mexico as an American. So if it's all right with you, I want for us to spend our time now what's left of it thinking about this final section that I think I called Dakota a little while ago.
01:17:56
Speaker
And maybe also I can just read those lines one more time so that they're fresh in people's minds. So we've gotten, remember, up to this point, the description of this deluxe edition of a Bible in the first section of the poem.
01:18:16
Speaker
and then contrasted with it the kind of disjunctive, perhaps frightening and ironic, but also funny in certain ways, description of our travels. And then there's another kind of break.
01:18:31
Speaker
and we get the following lines which end the poem. Everything only connected by and and and. Open the book. The guilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips. Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old nativity while we were at it?
01:18:55
Speaker
the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and lulled within a family with pets, and looked and looked our infant sight away.
01:19:19
Speaker
So I think that first line of that section, everything only connected by and and, I mean, we've talked plenty about it. If you want to say more about that, by all means be my guess, but it sounds like a complaint, a kind of complaint that's been made about the section that preceded it, the section of travels that don't have anything stronger to connect them than the word and.
01:19:42
Speaker
But then we get this kind of instruction, which now really does feel to me, Jillian, I don't know about you, like an instruction to you, the reader, to me, open the book. Is that book the Bible again? How do you take those lines? And what are you being, if you do take those lines as instruction to you, as reader, Jillian, what are you being instructed to do?
01:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do find this one thing I love about poems that I love is was when they don't entirely yield their contents. Right. And I do want to just preface this by saying that I don't really know the answers to these questions and I almost don't want to know them for everybody else. But
01:20:26
Speaker
But I do agree with you that I wonder if we must read the first line as a complaint. We can keep that aside for a second because the instructions that follow, certainly grammatically, it's an order, a command to open the book. I love the ways that Bishop includes parentheses in her poetry, which are things that can't be read aloud.
01:20:52
Speaker
And I love the possibility that
01:21:00
Speaker
that this unravels something about the command voice, right? That we have a command to you. Yeah, so the sentence, the guilt rubs off the edges of the pages and punnets the fingertips. That's a parenthetical. Exactly. And guilt, I mean, if it's unclear, is G-I-L-T, not G-U-I-L-T. Right. But of course, it's homophonically related to G-U-I-L-T. But if there's a command, open the book, and then it's repeated in another line, open the heavy book, what intercedes between those two commands is this kind of
01:21:29
Speaker
thing that's drawing us away from the authority of that voice and acknowledges that there's something literally falling apart about this heavy book. So if there's a God-like voice in the open the book, open the heavy book, which I've always thought there is a little bit, in its commanding voice, it's tempered or complicated by the possibility that the book itself isn't quite so monumental.
01:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, that. And I also want to, I mean, I take the word pollinates sort of seriously here too, which is to say like, yeah, okay. So the word guilt, you're right. There must no doubt be invoking some kind of homophonic association with the guilt, the kind of moral sense of feeling of guilt or whatever.
01:22:17
Speaker
But what it seems to be referring to in the first place is sober to imagine that this edition of the Bible has a gold, right? The edges of the pages are gold. I think there's something interesting and also very bishop-like to me about the way the real materiality of the book is getting onto the person who's reading it. That's described not as
01:22:46
Speaker
a kind of spoiling or instead it seems to be generative. It's an act of pollination. Right. But then I wonder like with fingertips, we've had God spreading fingertip and spreading is another sort of... Yeah.
01:23:02
Speaker
image of kind of taking over, right? And pollination could be another. I mean, it's complicated. I feel like it's both positive, but it has this, you know, in the way it harkens back to the, the sort of colonizing, I don't know, possibly colonizing gesture of Christianity. And yeah, you know, but I, you know, so sorry. Now I want to say, like,
01:23:26
Speaker
if a too crude description of the poem is that the first half of the poem is about a book and the second half of the poem is about our travels, now in this coda, we get the book getting onto our fingers. It's, you know, what it sort of- Merges. Opens the possibility, precisely. What it opens the possibility of for me is that like there's some kind of
01:23:50
Speaker
resolution of the dichotomy that's been established here that's being offered in these final lines. You know, it's like, when I teach this poem, I, you know, I'll ask my students sometimes, we're like, the scene that's described in the final lines of the poem, where is it happening?
01:24:08
Speaker
Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, you know, is it in a book? Is it something we saw? Is it only in the poem? Is it in our imagination? You know, sort of like what are the but but I but I think it's sort of it's those questions are almost maybe impossible to answer. People might answer them somewhat differently. But I think, you know, I guess the point I try to make is like it's hard to say, which is itself an interesting thing.
