Regular readers here (hello, Mum) will be aware of the recent upsurge in admiration expressed for Elizabeth Bishop's poems and everything about them and thus the reultant pressing need for her to be awarded a shelf of her own for books like those that Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin have.
The latest acquisition, Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work, is among the best of them and as fine a critique of any poet's work one is likely to find. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: the Complete Correspondance is a further item not arrived two weeks after it was due. Now this makes it a t-shirt, a Christmas present and a book that have gone missing within a few months. Amazon have readily replaced items or compensated the account but I don't want it to be me that starts to look suspicious.
But idolatry has its limits, nothing's perfect and things can get taken too far.
Some poets habitually, necessarily, use enjambment, running sentences over line endings to, perhaps, create a natural tension between the prosody and form. It is often more pleasing than the traditional bang, bang, bang of ending each line on a rhyme and/or a full stop or comma as in, say,
There was an old man with a beard
Who said, 'it's just as I feared'
I had thought that Gunn, in Vox Humana, was taking his syllabics plenty seriously enough when he split a word across a line end to fit his diligent 7 syllable count,
an indefinite haze, mere-
ly pricking the eyes, almost
Okay, Thom, you've made your point, that isn't free verse.
But, consummate artist though Elizabeth Bishop may be, blessed with any number of astute commentators of which Eleanor Cook is one of the most impressive, I begin to wonder if this devotion to the art of poetry hasn't gone one step more than really necessary when not only does Bishop split the indefinite article to achieve a rhyme but Cook holds it up as an example of supreme artistry.
In Pink Dog,
solution is to wear a fantasia.
Tonight you simply can't afford to be a-
n eyesore. But no one will ever see a
satisfies, tortuously, the aaa rhyme scheme of the poem's three-line stanzas but by performing this stunt, that Cook makes a contrived case for, the 'an' is rendered absurd, drawing far too much attention to itself.
Although it is not a syllabic poem but depends on beats to the line rather than syllables and it doesn't matter which line 'an' belongs to (it would be better off at the start of the next line rather than at the end of the line it begins on), this looks more like, (Write it) like disaster, than stylistic accomplishment and a poet of Bishop's talent could have found more unobtrusive ways to comply with her chosen form than draw attention to the contrivance that a poem is. It's a fail for me because the poet has allowed her art to show its workings, it's not a success because she has bent her usually natural-looking language into incongruity.
The beauty of enjambment (and I'm really not one for any kind of rules, maxims or diktats that must be applied across all poetry) is mostly how it blends natural-sounding sentences across an artificial form without the reader immediately noticing. But one can't help but notice this example in Pink Dog because it is foregrounded beyond reason and draws so much attention to itself that it distracts from everything else going on around it.
All poetry is artificial but much of the art involved is in hiding its artifice, the skill of the poet often to be admired in such legerdemain. Reading Bishop's sometime associate and corresdpondant, Muriel Rukeyser, one is struck by the difference between them - that Bishop is primarily of interest for how she makes a poem rather than what it 'says' whereas Rukeyser makes her socio-political point, no doubt very powerfully, but is not in anywhere near the same league as a poet because she doesn't have anything like the same music, subtlety or sophistication. I'm with Elizabeth all the time on that but let us not suppose than we don't all take it one step too far once in a while.
Double negative there, you see. I never made myself out to be the consummate prose stylist.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
