Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments - Hardcover

Excerpted from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop Copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Published in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction

To visit the Department of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, and explore the abundance of Elizabeth Bishop material is to enter a universe of fascinating proportions. In the boxes that preserve more than thirty-five hundred pages of Bishop's writing are brief, indelible character sketches. ("Loved the wrong person all his life / lived in the wrong place / maybe even read the wrong books--"), bits of overheard dialogue she found irresistible, notes for stories, commentary on poetry she revered (by Herbert, Hopkins, Stevens, and Moore, particularly), wholly arresting, distinctly characteristic bits of description ("the bureau trapped in the moon-light, like a creature saying 'oh' "; "Begonias ghostly in a galvanized bucket"), accounts of dreams, drawings, menus, shopping lists, and hosts of fascinating remarks on the art of poetry, as well as the occasional withering comment on a poem, an essay, or a literary attitude or viewpoint she deplored. Of Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and friend to Hopkins, for instance, she writes, "The reasonableness of all his ideas is too much--not a touch of the fanatical. He seems to have made himself into a poet out of wisdom--after deciding, sensibly, it was the best profession life had to offer him." There are also--especially in her notebooks from the 1930s and '40s, when she was often desperately uncertain about the direction of her work and her life--anguishedcris de coeur, indicating how much courage and bedrock stamina her survival entailed.

Many of the titles set down in the notebooks are referred to just once, including early groups with marvelous descriptive tags indicating Bishop's ideas for them. Her post-college journal, which she began on the island of Cuttyhunk off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in July 1934, lists the following on one page: " 'The Citrus Fruit'--love & friendship, 'The Emblem in the Eye'--6 sonnets, 'Flags and Banners'--motion in dreams, and 'An Individual Island for Everyone' (breakfast foods, etc.--satire)."

And there are innumerable fragments and drafts of poems, work that she did not complete to her satisfaction or considered trifling; drafts with phrases that haunted her, showing up again and again in her notebooks over the course of years; drafts with lines written out in a rush but accompanied by a chosen rhyme scheme; fragments that showcase verbal gestures familiar to Bishop readers from the more successful resolution of those gestures in the poems we know--all of it work that for one reason or another she chose not to publish but did not destroy.

Thinking about poetry in the highest terms was instinctive for Bishop and meeting her own standards was almost impossible, and this may account for the extraordinary quality of her unpublished work. In a letter to Marianne Moore dated December 5, 1936, the twenty-five-year-old Bishop discusses her reaction to the new book by Wallace Stevens,Owl's Clover, making clear how deeply she is pondering what poetry can and ought to do: "What strikes me as so wonderful about the whole book--because I dislike the way he occasionally seems to make blank versemoo--is that it is such a display of ideas at work--making poetry, the poetry making them, etc. That, it seems to me, is the way a poet should think." In another early letter to Moore, she asks, "Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?"

Early on, editors understood her perfectionism and regularly tried to goad her to let go and send them her poems. She began publishing inThe New Yorker in 1940 at the age of twenty-nine, and on March 9, 1955, Katharine White wrote to her, "As usual, this letter is a plea to let us see some of the Elizabeth Bishop manuscripts that I feel certain are on your desk, all finished if only you could bring yourself to part with them." Many years later, on May 26, 1972, Howard Moss, who had succeeded White as Bishop's editor and who became her friend, wrote exuberantly to her about a poem he had seen in draft years before: " '12 O'Clock News' is marvelous and we're delighted to have it…I was particularly happy to see that 'unicyclist' back. I've been waiting for him for years…Like Beethoven's father, I'd simply put you in a room and make you work all the time if I could. Of course, I wouldn't be that strict. A little gin, a few sandwiches…"

In a talk about poetry prepared but not presented in Rio in the 1960s (and included in full in the appendix), Bishop writes of the challenges as she conceived of them: "Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."

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None of the material here was stamped by Elizabeth Bishop for publication with the notable exception of her villanelle "One Art," which is included here in the appendix along with the sixteen available drafts of the poem as numbered by the Vassar archive. There is disagreement among scholars about the sequence of the drafts--see Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. Millier andElizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy by Victoria Harrison (both noted in the bibliography)--but the set as it is offers a unique opportunity to study a Bishop poem from inception to fulfillment. The poem was written within months as distinct from the sometimes decades-long separation between a poem's beginning and Bishop's satisfaction with it. Bishop kept the drafts together. And it seems the appropriate candidate for inclusion--for the sake of contrast and study--in this book of unfinished work.

The illustrated poem that opens the book, " 'I introduce Penelope Gwin…,' " a portrait of the artist as a young girl, must have pleased Bishop when she wrote it, but where could it have found a home in her oeuvre while she was alive except in an essay on her juvenilia?

In a letter dated January 20, 1938, when she was about to turn twenty-seven, Bishop sent "Money," one of the slighter poems collected here, to Marianne Moore. She referred to the poem as "a sort of joke (made out of a sentence in Dostoevsky'sHouse of the Dead: 'Money comes and goes like a bird.')" Graduating from college during the Depression, though, Bishop had cause to ponder the subject seriously, and her conclusion--that money's "migratory habits" are "stern, both ignorant and wise"--is captivating even if the poem is too tidy and circumscribed to have passed muster with her. The little poem also shows the kind of phrase that could hook Bishop and motivate her to begin a poem.

Bishop's notebooks from the 1940s are full of touching evocation of Mrs. Hannah Almyda, her housekeeper in Key West, whom she described lovingly in letters to friends. But it's at the moment when Bishop seizes upon a powerful metaphor--"the Pelican, self-sacrificing, tearing feathers from its breast to line its nest"--and writes "for a poem?" in the margin that the depth of her regard for her friend and the scale of her own dependence become manifest.

On a draft of "Hannah A." Bishop writes...