The Poetry Conversation

Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”

October 23, 2018

Ever since I first read Bishop’s “One Art,” I’ve suggested that the villanelle form be retired, like a star basketball player’s jersey. That’s my way of saying that her poem feels like such a perfect mesh of form and content, how could anyone write a compelling one in its wake? I can’t read it–to myself or in a class–without choking at the end. The tension between the emotions and the form’s restraint exactly balances the two. There is great grief but no self-pity, no blame (except of herself), and nothing that makes me feel as if I’ve intruded on something too private, despite the powerful emotions.

The poem is a perfect translation of personal experience into art, and the result is so seamless it never occurred to me that there was any intermediate stage until the drafts were published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. The first draft is the most surprising, closer to notes than to a poem, and full of all the ranting and whining that are so beautifully left out of the last draft. By the second draft, she starts to work with elements of the form, and it begins to take shape as a poem. I’d read discussions of the drafts, but never all the drafts themselves, because they appear in the book as typescript with indecipherable handwritten changes. But last year I came across an essay online that prints them all legibly and also discusses them in thoughtful and interesting ways. It’s from a blog I want to point you to, bluedragonfly10. The writer uses only her first name, Beth. The blog began in 2007 and continued until 2013, with nothing since. Beth is a writer, artist, and teacher, lived or lives in Colorado, and is incredibly smart about literature. Her essay on Bishop’s drafts is the best thing I’ve read on them, and the only complete printed versions I’ve found so far. (I’d be interested to know if there are others.) I highly recommend you read around in her entries–I’ve just started myself, and they’re fascinating.

Here’s the first draft of “One Art,” followed by the final version. You can find everything in between in the bluedragonfly10 blog post. Seeing the process gives me hope, and makes me more willing to write the bad stuff on the way to the better stuff.

HOW TO LOSE THINGS/?/THE GIFT OF LOSING THINGS

One might begin by losing one’s reading glasses
oh 2 or 3 times a day–or one’s favorite pen.

THE ART OF LOSING THINGS
The thing to do is to begin by “mislaying.”
Mostly, one begins by “mislaying”:
–these are almost too easy to be mentioned,
and “mislaying” means that they usually turn up
in the most obvious place, although when one
is making progress, the places grow more unlikely
–This is by way of introduction.
I really want to introduce myself–I am such a
fantastically good at losing things
I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences.

You may find it hard to believe, but I have actually lost
I mean lost, and forever two whole houses,
one a very big one. A third house, also big, is
at present, I think, “mislaid”–but
Maybe it’s lost too. I won’t know for sure for some time.
I have lost one long [crossed out] peninsula and one island.
I have lost–it can never be has never been found–
a small-sized town on that same island.
I’ve lost smaller bits of geography, like
a splendid beach, and a good-sized bay.
Two whole cities, two of the
world’s biggest cities (two of the most beautiful
although that’s beside the point)
A piece of one continent–
and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever and ever.

One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized not especially–exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes), (only the eyes were exceptionally
beautiful and
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all…the hands looked
intelligent)
the fine hands<

a good piece of one continent
and another continent–the whole damned thing!
He who loseth his life, etc…–but he who
loses his love–never, no never never never again–

And the final version:

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Gwen Head and Dragon Gate Press

September 30, 2018

I learned recently that the poet and publisher Gwen Head died in April of this year. It’s a sign of the times that I found out through amazon. I’d ordered a Laura Jensen book I’d lost somewhere along the way, Memory, that was published by the press Gwen founded, Dragon Gate, in 1982. It came from an independent seller, and when I saw the return address, Dragon Gate, my eyes filled with tears. The press had long been shut down, and I’d been out of touch with Gwen after we’d both moved away from the northwest and Gwen’s own memory had begun to fail. I contacted the seller, who has most of what’s left of the Dragon Gate inventory, and he told me about her death. My online search for mentions of Gwen and her own poetry books, and of Dragon Gate and its publications, confirmed how quickly the poetry universe I’ve known is disappearing under the avalanche of the present.

There will be a memorial for Gwen at Open Books in Seattle next February, but for those of you who don’t know her or the press, I want to offer a little introduction here. I’d be grateful if those of you who did have a connection to her would pass along any stories you have.

Gwen published four volumes of poems: Special Effects (1976) and The Ten Thousandth Night (1979) in the Pitt Poetry Series; Frequencies (University of Utah Press, 1992, which included selections from the first two books in addition to new poems); and Fire Shadows (LSU, 2001). Amazingly, you can find them all for sale online.

