December 8, 2025 Issue

Jorie Graham, in this week’s issue, interprets Elizabeth Bishop’s great “At the Fishhouses.” She notes, as many readers before her have noted, the poem’s spellbinding shift in register: "The poem has moved from the conversational, the anecdotal, to the divinatory." Seamus Heaney called it "a big leap." But Graham adds something new when she says, 

The final word, “flown,” seems to glide etymologically right off the watery “flowing,” before morphing, as if by miracle—the miracle of language—into the action of a bird. The vision lifts away. Was it a visitation? An annunciation? But it is gone. And we are back in our strange solitude, our individuality—in history.

The vision lifts away – this is interesting. I’ve read and reread this transfixing poem many times. I’ve read many commentaries on it: see my recent “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: Five Interpretations.” It never occurred to me that “flown” means the vision departs, flies away. I always thought it referred to Bishop’s idea of knowledge. Consider the poem’s last six lines:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

In other words, we know what is now happening (“flowing”) and we know what has passed away (“flown”). But I’m open to Graham’s take on it. The idea of Bishop’s harbor epiphany suddenly flaring and then vanishing appeals to me. 

Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses": Five Interpretations

Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (The New Yorker, August 9, 1947) is my favorite poem. I love it for two reasons: (1) its unconventional sense of beauty; (2) its movement from description to epiphany.

1. Unconventional Beauty

Not everyone sees beauty in fish scales and fishing shacks. Bishop did. In “At the Fishhouses,” she wrote, 

The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Note the repetition of “iridescent.” That’s a change from the New Yorker version. That version says “creamy iridescent flies.” When Bishop reprinted the poem in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Cold Spring collection, she doubled the iridescence, describing the wheelbarrow as “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” She calls the fish scales “the principal beauty” (“He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife”). 

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), says of “At the Fishhouses,”

The scene is not a conventional thing of beauty, but Bishop’s eye sees the working tools and the iridescent patterns of countless fish scales as if in a painting.

2. Description/Meditation

“At the Fishhouses” is beautiful in another way. It shifts from description to meditation – one of my favorite literary moves. You don’t see it very often. It’s not a procedure; it’s more of a happening. In the first two-thirds of the poem, Bishop describes the harbour scene: the fishhouses, the old man, the wheelbarrows, the lobster pots, the herring scales, the wooden capstan, the black old knife, the long ramp descending into the water, the water itself (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear”). Details accrete; a scene is evoked. This is standard literary procedure; Bishop executes it masterfully. But in the poem’s last stanza, she does something extraordinary. She takes a big leap:

The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark-gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Seamus Heaney said of these lines: 

What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually taking the leap. [The Government of the Tongue, 1989] 

The leap, Heaney said, is from “the observed world” to “the world of meditated meaning.” Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), calls it a “shift from description to meditation.” But she also says “the poem’s description prepares for a “visionary leap.” She refers to the “visionary thrust” of the poem. She says, “In this passage, in which the phrase “above the stones” is repeated four times, particulars are finally overwhelmed by a visionary flood.” To me, meditation is one thing; vision is another. Costello seems close to calling Bishop’s leap an epiphany. In fact, she says it: “Bishop seems to have yielded her consciousness fully to this epiphany.” But then she backs off: “This is hardly the certain rhetoric of epiphany.”

3. Description/Epiphany

As for me, I think “epiphany” is the right word. I find support for this in Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), in which he brilliantly compares the ending of “At the Fishhouses” with the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” He writes, 

This method, the movement from very detailed and exact description to a moment that is totalizing and hallucinatory in its tone, which moves above the scene and attempts in its cadences both to wrest meaning and create further mystery from the scene below, occurs also in the very final passage of Joyce’s “The Dead,” which, in describing the snow, also takes a leap.

The ending of “The Dead” is a famous example of literary epiphany: see Florence L. Walzl, “Gabriel and Michael, The Conclusion of ‘The Dead,’ ” (in Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, eds., Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, 1969 (“Dubliners as a collection and “The Dead” as a narrative both culminate in the great epiphany of Gabriel Conroy, the cosmic vision of a cemetery with snow falling on all the living and the dead”).

