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| Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 (Bettmann/Corbis) |
Adam Kirsch, in his absorbing "Full Fathom Five" (The New Yorker, February 3, 2014), a review
of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, says,
The visual and the literary make uneasy partners, since they
operate according to different temporal regimes: everything at once versus one
thing after another. As a result, when a poet takes to describing what he sees,
the result can be boring and static. Visual descriptions are usually the most
skippable parts of any poem.
I strongly disagree. I devour visual descriptions. Far from
being the most “skippable parts of any poem,” they are, for me, an immense
source of reading pleasure. Take for example the exquisite description of the
beach in James Merrill’s “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War”:
A mile-long
vertebrate picked clean
To the palms’ tall
seableached incurving ribs.
And Elizabeth Bishop’s depiction of fog in her great “The
Moose”:
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.
Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles.
And Seamus Heaney’s unforgettable description of the
Grauballe Man:
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
Of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inward to a dark
elderberry place.
I could multiply examples endlessly. The point is there’s a blind spot in Kirsch’s criticism. The pleasure principle is lacking.
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