On Elizabeth Bishop’s centennial, a reading of The Bight.

Go here for the poem uninterrupted by my commentary.

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THE BIGHT

[A shallow bay. We’re in Key West, where Bishop lived for a number of years, and we’re looking at a harbor. The word bite, and the word blight (Bishop was fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of Spring and Fall), should certainly be floating around in our heads while we read.]

On my birthday

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

[this. is. low. how. A simple poetic balance, and a calm straightforward assertiveness, express themselves right away.  And consider how low we are:  Already we’re at a bight; and now the bight’s at low tide.  Already a sense of melancholy.  Yet she says the poem’s written on her birthday.  Not in a very celebratory mood, I think.]

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

[As if the fluidity and depth of water weren’t compromised enough by all that shallowness, there’s also morbid skeletal marl sticking up out of the bight; and the anchoring pilings seem sadly pointless, since there’s so little water.  Upright, gathered, like sticks, they resemble matches.… Note the assonance throughout: tide, like, white, dry, pilings, dry.]

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

[Low again.  And water like fire?  We’ve seen it before, in one of her most famous poems, At the Fishhouses:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.]

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

[Baudelaire could make it sizzle; I cannot.  For me, the sound of nature is turned way down low.]

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

[That’s my music: An arid percussive click rather than any tonality; something strange and off the beat rather than something harmonic and measured.  That’s what I hear when I look most deeply at earthly life, when I dredge down to the truth.]

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

[You see how she’s – what’s Gioia’s word? – slyly awakening emotions in us?  Emotions having to do with what — depletion, futility, the contrast between our immense efforts to understand the depths of existence, to get the goods of life, and the paltry products of those efforts: rarely coming up with anything to show for it.]

and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

[An elaboration of the effort-and-futility idea: We struggle (man-of-war) toward meaning (transcendent rather than earthly here, on impalpable drafts) until the sheer effort of it makes us tremble.]

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

[There’s something annoyingly stupid and pathetically messy about the ongoingness of human existence.  Although the scene is junky and depleted, eagerly panting little boats still keep coming in, their crappy cargo hanging out of their mouths.]

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

[A sharp dry eat-or-be-eaten world.  No treasures here.]

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

[Wonderful pun on stove – gas fire, but also the little boats crushed in any old way.]

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.

[Nothing to show for the boats, relics of the last, not-yet-overcome trauma.  There’s something vaguely guilt-inducing about their abandonment and open vulnerability, something of  O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! This is everyone’s messy moral and emotional life, bursting with compromise and unfinished business.]

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

[Since Baudelaire’s been mentioned, we might think here of his most famous poem, Correspondences.  But there’s nothing in Bishop’s poem akin to the almost mystical “profound unity” between our subjectivity and the natural world that appears in Baudelaire. “The unnamed correspondences [in Bishop] are not ecstatic, Emersonian revelations of relationship; rather, they are almost wholly negative,” writes Brett Candlish Millier.]

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

[The sharp bite of the dredge’s jaw unearths more white marl.  Same old shit.]

All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

[We conclude how?  We conclude that, looked at with biting lucidity, the shabby contingency of life is simply awful.  A blight.  Yet, contemplating another birthday, another setting out into more life, we’re compelled to note also the sheer survivability of it all, the way most of us are in it and what the hell.]

The Worcester Telegram announces a birthday commemoration for the poet Elizabeth Bishop:

On Tuesday, Bishop’s 100th birthday, there will be a gravesite ceremony at Hope Cemetery in Worcester at 4:30 p.m. The gathering will include a reading of Bishop’s poem, “The Bight,” whose last lines provide the inscription of her tombstone: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

(Here’s a charming film about Bishop’s grave, and its inscription.)

There will also be Tuesday readings here and here, and a birthday party at a Halifax restaurant.

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Bishop’s work is a villa of the mysteries; we feel her assuming the full weight of human life; we feel her somehow gently housing that weight in her poems. Because she brings experience under the control of language, because she shapes it poetically, we say she is a powerful poet. Yet she gathers power not through imposing any architecture of ideas or feelings upon reality, but rather simply through offering reality a roof for the night. Shelter here, in these lines. Let me lodge you, look at you.

“The more one reads a Bishop poem,” writes David Orr in the New York Times, “the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check … [One feels] the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry.”

A vessel poised above huge forces – this describes a good deal of the best art. Leonard Bernstein describes Mozart’s G Minor Symphony as “a work of utmost passion utterly controlled.” Brahm’s Fourth, says Roger Scruton, conveys a “tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control.” The sublimity of Beethoven, Dmitri Tymoczko suggests, lies not in strident statement and emotion, but instead in the way a passage like this one in the Tempest sonata (click on the image and then zoom in)

symbolizes both desire – in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. …[T]his coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.

Passion and a strategic yielding to limitation – this combination gives Bishop’s poems their remarkable soundness, what Anne Stevenson calls “a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.” “We see the place, the person or the thing [in her poems] as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn’t state overtly but slyly awakens inside us,” writes Dana Gioia.

… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —

— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…

Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and some poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.

Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.