01:24:35
Speaker
Indeed, indeed, yeah. Why couldn't we have seen this old nativity while we were at it? Yeah, and then this dash, right? Another bishop move, right? Right, right. And I mean, the question of what speech act the question is, you know, if it's a literal question or a kind of plea or a kind of, you know, complaint. Right, the idea might be that like we saw something
01:25:03
Speaker
And we didn't recognize it as a nativity while we were there. Or like, there's a question about what seeing means, right? I mean, does seeing mean seeing it for what it is? Or does seeing it, you know, why couldn't we have seen it while we were at it? So we were there, but we didn't really see it. And the question is, what does the seeing mean? Like, do we assume that seeing it means bringing it into
01:25:32
Speaker
a kind of cohesive, concordant image that we can make sense of? Or does it mean something like seeing it as just everything only connected by and and? I mean, is it that that's not a complaint, but actually a kind of, this is the way it is, right? Everything only connected by and and, and no grand narrative that's going to sew it all up into a grim lunette. Yeah, I love that. And then we get this description, which is sort of the
01:26:00
Speaker
mediated, I think, by that Johann Sebastian Bach, Carol, break forth, O beauteous heavenly light and usher in the morning. Ye shepherds shrink not with affright, but here the angels warning. This child now meek in infancy,
01:26:18
Speaker
our confidence and joy shall be the hour of Satan's breaking, our peace, eternal making, which heralds this age of peace with the birth of Christ, but of course, does not come to pass. So there's religious language in there, the dark, ajar, the rocks breaking with light, which to me feels like this
01:26:47
Speaker
quite Bachian. I don't remember who actually wrote those lyrics, a German theologian in the 17th century, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame. So exactly like what flames don't do, right? They suck the air, they breathe like crazy.
01:27:04
Speaker
Yeah. It has no damage, right? It's colorless, it's sparkless. There's endless straw for it. It feels like endlessly renewable, right? This kind of magical, self-generating kind of light. Right. And then quite sort of out of the register of that kind of perfection is this quite humble description of a family with pets, right? Like to call the Christ scene
01:27:34
Speaker
like to call it the oxen ass, sorry, I've said it backwards, the oxen ass, which are tropes reiterated again and again. To call them pets, it's so wonderfully diminutive. Well, it's perfect too that it sort of maps onto the progress of the poem. We go from this old nativity to a family with pets.
01:27:58
Speaker
you know, this old nativity is the language of the first half of the poem. A family with pets is the language of the second half of the poem. But it's the same scene, right? It's the same scene. So it's been de-typologized or something, right? It's like, or given itself back to its sort of more meaningless coordinates, right? I mean, of course, a family with pets also
01:28:22
Speaker
is a real late 40s ideal. It's the space of the family that makes the person feel included in the very space that Bishop for several reasons, because she lost her family and also because she was gay, was not afforded. So it's interestingly cofected, I think. Oh, that's great. It's a sort of nostalgia for a past she didn't have.
01:28:49
Speaker
she didn't have, but it's also a real shutting down of the grandeur and the import of the Christ family. So I don't know. I like the reading of this sort of untypologizing move, the taking the thing that is so serious and engravable that you can't see it for what it is. You can only see it in terms of its sort of symbolic
01:29:19
Speaker
sort of theological register. And in a way, I mean, not to impose too much of a theological reading. In a way, it's like the word made flesh at the end of the poem, right? It's like the sort of theological type that becomes human, you know, and ordinary.
01:29:39
Speaker
It becomes ordinary, not holy. And I like the idea that to be looking at that and taking your fill, that looking has a kind of violence, something that Bishop writes about a lot in January 1, that poem.
01:29:57
Speaker
she's thinking about conquistadors and their visual lust for the land they see arriving in Brazil and thinking about the rape of the women, the local women, and the history of art as well. So Clark, yeah. So you've already begun to do this, but I want to hear you say more about the final line of the poem. So we get another dash
01:30:25
Speaker
And I don't know if we should take...
01:30:29
Speaker
the two dashes, because they're separated by one, two, three, four lines. Those are four lines between the dashes. If we even want to take the dashes as marking the beginning and end of a parenthetical kind of phrase. I mean, it could be. If we read it that way, it would be something like, why couldn't we have seen the solid nativity while we were at it and looked and looked our infant side away? Right. Exactly. I do think that there is that.
01:30:57
Speaker
that possibility, for sure. So in that last line, we get more things that are connected only by and and and, right? And looked and looked. Right. And also, I love the idea. I mean, I struggle over whether looking something away. Yeah, what does that mean? I was talking with my husband about like, what things do we do away? I've got one for you.
