Peter Campion, The Boston Globe
In several of these previously uncollected poems, Bishop broaches difficult subjects. In poems like “Key West” and “Something I’ve Meant to Write About for 30 Years,” she addresses the racial tensions of modern America. In “A Drunkard,” she writes of alcoholism. In poems like “To the Brook” and “Breakfast Song,” she writes, and gorgeously, of erotic love between two women. Such poems return us to Bishop’s great “Collected Poems” with a renewed sense of the personal anxieties and reveries that inform that work. (…) Thanks to this new collection, Bishop will have the recognition she deserves, while her readers will gain a refreshed feeling for the beguiling, and often painful, tensions behind her genius.
Adam Kirsch, The Times Literary Supplement
Reading such poems, it is natural for us to wonder whether Bishop’s reticence about sex was really a reticence about homosexuality – whether, if she had been born a little later, she would have taken advantage of the frankness available to Adrienne Rich and James Merrill.
The drafts in “Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox” cannot conclusively answer that question, but they help to shed some light on it. In several of these unfinishable poems, Bishop associates sex with shame, but not the shame of social prejudice or taboo. Rather, it is the shame of weakness, exposure, submission – of surrendering control, Bishop’s most prized possession, to a bodily instinct, or, still more terrifying, to another person. Lust as compulsion is the subject of the title poem, which takes place in a dive bar:
As easily as the music falls,
the nickels fall into the slots,
the drinks like lonely water-falls
in night descend the separate throats,
and the hands fall on one another
[down] darker darkness under
tablecloths and all descends,
descends, falls …
Poe said that poetry was exact.
But pleasures are mechanical
and know beforehand what they want
and know exactly what they want.
This kind of sexual “falling” (an echo of the suicidally insistent repetition of “down” in “At the Fishhouses”) can be found in several of the drafts. More fearful still, however, is the kind of emotional subjection that Bishop associates with love. There are some happy love poems here – in “Close close all night”, lovers are “close as two pages / in a book / that read each other / in the dark” – but they are slighter and less memorable than the unhappy ones. When Bishop examines love most intensely, she cannot separate it from the threat of abandonment – a lesson brutally enforced by the tragedies of her own life…
Gillian White, London Review of Books
Bishop lived in Brazil for much longer than any other one place; she was an itinerant for much of her life, and wrote to [Robert] Lowell in the late 1940s: ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.’
Yet Bishop worked against an inclination to self-pity. Her favourite lines from her poetry are from the end of ‘The Bight’ (1949): ‘All the untidy activity continues/awful but cheerful.’ The epigram represents more than a personal survival strategy – it’s something like a worldview. In a letter to Anne Stevenson in the 1960s (which Quinn quotes), Bishop writes: ‘My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’
(…) Somewhere between the wish that Bishop had been less of a perfectionist, and thus more prolific, and the wish to see only her perfect work (the cost of which would be the loss of this trove of new material), lies the ideally open-minded stance towards this collection. Such open-mindedness is what Alice Quinn’s remarkable archival and editorial feat deserves.
Anne Stevenson, Ready Steady Book
Bishop herself, in an essay called “Writing Poetry is an Unnatural Act” (brought to light in the recently published “Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box”) defined three qualities she most admired in the poetry she loved: accuracy, spontaneity and mystery. (…)
I do not believe that Elizabeth Bishop always wrote ‘great’ poetry. Part of her attraction is that she frequently failed to find her true note, her absolutely right voice, even in some of her (mainly early) published poems. In this, she was a poet’s poet for whom the chief advantage of having her drafts and unfinished work available for consultation in Alice Quinn’s recent collection is recognizing just how often she stumbled and how difficult it was for her to get her poems right.
Hers was a high, almost unachievable aim, one that I hope will set standards for accuracy and spontaneity in poetry today beyond anything that is learned in creative writing courses or undertaken in pursuit of a university career. As for that unteachable, hardly achievable quality of mystery, that’s something the muse still reserves for a personal gift. I suppose what Elizabeth Bishop can best teach us today are the virtues of patience, wit, perspective, persistence and –dare I say it?– ambition not so much for fame or success as for a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.
Meghan O’Rourke, Slate
Elizabeth Bishop was a famously meticulous writer. In a poem Robert Lowell once wrote for her, he asked, “Do/ you still hang your words in air, ten years/ unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps/ or empties for the unimaginable phrase—/ unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?” It’s no wonder, then, that the recent publication of Bishop’s hitherto uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments in “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box”, edited by Alice Quinn, encountered fierce resistance, and some debate about the value of making this work available to the public. (…)
A midcentury poet, Bishop wrote at a time when academic studiousness was one vogue (Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell) and self-revelation another (Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton). Following neither, she carved out an original niche, a poetics of subtle observation. Bishop writes about things: filling stations, radio antennae, shampooing another person’s hair, a moose in the road. Her work has, as Vendler has put it, a remarkable commitment to exactness, and her primary mode is description. (…)
Vendler argues that the variety of work here will confuse fledgling poets and poetry readers, leading them to confuse mawkish drafts with perfected excellence like that of “Crusoe in England.” On the contrary, these false starts warn us that it takes more than a tragic life to make a poem—indeed, that some efforts just don’t result in poems. And when they do, a tremendous amount of alchemy is required. Bishop might indeed be mortified by this book (what poet wouldn’t be embarrassed by the prospect of their scraps showing up in print), but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to publish it. “Edgar Allan Poe” is an extraordinary reminder that strong feelings and striking perceptions are not art until they have been transformed by our attention to them.