ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry lectures featuring talks by poets, scholars, and educators, presented by Poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear a discussion concerning the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop is considered by many critics to be one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. She was born in 1911, attended Vassar College, and later lived in Key West and Brazil before returning to Massachusetts. Her poetry is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging and the human experiences of grief and longing. In 1970, she took a teaching position at Harvard. She died in 1979. In commemoration of the centennial of her birth, the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard hosted a conversation featuring Bishop's, friends, and students. The discussion touched on Bishop's undergraduate escapades, her relationship with her mentor Marianne Moore, her friendship with Robert Lowell, as well as her years at Harvard, her generosity, and her personal struggles.

Lloyd Schwartz hosted The Conversation, which included Frank Bidart, Megan Marshall, Gail Mazur, and Rosanna Warren. Lloyd Schwartz is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays about Elizabeth Bishop and has edited Bishop's poems, prose and letters. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Frank Bidart has published eight books of poetry. He teaches at Wellesley College. Megan Marshall is a writer and scholar. Her book, 'The Peabody Sisters' was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She teaches at Emerson College. Gail Mazur was a student of Robert Lowell and has published four books of poetry. Rosanna Warren is a professor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Her most recent book of poems is 'Ghost in a Red Hat'. Warren's mother, Eleanor Clark, was Bishop's roommate in college. The program took place in March 2012 before a live audience at Harvard. We joined the conversation in progress, as Lloyd Schwartz asks Rosanna Warren to talk about how her mother met Elizabeth Bishop when they were students at Vassar.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Eleanor Clark, Rosanna's mother, and Bishop were classmates, even started a magazine together because these two brilliant young women couldn't get published in the official Vassar magazine. So they started their own magazine called 'Con Spirito', and were soon absorbed by the Vassar official Vassar Magazine. But I wish you would tell this story.

ROSANNA WARREN:
I know Bishop through my mother, and they were friends from freshman year at Vassar, off and on for many years. And they were, as Lloyd said, literary young ladies there at Vassar and both of them miserable. And in the winter they decided to run away from Vassar. And it was beginning to snow and dusk was falling, and they went out on the highway and started hitchhiking. And they got a ride. Somebody drove them 20 miles down the highway south of Poughkeepsie and then let them off. Now, by this time it was snowing hard and getting dark. And they waited and waited and waited on the highway, shivering in their coats. And nobody came or nobody stopped and nobody came and nobody stopped. And they must have been getting a little alarmed. And then they saw a pair of headlights coming slowly through what was now quite heavy snow, and the headlights stopped, and it was a police car, and they were arrested for vagrancy and prostitution. (LAUGHTER) And that is not the end of the story. They were taken to a rural New York State police station, where no doubt the very bored cops who didn't have anyone else to arrest or harass that night, had a lot of fun I imagine, booking these two young ladies for soliciting on a public highway and other crimes.

And they were desperately trying to prove that they weren't prostitutes, that they were college girls. And the policemen were saying, yeah, right. And this went on for a very long and troubling time for them. They weren't allowed even to make a phone call. And finally, after what seemed to them, I think, like hours, Bishop, as she was called, rummaging through her pea jacket pockets dredged up out of one pocket the Greek notes from her freshman Greek class at Vassar, and from the other pocket a copy of a 'True Romance' comic book. And the combination of the Greek notes and the 'True Romance' finally persuaded the police that these probably weren't hookers, and only then were they allowed to make a phone call. And Bishop, being an orphan, didn't have anyone to call. But my mother called her mother, who was an idiosyncratic divorced lady. That itself was unusual for that generation. I always call them threadbare New England gentility, quite threadbare, my grandmother, who was in Manhattan at the time but this time it was very late at night, probably around one in the morning, had come back from a rather fancy party to which she'd been invited, no doubt by better-heeled relatives, and she was still wearing her silver evening gown, and gets a call from a police station in upstate New York that her daughter is in jail and needs to be bailed out, along with another young lady.