4. Baptism

Is there an alternative to the Heaney/Tóibín/Costello epiphanic “big leap” line of construction? Yes, there’s at least one – April Bernard’s “baptism” interpretation. In Bernard’s view, there’s no visionary leap. Instead, there’s a slow, steady descent to the water: 

We first look down, with the speaker, from a slight height to take in the scene—“All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” and the five fishhouses, an old fisherman, fish tubs, lobster pots, the trees—before making our way downward, and then pausing. “The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. / He was a friend of my grandfather.” Then we proceed, down the boat ramp to the water itself, where, our narrator tells us, she often encounters a seal, to whom she sings “Baptist hymns” because they both believe “in total immersion.

We have swooped now, slowly down, and down, and are on our knees, as the poet urges us into the water, telling us, “If you should dip your hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire.” [“Elizabeth Bishop 1: Nova Scotia” (books.substack.com, April 4, 2024]

She concludes:

The ending sends us off, as if we’ve been dunked into the water for our own transformation, our own baptism, and perhaps our own death, into the cold “element” that is thrillingly, and maybe terribly, our true home. Her confiding voice here whispers us into the deep.

Bernard eschews the epiphanic for the baptismal. Her interpretation is quite persuasive, taking its cue from what Bishop says about the seal: “He was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.” But I resist it. I’m not religious. I resist interpreting this great poem religiously. 

5. Reality 

I prefer a realist interpretation. I think I’ve found one. Zachariah Pickard, in his excellent Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description (2009), points out that, even though the poem’s last stanza does “shift gears,” its description of water (and the knowledge derived from it) is still concrete: it tastes “bitter, / then briny,” and makes “your wrist” and “bones” “ache” and “your hand” and “tongue” “burn.” He says, “Far from other-worldly, this knowledge comes from “the cold hard mouth / of the world.” I agree. This great poem is grounded in reality. 

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

Ange Mlinko's "Acts of Extreme Attention"

Karen Solie (Photo by Barbara Stoneham)

Ange Mlinko, in her “Acts of Extreme Attention” (The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019), brilliantly connects two of my favorite poems: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and Karen Solie’s “Sturgeon.” Commenting on Solie’s work, Mlinko says,

An affinity with the poetry of Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, certainly, is evident as early as “Sturgeon,” a rewriting of Bishop’s “The Fish,” which descends from Moore’s “The Fish.” In her version, Solie narrates the story of teenagers tormenting a beached sturgeon, “a lost lure in his lip”:

On an afternoon mean as a hook

    we hauled him

up to his nightmare of us and

     laughed

at his ugliness …

The imagery, not to mention the sounds – the h’s and l’s and f of hook and haul, lost and laughed – echo Bishop’s held, half, hook, fast: “I caught a tremendous fish / and held him beside the boat / half out of water, with my hook / fast in a corner of his mouth.”

Mlinko notes other similarities: 

Solie: “Ancient grunt of sea.” Bishop: “He hung a grunting weight.” Solie: “soft sucker mouth opening / closing on air that must have felt like ground glass.” Bishop: “His eyes … of old scratched isinglass.” Solie: “his body’s quiet armour.” Bishop: “His lower lip … grim, wet, and weapon-like” (and the “lost lure in his lip,” above, is surely a misprision of “his lower lip”). 

Mlinko’s suggestion that Solie’s “Sturgeon” is a “rewriting” of Bishop’s “The Fish” is intriguing. She goes on to say,

But in a reversal of Bishop’s poem, the teenagers don’t have an epiphany and “let the fish go.” Solie’s fish, quite by surprise, leaps back into the river, preempting the self-congratulation that accompanies poetic epiphany. Solie’s narrator is startled into respect for “the old current he had for a mind.”

Mlinko’s piece brought to mind another excellent review of Solie’s poetry – Michael Hofmann’s “All Fresh Today” (London Review of Books, April 3, 2014; included in his 2014 collection Where Have You Been?), in which he says, “It’s one of the great things about Solie: so much is primary, hasn’t been written about before, pays no dues, does without obeisance or retreading or sheepishness.” I know what he means; Solie finds poetry in the most unlikely places – a coffee shop (“Tiny friendless salads make you weep”), a motel room (“They could lie with hands / in each other’s hair but for the wall”), a bar (“The bar / shucked bass into the street, / an unknown band from way down / east”). This is exactly what I love about her work. But to say she “pays no dues” is incorrect. Thanks to Mlinko’s illuminating analysis, we see the signs of at least one influence – Elizabeth Bishop. 

