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“So many small things I still want to see”: Elise Partridge and Robert Lowell
The expanded edition of Elise Partridge’s remarkable collection Chameleon Hours (2008) reprints poems from her first volume, Fielder’s Choice (2002), including a brilliant set of four brief dramatic monologues based on lectures given in the last year of his life by Robert Lowell, lectures Elise Partridge attended and for which, she notes, she “took detailed notes on his remarks about nineteenth and twentieth-century writers.” Her poems are much more than reiterated transcriptions of Lowell’s classes, or ventriloquisms of his voice. They trace their way through a mesh of intertexts, expanding Lowell’s own iterative method in Notebook 1967-1968 (1969), History (1973) and other of his late volumes, colliding elocutionary rigour with colloquial immediacy to create a vital admixture – characteristic of Elise Partridge’s finest work – of the confessional and the objective, of the personal and the formal, of the serendipitous and the exacting.
Most of the poems in Chameleon Hours are elegies: meditations on loss, on the art of losing. They draw their passing, brief intensities from a heightened awareness of lived material detail, of “small things,” that comes in the wake of absence. Robert Pinsky praises this practice as her “art of noticing”: “Absence and failure are described [in Elise Partridge’s poetry] in a way that takes pleasure in accuracy: a considerable and original accomplishment.” Her poems, for me, evoke much more than mere pleasure, much more than an enjoyment of pretty craft, and her accomplishment is more than considerable: the crisp particularity of her characteristic line engenders a keen pathos in restraint, and unflinchingly confronts the hard expressive limits of her own mortality—“pretty or not,” as she puts it. In “Chemo Side Effects: Vision,” one of her pieces that Pinsky singles out for praise, she notes how there are “So many small things I still want to see”; the modulating vowels distilled from the long-I—the withdrawing, observant subject at the heart of this particular line attenuated into phonemic shivers, ī becoming ah-ee, then lightly drawled into aw and ĭ and braided through commonplace consonants, s’s and m’s and t’s—produce a palpable set of articulated, glassy shards on the teeth and tongue, small bursts of sense. Vatic wonder, under Elise Partridge’s pen, doesn’t so much diminish as gain a tensile acuity, a closeness.
Her Robert Lowell poems recall not only Lowell’s voice and approach, his recurrent plea for “the grace of accuracy” as he writes in one of his last poems, but also the voices and recalibrated transcripts, the “notebooks,” that fill in his absence, his retreat; she also gestures at Elizabeth Bishop’smemorial for Lowell, “North Haven,” which describes Lowell’s meticulousness as a compulsion to revise, to “derange, or re-arrange” his poems obsessively, a reflexive craft arbitrarily halted only by his sudden death in 1977. Partridge took classes with Lowell that same year, and her poems are in one sense gatherings of some of his last words. Day by Day, Lowell’s last collection, also appeared in 1977; its final poem, “Epilogue,” acts as a contingent self-elegy, in which Lowell laments what he hears “in the noise of my own voice” as a “misalliance” between imagination and memory; the last lines gesture forward, with a caveat, at this unsatisfied poetic desire, his “want to see,” to keep noticing:
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
. . .
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name. (Day by Day 127)
The recalcitrant egotism and decrepit masculinity that persist in Lowell as “poor passing facts” of his existence are gently shifted in Elise Partridge’s reimagining of his lectures; like History, each poem takes up the biography and the voices of other poets, here Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman (twice), but has Lowell tease out moments in all three of fraught grandeur, when they could each be “operatic” or “awfully eloquent,” and when their robust poetic authority, their masculine assurance, is undone by “something . . . personal.” When Partridge has Lowell recall that Williams thought Crane “was all rhetoric,” the chain of spectral, layered voices at once resists poetic heightening and aspires, despite itself, to a feeling of living presence, of spontaneous immediacy that exceeds the limits of its own cleverness and craft: “And often rhythmical musical things / aren’t good, they’re padding for not feeling” (Fielder’s Choice 74).
