First Contemplation

Alice Spawls reminds us that, besides poetry, Elizabeth Bishop's other great love was painting:

Throughout her life Bishop remarked that she wished she had been a painter and in her letters more often enthused about art and artists than writers, once telling Robert Lowell that he was the one living poet she could bear to read. Yet it was only when an exhibition of her paintings was organised in 2011 that those who don’t pay attention to the credits of book-cover artists (Bishop’s paintings adorned three of her collections) discovered that she did indeed paint, even if she didn’t consider herself a ‘painter’. The 40 or so surviving works inevitably drew comparisons with her poems. They are mostly small, 8 x 10 inches or less—the size of an exercise book, painted with gouache or watercolour on thin paper and torn around the edges or beginning to disintegrate. Their scenes are quiet and usually peopleless: a tea set, a lamp, an empty room, flowers, buildings. Many were given as gifts, others are records of places and things. A lifelong stipend from her father (he died not long after she was born) allowed Bishop to travel and she would complain if she came across something she admired and didn’t have her paint box. Though her paintings are of settled scenes rather than fleeting moments, their freshness suggests a desire to preserve the first contemplation.

The Banal Peculiarity Of Everyday Speech

Barry Schwabsky's insight into John Ashbery's affection for "found contemporary language" also goes a fair distance toward describing what, for me, makes the work of many younger Canadian poets so interesting:

What Ashbery shows is that in modern poetry—“underperforming texts,” to borrow a phrase from his poem “Far Harbor”—sincerity can only be attained by passing through the banal peculiarity of everyday speech. At the end of the introduction to his ground-breaking 1969 anthology The Poets of the New York School, John Bernard Myers recalled a drive in Amagansett with Elizabeth Bishop. As they passed a roadside dive called The Enchanted Cottage, “’Enchanted?’ she cried, ‘Enchanted?? One more word I’ll never be able to use again!’” His point, of course, was that the aesthetic—or better, maybe, to call it the ethic—of poets like Ashbery (and of successors like some of the poets associated with language writing and, in spades, those who go under the moniker of flarf) is just the opposite: When a piece of language has been degraded in this way, that’s exactly when it especially comes into the poet’s purview. In Ashbery’s poems, mock Jacobeanisms jostle slang from the screwball comedies of the forties and the latest management-speak, but mostly the shadings are harder to sort out.

Monkey Ranch

Julie Bruck's GG-winning Monkey Ranch was, for some, one of the best poetry books of the year—a return to form after a 13-year interruption. Stewart Cole, however, lay outs some of his concerns with the book:

"When thinking of traditions or poets to which I might ally Bruck’s work (besides the lineated near-prose that characterized much of the dominant mode of Canadian poetry from the 1960s to at least the 1990s), I settle on Elizabeth Bishop, who serves as the subject of a poem in both The End of Travel and Monkey Ranch. Indeed, Bruck's prosy free verse stands above so much similar work because of her Bishopesque powers of observation and phrasal care. On the other hand, however, Bruck is like Bishop purged of not just her formal virtuosity—Bishop excelled at even the most difficult fixed forms, while Bruck doesn’t attempt them—but her eccentricity: nothing in Bruck's body of work is as unabashedly strange as 'The Man-Moth,' for instance, nor does she favour the sort of daring rhetorical leaps that lift 'The Fish,' for example, into its 'rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!' moment of transcendence. Instead, whether formally, rhetorically, emotionally, or politically, Bruck's work tends toward the safe route, rarely off-putting readers with any outlandishness, but lacking the sense of hazard that marks the artform at its best. To use a sports analogy: Bruck’s poetry often reads like it's playing not to lose."

Incantation

Canadian-born humorist David Rakoff died on August 9th from cancer. He was 47. Last April, he contributed a short essay to O, The Oprah magazine on how reciting Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Letter to N.Y" helped to calm him during his MRIs.

"Lying on the table, it can sometimes feel like I've been in treatment longer than I've been alive; that my world has contracted and been bricked over and this is who I am and will only ever be. There is solace in the poem's portrait of New York City, my home for close to three decades. It's a New York not just of my healthier but of my younger self. And it's nice to think of it all still being there, waiting for me, just as soon as I get up and walk out of this room."