Eleanor Cook on Bishop's "Filling Station" and Hopper's "Gas"

Edward Hopper, Gas (1940)

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), makes an intriguing comparison between Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1955; Questions of Travel, 1965) and Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940). She says of “Filling Station,”

It is a descriptive poem, yes, but I think Bishop may be writing an ekphrasis of sorts, an ekphrasis of a painting that should exist, a shadow painting. Look at Edward Hopper’s painting Gas (1940), a painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Point for point, “Filling Station” is the opposite. Hopper’s is meticulously clean, as against “Oh, but it is dirty!” The owner shutting it down in the evening is dressed in white shirt and tie, as against Father dressed in an ill-fitting “dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit.” There is no outer porch with “grease- / impregnated wickerwork,” a dog, comic books, taboret with a doily and “a big hirsute begonia” (a fine touch). Bishop’s poem depicts a filling station that is more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting. 

I’m not sure what Cook is getting at when she says “Filling Station” may be an “ekphrasis of sorts.” There’s nothing in the poem that suggests that. It appears to be a record of what Bishop saw at an actual gas station. Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), says “Filling Station” is a “response to direct observation.” Cook’s contrasting of “Filling Station” with Hopper’s Gas is interesting. Her point about Bishop’s poem depicting a gas station that is “more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting” is a good one. She says that Hopper’s painting is of a gas station “seen as aesthetic object.” I think Bishop’s poem is about a gas station seen as a piece of folk art. In that sense, I suppose, "Filling Station" is an "ekphrasis of sorts."

May 14, 2018 Issue

One of the defining characteristics of great lyric poetry is spontaneity. It has the look of casual notation, of immediate expression – the equivalent of an artist’s sketch or a jazz musician’s improvisation or a street photographer’s quick snapshot (think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Manhattan May Day Midnight” or John Updike’s “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “Santarém”).

The poems in this week’s New Yorker may have taken years to write, but they appear spontaneous – that’s one of the things I love about them. Sharon Olds’s “For You” starts out with morning coffee (“In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk / into the coffee …”) and ends unexpectedly, miraculously in elegy (“Trayvon Martin, song was / invented for you, art was made / for you, painting, writing, was yours, / our youngest, our most precious …”). 

Christian Wiman’s “Eating Grapes Downward” enacts the impromptu notebook-style writing mentioned in its opening sentence (“Every morning without thinking I open / my notebook and see if something / might have grown in me during the night”), doodles along for three stanzas, musing on such things as a “cousin’s cartoon mustache like Rollie Fingers” and a “miniature cow” named Mona, and then, at the beginning of the final stanza, seemingly going nowhere, offhandedly asks “What else?,” and, in reply, suddenly conjures this amazing passage:

Oh, and Mona, who seemed less cow
than concept, really, half animal, half irony,
sticking her rubbable muzzle
through the fence like a Labrador.
We stayed a long while petting the impossibility of her.
We gave her—if you can believe it—grapes
left over from our lunch,
and when they were gone, and we were almost,
her moo blued the air like a sorrow
so absurd it left nothing left of us
but laughter.

That “blued the air like a sorrow / so absurd” is inspired!

“For You” and “Eating Grapes Downward” brim with spontaneity. I enjoyed them immensely.

May 1, 2017, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoy Mark Ulriksen’s vivid baseball covers immensely. This week’s issue features a dandy. Titled “Strike Zone,” it’s a close-up of a scene at home plate: a wide-open-mouthed umpire is calling a strike; a wide-open-mouthed Red Sox batter is expressing dismay; and a wide-open-mouthed Yankee catcher, holding the ball in his mitt, looks ecstatic.

2. “Goings On About Town: Art” says of Maureen Gallace’s paintings, “Like the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, her work generates power from reticence.” It’s an interesting observation. But Bishop also had a keen eye for detail. As Bonnie Costello says in Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), “Her eye delights in the particular.” The same can’t be said for Gallace’s paintings. They efface detail. In this regard, the analogy with Bishop’s poems seems tenuous.

Maureen Gallace, "Summer House / Dunes" (2009)

3. “Goings On About Town: Night Life” says of Alan Broadbent,

He’s played the role of the best man for years now, both as the pianist for Quartet West—the celebrated ensemble led by the late, great bassist Charlie Haden—and as an A-list studio arranger and conductor. But Broadbent also deserves considerable attention for his work as a probing stylist who deftly balances the rhapsodic and the propulsive.

