Of Pungent Fruit, Bright Green Wings, Oreos

I find myself completely and utterly charmed today by this 1981 interview with Elizabeth Bishop in The Paris Review (because clearly I’ve been making my way through a lot of those interviews lately). There’s a lot to love about it, including Bishop’s description of when she found out she’d won the Pulitzer:

INTERVIEWER
You were living in Brazil, weren’t you, when you won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956?

BISHOP
Yes, it was pretty funny. We lived on top of a mountain peak—really way up in the air. I was alone in the house with Maria, the cook. A friend had gone to market. The telephone rang. It was a newsman from the American embassy and he asked me who it was in English, and of course it was very rare to hear someone speak in English. He said, “Do you know you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize?” Well, I thought it was a joke. I said, “Oh, come on.” And he said, “Don’t you hear me?” The telephone connection was very bad and he was shrieking. And I said, “Oh, it can’t be.” But he said it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t make an impression on Maria with this news, but I felt I had to share it, so I hurried down the mountain a half mile or so to the next house, but no one was at home. I thought I should do something to celebrate, have a glass of wine or something. But all I could find in that house, a friend’s, were some cookies from America, some awful chocolate cookies—Oreos, I think—so I ended up eating two of those. And that’s how I celebrated winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Oreos! Elizabeth Bishop ate Oreos! There’s something remarkable about the idea that Elizabeth Bishop might once have pulled apart two of those black wafers, licked at the processed whatever-that-is in the center. That’s what’s really struck me about this interview, the funny kind of human-ness she’s exuding as she’s talking about never being able to get into soap operas or saying of Marianne Moore, “I don’t think she ever believed in talking about the emotions much.”

She also responds to the interviewer about the oft-repeated notion (criticism, perhaps?) that she was never quite as prolific as some of her contemporaries in a way I find really comforting:

INTERVIEWER
You’ve never been as prolific as many of your contemporaries. Do you start a lot of poems and finish very few?

BISHOP
Yes. Alas, yes. I begin lots of things and then I give up on them. The last few years I haven’t written as much because of teaching. I’m hoping that now that I’m free and have a Guggenheim I’ll do a lot more.

It’s comforting to know that Bishop, like many of the poets I know, prefaced any excuse as to why they’re not writing as much as they “should” with a good old-fashioned “alas.” Because—alas!—life is long and poems are hard, and the idea that Bishop could say in 1981 that she “hadn’t written as much because of teaching” in the last few years makes that vague, constant constriction in my throat about not writing enough loosen just a bit.

I have a friend who said that being a writer always involves living two lives: the life you live because the grocery shopping needs done and the life you live because you have thoughts that wrestle you away from that tuna salad you were making and force you into a chair to make sense of them. Reading this Bishop interview, I feel strangely comforted, like the things I do for my human-self—those long walks along Tempe Town Lake listening to sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels on audiobook, for instance—are allowable distractions from my writer-self. And as someone who just successfully defended my MFA thesis this time last week (!), I feel a sense of permission from reading this interview—permission to be quiet for a while, if I need to be, to enjoy my mornings spent thumbing through cookbooks for slow-cooking soups and reading without necessarily feeling compelled to write.

I’m working on an essay on Wallace Stevens this week, and Bishop’s interview reminds me of the second section in “Sunday Morning,” in which the speaker asks:

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Though Stevens is wondering why divinity must only come “in silent shadows and in dream,” and offers those early pleasures as alternatives to more traditional, religious comforts, I’m finding this especially moving in the context of writing—art and literature may  be heaven, and well worth the cherishing, but sometimes “late / coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” have an essential physical beauty that deserve cherishing, celebration. Like, say, pulling apart an Oreo, ever so slowly.

So, friends, I ask: what philosophies do you have for when the fields lie fallow, by your design or otherwise? Are you reading this right now and thinking, “oh, God, I should be writing right this instant.”

*

Stevens, Wallace. “Sunday Morning.” Selected Poems. Ed. Jon N. Serio. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. 42-45. Print.

Some of my favorite things–

Happy poetry month, everyone! April, if not time for re-reading “The Waste Land,” is a time for indulgence in the lilac-colored goodnesses of the world. So, it’s time for my favorites, here! I think we all have five (or so) such poems– poems that might not necessarily make the cut if you were to do a careful analysis of all of your other favorites, culled and spread out on a desk. But these top five of yours do, probably, come to mind first— they’ve made their poem-shaped impression on your memory, or soul, or whatever other abstract part of your body is the most fun to imagine a poem’s imprint on.

So I’m going to share some of the best lines from poems that have made such an impression on me. These shouldn’t necessarily be telling of my preferred aesthetic or anything like that, and it’d be hard for me to label *any* poem with a capital F Favorite, but I love these poems. They’re consistently there for me when I need them, and, when I come back to them, they make my [whatever abstract body part we’ve decided on] quake.