And my grandmother, bless her heart without taking off her silver evening gown, put on her boots and her coat, went downstairs and cranked up the Model T and pat it up through the storm arriving at this little police station at dawn. And the policemen were thoroughly amazed to have the door fly open and out of the blizzard a lady in a silver evening gown. As if the evening had not already been exciting enough, and she paid the bail and scooped up the girls and drove them back to Vassar, and got them back in their dorm before 8:00 in the morning. And they were never caught. (APPLAUSE)

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Does't that sound like a scene from 'Bringing Up Baby'?

FRANK BIDART:
Exactly Katharine Hepburn showing up at the police station in her evening gown. Fantastic!

ROSANNA WARREN:
My knowledge of Bishop is all mediated through that literary friendship between her and my mother and their common loathing for Mary McCarthy, who was also a classmate. You can see it now.

FRANK BIDART:
The first time I really met Bishop, which was much later, after the time that she had appeared at Lowell's office hours. By that time, I had gotten to know Lowell very well and had worked with him and had become a friend. So when he decided to stay in England in 1970 and told the Harvard English Department they should hire Bishop to replace him, and she had been in Brazil, and so she came from Brazil to teach. She did not know almost anybody in Cambridge, maybe a couple of people. And he wrote to me that I should introduce myself to her. And so I had the best possible introduction to her because it was through his good offices. But this was not very long, a few years, I'm not actually sure when the group came up, but Mary McCarthy had published a book which had become very famous, called the Group, about the group of women at Vassar that Rosanna's mother was one of, one of them was a lesbian. Lakey. And people took Lakey to be a portrait of Bishop. And Bishop was extremely aware of the fact that that's how people thought that's what the book was about, and that it was about her.

And she was very angry. And that first time I met her, she talked about being furious at McCarthy, saying, I made that woman $1 million. And she was feeling not rich.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Both she and I mean, I never had that conversation with her, but I was certainly present to hear her deny that that character was based on her at all. And I know, and I've read Mary McCarthy denied that it was based on Elizabeth Bishop. The one detail about that character that convinces me that, I mean, it's obviously a composite of some sort. I mean, the character even has a woman partner who is a Latin American aristocrat. But the one detail that really resonated for me was that the character of Lakey is described as having an uncanny knack for giving the right presents, and Bishop really had that capacity. I don't know, the present I love hearing about the most is something that she gave Frank that I think was a birthday present.

FRANK BIDART:
Yeah, she gave me a I mean, the punctuation, especially in my early books, is very heavy. And she would kid me about it and, and argue with me about it. And at on the beach at North Haven, she found all these stones, and she made up this thing that looked like this that was whitewashed white, very, but very startlingly pure white. And on it, she glued these stones that she had found that looked like marks of punctuation. So there was a stone that looked like a question mark, and there was a stone that could be a comma and then a dash, which I use. And she called it at the bottom, Paleolithic punctuation. And it's a beautiful it's really a beautiful object. But just to go back for a second to Mary McCarthy, she did feel, I mean, privately that that Lakey at some level was her. I mean, one sign of this was the fact that she lived in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares for 15 years. And at one point when Bishop and Lota were visiting America, she brought Lota to some occasion where the group got together.

And she always said that she regretted bitterly ever having done that, because that is a or at least there's a version of that in the group where Lakey brings her lover to who's not an American. So I mean it was not irrational for Bishop to feel that that the character in the group was at some level about her, and she felt very angry and very used.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Did, did Candice Bergen sweeten the pain at all?

FRANK BIDART:
I don't know. I don't know.

GAIL MAZUR:
Candice Bergen played Lakey...

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Played Lakey.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Played Lakey in the movie version of the group. I think the movie that would have most tickled her if she had been alive to see it is this, you know, fairly recent soap opera called In Her Shoes with Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine. And there's a scene in that movie in which Cameron Diaz, who's dyslexic, is serving as a volunteer in a hospital and there's an English professor who was probably dying in the in the hospital, and he has a copy of The Bishop, you know, collected poems on his bed table, the pink book with the bishop watercolor on the cover. And he asks Cameron Diaz to read a poem and she reads one art. And in fact, or at least, I mean, this is Hollywood. So she reads almost all of one art, but they cut out a stanza to, you know, a three line stanza that really shortens the amount of poetry.

FRANK BIDART:
Did she read it nicely?

