I’m not trying to do anything specific in my poetry — only to please myself. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) |
Below are excerpts from an interview with Elizabeth Bishop by Alexandra Johnson, published in the Christian Science Monitor (23 March 1978, 20-21) and later in the book Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, edited by George Monteiro and published in 1996:
Geography of the Imagination
Why do you write poetry? What about it, as a genre, appeals to you over other writing forms?
Well, who knows really? I began when I was very young, about eight. I was very isolated as a child and perhaps poetry was my way of making familiar what I saw around me. Many things probably contributed to this. For example, my Nova Scotia grandmother was a great hymn singer. I grew up with those sounds, and, in fact, still have hundred of them floating around my head. My aunt, like so many Victorians, belonged to the village’s poetry society and she recited a great deal to me — Longfellow, Browning, Tennyson. So obviously I memorized a lot and it soon became an unconscious part of me.
Poetry has always seemed the most natural way of saying what I feel. I never intended to “be” a poet, as I think people set out to do today. I never wanted to think about any label. It’s far more important to just keep writing poetry than to think of yourself as a poet whose job is to write poetry all the time. What do such people do during those long, infertile periods? Poetry should be as unconscious as possible.
Does a poem begin for you with a sound, an image or an idea?
It differs with every single poem. Some poems begin as a set of words that you aren’t sure what they apply to, but eventually they accumulate and become lines, and then you see some pattern emerge. Sometimes an idea haunts me for a long time, though poems that start as ideas are much harder to write. It’s easier when they start out with a set of words that sound nice and don’t make much sense but eventually reveal their purpose. Again, the unconscious quality is very important. You don’t ask a poem what it means, you have to let it tell you.
How long do you carry a poem in your head before committing it to paper?
From 10 minutes to 40 years. One of the few good qualities I think I have as a poet is patience. I have endless patience. Sometimes I feel I should be angry at myself for being willing to wait 20 years for a poem to get finished, but I don’t think a good poet can afford to be in a rush.
One thing I love about your poetry is its ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, to make us look again and again at the familiar. Is this a conscious motive on your part?
I’m not trying to do anything specific in my poetry — only to please myself. The greatest challenge, for me, is to try and express difficult thoughts in plain language. I prize clarity and simplicity. I like to present complicated or mysterious ideas in the simplest ways possible. This is a discipline which many poets don’t see as important as I do. Complexity, I think, often obscures fuzzy thinking or verse masking as poetry. If poetry isn’t disciplined then probably the eye which observed or the mind which translated the experience lacked a certain discipline.
One senses that you are not observing an object for the first time, but rather returning to it again and again to capture its “otherness.” Will you comment?
I am very object-struck. Critics have often written that I write more about things than people. This isn’t conscious on my part. I simply try to see things afresh. A certain curiosity about the world around is one of the most important things in life. It’s behind almost all poetry.
I am very fond on painting and this may account for some of my interest in observing things closely. My aunts sketched and painted watercolor and this may have subtly influenced me. In fact, I often wish I had been born a painter rather than a writer.
Bishop’s writing studio in Samambaia, Brazil. |
What sources feed you?
Inspiration is a very curious word. When I was living in Brazil, I had a study on the side of a mountain that overlooked a waterfall and a small pool beneath it. Around it was a clump of royal bamboo. When visitors came, many of whom had never read a single line I had written, they would point to the bamboo and say, “So this is where you get your inspiration!” I thought at one point of pinning a sign on the bamboo saying, “Inspiration.”
This mysterious thing we call inspiration isn’t that easy to pinpoint. But it’s the strange and wonderful thing about writing poetry — you can never predict where or when or even why something moves you to write a poem. That’s what I mean when I said a poem comes in many guises. A poem may be inspired by something that happened 20 years ago but until I’ve written it, I may not have realized that at the time I was greatly moved. I think you have a trust that the eye and mind are constantly recording, and be patient enough for them to reveal what they have observed….
Your poems employ extensive imagery of maps and geography. Could you discuss why?
Well, my mother’s family wandered a lot and loved this strange world of travel. My first poem in my first book was inspired when I was sitting on the floor, one New Year’s Eve in Greenwich Village, after I graduated from college. I was staring at a map. The poem wrote itself. People will say that it corresponded to some part of me which I was unaware of at the time. This may be true.
Geography III, in part, concerns itself with the search for and definition of home. Is writing poetry your way of finding or having that home?
Interestingly enough, many of those poems were written when I decided to leave Brazil where I had lived for a long time. This may have contributed to this feeling. I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s a pretty good description of a poet’s sense of home. He carries it within him….
You have resisted almost every temptation to which both good and bad poets yield today — such as confessional or obscurely structural poetry. Have you always had a true sense of your poetic voice?
No, I haven’t This used to worry me a great deal and still does. In my first book, I was worried that none of the poems went together, that there was no discernible theme. I feel this about everything I’ve ever done. But apparently this is a consistent voice. I am grateful but astounded to hear this.
Yet in almost every poem one hears the calm, consistent voice of Elizabeth Bishop. Does this happen naturally, then?
Well, I’m not calm, but it’s nice to hear! I never think of any tone when writing. It just comes, I guess….
A final question: What one quality should every poem have?
Surprise. The subject and the language which conveys it should surprise you. You should be surprised at seeing something new and strangely alive.
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