Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Lindsay Turner on Elizabeth Bishop ("The Shampoo")
2.6k Plays2 years ago
Lindsay Turner joins the podcast to talk about what is perhaps my favorite love poem ever, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Shampoo."
[FYI: For some reason there's a minor technical issue w/my audio quality for the first 3-4 minutes of the episode—sorry!—but, happily, it resolved quickly and doesn't affect the rest of this lovely conversation.]
The Shampoo
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs and Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the chapbook A Fortnight (forthcoming, Doublecross Press). She's an assistant professor in the Department of English at Case Western University. Her second collection of poetry, The Upstate, is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Press's Phoenix Poets series in fall 2023. Her translations from the French include the poetry collections adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018), The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Common Life, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2023), as well as books of philosophy by Frederic Neyrat (Atopias, co-translated with Walt Hunter, Fordham UP, 2017), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Postcolonial Bergson, Fordham UP, 2019), Anne Dufourmantelle (In Defense of Secrets, Fordham UP, 2020), Richard Rechtman (Living in Death, Fordham UP, 2021) and Éric Baratay (Animal Biographies, UGA Press, 2022). She is the recipient of a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room for 2016-17 as well as 2017 and 2019 French Voices Grants.
During the episode, we listen to a recording of James Merrill reading Bishop's poem. The full recording can be found on the website of the Key West Literary Seminar. My thanks to Arlo Haskell from the Key West Literary Seminar and Stephen Yenser from the Literary Estate of James Merrill for permission to use the clip. (Copyright @ the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.)
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and make sure you're signed up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very pleased today to have Lindsay Turner on the podcast to talk about one of my most favorite poems of all time, Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Shampoo.
00:00:22
Speaker
Lindsay is someone I've admired for a long time. She is, I think this is probably true, unless the other guests so far that we've had have been holding out on me. This would be the first time we've had not only a scholar and a critic as our guest, but also a poet. Lindsay is a wonderful poet herself.
00:00:44
Speaker
And she's also a translator. And I think both of those perspectives are ones that I'm really eager to take advantage of and learn from in the conversation that we have today. So let me tell you a little bit about Lindsay and then we'll move on into the episode.
Lindsay Turner's Published Works
00:01:04
Speaker
Lindsay is the author of the book Songs and Ballads, which is a book of poems, which came out from Prelude Books in 2018, and a chat book called A Fortnite, which is, I think, forthcoming from Double Cross Press. In other exciting news, her second book of poetry, Proper
00:01:28
Speaker
you know, longer book of poetry, is called The Upstate, and that's forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press's Phoenix Poets series in fall 2023. Lindsay's the translator of too many books for me to list, but a translator from the French, primarily, exclusively? Exclusively,
Translation and Essays
00:01:50
Speaker
yeah.
00:01:50
Speaker
Okay, but that includes translations both of poetry and of philosophy and probably of other things besides. You can find her essays in places like the ASAP Journal, in Lana Turner, in LARP, in Kenyan Review, Boston Review, Yale Review, the Atlantic.
00:02:15
Speaker
And you can find her poems in similar kinds of places, sometimes the same places, but the New York Review of Books I saw recently, which I really loved, Yale Review, The Atlantic, places like this.
Poetic Sensitivity and Influences
00:02:31
Speaker
And I just have to say, I mean, I noted this at the top, but I want to emphasize it again here, that
00:02:40
Speaker
One of the reasons why I was so eager to have Lindsay on the podcast today was because I think you really hear, I mean, even when what she's doing is criticism, you hear the kind of sensitivity of ear and attention to nuance of language that I think comes from being a poet and a translator. So that I remember, for instance, an essay of hers I really loved. I think it was in Larb and on the poet Charles Wright.
00:03:10
Speaker
and on the idea of having an accent in poetry and on what that signals regionally and culturally, linguistically, and in terms of one's soul. And I just really admired that essay. I'll put a link to that essay in the show notes and to many of the other things that I've described so far.
00:03:32
Speaker
Remember also that in the show notes you'll be able to get access to the text of the poem if you'd like to look at it as we talk about it.
00:03:43
Speaker
and other things that happen to come up in the course of the conversation, I will make available to you that way.
Podcast Engagement Encouragement
00:03:51
Speaker
I've also been, as I've been putting episodes out so far, I've been writing newsletter posts that are pretty brief, but that also contain some reflections from me on the episode and some more links and things like that.
00:04:07
Speaker
So a link to the newsletter will also appear in the show notes, whether you get this on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And I guess the last thing I would say podcast business wise is to remember to follow the podcast on whatever podcast service you use and leave a rating or review if you'd like what you hear. I really appreciate it.
00:04:35
Speaker
But with with that said, Lindsay Turner, welcome to Close Readings.
First Podcast Experience
00:04:40
Speaker
How are you doing today? I'm great. I'm great. I'm so thrilled to be on this. And thank you for like, I'm sort of glad this isn't video because you could probably like see me blushing. But thanks for that really introduction. I'm just the first time I've ever been on a podcast and I'm I'm so glad. So yeah, it's a wonderful way to like start to start the new year.
