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She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling.

So begins Colm Tóibín”s wonderful little book, On Elizabeth Bishop. The book is one of those pocket-sized books, has generous margins, and is only 199 pages long. That probably doesn’t sound short, but believe me, it is. Because Tóibín has such a beautiful, smooth, creamy voice. He is thoughtful and meditative. And while he makes thought-provoking observations, they are delivered so softly that you find yourself wrapped up in them like a cozy blanket and mulling them over before you even realize how interesting it all is.

On Elizabeth Bishop is criticism but not of the academic sort. It is a book written by someone who loves Bishop’s poetry and wants you to love it too. He delves deeply into a number of poems but even if you haven’t read them he does not leave you lost. Because while he delves Tóibín also brings up patterns and images and techniques that range across Bishop’s work. He’ll say things like how what Bishop does not say in a poem is oftentimes as important as what she does say. And then we are looking at “The Moose” and Tóibín is picking it apart, pointing out the gaps, providing us with biographical information and context, and suddenly you understand why “The Moose” is one of Bishop’s most famous poems.

Tóibín also uses other poets and other forms of art as a way to see the poetry in a richer light. He writes of Marianne Moore, poet and mentor to Bishop, and the friction that would arise between them because Moore wanted Bishop to write like her but Bishop continued to develop her own style and voice. Tóibín compares the two writing of Moore’s poems:

They were close to certain pieces by Stravinsky, all brass and disturbed tones, unashamed of their own noise, or indeed paintings by Kandinsky, unashamed of their own swirling colors, whereas Bishop’s poems had the sad gaiety and inwardness and sparseness of Weborn or Mondrian or Klee.

And without reading either Moore or Bishop you get an idea of what their poetry is like and understand that Moore was never going to succeed in making Bishop into her very own Mini-Me.

The book has an overall effect of a long, intimate conversation, one you don’t want to end but reluctantly have to conclude. If you want to know more about Elizabeth Bishop, do read this book. Heck, if you are a fan of Tóibín’s you will probably like the book too and finish it wanting to read Elizabeth Bishop. And if you think he could never convince you to read poetry, allow me to say, Tóibín is very persuasive.

Can you believe it’s July already? I can’t. I was just getting used to June, just starting to feel like I was in the June groove, and now it’s time to move on. I am not ready. Can we turn the calendar back to June 15th please? That should be enough for me to get my fill of June and then when July 1st rolls around again I will be ready. Not going to happen you say? Where’s Marty McFly or the TARDIS when you need them?

Well, let’s barrel into July then. What will the month hold for reading? I get a 3-day holiday weekend coming up for Independence Day. Groovy, some extra reading time.

Even though I have been (mostly) good about keeping my library hold requests down to a manageable number, two books I have been looking forward to reading that have long waiting lines have, of course, both arrived for me at once. I now have to either a) rush through The Buried Giant and Get in Trouble in three weeks, or b) choose one to focus on and not worry about the other and get in line for it again if I run out of time. Choice “b” seems the most likely one I will go with which means Ishiguro’s Buried Giant will get my attention first. I am looking forward to it.

Carried over from last month, I am still reading Elif Shafak’s The Architect’s Apprentice. I am enjoying it much more than I was before even though I am making my way through it rather slowly.

In June I began reading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The Martian by Andy Weir. Two very different books and I am enjoying each of them quite a lot. James manages to be funny and ironic and ominous and can he ever write! I know people make fun of his long sentences but I get so involved in the reading I don’t even notice the length of the sentences. I do notice sometimes the paragraphs are very long, but that is only when I am nearing my train stop or the end of my lunch break and I am looking for a place to stop reading. And The Martian, is it ever a funny book. The book itself isn’t funny I guess, there is nothing very funny about being left for dead on Mars, the character, Mark Watney is funny; humor as survival tool. Weir, I must say, does a most excellent job of writing about complex science in such a way that is compelling and interesting and makes me feel smart.

I have a review copy of a new book called Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor on its way to me. The Emily in question is Emily Dickinson. It’s a novel from Penguin Random House and they are kindly going to provide a second copy for a giveaway. Something to look forward to!

I will also begin reading Elizabeth Bishop this month. I’m still reading Keats letters and biography and poetry but he will get a bit less attention as I start to focus on Bishop. Much as I wanted to like Keats, it seems I like the idea of Keats more than the actuality; enjoy his letters more than his poetry. Not that his poetry isn’t very good, it is, at least some of it because there is quite a bit of mediocre stuff he wrote to/for friends that makes me wonder why I decided to read the collected rather than the selected. Hindsight and all that. But even the really good Keats poetry left me with mixed feelings. I mean, I appreciate it and sometimes I have a wow moment, but it generally doesn’t give me poetry stomach (the stomach flutters I get when I read a poem I really connect with). We’ll see how it goes with Bishop. I have her collected as well as her letters to work my way through over the coming months.

Without a doubt there will be other books that pop up through the month, there always are! The unexpected is all part of the fun.

April is National Poetry Month and I have neglected to say anything about it thus far. Well, I am about to fix that.

The Library of Congress today launched the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. There are fifty recordings available at the moment and it will be added to every month.

The LOC is digitizing its collection of nearly 2,000 recordings of poets and prose writers who participated in events at the library. Most of the recordings are on magnetic tape reels and until now have only been available by visiting the library.

