It is not much use talking of possible influences on her work. As the editor recognizes, there’s a little Klee, and a lot of Vuillard (she loved the floral); but they have been filtered through an unyielding artistic sinlessness. Her wavering line resembles that of New Yorker cartoonists like Steig and Thurber, where the visual is the pathos of its own incompetence.
Bishop was attracted to the painterly, as an appendix of her remarks makes plain; but her watercolors, often helped along with gouache and ink, never got any better in three decades of practice, and there’s no sign she thought to take lessons. (Hitler’s watercolors are far more accomplished.) Her empty yellow ship’s-cabin resembles the inside of a steamer trunk, and out the curtained porthole is the sea; you can tell it’s the sea because the waves are the little jagged v’ s amateur painters use. Those waves recall “Large Bad Picture,” its bay “masked by perfect waves” above which are “scribbled hundreds of fine black birds / hanging in n’ s in banks.” Her poems depended on the loneliness or unhappiness that drove her to words (often cheerful, but just as often rueful); painting was an escape from the pressure of the artistic.
Bishop must have recognized she had no gift for drawing people—the streets and buildings here are eerily empty. Still, in the one carefully rendered portrait, her friend Sha-Sha (Charlotte Russell) leans (or floats?) jauntily against a grade-school blackboard. She’s dressed for summer, the little smear of lipstick, the plucked black eyebrows beneath blonde hair, the darkly handsome eyes, and the knowing posture a kind of Rorschach. The self-possession of the figure exceeds the crudity of expression. It doesn’t quite matter that her head meets her neck in an alarming way.
There’s something tender in the one other portrait, of a cartoonish sleeper who looks like a misshapen doll. In her poem “Sleeping Standing Up,” Bishop wittily remade the world from the sleeper’s ninety-degree-tilted point of view (some of these paintings are similarly vertiginous, and many almost dreamlike). Bishop was drawn to sleep, as many depressed people are; people who spend a lot of time in bed are intimates of the ceiling. In one of the best of the still lifes, a hydra-like chandelier casts gooseneck shadows on a large patch of ceiling. The editor calls it “untypically arty” and attempts to explain away the cropping; but Bishop wrote “Sleeping on the Ceiling” about another chandelier:
It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
It is the Place de la Concorde.
The little crystal chandelier
is off, the fountain is in the dark.
There’s also a large branched chandelier (and a stain on the ceiling) in one of Bishop’s remarkable unpublished poems. There have been many paintings of landscapes, but how many just of ceilings? Michelangelo painted ceilings, but not paintings of ceilings.
The difference between poetry and painting lies in their resolution of the visual. In “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” Bishop wrote, “The branches of the date-palms look like files”; but they don’t, not really, and not in her paintings (the branches aren’t even branches—they’re fronds). That is the advantage of poetry—poetry, in the act of naming, is the action of metaphor. Metaphor is the improvement of the visual; the pictorial truth is another, homelier matter. The one painting where the visual approaches the shock of metaphor is a Nova Scotia landscape: there are grassy, overgrown fields, some white houses, a gray spireless church, and in the foreground a low field of blue flowers. Field? No, a pond that looks like a field. But it’s not the least like a pond, more a field of flowers in which two rowboats are tossing.
A few allegorical paintings lie even deeper within the poetic, allegories in the way her poems “The Weed” and “The Monument” are—dream visions all too nakedly cozy with the psychological life. The most curious, a design for “E. Bishop’s Patented Slot-Machine,” shows a box with a handle labeled “The ‘Dream’” and, inside, numbered gears and a crystal ball. Where do you put the money? What is the prize? Is it the record of a dream, or only a “dream” slot machine? Does it produce dreams for a penny, or perhaps fulfill them? This, alas, is an unwritten poem.
In their wobbling lines, their clumsy childlike intensities, these watercolors reveal a little of the world her timid, homely poetry concealed, a world of lopsided buildings, nightmarish night scenes, and interiors where nothing meets at right angles. For a moment, their defenseless lack of skill lets us view that world through Elizabeth Bishop’s not-so-innocent eyes.
Verse Chronicle
Jumping the Shark
Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is that New Formalist wet dream, a hot babe who can bang out a sonnet on demand. If your vice runs to forms a little more obscure, you could hardly resist her. Her come-on seems to be, “Wouldn’t you like to peek at my sexy little sonnezhino?” or “Baby, baby, you gotta lick my paradelle all over.” The question isn’t why sexual intercourse didn’t begin for Larkin until 1963; it’s why—after Chaucer and Rochester and Burns, after all the ways they found to load every rift with sex—modern poetry is as erotic as a meat locker. The anesthesia and impotence of Eliot (when there’s sex in Eliot, it’s grimy and repulsive) seem to have become, not just the model for English verse, but the ideal.