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She reads it well, she's her character can't read aloud, but but she does. And then they have a discussion about it. I mean, I think Bishop would have been absolutely floored that a poem of hers was being discussed in a Hollywood movie, and the the English professor asks Cameron Diaz what she thinks the poem is about, and she says, oh, I think it's about friendship, which it isn't. And the English professor says, oh, you're absolutely right. But it's a kind of amazing to have that, you know, to have a bishop. I mean, that's sort of where she is in the national consciousness now.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Was she much of a movie goer?

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Yeah, she loved movies.

FRANK BIDART:
She did.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She loved movies.

FRANK BIDART:
She loved music.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She loved music. She loved Ella Fitzgerald. And in fact, we went to hear Ella Fitzgerald at the Boston Pops, I think a couple of times.

FRANK BIDART:
Well, one, at one point Fitzgerald had been in the hospital and she had not sung in public for like six months. And there was a lot of worry that in fact, she was gonna lose her sight.

GAIL MAZUR:
She did.

FRANK BIDART:
Ultimately she did, but but in the short run, she didn't. She had very thick glasses after that. But anyway. But then she gave a concert at Symphony Hall to really to thank. It was a benefit for the hospital and we went and I remember I mean, at the time I thought Fitzgerald sounded great and I was a little bit amazed that I did not hear any vocal problems because she was not young and she had not recorded or sung in public for a while. And Bishop had better ears than I did. She said, well, she wasn't quite as good as she had been, and I have subsequently heard lots of recordings made around that time. And it Fitzgerald after about 50, no 66 67 had real vocal problems. And she was right. It was inconceivable, in fact, that that day Fitzgerald had sung the way she had sung, say, even five years earlier. But I couldn't hear it in Bishop could.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
The other musical event that I think probably sticks out most in our minds, because it was another concert that we went to with Elizabeth Bishop, was the only concert Maria Callas ever gave in Boston. And we got I had a friend who worked for the box office at Symphony Hall, and we had great seats, and we went together...

FRANK BIDART:
And it's the only time Callas sang on this last tour she was singing with DeStefano is the only time she sang alone.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Alone.

FRANK BIDART:
And she was so much better than DeStefano was. And Bishop adored it and thought it was great.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
I wanna ask Megan about Bishop as a teacher.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Yes. Yeah.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
But also Bishop as part of this community of poets. And Gail was the founder of the Blacksmith House poetry series. And bishop actually came to readings.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Yeah, she came to readings. But the interesting thing about starting a reading series in Harvard Square, I had no affiliation with Harvard at all. So having Bishop and Lowell here and be so open to the poetry community, I started to refer to Harvard as my community college, which always got an appreciative laugh, and I thought, I have the best of both worlds. I'm not part of it, but I can partake. Of what? Of Bishop and Lowell. But she did come, and I was just thinking this morning about one of the things that had nothing to do with Harvard that was characteristic of her and of all of us at that time. In the mid-70s, there was a young gay genius poet who came here from Rhode Island named Peter Kaplan, and he very assertively befriended everyone. He came to the Blacksmith House all the time. He was writing. I think one of you published a poem of his in your...

FRANK BIDART:
The sestina. A great sestina.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Yes, a great sestina. He was 17 when he came. Yeah. And Bishop knew him, I knew him. He was overwhelming, sort of probably bipolar, very manic, hyper-irresistible young kid, and absolutely in love with poetry. And he moved to the Cape for a while, and then he tried to commit suicide. And everybody was very concerned about him. And then he disappeared. And his body was found in Newport Bay. And there was an anthology that Keith Waldrop and Providence published. And if anyone can help me with this, I'd appreciate it of poems for Peter. And I don't know if it was Lloyd or somebody told me that Elizabeth loved my poem. I don't have that poem or the anthology. I don't have a copy of it. So do you have do you have that?

