In the fall of 1971, I got up the courage to apply to an advanced writing course taught by Elizabeth Bishop. I was nineteen, I dabbled at poetry, and I had no business applying to a course for polished, published poets. On the strength of a handful of verses, I was accepted. I did not know much about Bishop beyond my thin paperback copy of Questions of Travel. It was flattering to be accepted; I was blind to her true greatness, her seminal role in poetry.
he was diminutive but commanding. She was precise in her comments, more observer than critic. And she took each poem on its own merits, however silly or overwrought, however premature or stillborn. She believed in scansion and rhyme. They were tools to unlock creativity, foundations that would serve us well, even in an era attuned to free verse.
Fifty years on, I look at Bishop’s writing with wonder. The underlying bones of rhythm even in her free verse, her freedom even in rigid formats. If you’ve ever studied her poem ‘Sestina’, you can hear the rocking, measured pace in every stanza, the care in selecting every word:
‘September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.’
She believed in memorization and reading as much as possible. Each week, we’d read our drafts to the class and the class would discuss. Usually, Elizabeth would respond at the end, often linking the writing to that of poets of note, which left us scrambling to find the works of potential influences or fellow travelers. Once in a while, she’d brim with enthusiasm and go on at length about whatever we had done to spark a bit of ecstasy.
She had a small apartment on Mt. Auburn Street provided by Harvard University (by this time her home was Brazil, and she was in Cambridge Massachusetts as a distinguished visiting professor). The apartment was sparsely furnished, with a table tennis setup where a dining table should have been. And she’d take on all comers; it didn’t take a cocktail to get her in the spirit of humbling yet another younger and more spry person. She relished a good joke, particularly if it was rude, and could talk about crime, gossip, and sports with real knowledge and enthusiasm. Elizabeth was shy by nature, but the class was a special entity, a loyal band of followers that she’d let into her world.
If you read her work (it has grown in renown, having become a center-point for women’s writing in the 20th century, an extension of her beloved Marianne Moore’s sensibility into a more modern era, a link to the likes of Louise Gluck, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among others), you know that sharp observation was her stock-in-trade. Like Moore, she was not given to emotional display; the personal insights came by allusion, sometimes by misdirection. She gave in to emotion rarely in the 100 poems that make up her life’s work; two of my favorites, Breakfast Song and Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore offer a bit more than a glimpse. She’d rarely talk about herself, though she’d talk a lot about her writing, her struggles, her literary disappointments. She was something of a polar opposite to her great friend Robert Lowell, whose confessional approach dominated American poetry in the years after WWII.
From her poetry – and her affection for the class — we knew the depth of her feelings. In early January 1972, John Berryman, another poet she knew well, took his own life by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge into the freezing waters of the Mississippi River in his hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Several days later, Elizabeth was taken to the hospital, having suffered a near-fatal asthma attack. Our first class of the new semester was cancelled, and we were asked not to visit her in hospital. Later that week we were contacted; the class would be held at its regular time in a meeting space near Elizabeth’s hospital room. And although she was short of breath, she apologised for missing the previous class, that she had let us down and promised that it would not happen again. And then it was back to the work at hand – the poetry, and the poet, who had come to mean so much to all of us.
Irish Independent
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