Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

It's been 'pop' music here recently, I can't help but notice. We can't have that all the time. It's a relatively quiet period for lunchtime concerts.

A few years ago I was doing what I could to help a friend with her Open University essays. Shostakovich, Ovid, Heaney and Hughes, that sort of thing. I was looking forward to the C20th Literature course and Elizabeth Bishop because I hoped the essay question might direct some attention to what it is about her poems that makes her quite the paragon example. But it wasn't to be. My friend chose to do Children's Literature and so I got some time off.

But it recently occurred to me that there would be exam questions on Elizabeth Bishop on the internet and there are,

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

They don't help much, mostly only giving candidates the opportunity to write what they know, or think.

But maybe it was a bad idea and I was expecting too much. Maybe the reason why she is one of the poets whose work I haven't yet found any fault with is because one can't quite say. Maybe 'poetry' at its best is something that can remain elusive.

School and exams did their best to put us all off poetry by reducing it to the 'I-Spy' project of identifying alliteration, assonance, rhyme and even irony, ambiguity, synecdoche and zeugma. I'd much rather poetry didn't do such things, or at least make any effort to. It's much more impressive to 'be any good' without having shown how hard you've tried.

And that's why Elizabeth Bishop is 'any good' - because it's not easy to say why. Detachment, I reckon, has a lot to do with it. Putting some distance between what is being said and what it might, possibly, mean. But even that is straying a bit close to irony.

Now that we live in an age that allows biographical references back in and accepts that the text does not exist in isolation from the time and circumstances in which it was written, my main reasons for admiring her, as well as the poems, are that she was hospitalized for five days after a drinking session and that, at the age of about 59 or 60, she found her glasses in the fridge which meant the milk must be on her desk.

They don't make them like that anymore.

I've generally always thought that 'novelist' was a proper job and 'poet' almost something one did for pleasure, like some do gardening, and it didn't matter what sort of job one made of it. It's best not to worry because most poetry is terrible. Good poetry is almost impossible.

In trying to fend off the seven months since I've written a poem I liked much becoming eight, I have committed some lines to a Word doc on the subject of Ronnie Spector, see below, but it's not quite happening and so is likely to show tell-tale signs of having been 'worked on' and so it's likely to go with the failed companion piece on Agnetha Fältskog and await an idea for a third female pop icon to make a triptych of bad tributes.

But, you never know. In retrospect, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about with Blondie once we'd been treated to Denis but she eventually came back with Maria which was the best thing she ever did so one never quite gives up hope. And we are back on pop music again. Sorry about that.