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. 

September 9, 2024 Issue

Seamus Heaney is one of my heroes. I first encountered his work on a 1985 trip to Halifax with several friends. One of them, Alan Buchanan, brought a slim book of poetry with him and read some of it to us as we drove. The book was Seamus Heaney’s Field Work (1979). Alan read it with great gusto. I relished every line. “You drank America / like the heart’s / iron vodka,” “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me into verb, pure verb,” and this beauty – “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” Soon after, I discovered Heaney’s critical writings. His essay collection The Government of the Tongue (1988) is one of my touchstones. I mention all this because, in this week’s New Yorker, Maggie Doherty reviews The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I read it avidly. What was Heaney’s letter-writing like? Doherty doesn’t exactly say. She provides an excellent outline of his life. She quotes some of his poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” and “Funeral Rites.” She praises their sound:

Like a good anthropologist, young Heaney had a knack for thick description, but, as with Hopkins, the great pleasure of his early poems is their sound. Combining the hard consonants of Old English, which he’d studied in college, with the Latinate style favored by many lyric poets, he developed a voice that was by turns ruthless and refined. Consider the first lines of “Churning Day”: “A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.” Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste.

She occasionally provides a brief excerpt from a letter, e.g., “In a letter, he described California as a ‘lotus land for the moment’; walking to campus, he passed ‘hippies, drop-outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads.’ ” But there are no extended quotes, nothing to indicate whether the letters themselves are worth reading. She says of the collection that it “shows the man to be both responsive and responsible, generous with praise for his fellow-writers, grateful for feedback from trusted readers, and open to the dissenting opinions of his colleagues and countrymen, even as he maintains his own beliefs.” Okay, all very interesting. But what of the writing purely as writing? Are there any flashes of the Heaney magic? Doherty doesn’t say. It’s a very disappointing review. 

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.

Fighting Off Larkin: Seamus Heaney and "Aubade"

Seamus Heaney (Photo by Nancy Crampton)

I’ve just finished reading Michael Cavanagh’s absorbing Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2009). For me, the most interesting part is its consideration of Heaney’s great essay “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B, Yeats and Philip Larkin,” included in Heaney’s 1995 collection The Redress of Poetry. Cavanagh calls it, among other things, “Heaney’s denigration of Larkin.” This seems harsh. Yes, Heaney’s essay attacks Larkin’s “Aubade” for accepting “the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death” and denying “the ecstatic presence of the supernatural.” But it also praises “Aubade” for its “high poetic achievement,” and, in a most original analytic move, tries to use that achievement to argue that “Aubade,” for all its bleakness, is really “on the side of life.” Heaney says,

Still, when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s “Aubade” does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all odds. For all its heart-breaking truths and beauties, “Aubade” reneges on what Yeats called the “spiritual intellect’s great work.”

Cavanagh sees “Joy or Night” as a departure from Heaney’s “insistence on the reality principle.” But, to me, Heaney isn’t a realist; he’s a transcendentalist. He believes in the supernatural. Larkin doesn’t. For him, “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” included in Larkin’s 1983 collection, Required Writing). I’m with Larkin. Nevertheless, I admire the hell out of Heaney’s “Joy or Night.” It’s one of the most spirited arguments I know of on whether “death is no different whined at than withstood.” 

Critics as Makers of Works of Art (Contra Colin Burrow)

Colin Burrow, in his absorbing review of Christopher Ricks’ new essay collection Along Heroic Lines (London Review of Books, October 7, 2021), says, “Critics see things, but do not make things.” Really? Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman isn’t made? T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death isn’t made? Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment isn’t made? Howard Moss’s The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust isn’t made? Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue isn’t made? Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida isn’t made? I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. There are works of criticism that are as much works of art as the subjects they consider. It’s time to drop the condescension and recognize them as such.  

Roy Foster's "On Seamus Heaney"

Reading Roy Foster’s absorbing On Seamus Heaney (2020), I was pleased to see The New Yorker mentioned. Foster writes,

Nearly twenty years later, I read “At the Wellhead” in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed but enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years.

