Scott Bradfield,"It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop" (A Review of Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop), The Washington Post, November 8, 2019:
- Her loneliness: “When you write my epitaph,” she once told her lifelong friend, Robert
Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
- Her talent: James Merrill once claimed she “had more talent for life — and for poetry — than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
- Her secrecy: It is hard to think of a major American poet who revealed so little about herself while revealing so much about the human world we inhabit. Through about 100 poems published during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop — in her compact, reticent, nearly invisible way — contained multitudes. [...] “You know what I want?” she once asked her friend, Richard Howard. “I
want closets, closets, and more closets.” There was something secret
about every poem she composed, like a private space that you only slowly
found your way into. And one that never made you eager to leave.
- Her literary method: Most of all, Bishop never lacked the luxury of time, working for years and even decades on individual poems until she got them just right. There was a dogged pertinacity to the way she composed poems, relentlessly hunting down every perfect word and nuance, often assembling her lines on a large bulletin board over her desk, like one of those serial killer-hunting detectives in a television series.
from Rowan Williams, "Why Poetry Matters" (A Review of John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century), New Statesman, October 23, 2019:
Burnside is a consistent champion of difficulty in poetry, the quality that liberates the reader (and writer) from a “prefabricated world” in which nothing is ever new and disorienting. On this basis he has some pretty sharp things to say about how poetry is often taught in schools – as illustrative of subject matter rather than as something that has to be wrestled with first and foremost as speech. Pupils, he says, are likely to go away thinking more about this subject matter than about what has been happening in the words they hear or read. Pushing students into prematurely writing their own poems on the subject further shrinks the challenge of staying with the difficulty and valuing it in its own terms. Yet he also has astringent things to say about “lazy” difficulty. Verbose, self-indulgent poetry, drawing attention to its own ingenuity, labours for surface effect rather than transparency to what the poem directs us to – which is not themes or ideas but the “music” of the givenness of a moment, or a juxtaposition of words, or a collision of sensations.
[...]
Burnside mischievously suggests that our passion to “understand” poetry may derive from “a middle-school confusion of literature and theology”, rooted in the abiding problem of making sense of an opaque scriptural text. But if there is a proper overlap between the two it is surely here, in the way poetry affirms the material, finite world but is always conscious of an unimaginable backdrop, never trying to occupy or contain that elusive perspective.
