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 Poet
series, “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 populi
and 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
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.