00:05:02
Speaker
I know. Well, I mean, it's honestly, just doing this series of conversations has been such a kind of selfish pleasure for me. And then there has been the incredibly gratifying and not at all
00:05:18
Speaker
expected, necessarily, pleasure of seeing that other people like to listen and the guests like to talk to me, it sounds like.
Setting the Stage for 'The Shampoo'
00:05:28
Speaker
So it's all to the good. And what could be better than talking about a poem as beautiful as the one we have in front of us today?
00:05:37
Speaker
So so this is a short poem, and I think it's short enough that we might get to hear it more than once in its entirety during our episode today. But for the for the first reading, I really would be so grateful, Lindsay, if you would read the shampoo to us so that it's fresh on everyone's mind.
Reading and Analyzing 'The Shampoo'
00:05:56
Speaker
Of course, I'd love to. Thanks. The shampoo.
00:06:02
Speaker
The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading gray concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical, and look what happens, for time is nothing if not amenable.
00:06:31
Speaker
The shooting stars in your black hair, in bright formation, are flocking where, so straight, so soon? Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon. Well, thank you very much, Lindsay. I love hearing it.
00:06:52
Speaker
I think I sometimes share this poem on Twitter, and I think that what I say about it often is that it's not just one of my favorite poems, but maybe my favorite love poem. And I wonder, well, having just read it out loud,
00:07:12
Speaker
And I'm thinking back to the very first conversation I had in the series with Brian Glavy about Frank O'Hara's poem, Having a Coke with You, which was also kind of a love poem. What you noticed about the form of address that the poem is, I mean, there is a U in the poem. We don't get it right away. There are some other pronouns that indicate
00:07:41
Speaker
kinds of relationality. Does it feel right to you to describe this as a love poem? And if the answer to that is a little complicated, would you share some of what makes it feel complicated to you? Sure, sure, yeah.
00:08:03
Speaker
I was also, it's interesting, I was also, I was listening to your conversation with Brian and thinking about this as a love poem and it's such a different kind of love poem than O'Hara's love poem because it's such a weird, oblique, sideways love poem, like typically for Bishop, right? She's not, it's what I love about her is she's,
00:08:21
Speaker
at once so simple and so complex. I think what I was- She's not as frank as Frank, right? Not quite. I guess when, I mean, I love so much about this poem and Bishop in general. I
00:08:40
Speaker
It's hard for me to talk about her without just devolving into like, this is so great. But what I love about this is a love poem is that it, on the one hand, it's a very simple, small, quiet, you know, beautiful, contained poem about washing someone's hair.
00:09:02
Speaker
in this big tin basin. There's such a concrete act of love in it. Asking someone if you can wash their hair. It's erotic, but it's also just kind and beautiful.
Complex Imagery and Rhyme Scheme
00:09:20
Speaker
in and simple and fundamental. On the other hand, what makes it really complicated as a love poem or as any kind of poem and what I what draws me to it every time is just the complexity of the images in the poem and everything else that's going on in this love poem and that I think has to do with the kind of love poem it is but for example like
00:09:45
Speaker
we think of Bishop as a poet of description and sometimes straightforward and simple description as she is at the fish houses, which is sometimes my favorite Bishop poem, although not always. Sometimes this one is. But in this poem, all of the images are so many of the images are about the moon and shooting stars and things in the sky. But everything that is actually in the poem is a person.
00:10:12
Speaker
and gray hairs and lichen. And it just sort of is mind boggling and complicated to me that in this poem that is about looking very closely, looking almost down very closely at things, at a lover's hair and the gray in it or at the lichens on the rocks, somehow
00:10:34
Speaker
those things are described in terms of looking up, like at shooting stars and the moon. And then the way stasis and motion work in this poem, all of these things that are
00:10:47
Speaker
that are just like, yeah, mind-mogglingly complex. And the way this poem manages to be like a very still, simple, small poem, and this kind of cosmic poem full of motion going in all different directions at once, the way it does both of that, I think is really, really interesting to me. Oh, yeah. Well, you've put your finger on one of the things that I love most about Bishop, which is right, the sort of
00:11:17
Speaker
marrying, that may be the wrong word, but of close attention to the very local with this imaginative or kind of surreal fancy, which we get in almost every one of the three stanzas of this poem. And maybe it's useful to say, again, to people who aren't looking at the text,
00:11:46
Speaker
So this is a poem that's written in three stanzas, each of six lines. And maybe you could hear it in Lindsay's lovely reading, but there is a rhyme scheme that's consistent throughout the poem. And I've discovered when I've taught the poem to students that sometimes they miss the rhyme scheme altogether. It's subtle, but it's consistent and there. Were you going to say something about rhyme, Lindsay? I was. I was, because I also
00:12:12
Speaker
you know, sometimes, and this happens with bishops, sometimes I'll go back to some of her poems, having forgotten about the rhyme because bishops rhyme is often very, very present and very subtle at the same time. And this, you know, this is a really, really complex rhyme scheme. It's a weird interlocking rhyme scheme, I think of bishops own
00:12:37
Speaker
making. But it's not super audible. And it doesn't structure the rhythm of the lines in the way you'd expect. So I was telling you, I tried to memorize, I did memorize this poem because I wanted to have it like rattling around in my head for a few days before I was going to talk to you so that I could
00:12:56
Speaker
think about it all the time. And it was harder to memorize than I thought because the line breaks and the rhymes don't occur rhythmically or in time, in the time of the poem, at the places you think they will. Yeah, I sort of charted it out just before our conversation today so that I could make sure that what I
00:13:20
Speaker
remembered as though by intuition or something about the poem was in fact true. And yeah, you're right. So the rhyme is interlocking. It's this kind of A, B, A, and then C, B, C. For people who have ever read Dante, it occurs to me that it's like two stanzas of Terza Rima with a sort of, where you have a line, two lines that rhyme with a line that doesn't rhyme in between, and then that,
00:13:49
Speaker
the sound that that other line had introduced becomes the rhyming sound in the next three lines. So maybe that's somewhere in the background here.
