The Practice of Poetry

In a 1977 interview with George Starbuck, Elizabeth Bishop recounts a story about e.e. cummings. Bishop and cummings both lived in Greenwich Village and shared a maid for a while. The maid complained to Bishop about how the other poet would say to her, “Leave a little dirt, Blanche” (“A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop” 97). Bishop goes on to describe how cummings’ wife told the “appalled” maid stories about “a little mouse that would come out of the wall and get up on the bed. They would lie in bed and watch her roll up little balls of wool from the blanket, to make her nest” (97). The way Bishop tells this story is not gossipy or snide: she seems to enjoy cummings’ fascination with the mouse, and his acceptance of its place in his house.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems illustrate how she, too, opens herself up to wonder at the common things of everyday life. In an interview done a year later called “Geography of the Imagination,” Bishop tells Alexandra Johnson from the Christian Science Monitor, “I am very object-struck. Critics have often written that I write more about things than people. This isn’t conscious on my part. I simply try to see things afresh. A certain curiosity about the world around you is one of the most important things in life. It’s behind almost all poetry” (100). 

Bishop’s (and cummings’) enthusiasm and curiosity for the details of the world echoes William Carlos Williams’ exhortation, “No ideas but in things” in “A Sort of Song”:

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

The Lost Generation naturally swerved away from propagandizing or any kind of writing that told someone what to think or believe. It seems natural that echoes of this distrust would resonate with our current generation.  Perhaps we need to return to this line of thought and continue looking for ways “through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones.” But, it also seems like we are ready for poetry to move beyond the image.  We can use the methods for revealing truth that poets like Bishop et al. used, and explore with a self-conscious and critically aware perspective. Such poetry could offer a hopeful philosophy. The essential mindset of the poets who were watching mice, moose, and saxifrage is one of openness:  how can we bring this openness into the poetry of today & couple it with philosophies for survival, without layering it with the oily untruths of “rhetoric”?

For the interviews cited above and further interviews, see the book titled Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop(edited by George Monteiro, U.P. of Mississippi, Jackson, 1996).

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