proximoception

Much further into Harmonium. I love this book. It is the best book in the world some days.

"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" explains which and why. I felt a similar liberation when I talked myself into reading Kafka whenever that was - a second poet was added, so poetry was. Even Bishop has limits, can become (at times) another world of repeated days. Probably Harmonium could, but you know what?

It is pitched exactly and entirely at freeing those too closely pent in their being, those who have forgotten where voice can go. It's almost like it was written by someone following a non- ridiculous version of Poe's "Composition" essay, one working backwards from what's amazing in poetry to how that might be newly written down, rather than whatever bullshit's supposed to get us to "The Raven." Probably the way Harmonium would flag reread frequently, though, would be that the subject matter of all the examples in this model of how to make poetry is how-to-make-poetry. At times it's taken to such an extreme that it feels more like an illustrated kit for making your own how-to-make-poetry KIT. So don't drink more than four Harmonia per week, kids.

(Not that the fact that you can totally go as far with art-about-art artistically as you can with any other sort is not itself remarkably suggestive, and if not yet a clear part of the message here certainly becomes so later in Stevens. Well, clear as in camouflaged in standard Stevens "bric-a-brac" rather than forming a cloudier part of the lens through which he asks us to look, at first seemingly just to see how much bric-a-brac there can be.)

But if you haven't been reading, or haven't been reading right, as for whatever reason seems to have been true of me at most points in my life, Harmonium is perfect. It gives the whole, basic case, and nothing but the case, and in the most efficiently self-proving ways. And atomized! I love how atomized it is. Because that's exactly what you need when you've gone idiot. And memorable lines, and instant enigmas that are just teasing enough to keep you working (the answer is usually less than eight pages away, part of some similar neighboring molecule, when logic or memory happen to fail at the nonce). I'm sure many find it difficult, even nonsensical, but it is the easiest, clearest way into what isn't at all clear or easy (but's nonetheless worth it) I know of.

And so full of Shelley! Keats is big in a couple of the more famous bits, like Monocle and Morning, and Whitman's a sort of permeating absence (the person who wrote the even better, but less easified and atomized, Harmonium - the one for when your head's been unscrewed to the seeking point, for day five of the week and thereafter), but the Shelley is strong with this one. And made to eat Emerson's Nature whole, here:

To the One of Fictive Music

Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
And queen, and of diviner love the day
And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread
Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown
Its venom of renown, and on your head
No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea,
Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum, none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.

For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all the vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
For this, musician, in your girdle fixed
Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:
The imagination that we spurned and crave.

Of "13 Blackbirds" I best loved the last one and the icicles one, this time 'round. Probably they're always my favorites (--Which are yours?). Blackbirds and Fictive Music are not the most obvious influences on young Bishop, but I think they're damn close to decisive ones, given what I'm arguing. Luckily I don't need to prove that claim to put them to some kind of work.

Past the obvious Keats bird, a touch of Lycidas & co. in the form and flora and presumably some bits of Lowell himself, I'm wondering how much Diffugere Nives lies behind North Haven. Maybe even Housman's version, since she was a fan of his.

Horace doesn't mediate the recognition of loss through animals at all, nor does he elsewhere that I recall (does any ancient?), so that's all new. But death as stasis, life as change - however cyclical - that's there. The friend who's stuck. The Grecian underworld is barely a metaphor, and not just in Horace. It's a metaphor that leads you at once back to the literal you'd meant to dodge, like Yosemite Sam with his guns at either exit.

Bishop replaces Horace's Empedocles with Darwin, which both sets up a microcosm/macro parallel between Lowell's obsessive revisions and evolution and suggests the small but sufficient problem with both: the precious singularities crowded out, the best ideas shot past. I've come to see her as far more aggressive than I'd have imagined, so there's room for wholly characteristic rivalry and breeder-critique here: kids and blurry texts won't get you clear. Texts that have ridden a single melting (of however many years) won't either but the farthest throw still wins - North Haven will outlast anything of his, I assume she rightly assumed.

Holding, chaining and staying are prominent in DN, using Housman as stand-in for a crib (his is one of the few poems I've somehow kept memorized). But there isn't just night holding Hippolytus who must stay, or Theseus leaving Pirithous in those untakeable U breakable chains. There's also that maybe most amazing part - though Housman's line 4 is my favorite sonically:

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven will add
The morrow to the day what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

To revise is to replace, Bishop argues, pace Keats. We will be changed right out by life, but that life that we are is also change (to revise what is inevitably revision is to miss this). I think I long missed what the Feast lines were saying, for some reason reading them as "rejoice! for the reason that what you have here is only for you, you're off the hook even trying to transmit it." But though there's a celebratory aspect to feasting it more directly means "feed with the most pleasing foods." It isn't good that this can't be shared, but since it can't be shared go nuts, go apeshit. It's not about pride that you've had what you did, but the Paterian-Horatian imperative to find whatever's here. Hence the flowers - there's just so much, the point of a bouquet.

No holding, at least once dead. No passing on. No need to tinker with the will. The uncharacteristic traditionality of the poem is part of this - revise the tradition, not yourself. Fill the role, since it's not you. What's you how could you even hope to say? It changes, and that's the part you can't simulate. The poem is not the person.

Though of course it is. "It must change" is here: Skunk Hour doesn't. "Dear friend, you did not change" with all your alterations is on some level the lament. She shows him how a touch too late.