Queerness and Love in Bishop's Poetry
00:13:58
Speaker
But I also try to scan the lines, and the meter is... You think it's...
00:14:06
Speaker
going to be more regular than it turns out to be, actually. There are interesting variations on meter. And maybe we can come back to some of that. But I want to zoom back all the way out and just to something else you said a while ago when I asked you if this was a love poem and you said that it seemed much more oblique than what we get in O'Hara. And yeah, no doubt, that's true.
00:14:34
Speaker
Well, for one thing, it's obliqueness has presumably at least something to do with queerness, right? With Bishop's own way of negotiating what it would mean to be a public figure and a lesbian,
00:14:53
Speaker
sort of wanting to write a love poem, but not wanting that poem to out herself in a way that would have made her uncomfortable. O'Hara has his own kind of negotiation of closetedness, right? And though Bishop was older than O'Hara, of course, they're contemporary to each other. They're writing poems at the same time. And more or less within the same sort of culture that they have their own subcultures that they occupy.
00:15:23
Speaker
fair to say as a generalization that Bishop would have been less comfortable than O'Hara being out or outed, right? So maybe that explains some of what comes across as sort of circumspect about the poem. She calls her lover her friend, for instance. Absolutely. With Bishop, I struggle a little bit because the poems seem at once to
00:15:52
Speaker
invite and to resist reading any of the biography back into them. And so it's sort of true that this poem becomes, you know, takes a lot of its meaning from you knowing about Bishop's relationship with Lota, who in fact I was just looking around in Meghan Marshall's biography of Bishop. I guess, you know, Lota had like two very
00:16:20
Speaker
pronounced like white streaks in her hair. So that, you know, the shooting stars aren't just, at first I thought they might just be like gray, you know, individual gray hairs, but I think they're actually bigger, wider streaks of hair. The idea of, you know, of a woman washing a woman's, another woman's hair, you know, it goes from like a,
00:16:48
Speaker
I think when you know about her relationship, yeah, it becomes a more erotic image because on the surface, that could be a mother washing a child's hair or someone's hair being washed in a beauty salon or whatever. A child washing a mother's hair, maybe. A child washing a mother's hair. And it was still in those contexts. I think Bishop wants you to be able to read it as
00:17:16
Speaker
as a gesture at the end of a poem that could be about many different kinds of love. It could be about an adult child washing an aging mother's hair. There are so many ways you could read it. But when you know the biography, then it becomes, I think, a little bit more powerful and more supercharged and more of a really remarkable poem about a relationship.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, terrific. So maybe we don't need to say much more than that. I mean, unless you want to, Lindsay, about biographical context here. Maybe things will come up. But actually, what I'm sort of eager to do is to jump back in now to some of the images in the poem.
Paradoxical Imagery and Visual Orientation
00:18:06
Speaker
And maybe we can begin with its first stanza. And there, I'm noticing
00:18:14
Speaker
like right away the first line, the still explosions on the rocks. Still explosion is an interestingly paradoxical phrase. The lichens and the way they grow and the kind of ambiguous thing that a lichen is, you know, the kind of organism that it is, that seems interesting to me. So what are you noticing there? I know you said something earlier about kind of stillness and motion, but
00:18:43
Speaker
What do you make of still explosions as a place to begin? Yeah, it really, as you just said, it really kind of encapsulates this, you know, I want to say tension, that's sort of a silly word, but this dynamic of things that are going places but also staying in the same place. And it's also, it's an opening that asks us
00:19:15
Speaker
Well, when the poem starts off, the shampoo, right? And then the still explosions on the rocks. Like that's jarring and that's disorienting. I've been teaching poetry workshops, you know, for a while. And so I talk a lot with students who are trying to write poems. I think about this when you're writing poems. How do you orient your reader at the beginning of the poem?