FRANK BIDART:
No.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
I remember a line from it, which is more than I remember from my other poems. But in the next to last letter from Elizabeth in the Library of America collection is I just felt she was so kind to him was a letter to Peter's father, who had just lost his 18-year-old son, and she talks about he didn't have any money. He was on his own. How he brought her flowers, how touched she was by him. And reading that letter again recently just reminded me of what it was like to be here in this town with multigenerational poetry, relationships and the sort of sense, you know, we were thrilled by it. And of course, in retrospect, we also took it for granted because it was suddenly it was the way things were, the way the 60s and 70s were, the way things were. You know, the world was open. And I was thinking about something when Frank was talking before about Elizabeth really masquerading as a matron from Scarsdale. Who was... Was it Ashbery who talked of her as...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
A lifelong impersonation.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Of...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Of an ordinary woman.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Yeah. Well, I was gonna say back to the suits that I was looking up her recollection of Marianne Moore. And at the beginning, she's talking about her first meeting with Marianne Moore. And she says, I was absolutely terrified. So I put on my new spring suit and went down to New York to meet her. And I think aside from kind of wanting to establish a certain apparent conventionality, there was also a way that putting on the new spring suit gave her courage to go out to do things that she was frightened about. And I know, or at least I believe she was not very happy to be teaching and perhaps was shy, or did it out of... as a way to earn money. And...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She loved her students.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Yes.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She didn't love teaching.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Right. And so to be in the class, which was an extraordinary honor that I've come to appreciate more and more with every passing year, was to be with someone who was not really very comfortable being there, but it was still a wonderful thing to witness that it was as if we were all kind of helping her through this semester that we knew she had to do. And she began, interestingly, by saying that she did not believe that the writing of poetry could be taught. And I've said this to friends who teach in the MFA programs that we now all teach in, which were not so many of them at the time, if any. Hardly. And they say, oh, you know, how could somebody say that? How, you know, how rude to the students, you know? But I took it in an entirely different way that here she had lived a life of great effort to become a poet. How could she communicate that to us? And she certainly knew that to be a poet meant to have all the things within her that she alone had, how could she give that to us, much as she might wish to?

So the idea was that we just do what we could, you know, through the semester. And she gave us assignments, like to write a ballad. We wrote in forms. And I remember the first day, maybe to fill the time as I'm a teacher myself, you have to fill the time when nobody has yet written any poems. She gave us a photocopy of the first page of the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, which begins, this is a valley of ashes and a lovely poetic description. And she said, now take this prose and turn this into a poem with line breaks. And that was our exercise for the day. So we we labored through this semester and I think this was the time it comes up now and then about the dental work that was going on. So she may also have been in a great deal of pain, but at the end of the semester, she invited us to her apartment. I think it was. She'd newly moved into the apartment on Lewis Wharf. And this was 1976, and I think it was meant to be a party or a reading. I think she told us she had...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
A kind of last class.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
It was the last class, and maybe that was something she regularly did. But we all took the subway over to the North End and got out in this very cold. This was by then, December, and went into this building and emerged into this space, which at the time for us was absolutely new. And this is part of what an adventuresome person she was. She was living in a kind of a loft space with exposed brick. We had never seen exposed brick before. So it's very, you know, and...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
In what was considered a very seedy part of town.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
It was just kind of an experiment. What might we do with these old buildings, you know? And there she was, so much happier and again, kind of aglow in the way that she had been in Robert Lowell's course and just greeting us all, I haven't my sister happened to have just come back from a semester in Japan, and she said, oh, your sister can come too. And, you know, sister wasn't a poet, but there she was. And decorated, I think, with Brazilian folk art and other kinds of things framed elaborately. And, it was just an entirely different experience of who she was. And I believe we've been trying to work this out. She had a young man read his poems. She was very proud of this young man. Dark hair and a big beard, flowing locks. The young man read his poems to us and this seemed like the real world. This was poetry and...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Could have been. But I wouldn't have read more than one poem.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
No, I think it was one poem. Just one poem.

GAIL MAZUR:
Who's on first?

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She didn't like that poem.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
So Lloyd was telling me. Well, I think she'd begun to like me by then. Or like my poems. You're like...

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
No. No, she never liked my poems, but we had become friends by then, and I had just finished my dissertation on her in which she had read when she was in the hospital, I think, after an asthma attack. And I mean, my dissertation was on her first book, and she gave me her reading copy of North and South with a little inscription that says, from north to south, from south to north and back again and back again, with ditto marks to Lloyd Schwartz with thanks, Elizabeth. And it's probably the thing in my house that I treasure, most certainly a great present from her.