01:31:24
Speaker
drink away or, you know, anchors away. Well, anchors away is A-W-E-I-G-H. But I think there are, there's a note, it's fire away is what it is. Fire away. Or in baseball, swing away. You swing away, right? And I think it's, I always want this to mean two things, both
01:31:44
Speaker
Yes, look away like go for it. Look, look, look, look, look, you know, take to your heart's content all you want. Yeah, just go for it. And there's that desire and that lust that comes from looking and just wanting to take in a scene and own it at some level and make sense of it. But then there's also the possibility that there will be a kind of spending of looking of the desire for looking like look it away like
01:32:08
Speaker
like corrode it away, almost in a way. To sort of erase it or extinguish it or exhaust it. To exhaust it, to do the thing that the flame won't do, which is expend itself. Because this is a poem that it does locate itself quite a bit in worlds of conquest and places of conquest. And it has a lot
01:32:34
Speaker
It has a lot to set up about the Crusades in a way and about Christianity as a kind of violence. Yeah, totally. We should say something also about the weirdness of the phrase infant sight.
01:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, infant sight. I'm moving away from infant sight. I know that in a draft of the poem, at least I think this is true. I remember once knowing this. I don't think I've looked at the draft myself though. She, instead of infant, had the word silent there, which is etymologically what infant means, right? So it means speechless. Before talking, yeah. That's why we call babies infants is, you know, we call them that because they can't talk yet.
01:33:22
Speaker
So what, you know, silent, silent sight, speechless sight, silent sight sounds almost like Silent Night, now we're back in the realm of song. So I don't know, I mean, is it used so nicely? And I totally am with you on the kind of ambiguity of what and looked and looked blank away might mean. So it might mean, again, to
01:33:46
Speaker
do it wholeheartedly, do it to your heart's content, do it as much as you want, or it might mean to do it so as to work it out of your system to sort of get rid of it. Now, if we plug the idea of infant sight into the algebraic formula there, that's the variable. What does it mean to have those two attitudes
01:34:14
Speaker
at once about something we're going to call infant sight. Right. It's interesting. I mean, one thinks about the possibility that
01:34:30
Speaker
infant desire, desire for the needs of an infant.
Infant Sight and Modernist Perception
01:34:36
Speaker
They're pure. I mean, they're pure. If infant sight is allowed to become adult sight, is there something about the not allowing for a kind of
01:34:56
Speaker
innocent desire for something, not letting it come to fruition, not letting it come to speech, not letting the entrance into speech being some sort of fall that tries to make sense of things that
01:35:13
Speaker
maybe had a pleasure before language, and a reality of their own that just wants to be left alone, which is, of course, the great modernist desire to see without discourse, to see without convention. I love it. The sort of wide-eyed baby taking in the world, who's sort of learning it, knowing it, but can't produce the language to describe it. But gives no meaning to it and doesn't turn it into pre-established meanings.
01:35:42
Speaker
Well, that really does seem to address the kind of either or situation of the first and second halves of the poem where the first half is sort of like all meaning but with very little life, then there's life without meaning. Right, right. I mean, and I almost wonder then though about the wonky
01:36:05
Speaker
final lines of the first section, which just kind of the dwelt upon. The thing that's caught in the toils of an initial letter, caught in the toils meaning there, I think, caught in the nets, right? Toils means the nets that capture a bit of prey, right? So there's something about when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves. And there's this
01:36:33
Speaker
You had this sense of those lines as kind of spreading and falling apart in a way. I wonder if that's an example of a kind of, I don't know, I'm just puzzled still. There are still things that I can't exhaust, as Ashbury himself said about these lines and their connections. Well, I think, and in a way, I think the lines
01:36:56
Speaker
are about a kind of fantasy of this inexhaustible looking. I mean, I hear the ambiguity, as I've said, that you describe in the final line between the two versions of what to look and look something away might be. But I do kind of come down on one side of that
01:37:20
Speaker
ambiguity, so maybe it's ultimately not one for me, which is I think the poem wants to locate itself at this place of an inexhaustible looking, a looking that can't be, you know, that needn't be satisfied, but that might go on forever, you know.
01:37:48
Speaker
So it's good and pure somehow, this infant site, and it's a fantasy of sort of... Yeah, I think so. I think it's a fantasy because it's something we didn't have. Why couldn't we have? Yeah, we didn't have it. Life isn't like that, but maybe a poem is or something like that is the version of it I'd offer here.
01:38:12
Speaker
Right. It's worth saying, too, that these are, I think, some of the most iambic lines of the poem. Oh, yeah. Everything only connected by and, and, open the book, the guilt moves off the edges of the pages and pollinates the finger. It's just, it's, it's, you know, and looked and looked our infant sight away. That's pentameter. Yeah, yeah.