00:19:37
Speaker
And those are two very, very disorienting. The shampoo, how do you get from the shampoo to the still explosions on the rocks? Like, what does that even mean, the still explosions on the rocks? But then we get the lichens. And so very quickly, because Bishop, Bishop is not often a disorienting poet. I think she takes great care to orient us, to orient the reader visually, especially. And and and it all and because
00:20:03
Speaker
because that metaphor is like what a lichen looks like. A firework arrested and it's like whatever and it's exploding. And in fact, if anything, its stasis is what the illusion is. It's just that our
00:20:25
Speaker
It's a question of scales of time, right? That we can't see that it's growing, but we might think for time that it has grown. Yeah. Yes. Yes.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting what you say about Bishop being a poet who likes to orient her reader, who's sort of careful to do that. That sounds exactly right to me. I think it's true in all of her poems, but I think in any of the poems it is. Well, I mean, I guess what I would say about it is that often she seems to me like a poet who wants to begin that way and then sort of earn her way towards disorienting us later, but that she's very patient about that. You know, that poem that you mentioned earlier at the Fish Houses, I think works that way.
00:21:07
Speaker
At the beginning, it really does seem like we are trying to be put hospitably into a setting, into a scene that we're invited to imagine.
Simple Descriptions Conveying Complex Ideas
00:21:17
Speaker
But by the end of the poem, there's crazy stuff going on. And how she gets from point A to point B is often what's so interesting about her as a poet.
00:21:28
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, in this poem goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the way it seems like a simple thing and it's actually a very complex thing. But even in the first three lines, the still explosions on the rocks, the lichens grow by spreading gray concentric shocks. There's so much complexity in that, even though it's just a very, very simple description of, as you said, what a lichen is and how it moves and how it grows.
00:21:57
Speaker
which is something that looks to us like Stasis, but is actually growing vice versa. And I wonder, I'm curious about how you read. I've been thinking a lot. This is what happens when you memorize a poem. I'm trying to memorize where the commas go. And I got stuck, I think when I was trying to sleep last night, thinking about
00:22:19
Speaker
that comma between spreading and gray and whether it's that they grow by spreading or they grow by spreading gray concentric shocks. Right. Are spreading, are spreading? I mean, the comma makes it seem like spreading gray and concentric are a series of three adjectives all modifying shocks.
00:22:44
Speaker
I think you could read it that way or you could read it as grow by spreading and then gray concentric shocks. Then what's gray concentric shocks doing? Yeah, no, I see what I see what you're saying. I have a question that might focus our attention. I mean, without taking us away from those lines, which I absolutely love, might sort of focus our attention on those lines in a slightly different way. So I mean, you said that it's disorienting to have a poem called The Shampoo that then begins with
00:23:10
Speaker
the phrase, the still explosions on the rocks, and it is. It would also be disorienting, I think, under whatever ordinary circumstances one wants to imagine, to say that, well, this is a love poem that begins with a description of lichens. I don't know, rather than roses or something else. So, I mean, there's no,
00:23:39
Speaker
There's no explicit attempt made here to say that, at least within the first three lines, there's no explicit attempt made to say that our love is like this or has been like this. But do you think that there's the suggestion that that's the kind of relationship, that our relationship, the speaker of the poem and the you who's being addressed here,
00:24:08
Speaker
have something going on that grows in the manner of lichens. Would that help to explain or maybe explains the wrong word, but illuminate some of what seems paradoxical and interesting to you about those lines? I think it does. I think that
00:24:31
Speaker
You know, this poem was written, Bishop was published in a Cold Spring in 1955. So Bishop was probably in her 40s when she was writing this poem. And it feels to me that it's very much about time and aging and the way relationships change over time.
00:24:55
Speaker
which is often or can be slowly and almost imperceptibly.
Middle-aged Love and Relationship Dynamics
00:25:02
Speaker
And it seems that that line, although within our memories they have not changed, is the first time the us comes into the poem or the first time we get the hint of the relationship this poem is about. And what we know is that this
00:25:23
Speaker
This relationship is one that lasts, that has lasted. I'm not sure how long they had been together at this point. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't have been very long. No, I don't think so. But interestingly, it might have felt like it. I mean, Bishop went to Brazil in 1951.
00:25:41
Speaker
And I don't know exactly when the Shimpu was written, but you're right that it comes out in her second book, which was published only a few years later. And it would not be until the next book that the questions of travel that the whole book would be dedicated to Lota. So here, I mean, it's interesting because it seems like on the one hand, yeah, this is very much a poem about
00:26:02
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to make it sound depressing, but it is what it is, like middle-aged love. Yeah, it absolutely is. This is why I like it. Yeah, me too, I think. But the other thing is that maybe it's about middle-aged love that's also new love in a way. And there's a kind of paradox in that, like a kind of fresh love that comes at a moment in life that on its own doesn't feel fresh or new or young.
00:26:31
Speaker
I think that fits with the kind of general idea that runs throughout so many of the images in this poem of this kind of like excitement or energy or eroticism in the very ordinary or what looks like a static kind of boring moment of life or something like that.
00:27:00
Speaker
Right, so then the idea is that like,
00:27:03
Speaker
if we're looking at the lichens growing on the rocks behind this beautiful house that Bishop and Lotus shared in Brazil, that that's an ordinary thing to look at. Nothing could be more grounded in a way than that, literally. But the second half of the first stanza suggests that
00:27:32
Speaker
the very ordinary, literally imperceptible growth that we're witnessing there has a kind of extraordinary reach that there's some celestial kind of ambition that's encoded in the minute, day-by-day growth of these lichens.
