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Nov. 7th, 2011 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception70. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
Finally finished reading another book, except not really, and one I'd read most or all of before. It's short and clearly the editor had to be exhaustive to fill even this many pages - every newspaper write-up that involved her answering questions made it in. She gave only three or four substantive interviews, all here, and all in her last decade. The Paris Review one's probably the best, but Dana Gioia's reminiscences of taking her class at Harvard (with only four other students!) is included too, and gives you even more of a sense of her, and especially her relation to Stevens, dozens of whose poems Gioia says she'd recite from memory.
But the newspaper pieces are pretty amusing, especially the ladies' magazine-style first piece, from c. 1950, and a '60s one by a young Tom Robbins where we get a lot of Robbins and pretty much just a cameo from his ostensible subject. The articles by Brazilians are adorably respectful and ornate. Bishop was right, it's in the magazines that it's clearest we're historical.
She offers the same opinions and anecdotes over and over, as one does for these things, including touting the same poets: Whitman as the best American though temperamentally foreign to her, Edward Lear, her friend Lowell - though at one point confesses she hates confessional poetry. She identifies as the major influences on her Stevens, her mentor Moore (though she denies this was deep), and Herbert and Hopkins, the latter two for style rather than content, famous Unbeliever that she was. Though she might not have been when she discovered them in early adolescence. I'm still at sea with Moore and with few exceptions find Hopkins useless and annoying, but I think I begin to see the Herbert. Her simplicity and directness of tone are pretty astonishing - how hard that is - and I admit he's near peerless at conveying that in verse. She mentions passing through a Shelley phase, Browning phase, and brief Swinburne one in her romantic teens. Dickinson she mentions with ambivalence, perhaps because of being introduced to her in the sentimentalized and basically censored early editions, Frost not at all.
Finally finished reading another book, except not really, and one I'd read most or all of before. It's short and clearly the editor had to be exhaustive to fill even this many pages - every newspaper write-up that involved her answering questions made it in. She gave only three or four substantive interviews, all here, and all in her last decade. The Paris Review one's probably the best, but Dana Gioia's reminiscences of taking her class at Harvard (with only four other students!) is included too, and gives you even more of a sense of her, and especially her relation to Stevens, dozens of whose poems Gioia says she'd recite from memory.
But the newspaper pieces are pretty amusing, especially the ladies' magazine-style first piece, from c. 1950, and a '60s one by a young Tom Robbins where we get a lot of Robbins and pretty much just a cameo from his ostensible subject. The articles by Brazilians are adorably respectful and ornate. Bishop was right, it's in the magazines that it's clearest we're historical.
She offers the same opinions and anecdotes over and over, as one does for these things, including touting the same poets: Whitman as the best American though temperamentally foreign to her, Edward Lear, her friend Lowell - though at one point confesses she hates confessional poetry. She identifies as the major influences on her Stevens, her mentor Moore (though she denies this was deep), and Herbert and Hopkins, the latter two for style rather than content, famous Unbeliever that she was. Though she might not have been when she discovered them in early adolescence. I'm still at sea with Moore and with few exceptions find Hopkins useless and annoying, but I think I begin to see the Herbert. Her simplicity and directness of tone are pretty astonishing - how hard that is - and I admit he's near peerless at conveying that in verse. She mentions passing through a Shelley phase, Browning phase, and brief Swinburne one in her romantic teens. Dickinson she mentions with ambivalence, perhaps because of being introduced to her in the sentimentalized and basically censored early editions, Frost not at all.