I agree. Listen to him play George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” on his 2005 album ’Round Midnight. It’s the most intense, swinging, gorgeous rendition of that great song you’ll ever hear.

4. Wei Tchow’s piece on Diamond Reef is classic “Bar Tab,” right up there with Nicolas Niarchos’s “Dutch Kills.” Both pieces mention the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), my favorite cocktail. Tchow refers to a witty Diamond Reef variation – the Penichillin: “Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine.”

March 6, 2017, Issue

Do we need to know about Elizabeth Bishop’s private life in order to appreciate her poetry? Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her absorbing “The Island Within,” a review of Megan Marshall’s new biography, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, in this week’s issue, appears to answer no. Discussing the lines “The name of seashore towns run out to sea, / the names of cities cross the neighboring / mountains / – the printer here experiencing the same / excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause,” in Bishop’s “The Map,” she mentions that Bishop’s previous biographer, Brett C. Millier, linked them to thoughts that Bishop confided to her notebook (“Name it friendship if you want – like names of cities printed on maps, the word is much too big, it spreads all over the place, and tells nothing of the actual place it means to name”). But then Pierpont says, “Of course, any such biographical explanation is a cheat: the reader cannot be expected to supply these facts; the poem means what it means, on its own.” I agree. My sense of who Bishop was arises from her meticulous poetic details. Take, for example, her exquisite description of fog in “The Moose”:

The bus starts. The light

is deepening; the fog

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;

the sweet peas cling

to wet white string

on the whitewashed fences;

bumblebees creep

inside the foxgloves,

and evening commences.

Pierpont discusses “The Moose” in terms of its meaning. She says, “Despite the passengers’ lack of anything remotely resembling expressive language (“Sure are big creatures.” / “It’s awful plain”), they are overcome with joy, lifted from their narrow selves for a luminous moment, before the bus rolls on.” But, for me, the beauty of “The Moose” is in those “cold, round crystals” of fog, forming, sliding, and settling “in in the white hens’ feathers, / in gray glazed cabbages, / on the cabbage roses / and lupins like apostles.” Such ravishing description indicates who Bishop was more revealingly than any letter or notebook could possibly show.

In her piece, Pierpont calls Marshall’s biography “lively and engaging, charged with vindicating energy.” This sharply contrasts with Dwight Garner’s verdict in The New York Times: “Marshall’s biography is dull and dispiriting” (“ 'Elizabeth Bishop' Details a Poet’s Life. An Author’s, Too,” January 31, 2017). Pierpont says,

Marshall, an aspiring poet in her youth, writes from a deep sense of identity with her subject: she studied with Bishop at Harvard, in 1976, and her biographical chapters are interspersed with pages of her own memoir, also centered on family, poetry, and loss. It’s an odd but compelling structure, as the reader watches the two women’s lives converge, and it allows for some closeup glimpses of Bishop as a teacher.

Garner differs:

Marshall’s attempts at memoir are painfully earnest. “I’d taken him a loaf of banana bread I baked one week, in lieu of a poem,” she reports about her interactions with one Harvard professor. Each of these reveries, some of which include samples of the biographer’s own verse (“Take flight, larks with a freedom earthbound creatures/Can’t know”), is about three slices short of a loaf and has no place here.

Who’s right – Pierpont (“odd but compelling structure”) or Garner (“thee slices short of a loaf”)? The only way to decide, I guess, is to read Marshall’s book.

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

Elizabeth Bishop (Photo: Bettman/CORBIS)

Megan Marshall, in her fascinating “Elizabeth and Alice” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, October 27, 2016) identifies “you” in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (The New Yorker, April 26, 1976) as Bishop’s partner, Alice Methfessel, who left Bishop, in 1975, after a five-year relationship. Marshall also reports that “One Art” went through seventeen drafts. She writes,

As late as draft eleven, the loss of Methfessel still registered in the poem’s concluding stanza as the one misfortune Bishop could not withstand: “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.”

Marshall concludes, “But, though she later described “One Art” as ‘pure emotion,’ Bishop guarded her feelings in the final version’s last stanza, pretending bravery.”