00:27:55
Speaker
completely, which is the same, I think, the same motion, the same trajectory that's in the shooting stars in your black hair, right? The gray hair has been turned into, you know, the kind of beautiful, miraculous, ephemeral, organized. This is a whole lot of organization, too, right? In bright formation, gray concentric shocks, the way things organize themselves in these kind of celestial patterns, even though they seem
00:28:24
Speaker
You know, you could read like lichens and gray hair as kinds of signs of disorder and entropy. Yeah, entropy. That's the word. Yeah. So I don't often think of organization and erotic love together. Is there some implication that the kind of love this poem is describing has something to do with
00:28:51
Speaker
a certain kind of organization. And I mean, is that useful for you? I hadn't thought of that. I hadn't thought of that at all.
00:29:01
Speaker
Now I'm thinking about, you know, come let me wash it in this big tin basin battered and shiny like the moon. There's no order is the right word. There's a sense of routine there, you know, this is like an ritual also. I love and when I think maybe my favorite part of the poem is the like
00:29:23
Speaker
this big tin basin, it's right here. And there's something also satisfyingly material about having that everyday object to hand. It feels like things at the end of this poem are in their right places. Well, let's come back to the end of this poem because I don't want to skip over the second stanza of the poem, which in a way seems like where
00:29:49
Speaker
abstraction happens. You know, like, okay, so let me just so that it's fresh, I'm just going to reread the second stanza of the poem. Okay. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical. And look what happens. For time is nothing, if not amenable.
00:30:16
Speaker
I don't know. We could start with the last sentence there for time is nothing if not amenable and work backwards or maybe works our way into that stanza in some other way. But I guess what I'm noticing and have always noticed about that stanza is that on the one hand, it sounds right.
00:30:36
Speaker
And on the other, like I'm not sure I know what it means. Yeah, so what do you think? Well, I was going to ask you actually.
00:30:47
Speaker
I follow, okay, and since the heavens will attend as long on us, I think that sort of makes sense. There's a sense, and this makes sense also with the kind of relationship that I think Bishop is describing in this poem, the feeling of like, we have time, right?
00:31:08
Speaker
this is maybe this is an on kind of an on Carpe Diem poem. That's beautiful. We have time and we have space. And that's a kind of a nice feeling. But then I'm not sure and I
00:31:29
Speaker
I've looked up a few times, like precipitate and pragmatical, and I've been trying to figure out whether they stand in parallel or in opposition. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, well, because precipitate could mean decisive or quick to act, and pragmatical, wise. What is it? Practical.
00:31:53
Speaker
I'm not sure what to do. It sounds right, like you said. I wanted to say this is a description of this person who is both precipitate and pragmatical, both
00:32:11
Speaker
They're both oriented towards the kind of action that this person takes. I don't know what you think. Well, there's a kind of logical relation that's implied by the structure of the... Sorry, what could sound more dry than using grammatical phrases like this? But anyway, by the independent clause that comes in the first
00:32:35
Speaker
four lines of that second stanza, that end with the word pragmatical, where we get a semicolon, right? But the idea is, and since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, as though it's because of what you described so beautifully a moment ago as the idea of we have time, or this is the anti-Carpe diem poem, right? And sorry, for those who don't know,
00:33:04
Speaker
the kind of logic of the Carpe Diem poem tends to be, we're running out of time, we're going to die, therefore you should sleep with me, is the sort of charming poems of seduction. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure that's a bad and overly simplistic reading of an interesting trope. But anyway, that's the general idea. So here the idea is,
00:33:31
Speaker
We have time, although I don't know, since the heavens will attend as long on us. Clearly, Bishop and Loda don't have all the time in the world, but there is this idea that from the celestial point of view, they do somehow. But in any way, it's because of that, or in recognition of that fact,
00:34:00
Speaker
that the dear friend, and just for simplicity's sake, let's call her Loda here, has been precipitate and pragmatical. So because you've had the good sense to note that heaven will wait for us, you've taken action.
00:34:20
Speaker
Something like that. I don't know. Although those things don't quite hang together. The logic of that isn't abundantly clear to me.
Tone and Time Scales in Poetry
00:34:32
Speaker
It also depends on how you read and look what happens. You could read it as something and knowing what we know about Bishop and knowing in general the tone of her poems and the way she seems to see the world, it's easy to
00:34:47
Speaker
I think read and look what happens as a statement of disappointment, or at least of, as a kind of wry acknowledgement of the way things are. And yet, I think there's a lot to suggest that this poem is about, is like really, really all in its love poem-ness. And that is what happens, here we are. Like here I am like writing this,
00:35:13
Speaker
writing this queer love poem in which I command the you in the poem to come and let me wash their hair, right? Yeah, and in which we are a we, and now we're a we. Yeah, look what happens might mean, and look, here we are together. Look what happens might be, look, we've gotten old.
00:35:38
Speaker
in a couple of years. Yeah and that's you know and that also for time is nothing if not amenable. Yeah talk about that sentence please. And so it's worth saying also again for people who aren't looking
00:35:53
Speaker
So that's the sentence that comes in sort of the second half of the fifth line and then the sixth and final line of the second stanza, for time is, is is where the line break is. And the word time is capitalized, which is an unusual thing, I think, for Bishop to do, to make a noun substantive in that way or abstract in that way.