The New Yorker published thirty-eight Heaney poems. Foster refers to at least ten of them: “Casualty” (April 2, 1979), “Crossings” (April 17, 1989), “Keeping Going” (October 12, 1992), “At the Wellhead” (March 28, 1994), “Tollund” (October 3, 1994), “The Sharping Stone” (October 23, 1995), “The Perch” (January 18, 1999), “Electric Light” (June 19 & 26, 2000),  “The Turnip-Snedder” (March 20, 2006), and “In the Attic” (February 9 & 16, 2009). Of these, my favorite is “The Perch” (“Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River / Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver”). Foster calls it “a short and perfect poem of microscopic observation.” He’s right.

Neil Corcoran's Wrong-Headed Criticism of Seamus Heaney

I’m currently reading Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998). In the Preface, Corcoran says he hopes his book “offers some original and provocative readings and re-readings” of Heaney’s work. Well, it didn’t take him long to provoke me. In the book’s first chapter, titled “Roots and Readings: Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), he says some of Death of a Naturalist’s poems, including “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed,” “tend toward pastiche.” He writes,

These poems have their eyes so eagerly trained on The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes’s first two books, that, even allowing for the element of comedy that undoubtedly inheres in them too, they tend towards pastiche.

I disagree. Ted Hughes wrote about hawks, crows, sheep, eels; Heaney wrote about turkeys, cows, trout. Both wrote about the natural world. But that’s where the similarity ends. Hughes’s governing aesthetic is violence. Helen Vendler says of him, “This is a poet who wants to write words like “Blood ball swollen” and “sliced … throat strings” and “hacked-off head” (The Music of What Happens, 1988). Heaney’s aesthetic, in Death of a Naturalist, is pleasure – sensuous, tactile description: “He once complained extravagantly / In an overture of gobbles; / He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud / With a grey flick of his Confucian eye” (“Turkeys Observed”); “It seems she has swallowed a barrel. / From forelegs to haunches, / her belly is slung like a hammock” (“Cow in Calf”); “Hangs, a fat gun-barrel, / deep under arched bridges / or slips like butter down / the throat of the river” (“Trout”); “Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions, / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations” (“The Diviner”). 

Corcoran rightly praises certain Death of a Naturalist poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” “Blackberry-Picking,” for their striking alliteration and onomatopoeia. But his characterization of “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed” as “pastiche” is wrong-headed. Heaney imitated no one. 

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.”

June 8 & 15, 2015 Issue

James Wood, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, says, “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief – it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm.” I confess I’m a nonbeliever. For whatever reason – lack of imagination, skepticism, a Heaney-like desire to see things plain (“things founded clean on their own shapes”) – I’m unable to suspend my disbelief. And so, when The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue appears, as it has this week, I gravitate toward what seem to me to be the least fictional pieces. For example, Thomas McGuane’s "Fall River," in this week’s issue, appears to be mostly personal history. It contains a wonderful line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences:

I also have a deck of playing cards with bathing beauties in arousing costumes to distract me, as well as match rockets, which I light in the basement until I’m rebuked for trying to burn the house down, baseball in North Park, daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street and has been declared out of bounds, and rides with my Uncle Frank in his “foreign” car, a Ford (he calls it foreign because “it is entirely foreign to me”).

That “daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street” is inspired!

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.

December 8, 2014 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Ride of Their Lives,” James Wood’s “Fly Away,” and Dan Chiasson’s “You and Me Both.” In his “Reporter at Large” piece, Bilger visits the Camp of Champions in Sayre, Oklahoma, “a combination rodeo school and revival meeting,” where kids bounce around on sheep and calves in preparation for “the most dangerous organized sport in the world” – bull-riding. He also journeys to the D&H Company cattle ranch on the Washita River in south-central Oklahoma where rodeo bulls are bred (“Tawny, black, mottled, white—rodeo bulls are almost always mutts—they grazed under spreading pecans, in thirteen pastures separated by tall steel fences”). And he attends the Youth Bull Riders World Finals in Abilene, Texas (“Then the gate flew open and the calf charged out, leaping and flexing across the arena like a steel spring shot from an old tractor. He twisted one way and the other, jackknifed in the air and rolled his belly, but could not get the rider off”).

