Introduction: Bishop’s Century: Her Poems and Art

The Worcester Review XXXII, 2011
by Edward R. Cronin

Centennial celebrations are valuable times for scholars and others interested in important writers. Conferences are arranged, the canon is re-examined, and new research is revealed. Certainly, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson—who was speaking, of course, of a quite different situation—centennials “concentrate the mind wonderfully.” In 2006, Worcester celebrated the centennial of Stanley Kunitz, who lived to see his 100th year. Last year, 2010, was the centennial year of Charles Olson, and this year, 2011, is the centennial of Elizabeth Bishop. (A poet more unlike Charles Olson can scarcely be imagined.) During 2011, the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop were celebrated through a series of readings, panels, and concerts organized by the Worcester County Poetry Association. And, of course, the Association published this special Elizabeth Bishop issue of the Worcester Review.  The essays in this issue are intended to increase our understanding of the kind of poet she aspired to be.

We all wish she had written more poetry. Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, has few more than 100 poems. (Some work, mainly fragments, have been gleaned from Bishop’s literary archives, but this now-published material adds little to her well-established standing.) Bishop’s publishers often had to deal with her perfectionism; she was often reluctant to see work in print until it had undergone many revisions. The poem “The Moose,” for example, which is discussed in several of the following essays, took over twenty years to complete. Because “The Moose” is mentioned by a number of commentators, it may be useful to use it as an exemplar of Bishop’s poetry in general.

Bishop has said that the qualities she admires most in poetry are “accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery.” Let’s measure “The Moose” by these qualities. It may seem odd to call a poem that did not see print until many years after its conception “spontaneous,” but to most readers, it does seem such because of its seeming fidelity to immediate experience. Never mind that the gender of the moose had changed from its first mention in a prose account of a real experience Bishop had had as a young woman during a visit to her Nova Scotia relatives; the poem conveys both the poet’s sense impressions as she seems to receive them and her thoughts as they happen. Of course, “The Moose” is one of many poems that support the view of Thomas O’Grady that Bishop may be termed a “Maritime” poet. What about “mystery?” The sudden confrontation of the bus passengers has a spiritual quality—paradoxical in a poem so grounded in physical reality (“accuracy”) and “otherworldliness,” to use essayist Robert Cording’s term, is a quality of many of Bishop’s poems. And finally, the importance of form to this mainstream poet. Bishop would agree with Frost’s famous statement that writing free verse is “like playing tennis without a net.” Underlying “The Moose” is a very tight net indeed, and Renee Curry, in her article brought to light the intricate versification behind “The Moose.”

Other essays in this collection examine a number of other poems, of course. The piece by Wells, for example, looks at the power of Bishop’s metaphorical language in “The Bight.”An essay on Darwin and Bishop by Leslie Wooten may seem to be an odd pairing, but it is good to know that Bishop’s favorite prose writers were Hemingway, Chekhov, and Darwin. All three are masters of the telling detail, as is Bishop herself.

I have called Elizabeth Bishop a “mainstream” poet, and it may seem as if this is a category so large as to be useless. But throughout her life, Bishop deftly stepped around any more specific designation. She accepted advice from her early mentor Marianne More, for example, but never imitated her, and her own reticence about her personal life—as well as her internalized definition of the nature of poetry—led her to reject out of hand the “confessional” poetry of her close friend Robert Lowell. Above all, she never wanted to be called a “feminist” or a “woman” poet and refused to be anthologized as such. Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet, and the nine essays in this collection and the brief poems written as a tribute all provide insights into the work.

from The Introduction to Chris Gilbert feature section, TWR, Vol XXXIII, 2012

by Eugene McCarthy

“I ripen and am the living resolve that sweetens in the vase of death, and am the seed that leads deeper down into the play of melody.” (TWR, XXVII, 2006, 64)

Chris Gilbert is no stranger to The Worcester Review. His poems have appeared in 1974, 1976, and 1988.  In 1996 James Zeigler printed his interview with Chris—Zeigler was at the time an undergraduate at Butler University (Indianapolis).  In 2006 TWR published a set of eight of Chris’s new poems with a brief commentary in the special issue “Following Kunitz,” on six nationally known, Worcester area poets; six of those poems appear in the MS, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation.

It was quite natural then for the Review to devote the special section this year to Chris’s work.  Our intention was to frame the treatment of his work in three parts: Chris in Worcester; his own poetry; and his place in the African American poetic tradition.  The contributions to this issue have fallen neatly into these three areas.

This special issue of TWR was initially intended to coincide with the publication by Graywolf Press of Chris’s draft manuscript, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation, together with a reprint of his award winning Across the Mutual Landscape (1983). The MS volume was edited by Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, both of whom provide commentary for this issue on their editorial work.  The Graywolf edition will not be out this year, but we decided to dedicate this issue to his work just the same, and all contributors had access to the manuscript poems.

What becomes apparent from the contributions to this section is that reading Chris’s verse makes one think, move, imagine, respond in fresh ways—the most distinct evidence of the power of his imagination to bring us “in it.”  Many wrote poems, honoring the man and his works; others felt that improvisation was the only way in. Those who took the more customary critical stance brought a freshness that seems inevitable for a Gilbert reader.

In the opening poem, Janet Shainheit declares many of the themes here, Chris’s character, his poems, his passions, the jazz music of his voice.  Fran Quinn slipped effortlessly into a metaphorical vein, talking about The Box of his manuscripts (though there are in fact several boxes) as he reminisces about Chris, seeking in the multiple versions to find Chris the man and poet. Mary Fell also, while searching those boxes for the “final intention” of many-versioned poems, recalls the emotional effort of revisiting and discovering the man and his work.

In her reminiscent and memorial poem, Catherine Reed finds Chris’s place is as much in Worcester poetry as in her own life of verse. Mary Bonina too feels him come to life again in her world and in the world of Worcester poetry, the history of which she explores so fully and warmly.

In his “improv” Terrance Hayes quotes “Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation” (in the MS of that name), as his personal memory fuses with the basic elements of elegy.   Ed Pavlić calls his examination an “into,” seeking in that “modern dance for voice” Chris’s “overflowing fullness of an experience,” a true characterization of his verse.  Yusef Komunyakaa’s fine and richly allusive poem blends memory and memorial.

Like many contributors, Jonathan Blake hears in poems of Across the Mutual Landscape the distinct, cadenced Gilbert voice—and overhears Etheridge Knight and Wole Soyinka.  In his interview of 1996, James Zeigler quoted Chris on his passion for jazz. Zeigler here continues to hear that jazz in the context of cultural history, imbedded in its political/social environment.

While some writers touch on Chris in the African American tradition, Anthony Walton opens for us in rich detail the ways Chris’s verse “spools and accumulates into a complex meditation on the poet’s world view” as a member of “the ‘emergent,’ post-black arts generation.”

It will come as no surprise that many of these authors select the same poems as keys to Gilbert’s poetic. Yet, each seeing new features in the same “play of melody” means that his “overflowing fullness of an experience” continues to enrich us.

The fact that Chris continually composed and revised and developed—an  inconvenient practice for his editors—means that he had an emerging whole vision. His earliest poems were not lost, but stored, reconstituted, and incorporated into that larger plan.  Poems composed for the Denise Levertov workshop in Worcester, l975*, reveal a great deal about his genius. (All members of that workshop, it is worth saying, have become well-published poets. All of them.)

The poem Mary Fell mentions, “And the Children of the King Don’t Sing,” was composed for that workshop, and neatly typed at the bottom: “poem written 5 years after a memorial service for Martin Luther King in Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.” It was published in TWR (1975, lower case title; “carried by” changed to “tacked against.”) In l974 he had published three poems in TWR, two “willie” poems, and “jazz haiku    hyannis mass.   may 73,” perhaps influenced by Etheridge Knight’s interest in haiku, or the thousands that Richard Wright composed late in life.

One of Levertov’s assignments was for her students to make a poem based a group of pictographs—which she had invented on the spot—images allegedly “found at a dig” and not deciphered yet.  The assignment was, as Fran Quinn related to me, to “translate” these objects, try to decipher a meaning even though there was, allegedly, no set way to “read” them.

What I take to be Chris’s first effort is a two-part narrative:

From the ‘pictograph’ exercise:

1

In our village, though we were poor
we had the fire’s life, the peace
of the lotus pool
But the overlord,
brilliant in his riches,
demanded our labor,
took away our harvest.
At last we took up arms.
To win the battle against him
was like scaling the steepest, highest mountain.
But together we did it.
In comradeship we returned to our fields,
Replanted then in the light rain
when the moon was propitious

2

The village on fire! No lotus pool
can quench it.
Now—poverty,
No more full bowls.
The sun beat down on us
like  a cruel overlord.
Instead of our harvest sickles
we must take up our swords
and become bandits in the mountains
or else beggars,
out in the desolate rains of autumn,
sleeping under the moon month in, month out.

Such a straight narrative must have seemed unsatisfactory to Gilbert, for he then wrote what is titled in pencil “hieroglyphic” (“C Gilbert” is penciled at the end):

there is always change
the sun transforms
a bit of grain into luscious harvest days
and the tiny fire of our village is later
a brilliance of budding lotus in a pool

no wonder that the rain must fall,
the moon rushes toward the mountain
and our hands are seeking unity
with the power of the tools

One can see the traces of images from the original in this entirely re-imagined poem. The theme remains, but all is condensed, narrative abandoned.  The Africa-ness of the original is lessened but remains as do African references throughout his poetry: “The seeing is enclosed the way the world is enclosed within the lid of the African god’s eye.” (“The Plum,” TWR, XXVII, 64; revised in Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation into “My skin is the dark lid covering the note of an African’s eye….”)

Another workshop poem, “and you see we learned,” is dedicated, at the end “to stevie wonder.”  It is the seed for “Time with Stevie Wonder in It” (AML, 14-15).  While he retains imagery and language, the poem is entirely reimagined with more on family, radio-and-music, locale, and of course on Stevie himself. Here is the original:

januaried movements
frozen, the ground covered;
your coal color gone years ago
and its environment         snuffed
so out of touch
how can you touch, hear, or
be alive,    how can anybody
packed in brief case history of social science
a problem
in the basement of white houses, tall mansions
of misunderstanding and perverse comforts,
where slick separations live
huddled against the wind
against the mind—
it is a crime.    you live
in casket framed huts so tight
against detroit’s streets
each brother a car parked in quick garages
that will go no where
each a foot of ice a metaphor
of the world
where things don’t move

but bein blind
you go to lansing to school
where the wind blows   blows
untutored and naked, uptight
you suck this column of cold air
till the lungs warm; the heart
fills, you force it back
thru harmoniked lips      hot
as equatorial fingertips
feelin our ears, bendin
notes around our heads

miles later, in my memory
of vibration on the radio streets
of lansing where i counted time
i see you,  now
crystal
innervisions

The “januaried movements” is retained as is the cold of Detroit and Lansing; the “casket framed huts so tight” becomes “neighborhoods stacked like boxes,” a similar image but reconsidered. Chris’s slangy idiom is already present.

These examples of revision suggest how Gilbert had a vision he sought to articulate, so that even early efforts were not practice pieces but parts toward the final whole. Thus he preserved old pieces and revised them into what we now have as his Improvisation, subtitled by him “(Music of the Striving That was There).”

We can see now how prescient Chris was of his work as poet.  He told James Zeigler (TWR, XVII, 1996),  “When I began writing, …I was really just writing out of the necessity to make a statement. …

“[My brother] listened to neo-boppish people like Stanley Turntine and Wes Montgomery, and neo-bop and bop is the jazz I identify with. …The collective improvisation fits well with the kind of poems I write. Sometimes they seem linear. For some of them, I didn’t mean for them to happen all at once.  …There is something at issue in the [bop] music and it’s critical. For poems, I like a sort of reflective, deliberate, laid back attitude but I like poems that have a critical issue, something at stake.”

Special thanks are due many people for making this Chris Gilbert issue come to print.  Rodger Martin, former editor of The Worcester Review, has been as always invaluable and wise, as is the enthusiasm of the new editor, Diane Mulligan.  In our early planning, Rodger, Fran Quinn, Mary Fell, John Hodgen were crucial advisors, as were many others whose works are featured here. Obviously none of the journal you hold in your hand could have happened without the contribution of all our authors; they brought dedication, thoughtful reflection, and carefully refined work that will be the grounding for further studies.

Barbara Morin, Chris’s widow, deserves particular credit here. She has been most responsive and generous in searching through Chris’s papers, enduring the emotional burden to provide photographs and correspondence.
It was an honor for me to be involved in this tribute to one who was not only our friend but one whose stature rises before us every day.

* Rodger Martin Papers (MS 27); Modern Poetry Collection. Keene State College [NH] Archives & Special Collections.  Copies of many workshop participants’ poems are kept here. There is also the letter of invitation from Mike True (Worcester Country Poetry Assn., Education Director) , May 23, l974, to the Levertov workshop.

Who Is Donald Baker?

Donald Baker                   credit: Wabash College

by: Rodger Martin (Excerpted from The Worcester Review XX)

As the twentieth century closes, the greater Worcester area has produced four poets who have received national renown during this period: Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara.

Often overlooked in this august company is another Worcester generated poet formed in the crucible of World War II, Donald Baker.  Since that war, Baker has published six volumes of poetry, been a Pulitzer Prize nominee, won a Pushcart Prize,  a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, become the Milligan Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Wabash College in Indiana (where he also was awarded the McLain-McTurnan Award for Distinguished Teaching), and directed The New Writers Award program of the Great Lakes Colleges Association.  His poems have appeared in  The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry, The Southern Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Saturday Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Bitterroot, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, and many others.  Perhaps because much of his recognition comes from the Midwest, Worcester has been late to note his presence.  Editors at The Worcester Review noticed the quality of his work in 1992 when we published his first poem in the journal.  Since then, he has been a regular contributor to the journal.  In 1993 Stephen Tapscott chose his work as the winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association’s annual contest.  When he read at the Public Library for the WCPA annual meeting (also in 1993), those of us there recognized we had found another powerful Worcester voice.

In the pages that follow, three critics examine Baker’s poetry and its impact:  Bert Stern, “‘Barnacled Hope’: Homage to Donald Baker,” writes an essay about the lyric poet and the individual stand against the storms of life; Roger Mitchell’s  “ ‘People Have Turned This Corner and Disappeared,’: Some Thoughts on the Poetry of Donald W. Baker” muses about that fine line between “consequence and inconsequence” a poet must navigate to rise above these crises; and finally William Trowbridge deals directly with the impact of World War II in “Delinquent Laurels: In Praise of Donald Baker’s War Poems.”

How did Worcester come to be as Baker says, “The nearest I come to a ‘home town’”?[1]  The Great Depression hit his family as hard as any.  They moved to 630 Pleasant Street from Springfield in 1930 when Baker was seven, and by the time Baker completed his studies at Classical High School, his family had also lived on Lovell Street (270), Reed Street (14), June Street (190) and Courtland Street.  The stability of the public school system provided for Baker that sense of place one could call home.  In biographical statements for three of his books the first sentence of each pays homage to that schooling not only directly but also by equating it with Ivy League and flight training saying he was “educated by the Worcester public schools, Brown University and the Army Air Corps.”[2]  In his letters for this essay, Baker refers often to his schooling, particularly at Classical High School where he played first the violin poorly and then switched to the viola.  There he refers to himself as “the least effective member” member of the debate team, but found the love of poetry trying to “memorize more Wordsworth than any other member of Perry Howe’s English class.”[3]

There he also discovered Edward Arlington Robinson and Robinson’s impact on his poetics remains to this day:

“… those wonderful lines from Robinson, ‘What to him are Plato and the swing of Pleiades.’  Those have stuck in my poetic heart, the rhythm, of course, and the alliteration, but chiefly I think that totally fresh and surprising (and perfectly apt)      word ‘swing.’  The more I think about it the more I come to believe that the most  important achievement of the great poets is their discovery of the unexpected but   absolutely right word– its connotations, its sound, its rhythm, and its relation to the other words of the line.  It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that in almost  every line of Emily Dickinson you’ll find that surprising and revelatory word.  The frost ‘beheads’ the flower; the ‘blonde’ assassin, and so on.”[4]

Baker believes his poems about poetry may be the best statements of his poetics; therefore, we conclude with “Essential Questions” in its entirety and two excerpts from poems Baker suggests speak his sense of poetics far better than he:[5]

“Essential Question”

My job is to get up in the morning
and start writing poems.
It’s at least as useful
as getting up in the morning
and starting to sell Cap’n Crunch.
I put on my jeans and sneakers,
eat two eggs over and a bran muffin,
and sit down at the living room window
with a cup of tea.

Vic Sammartino drives by
on his way to work.
He waves.
His busy smile expresses superiority and disdain,
because he thinks I am doing nothing.
He reminds me of the chairman of my department,
who prefers publishing scholars.
He’d better be careful.
Look what happened when they called Hitler
a lazy slob.

Meanwhile, I rake my imagination
for something to write about.
Am I an alcoholic?
Will my kidneys last out the year?
Are these essential questions?
Are they fit subject for poetry?
What is fit subject for poetry?
How can I tell?
Do I care?
So one inspiration leads to another
down labyrinthine ways
of the poet’s mind.

Mike Donovon’s daughter walks by,
off to the municipal pool,
in what appears to be a bikini.
She doesn’t wave.
No doubt her illiterate father
has poisoned her mind against poets.
She reminds me of high school summers,
girls named “Priscilla” and “Leona,”
who float on my mind’s eye
like rubber dolls in a bathtub.

Perhaps I should have been Gaius Valerius Catullus,
lounging at poolside,
composing a poem for Patty Donovon,
“voluptuous virgin,” phrases like that.
In Latin.

It’s no good.
If my wife ever had it translated,
she’d kill me.

Bradford Dunbar goes by, the corporate lawyer,
jogging.
He pretends to look at his watch,
then runs as hard as he can to intimidate me.
He thinks I am a failure
and out of shape.
OK, Dunbar, I know you saw me.
Lickspittle capitalist lackey!
He sprints to catch up with Donovon’s daughter,
who blows him a kiss
as he passes.
They don’t fool me.
He’s not her uncle.

Maybe I should have been Pablo Neruda,
hiding out in the Rockies,
writing a political poem,
“Letters from the extreme left,”
that would sweep the country.
I see Reagan, Haig, and Bradford Dunbar,
in Adidas and jogging shorts,
fleeing to Argentina.
They are arrested by the Cuban police.
Poets wreck all the nuclear energy plants,
and I win the Nobel Prize.

So that’s that.
What more can one do in a morning?
I get up from my notes,
go into my study,
and sit down at my typewriter.
It needs a new ribbon.
Well, it always takes a few days
to think through and polish a poem.
It’s twenty after eleven.
Let’s call it noon.
Let’s mix a martini,
and contemplate politics, love,
and the essential questions.

Unposted Letters, 16-19

***

One of them said, A poet has no
information.  It sounded right. . . .
Sometimes at such parties I go out,
into another year, where the moon
is painting the house next door

“Information” (li. 1-2, 6-8) The Day Before, 37

***

. . . if I could,
I’d trade eggs for milk, walk only
that sandy path behind the house
where berries grew.  I’d read it all
into pages we’d choose together,
you, me, Grandpa, and that boy we’ll
never become, hot afternoon,
flood tide in the river, a book . . .

“Sons and Poetry” ( li. 29-36) The Day Before, 35

Bibliography

Formal Application  (Daleville, IN: The Barnwood Press Cooperative, 1982)
Search Patterns (Brewster, MA: Sugar Creek/Steppingstone, 1996)
The Readiness (Brewster, MA: Sugar Creek/Steppingstone, 1996)
The Day Before (Muncie, IN:  Barnwood Press, 1989)
Twelve Hawks (Brewster, MA: Suger Creek/Steppingstone 1974)
Unposted Letters (Dalewood, IN: Barnwood Press, 1985)

Notes

[1]Donald Baker, Letter, September 11, 1998

[2]Baker, Formal Application, The Day Before, Unposted Latters

[3]Baker, Letter, 9-11-98

[4]Baker, Letter, 9-11-98

[5]Baker, Letter, June 16, 1998