00:36:18
Speaker
What does it mean? I mean, so to be amenable means to be what? Agreeable? Or to be changeable? Accommodating? It's so interesting. I mean, yeah. The way that line break is for time with a capital T, for time is nothing, if not amenable. I was just thinking, I hadn't thought of this before, but just now I've been thinking of that line in some kind of relationship to
00:36:49
Speaker
To Auden's, I walked out one evening, right, where there's that, oh, time goes the same. I'm trying to see who you cannot deceive time. You cannot conquer, isn't it? You cannot conquer time. And here's Bishop using time for a capital T and breaking the line on nothing, for time is nothing, if not amenable. And it does feel a little bit,
00:37:18
Speaker
at least in relation to that poem, like a, like a conquer time moment. Yeah. I wonder, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so is, is it that, or is it that like time will go along with whatever plans silly humans make or time will say, okay, I've seen that you've done this and you know, your today will slip into a yesterday.
00:37:48
Speaker
I'll go along with that. There's something about time scales here too, that takes us back up to the lichens. A certain kind of time will permit the lichens a time that is not human time.
00:38:13
Speaker
is going to let the lichens coincide with the moon. Although that's not a time within our memories, they have not changed and probably will not change, right?
00:38:30
Speaker
So there's something about the way time is relative or time is flexible or time isn't as straightforward and linear as we thought it was when we think about it from the point of view of lichens and the moon.
00:38:51
Speaker
Right. We have these different timescales that are vast and they're different. So the timescale of a human life or smaller than that, even the timescale of a relationship within a human life.
00:39:03
Speaker
But then we have these sort of the timescale by which lichens grow and spread over rocks, which is longer than that, presumably. I guess I don't actually know what lichen timescale is. It seems that way anyway. But then of course there's the much vaster and more cosmic kind of timescale of
00:39:28
Speaker
the orbit of the moon around the Earth and of the solar system in the heavens, quote unquote. But maybe the idea that's introduced up in the first stanza is that though they are vastly different, those timescales are somehow concentric, right? So that you have a small one at the center and then in rings that grow around it, these larger timescales that sort of include the smaller ones
00:39:58
Speaker
and share a geometry with them somehow, but are on a vastly different scale.
00:40:12
Speaker
I don't, when I'm writing poems or when I'm reading poems, I tend not to, I'd rather think about space than time. I find it really, really hard to think abstractly about time. And here we are with Bishop coming up with theories of time. But she asks us to, this poem is sort of asking us to, it's so interesting also that the poem,
00:40:37
Speaker
that this third stanza exists, right? That she takes us from the lichen so that it's like kind of sandwiched this, like a very, very abstract stanza that's making some very, very complex arguments, whatever they are, about the nature of time itself and human time and the time of,
00:40:56
Speaker
the natural world and the time of a relationship. That kind of thinking is sandwiched here in the middle of this very concrete love poem. Yeah. Go ahead, please. No, I wanted to bring this in. I said I was just looking at the biography and I wanted to
00:41:21
Speaker
sort of been dying to talk about dying to say this but so apparently Bishop sent this poem to the New Yorker and it came back because Catherine White said this is the sort of small personal poem that doesn't quite fit into the New Yorker and then she sent it to poetry and she said to someone like
00:41:42
Speaker
Oh, that's the biographer who says, Bishop says, I thought it was easy enough to understand. And the biographer says, too easy, perhaps. And I read that and I thought, I don't think this poem is easy at all. No, I don't think it's easy. It's really hard. It is really hard. Yeah, and it's fascinating and instructive and useful, I think, for poets out there to know, right, this poem got turned down by the New Yorker.
00:42:11
Speaker
um where Bishop and poetry and poetry said something like we never uh Marion uh Carl Shapiro said I never thought I'd see the day when we would reject a poem of yours but we do so daringly today yeah yeah yeah um shocking decision so um so sometimes that even the very good editors don't get it right um
00:42:35
Speaker
It was so interesting for me to hear you say that in your own poems you much prefer to think spatially than temporally, or to think about space than about time.
00:42:50
Speaker
sort of tempted to ask you to say more about that even in your own poems, but maybe we can apply that awareness that you bring to this poem in which it seems often like time is measured spatially, right?
Spatial Thinking in Bishop's Work
00:43:05
Speaker
So the passage of time is measured by the growing concentric circles of the lichens, right? Or is measured by the growing streaks of gray
00:43:18
Speaker
in someone's hair. Well, I was going to say,
00:43:26
Speaker
maybe we should read the third stanza again, but actually maybe now is a good time to listen to the whole poem one more time, including that third stanza, but we have a surprise for you today, which is that I found a recording, not of Bishop reading the poem, sadly, but instead of a poet who was Bishop's very good friend reading the poem
00:43:57
Speaker
on the occasion of a memorial for Bishop in, I think it was 1993 in Key West, so you're about to hear the poet James Merrill read the shampoo. This was a poem that he loved and that he wrote a kind of homage to, so people who are curious about that.