Addonizio’s poems are always looking for love, and in What Is This Thing Called Love they take their desperate pleasures where they can. The hot sex takes place with a Baedeker in hand—against a chain-link fence in one poem, against a fridge in another. (If you’re going to be one of her lovers, I suspect you have to sign a legal release first.) Since the men who straggle through these poems are never named, it’s hard to tell them apart—there’s Vulnerable Kiss Guy and Orange Wedge Guy and Guy Who Drinks the Rain from the Hollow in My Throat Guy, and after a while they all seem the same. When you look at the world through her glasses, sex is everywhere; and even the muse is just a hottie on the make: “They fall in love with me after one night, / even if we never touch. // I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.” (It’s not clear if this is a bimbo acting like the muse or the muse acting like a bimbo—but, hey, does it matter?) We know sex is war, all strategy and tactics and lost battalions (and mostly Pyrrhic victories), but it’s refreshing to hear it said with such panache.
Sharon Olds is one of the few contemporary poets to treat sex with animal pleasure; and for her it’s an Olympic event, pursued with an athletic single-mindedness that, in one poem, is not distracted even by a recent rape elsewhere in her building. (My favorite, however, is her paean to her early mastery of the arts of oral sex.) Addonizio is wittier about the physical acts that occupy so large a mental part of our waking (and, as Freud reminds us, sleeping) lives. She records some of the ambivalent appetites that seethe within the body politic and is not beneath ranting about her secret desires, like strangling people who miss her literary allusions.
Such facetiousness is part of the latest contemporary manner—ha! ha! poetry can be just as dumb as television, too! When you stoop so low to conquer, however, it’s hard to stand up again. On occasion, Addonizio tries a subject more serious. (Bathing her elderly mother, she tries “to be more merciful / than God, who after creating her // licked her clean with a rough tongue”—so God is a cat?) Alas, she’s so used to primping and posing and smirking, she can’t recall what it’s like to be reflective.
It would be pleasant to blame Billy Collins for the dumbing down of American verse, but there’s so much dumbing down I fear he’s more a symptom than the cause. The trouble with being a crowd pleaser is that, after you have the crowd, you have to please it—too many of Addonizio’s poems are made in Betty Crocker style, all helpful hints and ingredients whipped up in a jiffy for a dish tasteless as a stuffed pillow. When Addonizio uses some arcane form, you never feel the form is happy to be there—it’s used just as carelessly as her lovers, discarded when she’s had her way with it. She finds charmingly weird subjects for poems—dead girls in movies, serial killers, why the chicken crossed the road, liver-transplant surgeons—but often the idea is al
l there is.
After so many poems about partying and drinking (there’s a whole section devoted to them), the poet turns just as woozy and sentimental as that loser down the bar surrounded by shot glasses. Awful things may be happening elsewhere, things the poet can’t stop, but
I separate
the two halves of another cookie and lick
the cream filling, and pour myself one more
and drink to you, dear reader, amazed
that you are somewhere in the world without me,
listening, trying to hold me in your hands.
I like Addonizio’s poems best when she’s vulnerable, when the bravado is just for show, as in her poem to a younger lover—“When he takes off his clothes / I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped.” (The calculating fuck bunny part of her is fun, too.) It’s all very well trying to make poetry relevant, to portray ruthlessly the way we live now; but in the end the poor poet is still stuck with having to say something, and to do that he has to make sure he has something to say.
Billy Collins
Speak of the devil. The proofs of Billy Collins’s The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems came prefaced by a letter from his publisher, addressed “Dear Reader.” Why, I thought, this might be addressed to me! “The real trouble with most contemporary poetry,” the letter said, “is that it is piled high, mostly unread and gathering dust, in the attic of its own obscurity.” I was confused by the real dust in that metaphorical attic—but then I thought, contemporary poetry, obscure? Isn’t the trouble with contemporary poetry that you read book after book of it without an obscurity in sight? (Next year the government plans to put Poetic Obscurities on the endangered species list.)
“Everyone can connect with his humor and his humanity,” the letter continued. “Reading his poetry is no diagramless chore with recondite clues.” So, it’s all the fault of those other damned poets—you know who you are, leaving your recondite clues lying about, where anyone might trip over them. Go back to the hellhole you sprang from, John Keats. Get thee gone, John Milton and Alexander Pope, you diagramless whoremongers. And don’t get me started on you, William Shakespeare!
Billy Collins is apparently the antidote to all this. He’s an entertainer who gently thinks about gentle things (even when he has a harsh thought, it’s whimsically harsh), with a half-baked goofy curiosity about the world and a penchant for odd bits of information. He’ll write a poem about the code behind equestrian statues (if the horse is rearing, the rider died in battle—neat, huh?). He’ll write about a dream where he lost his nose in a sword fight (Freud knew exactly what that means), or about how he wants to be buried (fetal position, clean pair of pajamas), or about magic sunglasses that filter out an ex-lover. And what about that dog you once put to sleep? Well, he’s come back,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you—not one bit.