Gwen founded Dragon Gate press in the early eighties, to publish poetry and short fiction. She did an enormous amount of research in advance, and set it up in her home in Port Townsend, Washington (Scott Wolf’s Gray Wolf was once in part of that same house, so it must be embedded with poetry). She published books by Laura Jensen, Linda Gregerson, Richard Blessing, Henry Carlile, Joan Swift, Richard Ronan, Jim Simmerman, Katharine Hake, John Woods, Jeanne Murray Walker, Anthony Piccione, and many others. All small presses are labors of love, and Dragon Gate was no exception: she provided a home for good work that might not have made its way into the world without her generosity.

Here’s Gwen’s poem “Rain” from Frequencies. I also recommend a beautiful pantoum in the same volume, “The Swans of Saigon.”

RAIN

Rain is the original stereotype,
billions of identical units, each intent
on the din of its own tiny bit of information:
about ice crystals, say, at forty thousand feet,
wind shear, or the pollen count
on the Siberian tundra.

It begins like a sprung nerve, twitching.
An invisible junco lands
on the laurel. Then a flock of them.
Something plays the ferns like a marimba.
It continues, in Satie’s directions, monotonously, whitely–
like a nightingale with a toothache.
But this is more accurately rodent weather:
a clatter of nails and tail-tips on roof and walls,
the sour smell of a sickroom,
fear of bites while sleeping.

Awake and needing something, I go downtown.
Rain draws the maimed in thunderous masses
out into the slick streets as if to a shrine.
The dwarfs, the obese, the amputees, the mumblers, the dropsical
old women whose feet would make fine umbrella stands
crowd stupefied beneath the gray fountain
to be healed or drown,

and my taxi driver, taking a wrong turn, asks, “Lady
why do you look so sad?
You must be some kind of artist.”

Between the Lines

June 21, 2018

The amazing poet Terrance Hayes was just on npr, talking about his new book, American Sonnets for my Once and Future Assassin. I heard him read some of these strange, powerful poems in Seattle last year and I’m looking forward to the book. But what’s on my mind now is a phrase he used about how a poet is always trying to activate the space between the lines. I hurried to write that down: activate the space between the lines. The idea is one I think about all the time, but have ne’er so well articulated. I try to point to it when I talk to students about the rhythm of the line, about tautness rather than slackness, about making a poem rather than saying something. What I’m getting at is how those lines create a force field in the spaces between them.

I think these force fields exist in metric poems and free verse, in parts of long poems (you know them when you come to them in Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example) and some whole shorter poems. I think it’s what took the top of Emily Dickinson’s head off. Poems that have this can be translated, but they can’t be paraphrased. I can’t offer a more specific definition, but here are some examples of the electricity I mean, the sparks leaping across the white space.

First, this familiar early 16th century lyric:

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

***

FLY
W. S. Merwin

I have been cruel to a fat pigeon
Because he would not fly
All he wanted was to live like a friendly old man

He had let himself become a wreck filthy and confiding
Wild for his food beating the cat off the garbage
Ignoring his mate perpetually snotty at the beak
Smelling waddling having to be
Carried up the ladder at night content

Fly I said throwing him into the air
But he would drop and run back expecting to be fed
I said it again and again throwing him up
As he got worse
He let himself be picked up every time
Until I found him in the dovecote dead
Of the needless efforts

So that is what I am

Pondering his eyed that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words

***

IN THE EVENING
Jean Valentine

In the evening
I saw them

their little
open boats

carrying us
across the blood water

their invisible company
their invisible company

you beauty I never
did not know

no time
no place

you beauty
little ferryman

***

ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE
Heather McHugh

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn’t come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

Rilke Translations

June 4, 2018

I was just looking at some again recently for my poetry group discussion. We read the first two Duino Elegies in translations by Stephen Mitchell, David Young, Gary Miranda, and Edward Snow. When I came into the poetry world, all my teachers spoke of Rilke as one of the presiding poetry gods, so I tried to read the poems–in translation, that is, since I have no German. I don’t know whose versions I read then, but I found them impenetrable. I took it on faith that Rilke was important, but thought to myself, “I don’t get it. Why does everyone think he’s so great?” The first time I had any sense of his poems as poetry was when I read David Young’s translation of the Duino Elegies, published originally in Field, and then as a collection by Norton in 1978. His don’t have the square and solid look of the originals and other translations–they’re indented triplets. First Snow’s, with typical lines, then Young’s:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his stronger existence….
Edward Snow

If I cried out
…………who would hear me up there
………………..among the angelic orders?
And suppose one suddenly
…….took me to his heart
…………….I would shrivel
I couldn’t survive
……….next to his
………………..greater existence.
David Young

For the first time, I could see and hear music in the poems. And the extra white space made the poems seem less heavy and dense, and also slowed down them down to a speed at which I could follow them.