FRANK BIDART:
Something that's gone through a number of these stories is Bishop's disengagement from many of the prevailing attitudes in academia, and Lloyd's book was I think, the first serious collection of materials on her work. There had been a very small Twayne series and Stevenson's book, but there really had been very little scholarly work on her. She was very aware of this.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
Yeah. And she...

FRANK BIDART:
And she was very grateful for this because she knew the great value of the academic world becoming aware of the nature of her work, of her writing. But she was also very aware that there was not in anything like an adequate appreciation of what she had done.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
The little history of that volume, and in relation to her life is is very revealing, because it was a book that started to come together in 1976, and she was extremely helpful and cooperative in helping me put it together. And she was also aware that no publisher was interested in publishing it, that there was a series at Cornell volumes of essays about contemporary poets. And Cornell turned down this volume for a very bad reason, which I'd be happy to tell anyone in private (LAUGHTER) but not here. But after she died, maybe a year after she died, I got a note, a postcard from Donald Hall, who said, I'm starting a new series at the University of Michigan Press called 'Under Discussion'. I hear you have a volume about Elizabeth Bishop's circulating. I would like to publish it as the first volume in my series without having seen it. So by 1982, 1981, 1982, her reputation had so soared that someone was actually desperate to publish a volume, even if it wasn't any good, he was willing to publish it.

And there was such a huge change in the perception of the general literary perception of Bishop.

FRANK BIDART:
I think people like to think of Bishop as sort of rather calmly, placidly above such things, above caring. And it was not true. She was a human being, and she was aware of how issues like reputation affect one's life. And she wanted readers like everybody else. And when she came back from Brazil, she came back into a world in which Lowell's reputation was enormous and I think enormous for good reasons. But the fact is, it was very large and hers was not even remotely comparable. I mean, she lived in Brazil for a very long time. She had won prizes, but that did not really give her a passionate readership. And one day, visiting my apartment, she picked a book Off the Shelf, which was a collection of papers edited by Ian Hamilton of, I think there were papers that had originally been in the English magazine, The Listener, and there was an essay on Berryman and on Jarrell and on Sylvia Plath. And she looked through it and there was no essay on her. And she put it back on the shelf and she said, it's like being buried alive.

These things can be very cruel. And it was very wrong, but it was the world she lived in and could not, you know, she could not herself alone change critical climates. I've often said academia is this rule by fashion as Vogue magazine. And within a couple of years of her life, the fashion changed. Thank God in her favor. But it was not in her favor during her lifetime until the very end, until the last couple of years, just again, in terms of one's memories of her. And one of the most striking memories I have is the more I read her and the more I understood her work, the more I was amazed by it. I had grown up on the contemporary criticism, which very much emphasized Bishop as a great describer, as a rather minor poet who was a very brilliant kind of follower of Marianne Moore. And when I actually read the poems, this was just not true. This was not the case. She was much more than someone who was a wonderful describer. Well, there's a poem... The most striking anecdote I have in relation to this is about the end of her poem called 'At the Fishhouses'.

I mean, she has a number of poems that I think you really have to be called visionary. Poems of extraordinary reach and ambition. And they were not the poems that were emphasized by contemporary criticism. I mean, Jarrell has quite a nice essay on her, but it's really on Bishop as a kind of Vermeer-like miniaturist of beautiful surfaces. And it's not satisfying. It's not Jarrell at his best at all. Anyway, let me read you the very end of her poem At the Fishhouses, which is one of the great passages in 20th-century poetry, and then talk about when I discussed it with her. She's describing the sea, having visiting these fish houses that were slowly becoming more and more phased out in Nova Scotia. And then there's this extraordinary passage about the sea, which... this is not characteristic of the majority of the poem. And she says, I have seen it over and over the same sea, the same slightly indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free, above the stones, and then the world. If you should dip your hand in your wrist, would ache immediately.

Your bones would begin to ache, and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark grey flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. 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 flowing. And I said to her, this seemed to me an astonishing passage, and she talked about how excited she'd been when she'd written it. The first thing she did was show it to her analyst, Annie Bauman, and she said when she wrote it and she raised her arms like this, she said, I felt ten feet tall. She said, in some ways, I hardly knew what I was saying, but I knew that the words were right. And I think that attitude toward her work is very characteristic of Bishop. That is, at a certain level, she had an absolute certainty about what was right.