The verbal music that Partridge characteristically seeks is perhaps closer to Elizabeth Bishop’s version of Lowell than to Lowell himself; in a 1964 note, Bishop asks for an art—I want to say a poetry, but she doesn’t—that consists in “some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world.” Against heightening, Bishop wants the “delight” of exacting “living” diction; in “North Haven,” she catalogues local flowers, capitalized as if each were given a proper rather than a generic name, “Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch, / Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright” (Poems 210). In the poems of Chameleon Hours, Elise Partridge deploys a related tactic around “souvenirs of the world,” building tenuous recollected cascades of words—as in the last lines of “Thirteen,” looking back on backyard gatherings of teenage girls:
And before we bounded off Kate’s trampoline
our teams were redivided:
pretty or not.
Earthward, staggering, reaching, reeled, thirteen.
(Chameleon Hours 6)
Part of her poetic gift, derived from Bishop but hardly derivative, is her capacity to frame a lightly dissonant clash of sound and texture as aspirant lyric, as an approach to the condition of song that delights in its almosting, its edgy shortfall, reaching. (Like Bishop, too, she has a thing for birds.)
“Four Lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977” voices this shortfall, in its opening description of Hart Crane, as a gibe at idealism: “He’s taunting you with paradise.” Discussing Crane’s “Repose of Rivers,” Partridge’s recollected Lowell locates a poetry in the dissolution of memory:
The river speaks the poem;
the river’s washing out to sea
like your own life—the river’s doomed,
all childhood memories, washing out to sea
to find repose.
This last broken cadence approaches an iambic scansion, but that rhythmic surety dissolves both in the looseness of Lowell’s everyday speech (as if his talk were nearly but not quite subtended by metrical tics from his poetry) and in the refrain-like repetitions that suggest a mind feeling its way forward into words. The poem itself, like the other three “lectures” here, is also thoroughly reflexive, and we feel Lowell’s words diffused through the filter of Elise Partridge’s ear and hand, as she reconstructs his voice against the washing-out of whatever it was or is that speaks this poem, that refuses to let it repose in tacit oblivion. Against the plain speech he seems to value in Williams’s “The Yachts,” her Lowell laments how “anything beautiful” goes “trampling over all / it doesn’t notice.” Close attention and artifice are at odds in this conception—“[b]eauty’s terrible,” he tells us—and yet he values (as opposed to Crane’s seductive “thunder and obscurity”) the beauty of “careful description.” Care, in Partridge’s lectures, amounts to an unobtrusive reiteration of what she thinks she heard, what she write down.
And yet, each of Lowell’s talks is re-lineated by her, as if to discover the poems lurking behind the everyday in his recollected words. Re-appropriated, and then sculpted rhythmically and spatially into contingent poems, his texts become what he calls, in the third lecture (a reading of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”) a “loose writing,” enacting and negotiating a tension between form and formlessness, mastery and relinquishment:
The beginning’s all one sentence, highly
organized musically, but loose writing,
as Whitman practiced. Tempting to scan; you can’t.
What Partridge gives us is the work of formation, of revision, an organization that wants but also refuses closure, that tempts us with a poetic monumentality, a Whitmanesque vastness, that its improvisational looseness inevitably belies. Just as Lowell’s epilogue functions as self-elegy, so too do each of these four poems confront the spectre of the poet’s own death:
“’Goodbye My Fancy’ he intended as
his last poem . . . you’re too sick to write your last
poem, when the time comes. Clear and elegant —
except for some of the language, and the meter,
it could be seventeenth-century.
Your eyes water, reading it.”
The layered quotation marks suggest the complex embedding of voices, but also point to an understanding of the poem as a lecture, as a reading of other texts. Clarity and directness, as virtues of descriptive facticity, of an attention to small things and poor passing facts, are both enabled and impeded by poetic line. But for this particular Lowell, what matters isn’t so much the airless perfection of form as the loosened vacillation between craft and sense, what Elise Partridge confronts in her poems as an essential human want, as wanting still to see.