When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.
Don’t worry about the dog, though—he’s in heaven, where all the animals “can read and write, / the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.” I suspect the dogs compose poems just like Billy Collins (the cats, they’re writing poetry criticism).
Collins has the offbeat angle down pat. His images often reduce things to the size of childhood (a building with its facade torn off by a bomb is “like a dollhouse view”). On occasion—I’ll admit it—he can be hilarious. One poem mimics the patter poets use at readings, trying to be as helpful as the footnotes in the Norton Anthology:
And you’re all familiar with helminthology?
It’s the science of worms.
Oh, and you will recall that Phoebe Mozee is the real name of Annie Oakley.
Other than that, everything should be obvious.
Wagga Wagga is in New South Wales.
Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock.
What else?
Yes, meranti is a type of timber, in tropical Asia I think,
and Rahway is just Rahway, New Jersey.
Anyone who has suffered through a poetry reading will sympathize; but, as a poem, it’s like the rat so hungry he ate his own tail and didn’t stop until he’d gobbled himself up. Many of Collins’s poems are about poetry, though his references to poets past are often condescending. The pretensions of poetry need desperately to be mocked, but perhaps not by someone who doesn’t like it all that much.
Collins suffers from mortal thoughts (there’s a dry poem about what happens when a man sees the Grim Reaper coming for him) and would like to add a few words to the ancient themes of “longing for immortality / despite the roaring juggernaut of time.” But he can’t, or he won’t, because his nervous jokes are just a way of staving off despair—his humor has only an empty pit beneath. The trouble with poetry, it turns out—and it’s a bit of an anticlimax—is that poetry “encourages the writing of more poetry.” And the trouble with The Trouble with Poetry, it turns out—and it’s a bit of an anticlimax—is that, once you know the premise of a Billy Collins poem, the poem seems to write itself (he’s almost a metaphysical poet, his poems are so entirely exhausted by working out the idea—but his two-a-penny ideas would have driven Donne to drink).
What Collins does, he does very well. There are many poets who, seeing his example, seeing that poetry can reach the masses and make them laugh (this begins to sound like the plot of Sullivan’s Travels), want to stuff feathers in their heads just to be like him. The world can stand one Billy Collins, but what happens when everyone writes poems that humiliate the art they practice? I feel like a grouch to ask, but what then?
Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan’s shy, skittish poems are so small they scarcely seem to be poems. Her lines are very short (even William Carlos Williams might have found them pinched), usually three words, or four, or five, as if she hardly had anything to say—once I counted eight words in a line and fell off my chair. When a poem in The Niagara River threatens to go beyond half a page, as a few do, it makes her jumpy, because there’s hardly anything holding them together except spit and chewing gum. Yet, though she shrinks like a hermit crab (nothing tries to hide that hard except an animal wary of predators), her delicate modesty cannot conceal a poetry of winning oddity, with an off-kilter view of a world that always seems too big.
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
Here each small notion leans against the next, aided (rather than, as in so many poems, frustrated) by line breaks brutal as a modernist collage. In Ryan, the enjambment sharpens her quirky prose into a series of deft pauses and releases, with the occasional ring of buried rhyme or rhyme left to linger at line end. The whole is never so economical it seems starved; but the poems are reduced to minimal gestures, like those of a Noh play.
I have nothing against William Carlos Williams; but poets who love his mastery of American speech are rarely masters themselves, and he has been a terrible influence on those for whom imitation is the sincerest form of bad poetry. His poems were wonderful when they were the exception, but prose has so infiltrated and terrorized American poetry it’s now the rule—poets who prefer a subtler form of grace are criticized for being too difficult. Ryan, nevertheless, convinces me that prose can still have a sting to it. Her cunning twists and turns (like a creek meandering through a scrap yard), her way of conjuring a poem out of nothing (sometimes the poems are over befo
re you realize they’ve begun), show how a poet overcomes the cruelty of style.
There are poets whose work is memorable because they have a quirky, slant-sided way of looking at the world; and often such poets are women. Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and contemporaries like Anne Carson, Marie Ponsot, and Kay Ryan are poets devoted to the small, oblique idea, and of all things they love Blake’s grain of sand—or, in Bishop’s lovely phrase, “my crumb / my mansion.” (There are men of such ideas, too, like Clare and Carroll—a study of the sociology of such poetry would be of interest.) These garden ontologists are all shrinking violets (think how house-bound Dickinson and Moore were, and even Bishop); but a poet doesn’t have to be in the world to be of it, and there are advantages to watching intently and keeping mum—they are the virtues of predator as well as prey.
These poets often seem to have suffered some terrible wound; a hidden pain shadows their stickery poems, sometimes so imperceptibly that if you read quickly you miss it.
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