HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MS. BISHOP

By Zachariah Wells

Had she not died in 1979, today Elizabeth Bishop would be 100 years old. Given that, I thought I'd dedicate my last post as guest blogger here to one of our very best Canadian poets.[1]

As it happens, I'll be presenting a paper at a special symposium in Halifax this June, commemorating the Bishop centenary. The focus of that paper is Bishop's poem “The Bight.” The space-time moment preserved in this poem is Key West's Garrison Bight on February 8, 1948, Bishop's 37^th birthday. Bishop is often lauded for her skill as a descriptive writer, but even for her, this piece is remarkable for being almost pure scene-painting.

If you came across “The Bight” in an anthology with no prior knowledge of Bishop's biography or body of work, you might at first think it has very little to say for itself, that it was pretty and simple, but none too deep. Some critics have indeed come to such conclusions, such as Edwin Honig, who, in a review of the book in which “The Bight” was published, damned Bishop with the faint praise of being very good within the narrow range of her “limited performances.” Bishop herself, in a letter to Robert Lowell, called “The Bight” a “complicated” poem, and hindsight suggests that Honig failed at what Bishop did best: paying scrupulous attention to details.

For all the “sheerness” of this poem's surface, it subtly invites the reader to dip beneath it (or tear it open: just look at how many piercing, cutting and rending tools appear here) and read between its “crumbling ribs.” The first such invitation comes in the title itself. By eschewing the option of calling this poem, say, “Lines Composed on the Shore of Garrison Bight on My Thirty-Seventh Birthday. February 8, 1948,”[2] Bishop leaves the door open to temporal-spatial, semantic and aural ambiguities. A bight is a specific sort of bay, “A stretch of water between two headlands; a bay, esp. a shallow or slightly receding bay,” according to the OED. Another such body of water is the Minas Basin, that arm of the Bay of Fundy familiar to Bishop from her childhood on its shore. The Bay of Fundy is famous for its dramatic, record-holding tides; when Bishop starts a birthday poem with “At low tide like this,” you can be pretty sure she has her troubled past on her mind and finds herself at a personal low ebb. The poem is not just intercostal, but intercoastal, too. This reading is particularly compelling when you consider that Bishop had, less than two years previously, revisited Nova Scotia—a trip that led to such classics as “At the Fishhouses” and “The Moose.”

A bight is also “A bend, crook, esp. one in a body or limb; (also) the fact of bending or being bent, crookedness.” This corporeal association, followed by those “ribs” invites the reader to see a “correspondence” between this scene and the speaker's person—the heart behind the ribs, as it were. Once that link has been forged in the reader's mind, it doesn't take long to realize that this apparently placid piece of description is the muted, stoical expression of an existential crisis. Bishop was a keen reader of TS Eliot's criticism, but what we see in “The Bight” is not so much Eliot's “objective correlative” as a kind of “subjective correlative” of which Bishop was a master.

Finally, a bight is also a nautical term for “A length of rope when looped or folded, esp. distinguishing the body of the rope from its ends; a loop in a length of rope.” In the context of this poem, that loop is a life, poised between birth and the poet's eventual end. Not only does the poem begin with a reference to Bishop's birth, but the last two lines of the poem—the other end of a 37-line rope, you might say—are engraved on Bishop's tombstone in Worcester, Mass.[3] Written at a crucial time in her life—“Thirty-seven / and far from heaven,”[4] she had reflected—“The Bight” captures Bishop's Dantean moment of waking in a dark wood, the right road lost. She had a difficult life, was often ill, struggled with alcoholism and, though her first book had been published, she had serious doubts about her life's course as a poet. That she is able to reflect on this history and find it not only “awful,” but “cheerful” too, and that she speaks of it all in such a veiled, restrained manner, is a testament to Bishop's personal resilience and strength of character—and to her vision, in all senses of the word.

Bishop's close attention to the surface of things has garnered her many admirers, few as ardent as John Ashbery. In another poem of oblique self-representation, informed, I don't doubt, by Bishop, Ashbery says:

But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.

...

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.

And that, it seems to me, is what “The Bight” is: “a visible core” and “pure / Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.” No one could manage this kind of complex rhetorical gesture as deftly as Bishop.

The poem contains nuances and layers I don't have the space or time to dredge here (my paper will explore, among other things, the poem's place within Bishop's oeuvre and its often agonistic correspondences with George Herbert, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Emerson, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens), but I hope I've convinced you to dig into Bishop's poetry today and down the line. She's not the easiest poet to get to know, but spend enough time with her poems and they might just become lifelong friends.

In the spirit of Bishop's correspondence with other poets, I recently wrote a poem to her, which I'll use to conclude this post. Like Bishop, I've moved around a lot; her treatments of home and homelessness have always resonated with my experience.

WAYPOINTS

for Elizabeth Bishop

Comes a time, traveller, to rest your bones

by the roadside, to stretch out in a flowered

ditch, catch your breath and watch the patterned

play of sunlight and shadow on the membranes

of your eyelids, a few minutes or an hour

if needed. Comes a time at a trivial

junction to pause and reconnoitre,

reconsider flight plans and waypoints, wait

for someone with a wagon to pass by

and offer you a ride wherever it is

they're going. Comes a time when the sky

's dyed rose and darkening, to find a roof

or some other form of warmth and shelter

that might, on waking, be mistaken for a home.

---

[1] This statement is far more controversial than it should be, given that Bishop herself once said she was ¾ Canadian. Bishop, much of whose childhood was spent in her mother's ancestral home of Great Village, Nova Scotia, also lived in the US, Europe and Brazil. She is usually identified as an American poet and has rarely graced the pages of Canadian anthologies. I tended to assume that the fault of such omissions lay with Canadian scholars and anthologists, but discovered, when I attempted to include a Bishop poem in my sonnet anthology, Jailbreaks, that Bishop's American publisher does not wish her poems to be included in Canadian anthologies, for fear that this will cause “confusion.”

[2] Part of my paper will examine the relationship of this poem to Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey”; in a letter to Marianne Moore, Bishop half-jokingly referred to herself as a “minor female Wordsworth.”

[3] Bishop's desideratum was that only the last line be used, but this went unheeded for years until Bishop enthusiasts intervened. Their hearts were clearly in the right place, but the inscription of the penultimate line as well as the last one seems to me a failure of either nerve or judgment.

[4] A much less gloomy take than her journal entry of February 8, 1941: “—I am thirty years old to-day—& nothing accomplished.”

Born and raised on PEI, Zachariah Wells has lived in seven provinces and territories over the past fifteen years. He now finds himself in Halifax (for the third time), where he works as a freelance writer and editor and seasonally for Via Rail Canada, on board The Ocean Ltd. Wells is the author of the poetry collections Unsettled (Insomniac Press, 2004) and Track & Trace (Biblioasis, 2009), co-author of the illustrated children's story Anything But Hank! (Biblioasis, 2008) and editor of Jailbreak: Canadian Sonnets (Biblioasis, 2008) and The Essential Kenneth Leslie (The Porcupine's Quill, 2010).