I can’t help but hear her own difficult confrontations with cancer and with mortality, through which she writes the poems of Chameleon Hours, each one becoming something like her last, as it addresses its own passing, but still—as she has Lowell say of Hart Crane—“unusually full of life.” In a valediction, “Farewell Desires,” she asks the “Goddess of discards,” her muse of loss, to
let me be a waterfall
pouring a heedless mile,
stride barefoot over the drawbridge
to the plain road.
The gift of Elise Partridge’s poetry, one of its many gifts to her readers, is its careful affordance, its clear- and open- and watery-eyed encounter with a world replete in visionary plainness and casual miracles (“Seems supernatural, doesn’t it?”), awash in the small flashes that like her we still want to see.
Books to Read
Elizabeth Bishop, Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011.
Robert Lowell, Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1977.
Elise Partridge, Fielder’s Choice. Montreal: Signal Editions, 2002.
– – – , Chameleon Hours. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2008.
Sound Tracks: Elizabeth Bishop and Lavinia Greenlaw
This is the text of a colloquium presentation I gave for the Department of English at UBC on 16 March 2012. Please pardon the formality of the MLA style — I decided to put it up on the blog rather than on academia.edu because of its autobiographical content, because of its closely contemporary subject matter, and because it’s still underdeveloped as an academic paper. There are probably also a few formatting glitches; my apologies, I’ll try to correct those. I hope it’s of some interest.
When I try digging through swelling shelfloads of criticism and secular hagiographies that, by her 2011 centenary, have become associated with Elizabeth Bishop, it starts to sound like those of us who read her, and who try to read her “straight through,” have a pressing and symptomatic need each to have our own particular Elizabeth, to craft from her work a genetics of voice to which we can belong, as recombinant latecomers. I want to explore one such attachment today, through the poetry and electroacoustic work of Lavinia Greenlaw – or maybe two such attachments, including my own. It seems to me, though, that it’s important to acknowledge that while many poets have been and continue to be reclaimed, repurposed and tentatively canonized, Bishop forms a particularly crucial case, if for no other reason than her writing practice assiduously troubles and even resists such claims, such figurative colonization, with its deliberately dislocated and dislocating geographies, – or, perhaps better put, with its careful unmooring of what Bishop calls “the family voice / I felt in my throat” (Poems 181).
We’re told Elizabeth Bishop disliked the sound of her own voice. She “read her poems with reluctance in public,” writes J. D. McClatchy in his notes for Random House Audio’s The Voice of the Poetseries, “and she loathed being recorded” (9). She also typically refused permission to tape her readings, although recordings made for Robert Lowell in October 1947 when he was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress (a post for which he would recommend Bishop two years later) provide some source material for this audio compilation, officially issued for the first time only in 2000, after extensive pleas by editors and admirers to Bishop’s reticent estate. Listening to her awkward, plainspoken delivery and to the audible traces of her anxiety, Bishop’s pronounced distaste for her own untrained verbal performances seems justified enough. In a letter to Joseph Summers sent from Halifax, Nova Scotia in August of that same year, Bishop refers disparagingly to “records I made for [Jack] Sweeney” at Harvard in 1946, which she hears as “pretty dreary” (One Art 149). Conversely, she praises Sweeney’s recordings of Lowell, whom she had just met through Randall Jarrell in New York in May 1947: “they aren’t at all professional, but they are extremely good in parts.” Lowell’s own invitation to record her reached her in September, just after her second sojourn in Nova Scotia. Their correspondence had begun in earnest that summer, with Lowell following up on a review by him of her North & South, and, more significantly, responding enthusiastically to the publication in The New Yorker of Bishop’s Nova Scotia poem “At the Fish-Houses [sic],” which had appeared in the August 9 issue: “The description has great splendor,” he writes, “and the human part, tone, etc., is just right” (7). That very human, tonal restraint is clearly also what Lowell hears in Bishop’s voice, and his invitation – which he politely asserts she doesn’t have to accept – is coupled to a plea that she might “oust some of the monstrosities on [his] list” of overblown poets he feels obliged to record (8). The recording session did take place some time on or around October 17, and Lowell enthuses in a letter to Bishop on November 3 about the excellence of a number of her readings:
I’ve at last heard the records and some of them couldn’t be better – “Faustina’s” the best I think, but “Sea-Scape,” “Large B. Picture,” “Fish,” and “Fish-Houses” are wonderful too. “Roosters” is swell in places and not so hot in others. Anyway you’ll get them in a few days and can judge. (11)
Lowell goes on to apologize for some technical shortcomings in the recordings themselves, and laments that “perhaps they won’t do for publication,” which in fact did not happen until the 2000 audiobook. The reasons for his enthusiasm aren’t ever made clear; nevertheless, I don’t think he’s just being polite. There is something poetically remarkable about these awkward, inadvertently suppressed records.
