The Art of Losing

Roger Angell is the best prose writer about baseball. Here he quotes one of Elizabeth Bishop's greatest poems, One Art. Sadly he entirely misses Bishop's irony, the unbearable force driving the poem. Torre has (by the front office's standards anyway) lost and lost for years now, and his mastery of winning was questionable. It seems to me that in walking away from his players and millions more dollars than any other manager makes, and in attacking the team's ownership (and hence the team) in doing so, he has reached the pinnacle of losing.

He chains me to that bed & he berates me

In the comments to a recent post, batailleseyes took me to task for ignoring the ending of the Bishop(?) poem I referred to, that is:

He chains me & berates me--
He chains me to that bed & he berates me.

Ok, the rhythm here is really striking:

-'-   -   -'-
-'-   --'--   -'-

but it's got a bit of the usual amphibrach comic flavor, which maybe doesn't help the "chain"-"berate" contrast out.

The rule I've just invented for deciding these matters is as follows: Imagine Ricardo Montalban in his Wrath-of-Khan finery declaiming the lines in question, and if they don't seem silly they're fine. Consider, for example, the ending of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill":

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

This passes, I don't think the title line does.


Thinking about repetition put me in mind of a favorite passage from the beginning of Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise:

Two ponies pulled a sledge piled with gutted animals, and when the barbarian saw it, he spat, and touched his nose with the heel of his hand, and ducked his face down into his armpit. It is your ritual of hatred; seeing it for the first time, standing in the snow, I found it funny. My brother had climbed up onto the mule, and he was kicking his boots into its ribs, while I kicked its backside. "Look how he hates death," sang my brother, as the barbarian muttered and prayed. "He hates the sight of it." A strutwing goose trailed its beak along the snow from the back of the sledge, its feathers dripping blood. "He hates it," sang my brother.

Here's one more quote, from Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, a fantasy novel of unusual depth and vigor but the usual unevenness on every scale:

"My love," [he] said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an abscess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul. "My love," he said again. "What have they done? See what they will make me do. Oh, see what they make me do!"

All Elizabeth Bishop, all the time

Following up on "Washington as a Surveyor", the New Yorker has gone Bishop, 24/7. Or anyway there are three poems under her name in the current issue. These are much less finished works, with (I suspect) rather more editorial input, and are in need of either more such or not being presented as poems. "In a Cheap Hotel..." begins:

In a cheap hotel
in a cheap city
Love held his prisoners                     or my love

at which point I knew I was looking at a mess. I've now got a bad feeling about The Uncollected Poems, but we'll see.

Washington as a Surveyor

So I'm reading the 5 Dec New Yorker, la di da, Hersh on Bush, Munro on wickedness, all the same stuff, flippity flippity, "Washington as a Surveyor", when I get kicked in the left kidney - it's by Elizabeth Bishop. Well, she's been dead for over a quarter century, but occasionally one sees a new poem pop up, what's the story on this one? Flip back to the front - nothing on the Contributors page (later I discover that Mark Strand's poem doesn't get him mentioned either). As far the New Yorker's concerned, it's just a poem by Elizabeth Bishop - they've published her before, why stop now? Ok, so it's listed at Vassar under "Notes and notebooks of drafts, dreams, and other observations".

Washington as a Surveyor

Lord, I discovered when I discovered love
That day a continent within the mind,
Unstable on the sea, boundaries unlined
Which now I slowly take the measure of.
The coast's determined, the mountains do not move;
Natural harbors and clear springs I find,
Shade trees and fruit trees, everything of its kind--
Even for an empire more resources than enough.
My favorite flowers, besides, some of each,
Yes, and wild animals who stand and stare;
Rivers that run beyond my present reach
The other way, and clouds that glitter in the air.
Love's flag quickly I planted on the beach
While I explored, but the one I love is not there.


Stream-of-consciousness comments:

Ok, so it's obviously by Bishop - the frank repetition of "discovered", the concern with geography and love, the use of form, the interest in history a la "Trollope's Journal", maybe some Herbert influence.

So it's a Petrarchan sonnet, well and good for a poem about love. If there's a turn though I don't get it, which is kind of a big minus - it makes the choice a bit arbitrary and artificial. On the other hand the form forces some interesting lines so fine.

This would be George Washington, who worked as a surveyor from his mid teens. Some of that work was in wilderness and counts as exploring. So the measured tone is apropos, the devotional opening too, and the interest in empire - but I'm not sure knowing the speaker adds that much. Maybe there's some illuminating historical detail about Washington's life I'm missing.

