There seems to be nothing that Schuyler cannot or will not say, but he is not a provocateur like O’Hara. Most characteristically, he is a sweet, decorous, and witty writer—but he is just as capable of being the opposite. Whichever, he seems not to have to operate under any imperative—no “I must make this charming/characteristic/peculiar/off the wall.” He often writes, as I noted of “Arches,” under very low pressure, with minimal invention and exuberance—which is one of the things that make him hard to quote from. There are wonderful jokes and moments of outrage, but in a sense they are untypical, and I certainly wouldn’t want to pretend he’s all like that. He has that extremely rare thing, the ability to write interesting description. The “Andrew Lord Poems” is a sequence in Last Poems about pottery, not a subject to set the pulses racing, but the reader doesn’t take against it here. Nor, conversely, is a subject used to sell a poem: “Buried at Springs” is Schuyler’s elegy to O’Hara, but one almost wouldn’t know it. Even irrelation, in Schuyler’s hands, becomes a form of relation, just as informality is a version of formality, and inaccuracy of accuracy:
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much (“Buried at Springs”)
Look, Mitterrand baby, your telegram
of condolence to Yves
Montand tells it like it is
but just once can’t some high
placed Frenchman forget about the
gloire de France while the world
stands still a moment and all
voices rise in mourning
a star of stars:
Simone Signoret was and is
immortal
(thanks to seeming permanence
yes the silver screen? l’écran?)
Simone Signoret, A.K.A.
Mme Yves Montand, is dead (“Simone Signoret”)
All the leaves
are down except
the few that aren’t. (“Verge”)
These carelessly chosen quotations—and they could be varied by hundreds, thousands of others—all have in common the idea of impermanence (“immortal” gets a line to itself). Schuyler, it seems to me, responds to the challenge of impermanence, accommodates impermanence, sings impermanence more than any other poet, and that’s why he’s a classic. In the long tangent-driven poem-fleuve “Hymn to Life,” Schuyler finds himself suddenly remembering Washington, where he spent part of his boyhood: “Odd jobs, that stretch ahead, wide and mindless as / Pennsylvania Avenue or the bridge to Arlington, crossed and recrossed / And there the Lincoln Memorial crumbles. It looks so solid: it won’t / Last. The impermanence of permanence, is that all there is?” There is a sort of drollery here, beginning with “crumbles.” Schuyler has lost the thread of his thought, the boring vistas of odd jobs, and has allowed himself to take up—perhaps through aesthetic animus—almost a contrary position. Much dearer to his heart always is the opposite: the permanence of impermanence.
Hence, I think, the importance of tone in Schuyler (often wit), and of surface detail (prettiness). Both are secondary qualities, emanations like Yeats’s “wine-breath” in “All Souls’ Night,” and both, in a sort of mathematical way—not change, but change in the rate of change—exhibit a kind of constancy in inconstancy, like the revolutionary “gray in which some smoke stands.” Ephemeral things are sung in the most ephemeral way—and the effect is permanence (though not the dreary permanence of the Lincoln Memorial). And here too is Schuyler’s literariness, aere perennius. Poem after poem—utterly variable, unpredictable, scatty, meandering, often on next to nothing, or on the most inconsequential things—is, in fact, a monument: “Milk,” “Now and Then,” “A blue towel,” “Korean Mums.” Instability of language, of level, of approach, of attention (“Dining Out with Doug and Frank” begins, “Not quite yet”; its second section begins, “Now it’s tomorrow / as usual”) seems to be the response, instead, of a vast style. There is no gilding or freeze-drying, no e-numbers, the perishability is in the language: you wouldn’t say—I wouldn’t say—Schuyler is a proponent of “the best words in the best order.” And this freedom of address is actually—as I don’t think it is in Ashbery and not often in O’Hara, apart from “The Day Lady Died”—responsibility.