That something might be called their resonance, though I have to be careful to define what I might mean by that term, which seems odd in the context of Bishop, and of these readings. Jo Shapcott describes hearing Bishop read in a “deep rich voice” in the late 1970s at Boston University, but this is surely a combination of mistaken memory and a desire to heighten the posthumous heft of Bishop’s “strange, precise, profound poems” – their poetical depth (113). Profound seems to me precisely the wrong word for what Bishop does. Bishop’s voice, based on the surviving tapes, was never especially deep or rich, but always reticent, diffident and withheld. (Ruff a bit more kindly attributes this shyness to a combination of anxiety and asthma, but I hope it’s clear that it’s not my intention to criticize Bishop for reading poorly or for being somehow shallow: on the contrary, I want to pursue the poetic rightness of what she does achieve.) This hesitancy was a hallmark not simply of her speech, but of her poetics: “I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it,” she famously tells Lowell in a letter of 21 January 1949, after she herself had, with characteristic reservation, assumed the poetry consultant post at the Library of Congress two years after him. Voice acts both as a harbinger and as a disavowal of self, of what it is to be and say an “I,” an Elizabeth: to speak oneself into external being. As James Merrill among many other has noted, Bishop’s “I” – especially insofar as it remains implicated in personal history, in memoir – models what feels like a formalized disavowal, a writerly reserve:
I think one saw the possibilities, perhaps through Elizabeth Bishop, where “I” could be used with the greatest self-deprecation, humor, a sort of rueful sense of “Well, yes, I did this, but you know what to expect of me.” (Neubauer 85-86)
Deeply suspicious of both the confessional and the expressive, Bishop does not consistently retreat into the detachment of craft, but tends instead to dwell poetically in the tense uncertainties between bios and graphē, the written and the lived.
The year 1947 is significant for understanding the specific genetics of Bishop’s voice, what Michael Donaghy calls her “accent” (Shapcott ). The summer and fall of that year would see the second of her return visits to Nova Scotia after the death of her mother, trips that would provide Bishop with raw matter for many of the poems and stories she would write until her death in 1979. In the final lines of her New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” she writes herself – distanced a little into a “we” that collects her enunciative I and the readerly you – into what becomes a maternal, liquid and lapidary Atlantic physiography:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(Poems 64)
“I have seen it,” she tells us, “over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones” (63). Hands and tongues, she says, are not so much nursed on saltwater as burned by it, marked by its hard indifference. Bound to our historical and genetic limits, we are incised by but also finally lost to oceanic depth, to “what we imagine knowledge to be” rather than what we can in fact ever know. Brett Millier, like Shapcott, falls into clichés of profundity when he describes Bishop’s first visit to Nova Scotia – involving visits to Halifax-Dartmouth and to Cape Breton – after the death of her mother:
From the many notebook entries of this summer [1946], and the poems that grew from those notes, it seems clear that the trip [to Nova Scotia] was both deeply disturbing and deeply significant to Elizabeth in ways that it would take her years to articulate. (Millier 181)
Poems such as “At the Fishhouses” and “Cape Breton” had their origins in these notebooks, and certainly do speak to Bishop’s tenacious attachment to Nova Scotia as her genealogical locus. Under her yearbook photo from Vassar College, for example, Bishop lists “Great Village Nova Scotia” as her home, while in fact she had lived there only from age 3 to 6 with her maternal grandparents. As Lavinia Greenlaw puts it, “while [Bishop] is justly celebrated as one of America’s most important poets, it was not America that formed her.” Greenlaw – whose poetic enmeshment in Bishop’s work I will soon come to – recasts “At the Fishhouses” to explain the internals tensions within Bishop’s poetic voice, as an effect of cultural genetics, of what Bishop herself might calls the “question” of how she travels, and the complexities of rootedness and uprooting:
The young Elizabeth stayed with her grandmother for just three years but retained her connection with Great Village all her life. Nova Scotia is the setting for many of her best poems, and its geography of vast skies and wild Atlantic coastline is present as a sense of being on the edge of something deep and dangerous into which she might disappear and into which she might want to – an ambivalence that is one of the most striking aspects of her writing.