Among the items available at launch is Robert Frost being interviewed by Randall Jarrell in 1959 and the Academy of American Poets’ 35th anniversary program from 1969 that included readings by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. That is just the tip of the iceberg. It is a true treasure trove.

This is why I love the internet. Go now, explore the archive and enjoy.

Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is dearly loved amongst her fans but perhaps not as well-known as it should be; for one of America's towering talents of the 20th century, she is not read nearly as much as Eliot or Whitman, or even cummings. That may be in part because of her relatively slim output — this [...]

It’s National Poetry Month this April and what better way to celebrate than a chat with author, poet, and creative writing instructor Karen Benke.

It’s been a wonderful Bookman birthday day today. The cake came out so good and it couldn’t have been simpler. It is basically a single-layer chocolate cake with some cherries in it topped with a can of cherry pie filling and then drizzled with chocolate. What could be easier? And because of the cherries we can pretend that it is nutritious!

I began reading My Poets by Maureen McLane today and very quickly became friends with this book.

The first chapter is short and is a “Proem in the form of a Q&A” Here is a sample:

Why do you read poetry?
I caught this morning morning’s minion.

Why do you read poetry?
Batter my heart.

Why to you read poetry?
I have wasted my life.

Other questions include what is the first poem you remember, why poetry, and why do you write poetry? Here are a couple answers to the last question:

Why do you write poetry?
My purpose here is to advance into
the sense of the weather.

Why do you write poetry?
I sing to use the Waiting.

As if that weren’t marvelous enough, chapter two muses about the word “kankedort” which apparently only appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. From there we move to a chapter called “My Impasses” in which McLane talks about two poetry classes she took as a college freshman in 1985, one of them taught by Helen Vendler. She talks about reading poetry and reading poetry, good readings and bad readings, about finding a way into a poem and being stuck on the outside even though you badly want to understand. And she talks about how, years later, a poem that was so confusing and impossible originally can suddenly open up and let you in and mean so much. It is a really wonderful chapter that I might have to reread and write about because she says so much that is true.

And then chapter four. Oh, I had to stop myself in the middle of it so I wouldn’t rush to the end because it is so utterly fun. Chapter four is called “My Elizabeth Bishop / (My Gertrude Stein)” and it is written in the style of Stein. For her undergraduate thesis McLane decided she was going to write about Stein but Stein resisted her and a gift from a mentor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems turned out to be a wonderful discovery and saved her thesis from disaster. I must give you a taste of the chapter so here is how it begins:

My Elizabeth Bishop begins with Gertrude Stein.
This is not usual.
Bishop is unusual but not in the way Stein is unusual.
I was not used to Gertrude Stein and found I could not get used
    to Stein though I tried.
I was struggling to find a topic for my undergraduate thesis.
This seemed the most important thing in the world.
Whatever is the world to you is the most important thing to
    you.
I would be making myself in this thing.
I was always making myself or being made.
This was unavoidable.
I was planning on being made by Gertrude Stein but she was not
    cooperating.
She was operating on another plane a fractured cubist grid I
    could not make out.

And it appears to go on like this for entire 27 pages of the chapter.

I suppose this kind of book might not be for everyone, but oh, I have a little crush on it at the moment and hope that we manage to be best friends by the final page.

In the November 3, 2009 New Yorker, Dan Chaisson, whose articles, essays, and poems I'll stop and read anytime, anywhere, reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, a 900-plus page tome edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

Reading the review earlier today I felt bereft, somehow, lonely, off course—really, I can't explain it, save to quote for you this paragraph, which foists upon me questions about my own writerly ambitions and constraints and operates as a smack across the mind. Because I write life, whether in memoir, fiction, or poem. I write life. I seek to make life promising.

"Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn't mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so 'life' is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowel, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems."

Read the whole thing here, for yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_chiasson

Yesterday, I carried Elizabeth Bishop's Filling Station around in my pocket. I also pasted a copy of it into my Poetry Scrapbook.

What do I love most about this poem? The combination of a slightly shocked voice---"Oh, but it is dirty!"---"disturbing"---"saucy and greasy"---with precise, unusual word choices--- "grease-impregnated wickerwork" and "hirsute begonia." Yes, I looked that up.

And the ending! Just when you think the narrator is being snooty, and far too amused at this "oil permeated" scene, the whole poem turns in on itself, asking what place beauty and care have in a world of "black translucency," and who is tending to us in our darkest hours. Bishop even pokes fun at herself (I think) as a "high-strung automobile."

What keeps you going? What is fuel? Do you think about who "waters the plant, or oils it, maybe"?


The Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil soaked, oil permeated
to a disturbing over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite throughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Read the rest here.

For another perspective, here's a very short essay from the Poetry Foundation Blog by A.E. Stallings, who disliked The Filling Station for years.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by The Well-Read Child. And Jules at 7-Impossible Things Before Breakfast has made some sense out of the Poetry Seven's free--flowing process talk about the Crown of Sonnets that we unveiled last week. Go read.

A few weeks ago I was in Sydney, Australia where I stumbled upon Touch Galleries on Hickson Road (alas - the street wasn't name for one of MY relatives!), just blocks from the Sydney Opera House and Bridge. A huge two-story cloth-like banner waved gentle in front of the brick building announcing an exhibit of artwork by Nelson Mandela. I never realized Mr. Mandela could paint! The stark, colored