I confess that “pretending bravery” irks me. It makes it sound as if “One Art” ’s stoicism is a put-on. I think when Bishop says, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she means it. Helen Vendler, in her brilliant “Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III” (included in her 2010 Last Looks, Last Books), writes,

By bringing “One Art” down to the very moment of present writing, by lifting her pen after she writes “like” and then reinscribing “like” after her tenacious interpolation of self-command “(Write it!),” Bishop turns once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin. Her art, wrung from loss, paradoxically becomes her life principle.

What Bishop wrote in her eleventh draft is interesting. But what she wrote in her final draft is determinative. That draft shows her, as Vendler says, “turning once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin.”  

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "What We See When We Look at Travel Photography"

Robert Frank, "Santa Fe" (1955)

A special shout-out to Gideon Lewis-Krauss for his terrific “What We See When We Look at Travel Photography,” in this week’s New York Times Magazine, a delicious essay connecting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” Paul Fussell’s Abroad, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, Edward Hopper’s Gas, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, Janet Malcolm’s Diana and Nikon (a collection of her New Yorker photography pieces), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 3, 1955) with transfixing “road” photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Gary Winogrand. The core of the piece’s combinational delight is Lewis-Krauss’s multilayered interpretation of his friend David’s Instagram image of a nighttime gas station. “ ‘What is it,’ his caption asked, ‘about #gasstationsatdusk?’ ” Lewis-Krauss’s answer is brilliant:

It wasn’t an act of representation at all, and it certainly wasn’t private. It was the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment — something a little smart, and a little sad, and a little funny, and all in all very David. The image, an internet square of labyrinthine self-referentiality — a photograph that recalled a painting that was at home in a poem — recalled for me a different line of Geoff Dyer’s, where he quotes John Berger on Paul Strand’s portraits: They arrested a moment “whose duration is measured not by seconds, but by its relation to a lifetime.”

The “lifetime” Berger is referring to is, I think, the lifetime of Strand's subjects. Berger, in his superb essay, writes, “Strand’s photographs suggest his sitters trust him to see their life story.” Lewis-Krauss, in his piece, seems to be saying that David’s gas station photo is self-referential - “the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment.” I agree with both writers. Photographs have a double aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens.

Favorite Books of 2015

Here are five books published in 2015 that I enjoyed immensely:

1. James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of four extraordinary essays blending personal history with literary criticism. One of the pieces, "Why?," originally appeared in The New Yorker. (See my post here.)

2. Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, a brilliant essay collection on poets and poetry, including two wonderful New Yorker pieces, “American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry” and “Ardor and Artifice: Merrill’s Mozartian Touch.” (See my posts here and here.)

3. Julian Bell’s Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a superb, concise, stimulating study of Van Gogh’s life and work by one of my favorite art critics. (See my post here.)

4. Michael Hofmann’s Where Have You Been?, a delicious collection of essays on James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and Les Murray, among others. It also contains an excellent piece on my favorite Canadian poet, Karen Solie. (See my post here.)

5. Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, an exquisite study of Bishop’s poetry, including her great New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” which Tóibín ingeniously connects with James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (See my post here.)

Correction: I see now that Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been? is not a 2015 book. It was published in 2014. But I read it this year, and so I'm going to keep it on my 2015 list. 

Simic on Vendler: A Questionable Criticism

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

I want to consider a questionable comment on Helen Vendler’s criticism that Charles Simic makes in his “The Incomparable Critic” (The New York Review of Book, August 13, 2015), a review of Vendler’s recent essay collection The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar. Simic says,

 She’s drawn to ideas in poems, conveys them well, but tends at times to devalue physical setting, “what the eye beholds,” as if it were only a prop and not the hook that draws the reader in. The “poet’s sense of the world,” “the savor of life,”  “the vulgate of experience” as Stevens called it – she often doesn’t do justice to these in my view.

Simic supports his point with an example. He says,

I have in mind her analysis of a poem like “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where she follows the poet’s thinking well enough, but doesn’t show how closely tied Stevens’s meditation is to the changes taking place in the sea and the sky as the tropical night descends and the unknown woman walking along the shore sings her song, and why the speaker in the poem not only comes to understand what he is experiencing, but once he does is overcome with emotion, and so are we as readers. We are moved because we had experienced something like that once and couldn’t find words for it, and now have them. It’s that recognition that links the reader to the poet, and its interdependence of reality and imagination that Stevens strives to sort out in the poem.