The hyperbole here, while perhaps warranted by the occasion of an effusive book review, is wholly out of step with Bishop’s poetic, although we can certainly hear the echoes of the ironically-framed sublimity at the close of Bishop’s poem (as well as the falling from the world that informs “In the Waiting Room”). Greenlaw isn’t wrong to affirm that Bishop’s writing is marked by Nova Scotia; but if you have ever been to Great Village, you will know that it is hardly a place of vast skylines or wild coasts. (These stock-phrases sound more to me like the figural language of Canadian tourism.) The disturbances, instead, are much more closely personal and, importantly, accentual.
In a 1947 letter to Lowell, Bishop remarks – coincidentally, in a paragraph immediately following a description of having herself recorded “like a fish being angled for with that microphone” – on the “strange rather cross-sounding accent” of Cape Bretoners, a hybrid of something “Gaelic,” “Scotch” and “English,” she thinks (147). What I hear in Bishop’s voice on those Library of Congress records, after her return from two summers in Nova Scotia, aren’t anything so overt or so strong as those Anglo-Celtic brogues, but I do hear the pronounced and, to me, self-evident traces of time spent in the Maritimes. Her voice obviously – obvious, perhaps, to anyone who’s from there – migrates and shifts through an inconstant array of East-Coast inflections. When I first heard these readings, I thought Bishop sounded like my grandmother, who comes from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and of whose voice I have a cassette tape, still. There is something in the way that both Bishop and my grandmother pronounce their Rs, pulling the rhotic slightly back, swallowing it just a little, to create what linguists call, if I’m not mistaken, a rounded retroflex approximate – which is a fancy way of saying an east-coast R, an inflection that among others you can still hear in recordings of Bishop.
I have to pause here to tell you a story, a story about me. My reading of Bishop has an even more personal angle than its link to my grandmother’s recorded voice – it connects to my own colloquial speech genetics, too. Here is my story. I was presenting a paper at a conference at UC Santa Cruz – the American Pacific Southwest – in December 2009. The paper was on the poetry of Charles Simic and its relationship to the music of Charles Lloyd. At one point in the talk, I discuss Simic account of hearing Thelonious Monk play in a New York bar. At the end of my talk, I took questions, of course, anticipating discussion of improvisation and aesthetics, or the complex relationships between music and poetry. A younger colleague of mine put up his hand and asked: “Are you from Nova Scotia?” I was a bit dumbfounded – “What?” “Are you from Nova Scotia?” he repeated: “you said baerr.” Apparently, despite a continent of distance and a good two decades of life elsewhere, my mouth still betrays my adopted origins. It’s been ingrained, coded into my tongue. So too, I think, it might be with Bishop. Leaving Great Village at six, she never can shakes its inflection, shoring against her embouchure.
2.
