Dorm living, senior year of college. This must have been before I inherited a large spotted bunny from my friend Stanley’s dorm-mate. Lily had been keeping the pet (her first) in a closet from the time it was a small ball of fluff, but when I got it bunny was the size of a fat cat. Every time you came home from class there she’d be, grunting and looping around the room like a desperate rutting moose with lop ears and a cotton tail. We had to rig up a special waist-high baby fence to take up all the floor space and keep her from boxing my other bunny (did I mention there was another bunny in the room? also a large bookshelf pantry full of food, and a no-pets rule) on the ears. How did I ever get any work done?
Elizabeth Bishop: NewsHour Poetry Series : Video ↘
an Elizabeth
Watching the video brings to mind my in-college realization (after lapsing out in Modern Poetry class, certain I was going insane when Prof Leibovitz started to describe/analyze/exegisize Questions of Travel seeing as I did not recognize anything of Bishop in his words; after accidentally on purpose missing the rest of our class sessions that semester, and passive-aggressively in a fit of self-preservation decided to read only Marianne Moore and EB //collected correspondences, biographies, poetries, interviews essays etc.// even though the semester final would be a sweep of the modern canon; after all this, writing an essay about The Moose and having to deliver it by cab to my prof’s apartment (an event of which all I remember is the building had a lovely wrought iron door like in Buenos Aires)), the shock of clarity the revelation when I receiving pencilled comments suggesting the need to account and explain EB’s queer constructions for the ear and eye. Which I could not do! because I had not realized and still cannot see how they are strange! to me her writing just seems normal, and the rest of us affected.
Funny she is known for writing about traumatic experiences, loss and the importance of memory, how hard it is to be an individuated being; also for her perfectionistic revision and “unusual and interesting way of looking at the world” oh and that at first she was thought of as a miniaturist.
- identified—because of my childhood—with the collection of visual/cyclical themes in her poems, and so did not realize these as particulars. again, overgeneralization from the shape of my experience making it hard to tell when something is different, or what it is that attracts me in the first place.
- the interviewee wishy-washy listing these things of EB’s as such, they seem dumb and just words not lived humanness. signs w/ o referent, so expect they’re gonna show up in all poetry and are not a special or specific feature of any poet.
- the bare fact is comparative or umbrella-concept words that can apply to her poetry or even the process won’t call to mind the sensation of it at all, of why or when you would pick her Collected from the shelf instead of someone else’s.
- articulate people like the interviewee find there’s nothing even close they can say which catches hold of bishop, and so dwindle down to biography or read-aloud mode (or failing those two, personal history and zoo anecdotes).
- all our efforts amount to is “EB was unusually good describing things as only she could. I tried to savor to tell of it and / experience the meal twice, but ay the meal was her telling of it and oh no cook’s gone home”
favorite day at the Cooper-Hewitt, college.
bad baby up all night and then these are the campus steps in the morning?