01:38:32
Speaker
She does that sometimes at the ends of poems, I think about the yet to be dismantled elms, the geese. Geese, another poem I love. That's another one that ends with a line of pentameter. That's true. Yeah, it's sort of, and for me, in both cases, what that signals, and actually, so sorry, I just quoted the last line of the poem called Poem, another bishop poem. And I think in both of those cases, I think both of those poems are sort of about representations of the world.
Bishop's Interest in Representation
01:39:02
Speaker
memories, and then this final scene that's sort of neither and both at once. And she was very interested in the history of making likenesses. This is something that I've written about, about what she learned from another American poet, William Carlos Williams, about his disdain in a way for metaphorics and his preference for straight description as his fantasy.
01:39:31
Speaker
and thought a lot about the ethics of what it means to turn one thing into another thing and to try to make sense out of it that way. So it's something that she's always thinking about. But I think especially in these 40 poems, because I think poem might be from the same era. It's later. Yeah, that's from Geography 3. That's a later one.
01:39:54
Speaker
But yeah, I think it's definitely a preoccupation of hers. Jillian, I want to keep talking with you for hours and hours and hours. But at some point, you know, all things have to end.
Jillian's Poem Reading and Closing Remarks
01:40:10
Speaker
All things have to end, at least for now. Yeah, at least for now. But we've made it this far, and I think we should go just a little bit further, because I'll bet having
01:40:21
Speaker
thought about this poem now for the last hour and a half or so, and having heard Ashbury read it and, you know, bemoaning the absence of a recording of Bishop reading it, what our audience would really like to hear now is the poem one more time, but in your voice. Would you be willing to read it for us? I'd be delighted. Thank you. Thanks. Over 2000 illustrations and a complete concordance
01:40:47
Speaker
Thus should have been our travels, serious and graveable. The seven wonders of the world are tired and a touch familiar, but of the other scenes innumerable.
01:41:00
Speaker
though equally sad and still, are foreign. Often the squatting Arab or group of Arabs plotting, probably, against our Christian empire, while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand, points to the tomb, the pit, the sepulcher.
01:41:18
Speaker
The branches of the date palms look like files. The cobbled courtyard where the well is dry is like a diagram. The brickwork conduits are vast and obvious, the human figure far gone in history or theology, gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
01:41:40
Speaker
always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds suspended on invisible threads above the sight, or the smoke rising solemnly pulled by threads. Granted, a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in caddy cornered rectangles or circles set on stippled gray, granted a grim lunette caught in the toils of an initial letter when dwelt upon
01:42:09
Speaker
they all resolve themselves. The eyedrops waded through the lines the burin made, the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, gods spreading fingertip, and painfully, finally, that ignite in watery, prismatic white and blue. Entering the narrows at St. John's, the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship
01:42:38
Speaker
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs, among the fog-soaked weeds and butter and eggs. And at St. Peter's, the wind blew and the sun shone madly. Rapidly, purposefully, the collegians marched in lines, crisscrossing the great square with black like ants. In Mexico, the dead man lay. In a blue arcade, the dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies.
01:43:05
Speaker
The jukebox went on playing, aye, Yalisco. And at the lubilis there were beautiful poppies splitting the mosaics. The fat old guide made eyes. In Dingle Harbor, a golden length of evening, the rotting hawks held up their dripping plush. The English woman poured tea, informing us that the duchess was going to have a baby.
01:43:30
Speaker
And in the brothels of Marrakech, the little pockmarked prostitutes balanced their tea trays on their heads and did their belly dances, flung themselves, naked and giggling against our knees, asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there.
01:43:47
Speaker
I saw what frightened me most of all. A holy grave, not looking particularly holy, one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldachin, open to every wind from the pink desert. An open, gritty marble trough carved solid with exhortation, yellowed as scattered cattle teeth, half filled with dust, not even the dust of the poor prophet Panem, who once lay there.
01:44:15
Speaker
In a smart Bernouce, Kador looked on amused. 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. Why couldn't we have seen this old nativity while we were at it?
01:44:37
Speaker
The dark, ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and lulled within, a family with pets, and looked and looked our infant sight away.
01:44:58
Speaker
Jillian White, thank you so much for the conversation, for thinking about this poem that I love so much and I know differently and better. Thank you, Kamran. Right back at you, it was absolutely delightful. Such a joy. Thank you. Yeah, what a gift. Thank you again. And thank you, dear listeners, for making it with us.
01:45:20
Speaker
Stay tuned, subscribe to the podcast, and share an episode with a friend. We'll have more for you soon. And until then, be well, everyone.