She could be very modest in many ways and rather differential. And yet she had this real toughness as an artist and a conviction that when she believes something was right, that's the way it had to be. And she wasn't gonna follow anybody's advice. And it's very in a way, it's heartening to realize that she knew how extraordinary that was. Though, as I said at the time, I do not believe there was any criticism that acknowledged in print how completely remarkable that is.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
When I was reading her memoir of Marianne Moore, she writes about how when she first read Moore's poetry, she was at Vassar. And I don't believe Moore's reputation was that high at the time.

FRANK BIDART:
Not enormous.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
Elizabeth Bishop, she said... I read it and she said, I didn't know that poetry could be like that. And that was the feeling that I had in the classroom, Robert Lowell's class, and she's reading Crusoe in England. And the atmosphere for poetry was so different from that. There was the confessional, and there was, I don't know, but this kind of persona poem that was so much more than that. Nobody was doing that. And I didn't really know. I can't say I knew how to appreciate it, except it was stunning. And clearly, Lowell appreciated it.

FRANK BIDART:
Yeah. No he did. I think Lowell always said she was his favorite poet, but he could not carry along his own audience to get to see that.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
I think there's a there's a really wonderful story about about her conviction, about her own work that goes back even earlier than that, because this was something and I and it's kind of famous story about her great earlier poem then At the Fishhouses called Roosters. Very ambitious, very daring because it's written in rhyming tercets. So three lines with three rhyming lines. And at that point, very early in her career, she showed everything to Marianne Moore. And Marianne Moore, and Marianne Moore's mother would read Bishop's poems and get and this is, you know, I say this is a kind of well-known story in Bishop's biography. And Marianne Moore was very disturbed by the rhymes. She didn't even like the title. She thought the title Roosters was vulgar, and she wanted Bishop to change the title to something that she thought was more classical, called The Cock. The cock crows. It's about partly about Saint Peter. And that Bishop was worldly enough to know that this was not possible. But it was the first time that she refused essentially to listen to Marianne Moore.

And she published that poem the way she wrote it, and it caused a real breach in her friendship with Marianne Moore that lasted a number of years. I mean, they kind of made it up, but they were never as close again. And Marianne Moore as the mentor regarded this as a kind of betrayal of her advice. And I'm sure Elizabeth Bishop knew that she was doing something that was risking really offending the one person who had, you know, the one person in high places who had really supported her. But damn it, she was not gonna change a word, let alone the title.

FRANK BIDART:
If you look at the version that Moore produced that she sent back to Bishop reproduced in various books, it wrecked the poem. I mean, it would have ruined the poem if Bishop had accepted it.

MEGAN MARSHALL:
I think it's in the Kalstone book, isn't it?

FRANK BIDART:
It's in the Kalstone book. I don't know if it's reproduced elsewhere, but it's in the David Kalstone book.

ROSANNA WARREN:
And Bishop is not Marianne Moore. I mean, she's not a little Marianne Moore or even a derivative in any fundamental sense. But Moore has her own magnificences. But I find them nothing to do with what Bishop essentially is.

FRANK BIDART:
But it took American criticism such a long time to see that and that's really a kind of tragedy.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
I think one of the very best things ever written about Bishop early on in her career was Robert Lowell's review of her first book, and it still holds up. It's still full of really profoundly insightful about what Bishop is actually doing in her poems. And it's not just about description, although she said many times that when one praised her poems, she would deflect this praise by saying it's just description.

FRANK BIDART:
You see, that's in a way that's the side of Bishop that believed in the genteel image of so self-depricating. So not wanting to be the visionary, to think the world thinks you think you are a visionary poet. So you do this exaggeratedly modest gesture. It's just a description.

ROSANNA WARREN:
I think it. Has something to do, too. With her love of George Herbert and with questions of tonality. I mean, Herbert is a very quiet poet, a modest poet. If you think of John Donne, for instance, and yet a poet of immense smoldering power and surprising originality within the conventions and limitations he's set for himself and within a tone of voice which is apparently conversational and not, on the surface, breaking conventions, although he's reinventing them at every line in some way. And I think that Bishop was caught between various aesthetics that couldn't account for her. On the one hand, a sort of high filigree syllable counting descriptive Marianne Moore poetics, on the other hand, increasingly as the 70s gained traction confessional melodrama and and then beat inventions, and none of those decibel levels could account for the deep, powerful quietness and modes of discovery that Bishop had and I took... I think it's instructive in any era to think about the decibels in poetry.