If true, Simic’s comment would, for me, be a damning criticism of Vendler’s approach. In my opinion, one can’t respond meaningfully to an artwork to which one hasn’t responded sensually. But Vendler’s writing has never struck me as a devaluation of physical setting or an underestimation of “what the eye beholds.” On the contrary, her work has taught me the value of sensual apprehension. Her expressions of pleasure regarding physical description are among the most memorable passages in all her writings. For example, in “Elizabeth Bishop” (included in her great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us), she says of Bishop’s “The Moose,”

In the first half of the poem one of the geographies of the world is given an ineffable beauty, both plain and luxurious. Nova Scotia’s tides, sunsets, villages, fog, flora, fauna, and people are all summoned quietly into verse, as if for a last farewell, as the speaker journeys away to Boston. The verse, like the landscape, is “old-fashioned.”

The bus starts. The light
is deepening; the fog
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 rosesand lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.

That “exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness” is marvelously fine. There are many examples of Vendler’s sensuous appreciation of physical description. Here’s another one; it’s an excerpt from her “Seamus Heaney” (included in her brilliant 1988 collection The Music of What Happens):

He [Heaney] sees the long, dark body of the Grauballe man, preserved for nearly two thousand years, and almost numbers its bones:

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 inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

If, in the end, the Grauballe man is made to stand, in one of Heaney’s anxious moralities, for “hooded victim, / slashed and dumped,” he is also, in the plainness of his utter amalgamation of all being (tar, water, wood, basalt, egg, swan, root, mussel, eel, mud, armor, leather), a figure of incomparable beauty.

Of course, there are many ways to appreciate poetry; sensual response is only one of them. I suppose that a poem such as Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” could be enjoyed purely as seascape (“the outer voice of sky / And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled”; “mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea”; “The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, / As the night descended, tilting in the air”), as Simic suggests. But reading it, particularly the words “But it was more than that,” you sense that Stevens intended something else, that description, however beautiful, was not his endpoint. Vendler, in her “Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers” (included in The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar), ingeniously interprets “The Idea of Order at Key West” as an elaboration of a new poetic that is “neither instinctual nor mimetic; it is an abstract one of intellectual artifice, of exact measurement, of geometric lines and demarcated spatial lines.” Vendler’s interpretation reveals, for me, at least, a newly perceived aspect of “The Idea of Order at Key West” – “the spirit’s mastery, by the geometrical abstraction afforded by lyric language, of the sublime landscape of the night sky.”  

Elizabeth Bishop - Poetic Trickster?

Colm Tóibín, in his absorbing On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), calls Bishop’s habit of correcting or qualifying herself a “trick.” He says,  

The enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms in the poems (and maybe in the letters too) was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to follow the poem’s casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it saw, or what it knew.

I’m not sure “trick” is the right word. It connotes insincerity. It’s too cynical. When Bishop, in her great “Santarém” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), says, “In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather,” is she trying to trick us into trusting her voice, or is she simply trying to be as accurate as possible? Tóibín further says,

The trick established limits, exalted precision, made the bringing of things down to themselves into a sort of conspiracy with the reader. But she also worried about anything that might be overlooked (“no detail too small”), or not noticed properly, or exaggerated, or let too loose into grand feelings, which were not fully to be trusted.

I agree with the “no detail too small” part of this observation. Bishop was a meticulous observer; she relished visual accuracy. Seamus Heaney, in his “Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop” (The Redress of Poetry, 1995), refers to her “obsessive attention to detail.”

But Tóibín has spurred my thinking. Why enact the qualification? Why not, in “Santarém,” for instance, just delete “church” and insert “Cathedral”? Why show both the first word choice and the more accurate second one? I think this is attributable to another element of Bishop’s style – her Hopkinsian aim to portray, in her words, “not a thought, but a mind thinking” (quoted in James Fenton’s “The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop,” The Strength of Poetry, 2001). As Fenton says, she shows “the feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.” One way she does this is by showing her hesitations, corrections, and qualifications. For example:

                                           Oil has seeped into

the margins of the ditch of standing water

and flashes or looks upward brokenly,

like bits of mirror – no, more blue than that:

like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

[from “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” The New Yorker, December 24, 1966]

No, more blue than that – this instant qualification isn’t a trick; it’s a habit of mind – “a feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.”

The Pleasure of Description (Contra Kirsch)

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.