Lavinia Greenlaw is one of a number of younger British poets who claim Bishop as an influence. She has written numerous reviews of Bishop’s work, has produced a audio documentary for BBC Radio 3 on Bishop’s childhood, and, perhaps most significantly, has directly repurposed and reworked a number of what you might call Bishop’s keywords into the core of her own work: “Questions of Travel,” “The Casual Perfect,” and others. But Greenlaw is more than a fan, and “influence” is hardly the right term for her relationship with Bishop’s work. Greenlaw has remained a decidedly London-based writer, but her interests tend to gather around resisting the genetic determinants of her Anglocentrism. Her voice characteristically oscillates in her writing, a crucial ambivalence that has frequently been misread by reviewers of her work as hesitancy, between where she comes from and where she’s looking to, between the way she speaks and what she hears.
The Importance of Music for Girls, Greenlaw’s disco-punk memoir, begins with an account of her own near-death at age 4 when her mouth was accidentally pierced by a length of bamboo garden cane: “It could have affected your speech,” her mother tells her, “by changing the shape of the roof of your mouth” (3). Voice is both determined and deformed by her domestic, maternally-governed backyard. I want to claim that the difficult vagaries of Bishop’s accent, its complex dislocations, help to explain something of Greenlaw’s fraught lyricism and her attention to the displacements of public, performative language. Greenlaw’s shape-shifting elocution involves a recombinant genomics that synchs her to a poly context in which the dislocations and displacements of recording technologies come to inform how we sound ourselves.
Greenlaw’s poems resonate with Bishop’s, or perhaps alongside them. “Millefiore,” a lyric from Greenlaw’s 1997 collection A World Where News Travelled Slowly, thematizes resonance – as the sympathetic material attunement of molecular glass with intensified sound – but also recovers a fractal sounding, a version of the disavowed recorded voice that I have been tracing in Bishop’s poems. “Millefiore”’s dedication to the Scottish poet Don Paterson, who happens also to be an accomplished jazz guitarist, suggests that Greenlaw wants self-consciously to re-frame an ars poetica here, but a poetics that is at once intermediate and multimodal, aspiring conditionally to the feel of vocal music. The glass eye described in the lyric is “vitreous not ocular,” externalizing its opaque substance rather than pretending to be an organ of vision: neither poor prosthesis nor crafty fake. The inherent fluidity of glass – which as the long viscous drip of cathedral windows remains us, is not solid but a silicate liquid – allows the eye to hold rather than transfer the light of “everything,” but also enables it materially to oscillate, and Greenlaw imagines the eye recreating the ceramic texture of millefiore, an interlace of a “thousand flowers.” Despite its lyric trappings, this is not the visionary sublime, but a material registering, a sonogram, of someone’s artful voice: that is, it’s a glass phonograph. The inscribed sound-waves are apparently unplayable, vibrating senselessly in a dysfunctional skull socket. But in registering the limits of that listening, of what’s knowable, in the lyric textures of her poem, Greenlaw produces what she would later term an “infinite [as in, non-finite?] proximity,” a collision of the immediate, embodied auditory and the mute, representational visual at, and in, the virtual surfaces of poetic text. In her review of Exchanging Hats, a posthumously-published collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings (which Greenlaw calls “poems made in pen, ink and water”), Greenlaw takes Bishop’s seeming lack of painterly technique, her uneasy primitivism, more deliberately as emerging from Bishop’s poetics of disavowal: “The wobbliness of it all is her argument with what the eye expects, how the eye wants to tidy up what is really seen.” Both Greenlaw and Bishop have sometimes been castigated for a forced formalism, a willful tidying up; in fact, the work here dwells not on the well-turned artifact, but in the argument itself with form, what David Kalstone presciently names Bishop’s “becoming a poet,” rather than ever her claiming actually to be one.