Think about what is noise and think about what is signifying sound. And it's very beautiful, I think, and ennobling and heartening to hear that she can be heard now and have instructed several generations of younger poets about what hearing might be and what speaking might be in verse.

FRANK BIDART:
I agree completely.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
There's a very interesting essay written after she died, but that makes a point about Bishop's poems asking questions and that her poems are full of questions and not so much answers. But boy, they're good questions. We are running a little out of time, and I would like to introduce someone in the audience who and I don't know whether you had very much to do directly with Bishop, but I know that Bishop had something directly to do with with you, Susan Davenny-Wyner. Wonderful conductor and a great singer who introduced, who gave the first performance of Elliott Carter's fascinating and complicated setting of Elizabeth Bishop poems called A Mirror on Which to Dwell. And I think Bishop heard the very the second performance, because I was with her, or I wasn't with her, I was with her at the performance. But this was my function. This was at an MLA conference. And then there was a big tribute to Bishop in 1976, just as her last book was being published, Geography three. And there were many papers being given about Bishop, none of which Bishop wanted to hear.

So there was a panel with very distinguished American senior American critics talking about Bishop while at the Americana Hotel. While Bishop was across the street at the Stage Deli, having corned beef hash with two of her closest friends who were the duo piano team of Gold and Fizdale. And it was my function to race across the street when the talk talks were over to retrieve Bishop and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale and bring her back to the Americana Hotel to hear Susan Davenny-Wyner and Speculum Musicae, this really amazing group of musicians who concentrated in contemporary work to hear what, for most of us was the first performance, though I think was actually the second performance.

SUSAN DAVENNY-WYNER:
Elliott Carter's way of setting her each day with so much ceremony all over the place, was so extravagant and passionately across tessituras and a voice that was very exuberant. And she was sitting in my line of vision as I was performing, and I saw her go like this, bent back and herself. And she was very shy afterwards with us and with me. But then when I heard her read her own poetry and heard that she read not in the Dylan Thomas context, but in a very measured way, so that the metaphorical imagery could live without any performance intruding between you and the images. I always would love to have known what she really thought, because my sense was that it was a complete anathema. (LAUGHTER)

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She said, that she just didn't understand it, that she didn't think Carter had really gotten what the poems were doing. On the other hand, she had admired Carter a lot, and there had been earlier settings of her poems. So a couple of poems, a couple of settings by Ned Rorem, which were much more conventional and which she hated. And so I think she was both thrilled that Carter had chosen her poems to write about. And these were his first settings of poetry in many, many years. So it was a kind of it was a great musical event, but she just didn't hear what he was hearing in her poems. I think she might have changed her mind if the recording had come out and if she were listening to it more and heard more of what was happening. But she was baffled. But she didn't say to me that she hated it.

FRANK BIDART:
No.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She just...

FRANK BIDART:
No, no.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
No no.

FRANK BIDART:
She definitely did not attack it. She just felt she didn't quite understand it.

LIOYD SCHWARTZ:
She didn't get it. Thank you so much for coming.

SUSAN DAVENNY-WYNER:
Thank you. (APPLAUSE)

ED HERMAN:
That concludes this discussion of Elizabeth Bishop. The program took place at the Barker Center, Harvard University on March 27th, 2012. The recording of this program is used by permission of the Woodberry Poetry Room and Harvard College Library. Elizabeth Bishop published only 101 poems during her lifetime. Her work is included in many anthologies, and The Complete Poems 1927 to 1979 was published in 1983. You can read and listen to some of Bishop's poems at Poetryfoundation.org, where she is also the subject of several articles. The Poetry Foundation site also has information on Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, and Rosanna Warren. Keep up with the world of poetry at the Poetry Foundation website, where you'll find many articles by and about poets. An online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Poetry Learning Lab, the Harriet blog about poetry, the complete back issues of poetry magazine, and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herman, thanks for listening to poetry lectures from Poetryfoundation.org.