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. 

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.