I like Bilger’s feel for Oklahoma. He says, “In the right light, there’s a kind of grandeur to its vast featureless sweep, where every truck stop and water tower can take on totemic power.” But a weird undercurrent runs through the piece. It’s there in the vests that read “Cowkids for Christ” that some of the calf riders wear. It’s there in the parents’ willingness to expose their children to catastrophic injuries (“ ‘I worry about it. I do,’ his father told me. ‘We discuss it all the time. If something serious happens in the arena and God calls his number—if a fatality happens to my son bull riding—it’ll be a struggle. I’m not going to lie to you. But I’ll know that my son will be at peace. That he died happy and enjoying what he was doing’ ”). The story’s clinching quotation is Tuff Hedeman’s comment. Hedeman is a four-time world champion bull-rider. Near the end of the piece, he says, “For me, ninety per cent of it was good. I never had a life-threatening injury. But the last thing I would ever want my son to do is ride bulls. It’s insane.” “The Ride of Their Lives” concludes beautifully. Bilger cuts back to the Camp of Champions, to a cattle trough baptism in a tent. Eight-year-old Jet Erickson, one of the cowkids we’ve been following in the story, volunteers for the ceremony:

Jet, stripped to his swim trunks, climbed in willingly enough but then seemed to change his mind. He pushed his feet up against the end of the trough and gripped the rim tight with his hands. For just a moment, he hung there like a spider perched above a water glass. Then one of the church elders cradled his head and slowly, quiveringly, Jet let himself go under.

It’s a memorable scene, perhaps a metaphor for the crazy culture of religion and rodeo in which these kids are immersed.

  

New Yorker readers are lucky to have regular access to the work of two of the best literary critics in the world – James Wood and Dan Chiasson. Both are in this week’s issue. Wood, in his piece called “Fly Away,” reviews Samantha Harvey’s new novel Dear Thief. Chiasson, in his “You and Me Both,” considers Olena Kalytiak Davis’s recent The Poems She Didn’t Write and Other Poems. “Literature teaches us to notice,” Wood says in his How Fiction Works (2008). He admires perceptive writing immensely. In “Fly Away,” he says of Davis’s novel:

Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything: the “feathered breaths” of her grandmother, how her “exhales were smooth and liquid, which seems to me now the surest sign of a life’s exit—when the act of giving away air is easier than that of accepting it”; the way the dying woman’s skin has “flattened a tone—and I mean it this way, like a piece of music gone off-key.”

That “she seems alert to everything” is perhaps Wood’s ultimate literary compliment. “Attentive purity” could be his watchword.

Chiasson’s descriptive analysis is extraordinary. For example, in “You and Me Both,” he says of Davis’s “Robert Lowell,” “The poem drifts from its altitudes down into the scuffed actual life it briefly sought to transcend.” That “scuffed actual life” is inspired!

I don’t always agree with everything Wood and Chiasson say. For instance, in his piece on Davis, Chiasson claims, “The medium of poetry isn’t language, really; it’s human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers.” Is that true of every poet? I think of Seamus Heaney “toasting friendship” in his great poem “Oysters.” Love, vitality, friendship – these are as much the medium of poetry as loneliness. Chiasson’s statement seems too sweeping. Nevertheless, it’s got me thinking. He may not always be right, but he’s unfailingly stimulating.

