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The poet and critic Yvor Winters urged writers to head off the Alice Quinn’s of this world by burning their drafts and correspondence. He believed that professors will invariably misuse the papers they find in the care of libraries. This book is a case in point. Elizabeth Bishop is nearly always described as having been an intensely private person and a meticulous poet. Readers who love her work may well feel that New Yorker’s poetry editor Alice Quinn has done Bishop wrong.
The title is cute and un-Bishop like, but the real problem is in the subtitle. “Uncollected Poems” suggests that Bishop might have one day collected and published the poems in this book. Quinn knows this is misleading at best. Her introduction says that except for “The Art of Losing” Bishop marked nothing in this book for publication. Does this matter? Well, the lady is dead and her scruples belong to another country. Writers have been violated in this way again and again, and Quinn might say, “Better me who loves Bishop’s work than some tenure-driven hack.” The fire? Bishop died suddenly at 68, and what writer wants to immolate her life’s work especially in a day when libraries buy poets’ archives. So, the book is here and even if soiled won’t disappear.
That said it will be nearly impossible for those who love Bishop’s poetry to steer clear of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. John Ashbery’s blurb is correct, “For those who love Elizabeth Bishop, there can never be enough of her writing.” What has Quinn added? Her disservice to Bishop works to emphasize the qualities that make Bishop’s completed poems so beautiful and memorable. What Bishop failed to do in these pages, whether because of youth and inexperience or whatever keeps a poem from getting itself finished, will remind her readers of what she accomplished and why we revere her poetry. This may not be the “adventure for readers who love the established canon” that Quinn hopes for, but we can now see more clearly the high standard to which Bishop held herself.
There are three poems that might enter the Bishop canon. (In her superb review of this book in The New Republic Helen Vendler accepts the first two of these). They are: “It is marvelous to wake up together” and the ten-line evocation of her Nova Scotia girlhood, “A Short, Slow Life.” My other candidate is “Breakfast Song,” which is perhaps too close to “It is marvelous…” but would make a good popular song if Billie Holiday were around to sing the lyric. Not surprisingly there are delightful lines in this book—“the line of marsh / like scribblings in green chalk”—in which Bishop’s renowned eye is evident. The fascination this book has for me is pages 166 and 167. On the left is a typewritten page of notes with handwritten, not always legible, additions. On the right is “Just North of Boston,” which Quinn describes as “the sadly abbreviated second draft.”
What fascinates is Bishop’s method, to which she points in her poem “The End of March”:
“I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,”
Her drafts show how much Bishop depended on “useless notes.” “Just North of Boston” never gets beyond description—the plaster Hereford’s on the lawn of Frank Guifridda’s Route 1 steak house!—, never reaches the point of saying something the way her finished poems do, but there’s the mind here of an improviser. Other poets may work from such detailed notes, shedding so much of the original impulse, the very words of it, in the process. What sets Bishop apart is that her belief in “accuracy, spontaneity and mystery” seems to have found these qualities the farther away she got from where she started. This concentration, which is as inadequate a word as discipline or obsession can be glimpsed here, as it can’t be in Bishop’s finished poems.
I first encountered this aspect of Bishop’s art in Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversation: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Ondaatje, a Bishop fan, juxtaposed the first draft, “untidy, seemingly almost useless” in his words, with the final version of her villanelle to demonstrate how far editing can take the writer, and the film editor, from first thoughts and musings. In Ondaatje’s book this exhibit had a real force, which Quinn’s book understandably does not sustain. Seeing so many pages come to nothing or nothing much amounts to so much “material” (Quinn’s word) and not “the real poems” (Bishop’s phrase) that Bishop finished.
Quinn’s book will be of value to scholars and adepts of Bishop’s work. Odd that those who might get the most out of her book have been denied an index.
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