James Merrill's Reading of 'The Shampoo'
00:44:19
Speaker
I'll put a link to the poem that Merrill wrote
00:44:22
Speaker
sort of modeled on and borrowing a rhyme scheme and set of thematic concerns, let's say, from the shampoo, a poem of Merrill's called the kimono. But let's listen to Merrill read the poem. And then, Lindsay, we can talk about the third and final stanza as a way to end. OK, here's Merrill. Shampoo. There's still explosions on the rocks, the lichens,
00:44:51
Speaker
grow by spreading gray concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical. And look what happens. For time is nothing if not amenable
00:45:24
Speaker
The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking wear so straight so soon. Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon. Lindsay, what do you notice in Meryl's reading just first of all before we dive into that third stanza?
00:45:50
Speaker
Um, well, uh, you know, you, you, uh, primed me for it by talking about accents, but I just love his accent where he's, uh, where you look what happens kind of drops the syllable there. Um, his mid-Atlantic sort of monied accent. It's so amazing. I used to have like on my
00:46:12
Speaker
iPod ages ago, a recording of him reading the black swan, and it would just kind of come up in shuffle rotation. And then suddenly there'd be Marilyn going, the black swan. And like, you know, I would listen to his voice forever. For people who haven't heard Bishop read before,
00:46:29
Speaker
If we'd had a recording of her reading this poem, it would have sounded very different, I think, from what we just heard from Meryl, right? Bishop sort of claimed to hate to read her poems and she read like it, right? So she read like she was trying to get through it. Her readings tended to be very flat. Having said that, I love them.
00:46:47
Speaker
Whereas Meryl was often celebrated as being a very expressive and kind of dramatic reader, and yes, one in this sort of accent. So say more, Lindsay, about what you just heard in the recording we played. Oh, well, I also love bishops. I also love bishops reading because I think
00:47:04
Speaker
She reads very simply. She doesn't perform. She just reads what's on the page. Whereas Meryl, I think you can hear the way his voice modulates, especially since we want to focus on this last stanza. The way his voice kind of modulates when the palm moves.
00:47:25
Speaker
from the kind of interrogative to the interrogative, yes, to the imperative poem. He's playing up the, and I think in that same reading, he talks about this poem as the gay love poem that it is, and he's playing up the intimacy there at the end.
00:47:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's beautifully said. So one thing I'm just now sort of noticing as though for the first time, though, I'm sure I had recognized it in some way earlier. And this is a poem, like I say, that I love. This is a poem, in fact, that
00:48:11
Speaker
I once had a friend, a very dear friend, ask me to read a poem at her wedding and invite me to choose the poem that I would read at the wedding. And this was the poem I chose. I remember it led to a moment at the wedding reception when a drunken wedding guest accosted me. It's sort of like around the intramariner, except it doesn't go that way.
00:48:30
Speaker
that accosted me and said, what was the shampoo? And I said, well, what do you mean? I guess it didn't seem clear enough to him. But it's a poem I love. It's a poem I've taught. And right now what I'm noticing is, so the shooting stars in your black hair, I guess easy to see how that's a lovely kind of figurative description of streaks of gray that are forming in someone's
Figurative Language and Everyday Imagery
00:48:56
Speaker
hair. And we can think about,
00:48:57
Speaker
what it would mean to refer to a lover's gray hair as shooting stars. In bright formation or flocking, suddenly there's like a second figuration that happens where
00:49:12
Speaker
If what we're talking about are streaks of gray in hair, at first they're shooting stars, and now without ever having named it, they're birds or something flocking. I mean, shooting stars don't flock, in other words. So straight, so soon. And now I'm wondering, is there some, I don't know, we've talked about this as a queer love poem.
00:49:36
Speaker
What's the sudden anxiety about I'm so straight and the so soon makes me think that whatever you had said, I think quite rightly in the second stanza about this not being a Carpe Diem poem. Now maybe there is, I don't know, a kind of anxiety suddenly in the first four lines of that third stanza about aging or about
00:50:06
Speaker
Even the kind of anxiety about abandonment, or, you know, where are you going? Or are you going away from me? That kind of, those, you know, familiar feelings of jealousy and worry that can creep into even the most happy love affair. So, yeah, let's think about that third stanza,
00:50:31
Speaker
sort of if you don't mind or if you're willing to indulge me here as the last two lines kind of answering in one way or another the interrogative that's posed by the first four lines. And Lindsay, what do you notice about those first four lines of the third and final stanza?
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah, and that's, you know, I think I've been thinking about this, again, thinking of this poem in primarily spatial terms, right, the way the first poem
00:51:04
Speaker
The first stanza starts by looking down presumably at the lichens on the rocks and then takes you by thinking about time, takes you up to think about the moon. And this one also it does something like that motion although in a different way because
00:51:25
Speaker
because what we're being asked to track, at least figuratively, is the motion of something across the sky. Shooting stars, birds,
00:51:40
Speaker
Something about that makes me think, I think bright formation makes me think of a constellation. And then the constellation flocking makes me think of a whole constellation of stars taking flight at once, like a flock of birds. And somehow all of those images, all of which occur in the sky and have to do with things moving. Things moving in the sky is,
00:52:08
Speaker
And quickly, there's a lot of speed, I think. And the question's so straight, so soon, also seems to respond to the images of quickness. We were talking about disappearance, quickness with which things are perhaps either changing or moving or disappearing.