Her titles always signify - she'd already claimed North for mind. The Haven for the mind is the notion of permanence, of an ordering principle worth any number of sacrifices to activate. A rock that stays. But we're not that kind of island. We're the condiment, the moss. The "wait wait wait" of nature, its attempt.

So Ashbery claims "Soonest Mended," one of the handful of poems even those of us generally unthrilled by Ashbery are thrilled by, grew out of a fan letter to Bishop in the late '40s and her postcard response. The letter was motivated by "2000 Illustrations," which in Ashbery's summary is describing an atlas.

So he de-Sunday Mornings it. He also, assuming the 2nd person addressed toward the end of SM (oy, same syllables and stresses as Stevens' also) is more or less Bishop's poem's speaker, takes 2000's message pretty straightforwardly. Vendler does this too, seeing it as an expression of religious nostalgia, but of course Ashbery may realize the speaker isn't Bishop and address him/her as an intimate friend anyway, since the poem meant so much to him in isolation. The layered critique of the religious impulse is more Bishop's point, and fact-facing art and an understanding of what we need from it her suggestion of a way forward. The anguish of the speaker isn't something she knows nothing about, but it isn't her own end point: it's a question she has never not had answers to.

Ashbery gets the poem well enough that his own answers aren't entirely incompatible, and on the other hand is enough of his own person that they don't directly reproduce hers (and takes his usual ambivalent swipes at the sublime). But evading the religious dimension may be what leads him to assume that 2000 is advocating attempts to return to an infantile sense of an ordered world, to see things like a child, as though the poem proved this mode is still available to us. Which I guess it does, and it's a common enough procedure of Bishop's to go back to sights and assumptions of childhood, but that's not the extent of what it's up to. His "so we were both right" tries to hoop together this supposedly advocated fact-ignoring child-vision with his sense that how we see and feel, our frame of reference, is in constant flux just as the world is (hence no highs, because no lows or middles - all tumbles and turns).

I don't at all mind his having read her this way. Her gullible, anguished avatars are one of the gifts she gives us (part of what Herbert gave her - and Spenser him, I wonder?), since they allow us to take the poem as a question, and our own (much Bishop-nudged) ensuing conclusions as at least partly our own. Which they inevitably are, but Ashbery's more so. Gilt-fingered Bishop's poem is about the innocence of desire (third-most present precursor here is The Emperor of Ice Cream), Ashbery's about the innocence of change. Freshness as an ultimate value isn't absent from hers, but I think it's mostly assimilated into desire, hence her metaphor of travel vs. Ashbery's of moored, apprehensive domesticity. He thinks of himself at home in space, though protean in time - in a sense the difference between At North Farm and The Prodigal is pretty much the same one as here. There, too, he cuts the head off a Bishop poem in order to get the body to slump in the direction he wants. I could doubtless have come up with a more sympathetic metaphor, but you get the gist. It and SM are both excellent poems, but their simplicities are less important and their complexities more private (though not more hidden) than Bishop's.

I'd say one price she tends to pay is rhetorical - both of his get to flow better because on some level he's saying exactly what he means. He's not concerned with there being more than one way to look at what's being described, despite his caring greatly about the FACT that there are - for him, the second way to look will be another poem, and a third will follow. Any dialogue with other points of view gets literalized - that "you." Whereas Bishop's always working through two or more ways of seeing, like Stevens overtly did, Frost covertly; "through," because one's going to win, or some offspring of those present at the start will. And we'll be on board. His vision is mostly one of evasion. Though I suppose you could say he's an active procrastinator - everything gets into his verse except what he's avoiding, which also gets in as parts of explanations of why he's avoiding it.

Damn. Nice catch by Bromwich:

In a brief note, Bishop traces the title to a newspaper misprint for "mammoth," but the reason for its appeal to her is plain when one remembers the man-moth of Shelley's Epipsychidion:

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the loadstar of my one desire,
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight
Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,

[leaves out the last line for some reason:]

As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.

Surely I noticed that at some point? But wouldn't I have remembered? Perception and memory, sieves both.

Owlet light...so twilight? If an owl's light is night, a baby owl's is baby night? Didn't remember and/or notice that either.

She spoke in deep past tense of her Shelley/socialist period, apparently mid to late teens as was customary at the time, so this may have been involuntary. Though she was just c. 24 when she wrote the poem, and a couple years later published two Kafkan prose fables that pretty frankly face near-complete poetic indebtedness, In Prison and The Sea and Its Shore. And she tends to give the other Romantics a shout out where it's relevant. But of course with them she didn't have a period.

Her lower keyed urbanity and Chekhovian mosaicizing make her work look much quieter than Shelley's, but she's basically about totalizing hopes and total disappointments just like he is. Shelley you don't transcend with age, you bury. And Bishop never actually repudiated him, unlike Eliot and some others have. He became part of her bedrock. As probably did socialism.

You can also allegorize the approach to the thing you can only conditionally think about. Bishop does this: a lot is translatable, but it fades into what isn't quite. I guess that's why she's so unprecedentedly satisfying--she makes a tangible, coherent object and shimmers every part and angle back toward something deeper. Like great wine in a lovely bottle, or your loved one in the body of your loved one, or...something. Viva Bishop! I think I have a more personal sort of love for her than for any of them but Shelley. She makes you feel you know her.