Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop!

Today, February 8, 2011, is Elizabeth Bishop's 100th birthday.

I've written before about my love and admiration of Elizabeth Bishop. (Yes, it is true that I once had a crush on her too.) I wrote about her in an essay here and in blog posts here and here.

I'm not sure what the reticent Miss Bishop would have thought of it, but I'm delighted that her birthday is being celebrated with fanfare. In Nova Scotia, her childhood home, there's even a year's worth of centenary events: EB100, the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary. It's been fun to poke around online and find friends and strangers alike celebrating her. You can see Lisa Peet's take at Like Fire (she has good taste in Elizabeth Bishop photos) along with Lloyd Schwartz's up at The Readers Almanac. Dana Gioia, a former student of Bishop's, wrote a long piece in the Wall Street Journal about the two new volumes of her poetry and prose just published by the Library of America in honor of her 100th birthday.

I couldn't decide which poem to post today. I thought about her gorgeous villanelle, "One Art," which I recently saw referred to as the best poem of the 20th century. I thought about her "Sestina," which inspired me to write the very few poems (sestinas, of course) that I've written in my adult life. I thought about "Insomnia," one of the few poems I know by heart (and one hated, apparently, by Marianne Moore who called it a "cheap love poem.") I thought about "Visit to St. Elizabeths", about Ezra Pound, with its rhymes and expanding form.

In the end, I decided on an old favorite, "Arrival at Santos," the first poem in Bishop's book Questions of Travel. I love her descriptions, I love Miss Breen, and I love the fact that she moved an "s" to the beginning of the next stanza to make the rhyme work. Enjoy!

Arrival At Santos

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?

Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,

descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans.
Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's

skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall

s, New York. There. We are settled.
The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,

but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps--
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter

do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.

January, 1952

Poem of the Day

So, it's the next to last day of the blogathon, and the Sunday of a holiday weekend to boot, all of which seems to mean--I don't have much (anything?) to say. More organized bloggers than myself will have pre-written posts for these last few days, so as not to be in this predicament, but I didn't manage to do that.

So, today's post will have to be a poem, and one not written by me. Instead, I return to my beloved Elizabeth Bishop. This is from the earlier version of her Complete Poems, the one published in 1969. (A second edition of the Complete Poems came out after her death in 1979.) Apologies to any Bishop purists--the blog software isn't letting me space it exactly as she had towards the end.

And because this is one of my favorite pictures of EB, I'm going to use it again:


Under the Window: Ouro Preto

For Lilli Correia de Araujo

The conversations are simple: about food,
or, "When my mother combs my hair it hurts."
"Women." "Women!" Women in red dresses

and plastic sandals, carrying their almost
invisible babies--muffled to the eyes
in all the heat--unwrap them, lower them,

and give them drinks of water lovingly
from dirty hands, here where there used to be
a fountain, here where all the world still stops.

The water used to run out of the mouths
of three green soapstone faces. (One face laughed
and one face cried; the middle one just looked.

Patched up with plaster, they're in the museum.)
It runs now from a single iron pipe,
a strong and ropy stream. "Cold." "Cold as ice,"

all have agreed for several centuries.
Donkeys agree, and dogs, and the neat little
bottle-green swallows dare to dip and taste.

Here comes that old man with the stick and sack,
meandering again. He stops and fumbles.
He finally gets out his enamelled mug.

Here comes some laundry tied up in a sheet,
all on its own, three feet above the ground.
Oh, no--a small black boy is underneath.

Six donkeys come behind their "godmother"
--the one who wears a fringe of orange wool
with wooly balls over her eyes, and bells.

They veer toward the water as a matter
of course, until the drover's mare trots up,
her whiplash-blinded eye on the off side.

A big new truck, Mercedes-Benz, arrives
to overawe them all. The body's painted
with throbbing rosebuds and the bumper says

HERE AM I FOR WHOM YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING.
The driver and assistant driver wash
their faces, necks, and chests. They wash their feet,

their shoes, and put them back together again.
Meanwhile, another, older truck grinds up
in a blue cloud of burning oil. It has

a syphilitic nose. Nevertheless,
its gallant driver tells the passersby
NOT MUCH MONEY BUT IT IS AMUSING.

"She's been in labor now two days." "Transistors
cost much too much." "For lunch we took advantage
of the poor duck the dog decapitated."

The seven ages of man are talkative
and soiled and thirsty.
Oil has seeped into
the margins of the ditch of standing water

and flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like bits of mirror--no, more blue than that:
like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

Sentence of the Day

It's been another long day. The rhubarb roundup will have to wait.

But what I'll give you as a sentence. And an introduction to the sentence.

In my senior year of college, I discovered Elizabeth Bishop. And though I didn't read much poetry in general, I developed a crush on Elizabeth Bishop almost immediately upon reading her sestina called "Sestina" (She has a second published sestina called "A Miracle for Breakfast" but I don't like that one quite as much.) I wrote about my infatuation with Bishop in a short essay in the Christian Science Monitor a couple of years ago.

I read her Collected Prose the summer after I graduated, and I read the longest essay in the book--called "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"--while visiting my friend Mo's fiance's parents' summer house, a camp, they called it, on top of a mountain and next to a lake in the Connecticut Berkshires. I read the essay lying in a chaise longue beside the lake, and later that day, or the next morning, Mo and I swam across the lake and back. I was almost completely content.

And even though it's been almost 21 years since I first read the essay, and I've forgotten many of the details, there's one sentence I still remember with clarity. It's in a paragraph a few pages from the end, about Marianne Moore's "originality and freshness" of diction and her "polysyllabic virtuosity." And here's what I've remembered over all these years (with the sentence preceding it, so it makes sense).

"A friend has told me of attending a party for writers and artists at which she introduced a painter to Marianne by saying, 'Miss Moore has the most interesting vocabulary of anyone I know.' Marianne showed signs of pleasure at this, and within a minute, offhandedly but accurately used in a sentence a word I no longer remember that means an addiction, in animals, to licking the luminous numbers off the dials of clocks and watches."

After all of these years, I am still amazed that such a word exists. I'm not sure I even need to know what it is. It's enough that Marianne Moore knew what it was and that Elizabeth Bishop thought to tell us about it.