00:52:27
Speaker
And that seems, I see what you're saying, I think about the anxiety in that stanza, but it also seems to be so beautiful. That I guess I get swept away by this, what seems to me to be this kind of image that changes from stars to constellations to birds and to be all of them at once.
00:52:52
Speaker
I don't think I had ever noticed anxiety there until just now. And so maybe this is saying something more about my mental state today. Let's do this, right? They change every time you read them. They're so slippery. But right now, I guess I'm thinking about the beauty and the speed of those first lines. And then the way the answer to that is something very solid.
00:53:21
Speaker
Well, ordinarily, I guess one would feel, at least in our culture, one is sort of trained to feel disappointed or anxious about one's own hair going gray or a lover's hair going gray or something. But here, of course, it's that the signs of aging that are
00:53:39
Speaker
precisely the things that are being valorized and celebrated as beautiful by the lover. And also, one thing I hear in that Meryl reading is
00:53:55
Speaker
if there is a kind of rising anxiety or even creeping anxiety that comes into the articulation of that question in the first four lines of that last stanza, you know, that characteristic Bishop M dash that begins the penultimate line, you know, Bishop loves a dash and not quite as much as Emily Dickinson, but she she loves a dash, marks a sort of
00:54:21
Speaker
It's as though the poet has taken a deep breath and there's a kind of decisive resolve about it. Okay, so there's this heavenly stuff going on. Now I'm gonna bring us right down to the kind of homely and everyday and practical and decisive.
00:54:40
Speaker
And it's also an address or a loving command to the loved one, to the beloved at the end. Perhaps it is like the response to the anxiety is to say to the person you love, like, come here.
00:54:58
Speaker
you know, come here, let me wash your hair, which is a wonderful, a wonderful response, I think, and also to these questions of time and motion and scale and the place of the human experience of time in the greater scale of the way time works, right? It really is a poem about, or a poem that has its head in the stars by the end and then
00:55:27
Speaker
The way that concludes in this poem at least is, is, you know, to say to like kind of
00:55:37
Speaker
Well, the heavens come down to earth, right? Yeah, you know, picturing, you know, picturing this basin, which is also then it goes back. Bishop isn't done like it goes back up to the moon at the end, but it settles there with the. Yeah, well, we begin with lichens and we end with a basin that's like I mean, I don't know if I wonder if Bishop is interested in a pun on lichen at any point in this poem, you know, the way we like in one thing or another.
Symbolism and Poem Conclusion
00:56:06
Speaker
But
00:56:09
Speaker
But right at the end, the moon is the last word of the poem. I'm a famous lover of the moon. It's like one of my things. And I think Bishop was too. But here, what that word signifies at the end is a figurative description of a very earthly thing, of the basin in which the hair is washed.
00:56:38
Speaker
And it's a battered, and so it's sort of weather-worn and lived in as moons go. Yeah, it's a metaphor that does very similar work. It works in parallel to changing the black hair into shooting stars, right? The black hair with the shooting stars, the tin basin is the moon.
00:56:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And that that echo or that kind of mirroring of metallic silver surfaces in each other is really is just in itself like I could, I think we can spend forever thinking about the about the way the silvers, the respective silvers and grays are working in this film.
00:57:15
Speaker
We sure could. But unfortunately, we're almost at an hour here, and we should probably end in a minute. You had said something earlier, and maybe this can be a place to end, Lindsay, about how you loved that tactic of this big tin basin at the end.
00:57:33
Speaker
Is there in that some kind of implication that the love poem itself is the container in which or the vessel in which the act of care is performed, like it's the speech act or the poem itself that is the place where love is
00:58:04
Speaker
I think that's such a beautiful way of thinking about it, and I think it makes sense when thinking about this little poem, which is pretty short.
00:58:23
Speaker
And for the most part, yeah, it seems pretty simple. It seems like a kind of homely, like most ambitious. It's a little battered. It's a little battered, but it's also shiny. But also shiny. And that contains within it, that reflects within it or that, you know,
00:58:40
Speaker
takes things and turns them into motion. I think that's right. I like that one. Yeah, it's a poem that plays with long lines and short lines. And the effect of that sometimes if you sort of look at the poem and turn your head sideways is to make the stanzas seem a little basin-like. Oh, I never even thought about that. Yeah, I don't want to see shape poems everywhere after our Christmas tree episode, but maybe I'm beginning to with Meryl on the Brain now.
Podcast Conclusion
00:59:07
Speaker
Well, Lindsay Turner, thank you so much for this conversation. I really had a blast talking with you about this poem. And I want to thank everybody for making it this far and listening to us. Please remember to follow, rate, review the podcast. I've got some terrific episodes in the works, and I can't wait to share them with you all. Take care, everyone. Thank you, Kamran. This was fun. My pleasure.