Am I missing echoes of Milton or Herbert? E.g., "everything of its kind" sounds like an allusion, and the sense of an innocent land with the unfrightened animals.

Nice going from "Unstable on the sea" to "favorite flowers" as the exploration is described. "The other way" is a strong cold note prefiguring the ending. "Besides", "Yes" seem like filler to satisfy the meter. The lines are in large part longer than ten syllables, which slows things down a tad. "That day" gets some odd emphasis. Why "quickly I planted"? This seems to make "Love's flag" a spondee and I guess avoids the plain iambs of "Love's flag I quickly planted on the beach". Regardless, it contrasts nicely with "slowly" earlier. I like "more resources than enough" - it gives the sense that one might expect "enough" but one's getting more than merited.

It's a lonely poem - a full continent to be explored in the name of love, and nobody's there to be found. The rivers run away out of reach for now, and after that the clouds glitter.

Back to "Lord" - is this Bishop speaking to God? "Why have I been given this rich, beautiful continent but no helpmeet?" Does the poem refer to a moment ("that day") of personal realization?

Ok, so some nice writing, strong beginning and end, no full control of the material or theme, some laxity in the middle, a better poem for the author's other poems - if I'd written this, I'd tell myself something "You rock, but this didn't quite gel, I couldn't stuff everything I wanted into the form or make it fully resonant." A good early Elizabeth Bishop poem, but not up to her extreme standards, hence its absence from The Complete Poems - still much more pleasurable than most poems in the New Yorker.

Update: via the comments, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box : Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, coming out in March 2006.

Elizabeth Bishop, snark, and interplanetary travel

Bishop's mature work opens with "Arrival at Santos" from Questions of Travel. The poem begins:

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

Note the rhymes, overly simple or feminine (a typical feature of humorous verse in English) - scenery/greenery is even a dactylic rhyme, if that's the seldom-used phrase. Rhymes which are less noticeable because of the relaxed tone, the enjambed syntax, and the longish adjectivey lines. Rereading the poem the other day I thought, "Is she being snarky?" Certainly "wry" is a good word here, but I think there's a degree of involvement by the poet, a quality of imaginative participation in the scene, that is like what you'll find in a good Television Without Pity review of a Buffy episode. But "snark" won't do. Really one should say that "wry" or any other word in the dictionary won't do because "Elizabeth Bishop poem" is exact. This is a confessional poem in the sense that it's imbued with the essence of the poet's personality and cast of mind - you read it and, while not learning any details of the poet's life, you suddenly know her. (I should note that the wonderful ending of the poem recalls the beginning in its use of a dactylic rhyme and comments on the previous sentence.)

Another thing that jumped out at me in the above lines was the "eighteen days". A friend recently drove for fourteen hours. That's about how long a journey takes now - maybe a few days at most to get somewhere exotically inaccessible. I doubt anyone will have a real sense of what the quoted line means again until people travel to Mars.

Childish graffiti on an Elizabeth Bishop poem

Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa."
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks,
and I say "Haaa, haaa.")


Not really up-to-snuff unsullied original here.

Violet was flayed on the lawn

The subject of the previous post is still a mote in my eye. Reading Elizabeth Bishop's "A Cold Spring", the second line "the violet was flawed on the lawn" looks like the above. And when she writes "the dogwood infiltrated the wood/each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt" ...

Bad poem material

Domestic cats suffer from hyperthyroidism. Since the thyroid concentrates iodine, a standard treatment for serious cases is a single dose of radioactive iodine. (Cats have duplicate thyroid glands, one of which is turned off, so the diseased functional gland gets zapped and the good gland gets turned on.) Because of (probably paranoid) health concerns, the treated cat is isolated for five or so days until the hot iodine decays; in fact, it's kept in a lead-lined box. If you want to visit your cat during that time, you have to do so through a glass wall.

A friend, hearing the above, turned to me and said, "Sorry to say this, but that sounds like the subject of a bad poem."

There's a good poem by Elizabeth Bishop called "Large Bad Picture", but admittedly for the most part bad subject matter makes for bad poetry. Or is that a tautology?


Here's some sure-fire bad poem material: a bird that sings with its wings. Be sure to check out the videos on the left. (In further fascinating bird sound news involving the same ornithologist, the ivory-billed woodpecker observation I noted here has been [following some controversy] accepted after skeptics heard recorded calls and rapping.)