Since then I’ve read many translations of Rilke, and taught some of them in comparative translation classes, but I hadn’t looked at Young’s in quite a while. Now I find them distracting and oddly broken up (though as I typed them above, all that beauty I felt the first time came back to me), only because I’m so much more familiar with the contents. But I’m forever grateful to them for giving me a way in to the Elegies, for conveying the poetry of them for the first time.

The Miranda translation is the one I came to most recently, and I think of it as another great introduction to the work. His version is spoken by something close to a first-person speaker, and has a clearer through-line and forward pull than any other version I know–and probably than the original. It makes for a kind of immediate emotional connection, but loses what Robert Hass describes as Rilke’s omnipresence: “It is as if, not having a place to stand, the author of these poems is everywhere. Really, they are the nearest thing in the writing of the twentieth century to the flight of birds. They dive, soar, swoop, belly up, loop over.” (From his introduction to the Stephen Mitchell translations.)

The two I find myself most drawn to now, of the ones I know, are those by Stephen Mitchell and Edward Snow, and as I read them side by side I like one better here and one there. Whenever I’ve taught comparative translation we’ve all concluded that for those of us who don’t know the original language, one translation is never sufficient, no matter how good it is. We need several so we can triangulate, and we need the original on facing pages to remind us of what we’re missing. And different ones at different times in our reading lives.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit’s growth–: could we exist without them?
Stephen Mitchell

In the end, those torn from us early no longer need us;
they grow slowly unaccustomed to earthly things, in the gentle manner
one outgrows a mother’s breasts. But we, who need
such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress
springs from grief–: could we exist without them?
Edward Snow

Close Encounters with the Poem Itself

March 29, 2018

I had a very interesting conversation with two writer friends yesterday that eventually led me to an insight about what I want from poetry and other arts–in the very same way that working on a poem leads me to discover my own thoughts and feelings. The discussion began with the recent flood of revelations about the sexual misbehaviors of many male writers, and the response by some to boycott their work. I strongly disagree with that response–it strikes me as censorship and a moral litmus test–but I understand what triggers it. I was appalled by the sexism of the poetry world I stepped into in about 1970, and saw a lot of offensive behavior, then and afterwards, by poets whose work I admired and loved. Sometimes I took a break from reading their poems, but I always went back eventually and found a way to focus on the work rather than the life of the writer.

All of my early readings of contemporary poetry were encounters with the poems themselves, because I knew nothing of the poets’ lives. I first read Sylvia Plath’s poems before I’d ever heard her name, let alone anything of her life and death, for example. The same was true for Elizabeth Bishop, and many others, and I’m grateful that I started with the work. My first literary approach to reading a poem was New Criticism, which reinforced my own focus on the poem itself, not the life of the poet. I’ve added some layers to that in the years since, but that will always be my foundation and primary lens. I’m as susceptible to curiosity and juicy gossip as anyone else, but I think what I learn about a writer’s life gets between me and the work far more often than it illuminates the work. It becomes a kind of noise I have to tune out. Of course there are exceptions–Colm Toibin’s On Elizabeth Bishop brings in snippets of the life to make insightful comments about individual poems, and especially the power of what she leaves out of them. The biographies I’ve read of her don’t do that, and instead fill my head with irrelevancies I have to wash out when I read the poems.

Because what I want when I’m absorbed in a poem–and this is the heart of the matter–is an uncluttered encounter between me and the work of art. I turn to art to leave behind the noise of everyday life and get in touch with something deeper, an experience that lets me return to daily life changed, enriched, challenged, seeing things in new ways.

Robert Frost was my first poetry love, and an enduring one. When I read him as a child and then a teenager, what spoke to me was the darkness and loneliness: “My sorrow when she’s here with me/ Thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be….” And especially, since I lived in a desert landscape, “Desert Places”:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

The last line took my breath away: How did he know? How did he know?

When we were college seniors, a friend and I decided we were going to make a pilgrimage from Utah to New England to meet Frost the following summer. Even though it was a fantasy, I was devastated when he died that January, before I could meet him. It was only years later that I realized what a disaster it would have been if we’d managed to make the trip, somehow find him, and try to introduce ourselves to the man himself. I think that’s a perfect example of the point I’m trying to make here: my deep connections were with the speaker of the poems, not the writer of them. They were powerful, and touched on something true and real, things we did indeed have in common that would only have been obscured by the realities of daily life. I want a tryst, a téte à téte, not with the poet but with the poem itself.

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Sharon Bryan