James Ley On James Wood

James Ley, in his absorbing The Critic in the Modern World (2014), says of James Wood’s criticism, “His characteristic approach is to interpret a fictional work via an assessment of the author’s stylistic proclivities: his point of entry, the basis of his understanding, is the weave and texture of a writer’s prose.” This is well said. It gets at the quality that most draws me to Wood’s writing – his detailed analysis of what makes great writing great. It reminds me of what Helen Vendler said about Seamus Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act” (“A Wounded Man Falling Toward Me,” The New Yorker, March 13, 1989). It’s Wood’s art, too. For example, in his superb "Late and Soon" (The New Yorker, December 12, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, he quotes a couple of excerpts from the novel and says,

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

I relish this kind of stylistic analysis. Wood provides it in almost every piece he writes. I wish Ley had devoted more of his study to consideration of Wood’s aesthetics. But, unlike Wood, Ley isn’t an aesthetic critic. His approach is metaphysical. He’s interested in Wood’s ideas – hysterical realism, fictionality, lifeness, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It illuminates Wood’s thinking. But it neglects an essential point: Wood’s strongest thought is in his style, the way he expresses himself. Ley knows this. At one point, he says, “The metaphysics of each critic is reflected in the texture of his writing.” Exactly. Ley’s study would’ve been much richer if he'd focused on examining “the weave and texture” of Wood’s splendid prose.

Seamus Heaney's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Seamus Heaney, who died two days ago at age seventy-four, had a close New Yorker connection. Over the years, he contributed thirty-eight poems to the magazine, including his great elegy, “Casualty” (“Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin / Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water”) (The New Yorker, April 2, 1979; included in his superb 1979 collection, Field Work). New Yorker poetry critic, Helen Vendler, an ardent champion of Heaney’s work (he dedicated The Spirit Level to her) wrote four pieces on him: “The Music of What Happens” (September 28, 1981); “Echo Soundings, Searches, Probes” (September 23, 1985); “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” (May 13, 1989), and “Choices” (April 15, 1991). They are among the glories of New Yorker critical writing. 

Yesterday, I was pleased to see The New Yorker pay eloquent tribute to Heaney. Dan Chiasson, commenting on Heaney’s sequence of poems called “Squarings,” says, “The work of these poems is to make as real as possible the represented sensory experiences of the child, conveying their aromas and textures as though at first hand” ["Postscript: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)," “Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013]. This gets at what I most prize in Heaney’s poetry – his gift for ravishing, sensual, tactile description. Vendler, in her brilliant Seamus Heaney (1998), says, “Heaney’s senses often transmit themselves in language with an ecstatic acuteness.” Here is a yellow curd of butter “weighting the churned up white, / heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer, / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl” (“Churning Day”). And here is the sweet flesh of a blackberry “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking” (“Blackberry-Picking”). And here is the exhumed cadaver called the Grauballe Man (from the extraordinary poem of the same name):

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.

                        

Chiasson is right when he says, in “Postscript,” that Heaney’s “poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence.” [Incredibly, James Fenton dissents on this point; in his “The Orpheus of Ulster” (The Strength of Poetry), he says, “I don’t much care for what he fishes out of bogs.”] But if Grauballe Man represents atrocity, he’s also, as Vendler points out, “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” (“The Music of What Happens”). Beauty runs through all that Heaney wrote, including his incomparable criticism. His Preoccupations (1980) and The Government of the Tongue (1988) are, for me, touchstones. In “Feeling Into Words” (in Preoccupations), Heaney provides this unforgettable definition of technique:

Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of existence within the jurisdiction of form.

Regarding the importance of rhythm, he says, “A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being” (“Sounding Auden,” in The Government of the Tongue). In “Lowell’s Command” (The Government of Tongue), he quotes the concluding lines of three of Robert Lowell’s poems and says, “Closing lines like these would tremble in the centre of the ear like an arrow in a target and set the waves of suggestion rippling.” On Wordsworth’s poetic voice, he says, “As his poetic feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice” (“The Makings of a Music,” in Preoccupations). On and on – as a poet and as an essayist, Heaney is endlessly quotable. Vendler called his pieces on Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Auden “the best in recent memory” (in “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me”). She said that twenty-four years ago. It still applies today.

Credit: The above photo of Seamus Heaney, by Richard Franck Smith, illustrates Joshua Rothman’s "Seamus Heaney in The New Yorker" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, August 30, 2013).