Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop.
St. Andrews, B.A
Despite winning a coveted Pulitzer Prize (Poems: North & South),
a National Book Award (Complete Poems), fellowships from Guggenheim and
Houghton Mifflin, and even the Neustadt International Prize for
Literature (1976; see WLT 51:1, pp. 5-52), Elizabeth Bishop remains a
strange bright object in the literary sky.
For one thing, she moved outside the usual artistic orbits, having no
set poetry circle. For another, she rotated only with discomfort through
the teaching firmaments of Harvard and New York University. (Where she
insisted, to her students' horror, that they memorize and recite
poems "So that you'll learn something in spite of me.")
For yet another, she hated poetry readings, noting that after "the
first time I gave a reading I stopped for twenty-six years." And,
of course, she found her center of gravity not in New York with the
glitterati but in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares.
George Monteiro's harvest of interviews suggests that many fine
minds tried wrestling this recalcitrant poet down and wound up securely
pinned themselves. Bishop had little to do with causes and even less to
do with the pretensions of self-proclaimed critics or, for that matter,
of preening poets.
Citing the universality of art, she also refused to be included in
sex-exclusive collections while simultaneously proclaiming, "But I
was, and am, a feminist." She insisted, despite recognizing the
male bias in anthologies of her day, "Art is art and should have
nothing to do with gender." Monteiro's lucid introduction to
these interviews respects the complexities both of Bishop and of her
repressive historical moment.
Perhaps too these interviews are engaging precisely because of the
stratified oddities that are the substance of Elizabeth Bishop: she is
tense, amused, abrasive, perceptive, unbowed, eccentric, disappointed,
profound, haunted, honest, scarred, out of patience, persnickety,
stoical, totally unredeemed by anything other than hard-won words pulled
like a sword from the stone of life.
B. A. St. Andrews SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse
