Chekhov’s Mistess

Vendler on Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box

Yesterday, I mentioned a couple of interviews with Alice Quinn who edited a new book based on archives of Elizabeth Bishop’s notes, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. I’ve looked at it a couple of times in the bookstore, but I’ll wait for the paperback price-tag.

It seems that Helen Vendler has been stewing on this collection a bit:

This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of “Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.” It should have been called “Repudiated Poems.” For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to publish them. They remained unpublished (not “uncollected”) because, for the most part, they did not meet her fastidious standards (although a few, such as the completed love poem “It is marvellous to wake up together,” may have been withheld out of prudence). Students eagerly wanting to buy “the new book by Elizabeth Bishop” should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are “Elizabeth Bishop” as a poet. This book is not.

From “Betraying Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Losing.” The New Republic, 3-24-06.

Everybody knows the value of seeing works in progress, notes and crap that doesn’t pass, so Vendler may seem out of line. However, her beef is essentially in presentation:

It is true that regardless of the wishes of the author, juvenilia and drafts and fragments are usually published in the long run, but they are not presented as “Uncollected Poems,” and thereby given parity with “Collected Poems.” (The Bishop archive at Vassar, more accurately and neutrally, calls this body of work “Unpublished Poetry.”) It seems to me a betrayal of Elizabeth Bishop as a poet to print items from the archive in magazines and journals as if they were “real poems” and not attempts that were withheld by the poet from just such public appearances.

Hard to argue there. Betrayal is strong language for it, but we are talking about poets.

comments

Probably everyone has read already; and, not to play the devil, but inside today’s NYT Book Review (actually on the cover) begins David Orr’s “Elizabeth Bishop’s Rough Gems”. Having read her work in graduate school, fortunately, I was curious about the purpose and interest behind assembling a collection of unfinished material, sometimes sketches, sometimes with merely a vail of distance between Bishop and her poems. In summary, Orr suggests the collection reveals Bishop as a stylist. He points to her subtleness and its “unnerving” effect on readers, and to other poems among the fragments that could indeed “stand alongside anything The New Yorker got its hands on back in the 1950’sor 60’s”. He also praises Quinn’s editorial skills in providing a chronology, or in linking events to Bishop’s responses penned to remain drafts and fragments.

    – GinaB (04/02  at  09:37 PM)

typo. Should be ‘veil’. (I need glasses.)

    – GinaB (04/03  at  11:04 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: March 28, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:2
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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