Where this shows most, and most surprisingly, is in the endings of the poems. Again, this is hard to show by quoting, but time and again a poem that looks to be this, then that, then the other thing, will end—will have a proper ending. A knockout, a result, a return to the beginning, a few sixteenths of an inch along a lightmeter, a color chart, a diary or a biography. The effect is terribly moving. It unexpectedly restores the personal, the artistic, the controlling hand. It’s at times as though there were one sideways genius ramifying, digressing, surprising, and then another intervened, with an implacable insistence on pushing the whole thing forward. While looking like our jumble and our aporia, a Schuyler poem is always an advance. The short poem “Closed Gentian Distances” begins—in the way dozens of Schuyler poems seem to do—“A nothing day” and ends with two lines that Heraclitus or Heaney (the pun on “stream”) would have been proud of (as well as a different version of simplex munditiis: “crisp in elegance”): “Little fish stream / by, a river in water.” So much, then, for nothing. “The Night” begins “The night is filled with indecisions / To take a downer or an upper” and ends “It’s true / We do we / Love each / Other so.” The first stanza of “October” goes: “Books litter the bed, / leaves the lawn. It / lightly rains. Fall has / come: unpatterned, in / the shedding leaves,” and the last sentence is: “The books / of fall litter the bed,” an extraordinarily slight, deft, and lovable piece of patterning. An alternative type of ending, just as conclusive and controlled, occurs when Schuyler reaches a point so bizarre, often, or so delicately foolish, that it makes further writing impossible. It sounds strange, but I can think of no better way of describing the ending of, say, the poem “The Walk”: “I love / their white / scuts when they / bound away, / deer at horseplay.” Or “Today”: “Everything chuckles and creaks / sighs in satisfaction / reddens and ripens in tough gusts of coolness / and the sun smites.” After “smites”—rien ne va plus. Les jeux sont faits.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
As so often, it is John Ashbery who takes the cake—the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top—for his description of Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979): she is “the poets’ poets’ poet.” It sounds well-farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it. As I begin, therefore, I feel stirrings of a wholly impersonal desire to … maybe pan her? No, not really, but where else have the culture vultures not been in their charabancs, with their guides and follow-me signs?
Marianne and Mrs. Moore finished her in Brooklyn (decorum studies?) after she left Vassar. James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, publisher and friend of Ezra Pound, was so desperate to publish her that even after he accepted he wasn’t going to be allowed to, he still hoped at least to be permitted to announce that he was, in a residual way—a sort of publisher blanc. The alpha males—and the alpha-beta males, and the beta-alpha males—of her generation, Lowell and Jarrell and Berryman, vied with each other to slip her the bays, though this could take strange and even injurious forms: in a Dream Song that cuts a lusty swathe through the ranks of American poetesses, there is a tacky reference to “Miss Bishop’s too noble-O,” while Lowell wrote lurid, clodhopping monologues “for” her (“I would drift and hear / My genius begging for its cap and bells / And tears bedewed my flat, untasted beer”—reminding one of Jarrell’s musing stricture, “but who ever saw a girl like Robert Lowell”), and poemized perfectly good short stories of hers; when he says, “‘The Scream’ [sic] owes everything to Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful, calm, story, ‘In
the Village,’” reader, he means it. Her standing is the more remarkable in that she didn’t demand it and had no way of compelling it; no power was vested in her, she gave readings rarely, unwillingly, and not well, didn’t (at least until her last decade) teach, didn’t review, hardly blurbed, and her rate of production was anything but intimidating. She did have a “first read” contract with The New Yorker (from 1946), but even that—at that time—would have seemed more like an eccentrically coined practical arrangement by a long-term absentee than something to be envied by others, or parlayed into some advantage by herself. In the heyday of “lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals” (Frank O’Hara), The New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylization as a “poet by default”: “I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.” In a generation at worst of noisemakers and grimly professional professionals, Bishop stood out like a whole thumb or a thumbs up for her unassumingness and positiveness and the reticence of her personal style.