The open-ended discovery of an unsettled and unsettling poetic voice is mapped as a kind of mistaken listening, a creative misprision, in an episode from Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls, in which she outlines her first encounters with recorded music, specifically Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. As a child overhearing her parent’s music, she admits that she can’t quite make out the words to “Lay Lady Lay,” which she hears as “lay, lay, delay.” This goofy distracted mistake becomes foundational to her own work as a poet – with the book open in front of us, we overhear, at a silent remove, the moment at which she first feels her way toward a poetic re-making of language, its resilient fluid stuff. There is also a specific lyric temporality, its “delay” – her own version of a Bergsonian durée– that can only come from not understanding Bob Dylan, not hearing him correctly. Significantly, there is also a peculiar genetics of accent at work in her description. She transliterates the surreal nonsense that she hears in Dylan’s lines: “brass bed” becomes BRA SPED. Admittedly this isn’t IPA, and I’m putting some undue pressure on the accuracy of her transcription of her own audition of the song, but Dylan does not say or sound out “BRA,” ever, in the song. In a peculiarly throaty falsetto, he sings with a nasally Midwestern American accent something like “BREH.” I don’t mean to criticize Greenlaw’s ear at all by nitpicking this way; what I do want to notice is that she overlays her own London accent onto Dylan’s voice – she hears her own inflection, herself, re-sounded on Dylan’s very strange, idiosyncratic vocal performance. She has Dylan intone, like a slightly posh Londoner, BRAWSS. This imposition might be understood as antinomian, as reciprocal to the traces of Nova Scotia we can detect, liminally, in Bishop’s 1947 recordings. Greenlaw’s accent goes in the opposition direction, expressed rather than impressed. But it nonetheless re-casts that wobble as reciprocity, as give-and-take rather than determinism – regardless of what trajectory any tidy closure might follow.
I have taken too much time already, and there are numerous significant collisions and collusions with Bishop in Greenlaw’s poetry, but I want to conclude with a brief description of a recent electroacoustic project undertaken by Greenlaw at two railway stations in England, Manchester Picadilly and London St. Pancras, called Audio Obscura. Greenlaw created two audio installations which recorded the random chatter of travellers on their way through a rail station; that chatter was then edited to script and re-recorded by voice actors, and the resulting audio tracks made available for listening (on personal audio players with earphones) to passers-by in the stations in which they originated. In a print version of the transcriptions, which have been aggregated and shaped into fragmented lyrics, Greenlaw asserts that she has mined a kind of verbal DNA, caught in passing, and distilled a poetry that exists between vox populiand the solitary lyric voice. The resulting pull between close attention and diffused distraction, she suggests, enacts the subjective becoming of poetic voice, as its texts “hover between speech and thought,” or “somewhere between what is heard and what is seen, what cannot be said” (6). The texts themselves, as concatenated fragments, incline toward the legibility, the sense, promised by a poem – they look like poems – but finally resist hermeneutic finality:
Most of us don’t set out to scrutinise those around us or to listen to their conversations yet we find that faces, gestures and phrases stand out and are remembered whether we like it or not. Things catch our attention because they raise a question and fail to answer it. We are left in suspense. (4)
Those unanswered questions derive for Greenlaw directly from Bishop’s questions of travel, which Bishop distils into one key interrogative in her poem: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” (Poems ). Home becomes unheimlich, dislocated and disturbed in under Bishop’s scrutiny. Or, in Greenlaw’s hands, interstitial, transitional. Her set of glosses on William Morris’s Icelandic journal, also published in 2011 alongside Audio Obscura and The Casual Perfect, involve Greenlaw taking up phrases from Morris’s prose and writing her way across and through them, not so much as explanation or expansion, not footnoting, but to recognize the intersubjective disturbance, the wobbles, of travelling. For her, Morris offers
the document of a journey that becomes a description of all journeys: the tensions that set in once the decision has been made, the hope that something will keep you at home coupled with the fear of missing your plane or boat or train, the realization that you are dis-equipped however much luggage you have brought along with you, the dropping of habits and co-ordinates, the ease with which you cobble together new ones, and the point at which you stop travelling and start heading home. (xxiii)
That turning point, that peripety, is where the voice, both for Bishop and for Greenlaw, feels its way into audibility, into view.