5. “A Grave,” Marianne Moore. I love this, firstly, because the poem begins by doing precisely what the speaker gives us humans a hard time for having done ourselves: it’s a poem about looking at the sea, and it begins “Man looking into the sea,/ taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself….” That just tickles my funny bone. But, for a more enduring reason, I like that this poem is about the way we try to comprehend largeness of the world, our smallness in it: “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,/ but you cannot stand in the middle of this:….” And that ocean [that, need I say,  beautiful ocean–one shouldn’t overlook the absolute lushness of Moore’s verbal painting], that f’ng ocean

advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which
dropped things are bound to sink–
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.

Those dropped things being our looks, or the actual bodies of folks/turtles/whatever kind of life falls in said ocean– and that ocean behaving as if things didn’t sink here, as if those things didn’t have volition or consciousness. When it’s obvious to us, surely, that they do.

4. “The Ninth Elegy,” Rilke, translation A. Poulin [see the google book preview for this version–which is the best version; it’s on page 61, or click from the TOC]. “Why, when this short span of being could be spent/ like the laurel”– why, after all, should we not be something beautiful and consciousness-less– “why,/ then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate,/ long for fate?” WHY? And after spending our “irrevocable” once here, “What can we take across/ into that other realm?” Well, Rilke won’t say (“that’s better left unsaid”), but he will remind us that, among all of these unspeakable things, this speaking thing we do is miraculous:

…the wanderer doesn’t bring a handful of that
unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley,
but only some word he’s earned, a pure word, the yellow
and blue gentian. Maybe we’re here only to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window—
at most, pillar, tower… but to say them, remember,
oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves
never dreamed of existing so intensely.

3. “Appalachian Lullaby,” Charles Wright: We all have those poets we keep coming back to (if not exclusively) because of having shared the same home. I love traversing the land of my family’s Kingsport and then the mountains of North Carolina–traveling toward, it so happens, where we both went to college– in his verse. But the emotional chords he strikes are always just so, I don’t know, right; these poems are full of what east TN is actually full of: “night is seeping out of the Cumberlands…” and the “washed-red mimosa spikes,/ under the blue backwash of evening.” And, driving deeper: “Hello goodbye hello. Works and days./ We come, we hang out, we disappear.” Sheesh.

2. “372 [After great pain, a formal feeling comes–],” Emily Dickinson. I’m surprised at myself for this one– I don’t think this is even her most interesting poem. But something about its directness, her less-slant-than-usual way about it, that will always stick with me. The extended metaphor of remembering pain as one would feel while freezing to death = one of the creepiest in the universe, and that conditional phrase– “if outlived”– really socks it to me.

This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow–
First–Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go–

1. “The Snowman,”  Wallace Stevens [&, if I were to cheat and include a poet twice/try to fit two poems into this one very prominent spot, I’d add: “Thinking of Wallace Stevens at the Beginning of Spring,” also by Charles Wright, also from A Short History of the Shadow]. While we’re thinking about snow and coldness….Trying to trace the complex syntax of “The Snowman” from memory in front of an undergraduate workshop my have scarred me slightly, but it also ensured that this poem– at least the sentiment of this poem– never leaves me. One must, indeed, have “been cold a long time /To behold the junipers shagged with ice,” and not to go where our feeling human brain wants to take us, not to “feel any misery” in the sound of a few leaves, the dead landscape, the lonely-for-being-unalive snowman. But Stevens, in going there, admits the loneliness of even that subjectivity– of trying to hold the world with language, wrought as any word is with our own private emotions. It’s a loneliness that Wright echoes in his springtime response to Stevens: “Why do they stay so cold, why/ Do the words we give them disguise their identity/ As abject weather,…” And it’s understandably a loneliness that, as a poet, I often feel deeply.

***

I didn’t intend for all of these to be about, to some degree, the ephemerality of life. And I didn’t intend to pick so many dead modernists– I suppose we could have a conversation about my liberal arts education, but let’s not. Simply, I came across these during my most impressionable years. And I’l follow this up soon with some of my newer favorites, a list that will surely be chock-full of poems of different timbres and brighter colors. But damned if these poems won’t always haunt me. Which poems haunt you?

Adrienne Rich and the Obligation of Poetry

April may be the cruelest month (all that breeding of lilacs out of the dead land and all), but it’s also National Poetry Month, and here, at the beginning of a month of celebrating the power of words, I’d like to take a somewhat-belated moment to remember poet Adrienne Rich, who died just last week at the age of 82.

Like everyone else in the literary world, her death led me online to find comfort in her words, which have always offered a resilience, a hard edge against the world’s constant wavering. I found this interview in The Paris Review from just last year that stopped me  cold

What are the obligations of poetry? Have they changed in your lifetime?

I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference.

Nothing “obliges” us to behave as honorable human beings except each others’ possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a greater social compact.

And this is why Rich will always be an enduring voice for me: because she strives to capture the fact that, as she puts it earlier in the interview, her speakers are always individual, “but they’re searching for a shared moral reality.” Whether writing is (or ought to be) an inherently moral act may be a conversation for another time, but for me, Rich’s poems always trigger the activist in me: not just politically, but in terms of my humanity. Quite simply, she’s always made and will continue to make me want to be better.

I’ll leave you with a link to my favorite Rich poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” and invite you to link to and/or name your favorites in the comments!