She wasn’t a player—heck, she wasn’t even American, but three parts Canadian. She had spells in New York and Washington, but she didn’t (as she might have said) “get on” in those places and preferred the less assertive, more hokily unregarded corners of Maine and Key West, where the United States seems, a little improbably, to fade and concede some of its identity to its neighbors; before, in 1951, taking herself off the power map altogether by accidentally immigrating to Brazil for fifteen years. Where once she had traded on absence and alienation—“the sea, desperate, / will proffer wave after wave” or “And I shall sell you sell you / sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me”—now she offered her presence—only it was her presence somewhere else: “We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior” she importantly/briskly/newsily ends “Arrival at Santos.” She hardly needed Brazil in order to be distant, but it did provide her with the most definitively wonderful alibi (she is not above citing “Brazil, ‘where the nuts come from’” in the draft of a poem). The critic David Kalstone notes, wisely: “It is rare that the imaginative possibilities of a life find so real a base.” Brazil was seriocomic, excessive, tropical, garish, serendipitous, violent, unpredictable, harmonious, and inconsequential. It was a new landscape and a different society from that in the college-bound poem-vitrines of her peers; which of them, in the 1950s, wrote about poverty, or race? Brazilians assumed she was there in disgrace, or maybe on the run. Bishop said, “They think if I was any good I’d be at home.” Americans—except the few who knew—assumed much the same.
A cynical analysis of this state of affairs would suggest it was because she was so unthreatening that she was chosen for her role, and while there is probably some truth to this, there isn’t much, and it was mainly her contemporaries’ straightforward and never-fathomed fascination with her difference that set her up and kept her there. In the 1960s and ’70s, younger American poets—James Merrill, Frank Bidart—sat at her feet; later, others, younger still, filled her classes when she taught, protestingly, at Harvard and MIT. Nor is hers at all a transatlantic reputation: she is ours as much as theirs, or should I say, theirs as much as ours. I can think of probably dozens of British and Irish poets, men and women, younger and older, who have written about her, thought about her, commended her, invoked her example, swear by her. Nowhere else such unanimity.
When I started reading her, the book was still the Complete Poems of 1970, white and yellow and blue, like a Ukrainian flag and tonic. A subsequent printing of this contained her four—no more—books: North & South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955), Questions of Travel (1965), and Geography III (1976). Each book was already significantly underweight, by the standards of Larkin, let alone America. The first two were quickly republished as one, which made sense, and rang up the Pulitzer Prize in 1956; the third was bulked up by the inclusion of her story “In the Village,” rather as Lowell’s Life Studies had been by his prose memoir “91 Revere Street”; the fourth was flyaway flimsy, just ten poems in large type, none of them long, and one a translation from the unctuous Octavio Paz. We readers of the Complete Poems looked at each other sagaciously, with a sort of masonic wink, knowing that “complete poems” really meant “completed poems,” and rolled our eyes heavenward and thought of all the ones that weren’t; that waited, according to report, for years, like paintings, with primed spaces in their midst, for the right word to come along; the unseen, the unknown, the unpublished, the unwritten Bishop being always if not sweeter then perhaps rougher or wilder or more yielding or revealing; the typical Bishop devotee is always itching to tear the poems away from her half-done, to free them from her inner censor or inner finisher or varnisher. This is why the otherwise contentious inclusion, in Poems, of a selection of twenty-seven “unpublished manuscript poems” is not only salutary but also somehow inevitable; it is the way her reputation is tending. It’s not that “My love, my saving grace, / your eyes are awfully blue / early and instant blue” (“Breakfast Song”) is particularly deep or wonderful poetry—though it’s not too shabby, in an unexpectedly kooky James Schuylerish “loving you” way (and surely the great bard of breakfast would have appreciated the way “instant” picks up the “coffee-flavored mouth” that is kissed at the beginning)—it’s that we need to know she wrote it. It doesn’t do her down either. Not feet of clay, just plain feet. For too long, Bishop came across as a sort of immaculate mermaid.
