Elizabeth Bishop, briefly

I wanted to post tonight, but I find I’m too tired to think of anything clever to say. Fortunately, the world is full of very clever things said by other people. One of my favourite non-fiction books ever is Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets, written by Ian Hamilton. In it, he provides brief outlines of the lives and works of 45 poets that include the obvious choices such as Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, E.E. Cummings, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin, but also lesser known poets like Charlotte Mew, Hart Crane, Roy Fuller and James Merrill. The outlines are magnificent, a mere three or four pages each but packed with distilled literary goodness that brings together life and art in accessible and entertaining ways. These are followed by some samples of each poet’s writing, so in the space of ten minutes you can feel like you have some insight and appreciation where before there was only the absence of knowledge.

I thought I would quote Hamilton on Elizabeth Bishop, one of the few poets whose work I have read despite the fact I’ve never been obliged to study her. Bishop died in 1979, aged 68 and a highly respected, much lauded poet; during her lifetime she kept a wholly discreet cloak around her private life and remarked with some asperity on the contemporary ‘confessional’ poets, ‘You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.’ Here’s what Hamilton has to say:

‘Austere and almost fiddlingly skillful, more interested in places than in people, detached almost to the point of authorial invisibility, she was there to be invoked as a cool, neo-classical alternative to the various slacknesses and excesses of the moment: excessive avant-gardism, excessive self-exposure, excessive political engagement, and so on. There was nothing excessive about Bishop, so it seemed. For her, there was an active virtue to be found in self-forgetfulness, in saying “look at that” instead of “look at me”.

‘The year 1994 saw the publication of Bishop’s Letters, and of two biographies – together, they revealed a life that had been filled almost to ruination by excess: drink, sexual passion, sickness, suicides. Suddenly it was possible to read the Bishop oeuvre in a different way: to find in its low-key formality a painful yearning for the non-excessive, the repetitive, the stable.’

And here’s one of her better known, and perhaps more personal, poems:

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing father, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.