Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box

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Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box

Tess Taylor, The Atlantic

During her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was famous for her fastidiousness. John Ashbery once affectionately dubbed her “a writer’s writer’s writer,” and she curated her poems with exacting care, often letting nearly finished drafts sit for years at a time while she hunted for just the right word. One poem, “The Moose,” begun in the mid-forties, is legendary for waiting nearly thirty years to receive her seal of approval. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this reticent perfectionism, Bishop’s work invited the curiosity of her readers. In 1955, Katherine White, then poetry editor at The New Yorker, wrote her, “As usual, this letter is a plea to let us see some of the Elizabeth Bishop manuscripts that I feel certain are on your desk, all finished if only you could bring yourself to part with them.” Bishop couldn’t bear to part very often. By the end of her life, she had approved only a relatively small body of work for publication—300 pages, slim in comparison to her friend Robert Lowell’s behemoth 1,500-page “Collected Poems”.
(…) It is impossible to know what to make of the artifacts of any life, especially that of a writer as private as Bishop. Still, twenty-six years after Bishop’s death, Alice Quinn, the current poetry editor of The New Yorker and a Bishop devotee, has gathered and ordered the fragments so that the world can try to enter the spaces Bishop leaves behind.

Carol Bere, Contemporary Poetry Review

“I wish I had written a great deal more. Sometimes I think if I had been born a man, I probably would have written more. Dared more, or been able to spend more time at it. I’ve wasted a great deal of time,” Elizabeth Bishop commented in an interview with George Starbuck (Ploughshares, Spring 1977). Yet Bishop dared in her own way to capture an individual world within each poem; her poetry was generally exploratory, truth-seeking, different in the best sense of the word, non-repetitious, and underpinned by a controlled mastery of form. Bishop’s poetry may be grounded in everyday descriptive details, but she is also preoccupied with dreams, mysteries, and the strangeness of existence. All of those elements can be found in varying degrees—and in occasionally surprising ways—in “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box”, Alice Quinn’s well-edited collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments. The volume may stop short of representing Elizabeth Bishop Unplugged, but it does provide a welcome opportunity to consider her creative process…

Carol Rumens, Guardian

Although they do not map the stages of composition, these drafts show us the kinds of sketches and improvisations Bishop worked with. We learn she had a habit of jotting an alternative word or phrase in the righthand margin, and glimpse her reviewing her raw material from new angles. That Bishop would have hated to see her rough work in print is certainly possible, but the book’s editor, Alice Quinn, does not pretend that the work is anything but rough. The poems are framed by commentary, almost as they are framed in real life by their boxes and shelves in the Vassar archive. If Bishop did not destroy her papers but gave them to a university library, she could not have seriously opposed a wider readership, provided we read, as Quinn encourages us to, as explorers of process rather than consumers of product.

Sheila Farr, The Seattle Times

The work in “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box” doesn’t live up to Bishop’s famously perfectionist standards. Many of the poems remain unresolved. Others are embarrassingly slight or in such raw form as to be little more than seeds. (…) Quinn provided a brief introduction and copious endnotes to the material, but her words seem geared to the most devout Bishop scholars. For the book to be truly user-friendly, it would benefit from a more comprehensive introduction to the poet’s life and work, rather than asides to other scholarship. (…) The most revealing part of the book for me is the series of facsimiles of 15 separate drafts that preceded the publication of Bishop’s masterful “One Art.” Here you can see the transformation of a great poem from amorphous thoughts to sheer elegance of expression.

William Logan, The New Criterion

After her mid-thirties, she finished fewer than two poems a year; and her papers contain notebook after notebook and file after file of poems in fragmentary or unfinished form—some just dust heaps of phrases, others roughly glued into shape, some dragged through numerous frustrating drafts, and a few that seem to lack nothing but the poet’s approval. (…) Her vulnerability, her charming chaos (even when complete, the poems feel fragmentary, like her personality), were not overcome but succumbed to—she lacks that seriousness, that pretentiousness in the poet’s lingua franca, that in [Robert] Lowell, [Randall] Jarrell, and [John] Berryman now seems leaden, done by union rule for union wages. Bishop emerges from this book a more personal poet, the made surfaces of her poems concealing the disorder from which they were made.

Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

One wonders what prevented Bishop from finishing what often appeared to be promising beginnings to poems. In a letter to [Marianne] Moore from Key West in 1937, she writes: “Once more I am overcome by my own amazing sloth and unmannerliness. Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don’t do it at all?” (…) What these uncollected works lay bare for me is how much emotion there was in Bishop’s poems to start with, which her endless tinkering tended to obscure in the end. It has made me read her published work differently, discovering intimate elegies and love poems where previously I heard only an anonymous voice. “The enormous power of reticence—that is the great lesson of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” Octavio Paz said of her. He was right.

Sam Munson, Commentary Magazine

Indeed, “Edgar Allan Poe” contains poems that an artist less demanding than Bishop would have not merely published but brandished as triumphs. (…) But the volume is also not without its problems, resident in the nature of the material from which it has been assembled. Helen Vendler, writing in the New Republic, suggests that these incomplete, sometimes greatly flawed, and occasionally banal works should never have been brought to light. That is taking things too far. (…) Given the amount of energy devoted to the painstaking excavation of the works and lives of lesser American poets, any reader of Bishop, and any lover of American literature, has reason to be grateful for this book.

2018-08-21T17:23:10+00:00 April 14th, 2007|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 53|0 Comments