In 1984 there came The Collected Prose and The Complete Poems (now dated 1927–1979), with added juvenilia, more translations (more Paz), and a klein aber fein section of “new and uncollected poems”—all of four pieces, the récolte of 1978 and 1979. Since then, the posthumous publishing of Bishop has gone steroid, volumewise, but still more pagewise: a book of her watercolors, a book of uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments called Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, and then the letters, big books of letters, a selected letters, her correspondence with Lowell, her correspondence with her editors at The New Yorker, her correspondence with Marianne Moore (forthcoming), a Library of America single-volume edition of poems, stories, drafts, reviews, and fifty-three letters, again—it’s the inescapable come-on—“many published for the first time.” There is a sort of sibylline deal with Bishop, in reverse. She comes to us originally with very little, eighty or a hundred poems, and we offer her the farm; then she comes again, with a little more, and then a little more, but we have already given her everything. She has always had everything we have to give. And we stand there with our pockets turned inside out and our shoulders at half-mast, and she keeps giving more.
The poems are one-offs and all sorts. They seem to have remarkably little in the way of preset or dependable qualities to fall back on—no constancy in the way of grammar or line length or rhythm or gesture or fable or machinery. They have tics aplenty—waywardnesses, one might call them, and Bishop liked to come across as wayward—but always different ones. They repeat words, they don’t repeat words; they jump, they don’t jump; they widen out, they don’t widen out; there are runs of questions, there are no runs of questions; there is a section in italics, there is no section in italics. It’s as though each poem has to be designed separately, from scratch; there is no blueprint, no assembly line. It’s hard to argue that rhyme is always important to Bishop, or a lavish way with words, or an attractive quibblingness of tone, because straightaway one can turn up examples to the contrary and find her unrhymed, parsimonious, decisive, and just as good. She was raised on psalms, studied music, was fond of singing, translated sambas, wrote Dylanesque ballads about innocent miscreants (“The Burglar of Babylon” reads to me like something that might have appeared on Blood on the Tracks) and blues (“Don’t you call me that word, honey, / don’t you call me that word. / You know it ain’t very kind & it’s also undeserved”), and yet the poems of hers that I go back to are composed in a straggling, spifflicated, slightly backward, Victorian-hued, indifferently musi
cal talk. Others again are stiff, almost puritanically joyless, in their acceptance of menial descriptive duties. The result is that line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold, or, better, as mistakable as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine: With Bishop you get an unpredictable kickshaw or notion in a plastic ball for your money—sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, “an acre of cold white spray […] Dancing happily by itself.” Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell, it has something parodic and clanking about it, the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets; lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it is oddly inconsequential, doesn’t weaken the whole, isn’t demoralizing, somehow doesn’t affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.
It is strange, leafing through these Poems, that while most of the pages seem to come up in color as expected, are vibrant, gaudy, imperishably familiar, full of lush deep-pile detail, others look utterly unfamiliar (really as though I had never seen them before)—“From the Country to the City,” “Little Exercise,” “Anaphora,” “Letter to N.Y.,” “Sunday 4 A.M.,” “Night City.” A book of Bishop’s is a funfair, each ride or booth is its own idiom, and still there are corners backstage where no one looks and there isn’t anything much going on. She is one of those poets where you endlessly revisit the individual poem, where you gorge and glut yourself on a few individual poems—in my case, “Large Bad Picture,” “Florida,” “Roosters,” “Seascape,” “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “The Bight,” “Cape Breton,” “Filling Station,” “Sandpiper,” “Crusoe in England,” “Poem,” “The End of March,” “Santarem,” “North Haven,” and as many more—without getting any closer to an encapsulation of the poet, or perhaps—because of the way the poems abide and deflect our questioning—without even having to reach for the poet at all.
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