Books and Such
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011. Print.
– – -. Exchanging Hats: Paintings. Ed. William Benton. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Print.
– – -. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Greenlaw, Lavinia. The Casual Perfect. London: Faber, 2011.
Print.
– – -. A World Where News Travelled Slowly. London: Faber,
1997. Print.
– – -. Audio Obscura. East Anglia: Full Circle Editions,
2011. Print.
– – -. The Importance of Music to Girls. London: Faber,
2008. Print.
Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1989. Print.
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print.
Shapcott, Jo, and Linda Anderson, eds. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet
of the Periphery. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2002. Print.
“Sweeney, Jack and Maire.” Archival Finding Aid, University
College of Dublin. http://www.ucd.ie/archives/html/collections/sweeney-jack&maire.htm. Web.
Travisano, Thomas, with Saskia Hamilton, ed. Words in Air:
The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and
Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2010. Print.
Live Short Take on Jen Currin and Ken Babstock
Last night, I attended a poetry reading by Jen Currin and Ken Babstock, part of the Play Chthonics series here at Green College, U. B. C. As an experiment in listening, in refocusing a divided attention, or maybe in overwriting distraction, I thought I would try blogging live, drafting a post as a transcript and as a reaction. I find I have trouble hanging on to the lines of poems at readings; there is no rewind, no pause, and if things seem to resonate and to hang in my ear for a moment or two, the succession of coming lines overwrites and pushes them out of my immediate memory. I tried to write the odd line down as the reading happened, tapping it onto the virtual keyboard of my smartphone blogging app. I hope I didn’t distract from the experience of those around me. Some people find the technologies of social media inherently abrasive, rude. And maybe they’re not wrong. Those technologies are at least distracting, and distracted. It was a great reading; both poets offered up innovative, paced, striking poems. There was too much to catch. But I tried to hang on to bits as they flowed passed:
Jen Currin is reading poems chosen by chance from her books. This: “Night arrived in the form of a candle.” This, not given at a reading before: “Dogs on film and no one wants to hold her hand in exile.” And this, from somewhere in her Hagiography: “To make it sane I planted poppies.” New pieces: “Photo Booth” (“You’re a descriptive kind of girl”); “The Oceans” (“I feel your seaweed body bending my way”); “Taking an Intuition Class” (“We understand a little, just a little of us”); “The Emergencies” (“We must listen”); Our Face on the Cover”; “Fear is Not a Body Part.” “The Art of the Spiritual Headache” ends with a gesture at freedom, freeing. Applause.
Ken Babstock is trying sitting rather than standing: harder to breathe, but less jittery. The necro lyric or the zombie lyric: writing continuing to write lyric beyond its end. “Are songs litter?” Reading like Jen some things that he doesn’t normally. Randomized choices? An elegy for Vic Chesnutt, “I Think I Will Go to Bakersfield”: “What can I say? I’m done.” “Hoping Your Machine Can Handle the Big Image”: a response to Karen Solie’s “Tractor”. Ken says solipsism gets a bad rap. Rep? Rap. Now a sequence of sonnets, procedural constraints, hybrids, holes. Not wholes. Nostalgically treating Cold War surveillance. Low frequencies.
During the question session, Jen discusses her interest in Elizabeth Bishop, and talks about a project for which she uses the words of Bishop’s poems as a source vocabulary to make new poems, rearrangements. Ken is asked about the connections between his new sonnets and John Berryman’s Dream Songs.
There was more. You can hear it on the recording. But I wanted to listen rather than transcribe so I stopped. Interesting how little clings to such a transcription, though my impression was that the act of copying did intensify the memory of the words, of lines. But much fell away, as well.
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| If you look closely, you can see my smartphone open and lit up on my lap. (Photo by Karen Correia Da Silva) |
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 