Looking for Bishop
Jul. 22nd, 2010 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radfrac_archive_fullI have listened about fifty-one times to the Bookworm interview with Alice Quinn about Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox, the recent publication of Elizabeth Bishop's unpublished works.
I have listened to the interview enough times that it's now one of my fall-asleep recordings, along with the Clayton Eshleman interview. His reading of his long poem "Combined Object" is bottomless, and it is about sleep.
Sometimes when I am sad--say when I am taking the ferry to Vancouver, and the ship's prow is very white, and the sky is very blue, and the day is like a pure word being spoken quietly over and over--I pretend I am on Bookworm and Michael Silverblatt and I are talking about poetry.
There's only one full published poem of Bishop's in the interview, "Poem." I liked it enough, though, that I've been meaning to get Jukebox from the university library for weeks. I keep writing down the call number in odd places. When I get there, though, I've got so many books already, or the burden of what I should be reading descends, or I remember at the checkout and don't want to go back up to the second floor (where poetry is painfully sequestered from the rest of literature).
For this past weekend at the lake, I printed off a selection of Bishop's poems more or less at random -- "Poem," "An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore," "Love Lies Sleeping," "North Haven," and "Cirque D'Hiver," which at the moment is my favorite of the set. I stuck them into a bulldog clip and scribbled Selected Works of Elizabeth Bishop / ed. R. Fracture on the front so I'd remember what they were.
(I went just now to find the poems to see if I'd accounted for them all, and finding an apple instead, began to eat it absent-mindedly, as though that were more or less the same thing as reading a sheaf of poems.)
Yesterday I went in to Munro's to look at Bishop's Complete Poems. They did have it, and for a reasonable price, but the cover* was so ugly that I couldn't bring myself to get it. I went to browse those remarkable sale islands instead -- only at Munro's would every book on those islands be readable. And there on the poetry shelf (right rear island apparatus as you go in, upper shelf) Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox, for a slim shard of its original (hard)cover price. So I bought that instead. And two of my acquaintance were clerking that day, though of the two I spoke only to the Excellent E. I really only nodded to the youth who is bound for Trinity. It took nearly the very last of my ready money, but you know how that is.
The more fragmentary stuff in Jukebox has an intriguing open-work modernist feeling to it, probably undesired, but possibly even more interesting because of that.
{rf}
*The image on the Amazon page seems to be cropped: the edition I saw had quite a lot more peach to say for itself.
I have listened to the interview enough times that it's now one of my fall-asleep recordings, along with the Clayton Eshleman interview. His reading of his long poem "Combined Object" is bottomless, and it is about sleep.
Sometimes when I am sad--say when I am taking the ferry to Vancouver, and the ship's prow is very white, and the sky is very blue, and the day is like a pure word being spoken quietly over and over--I pretend I am on Bookworm and Michael Silverblatt and I are talking about poetry.
There's only one full published poem of Bishop's in the interview, "Poem." I liked it enough, though, that I've been meaning to get Jukebox from the university library for weeks. I keep writing down the call number in odd places. When I get there, though, I've got so many books already, or the burden of what I should be reading descends, or I remember at the checkout and don't want to go back up to the second floor (where poetry is painfully sequestered from the rest of literature).
For this past weekend at the lake, I printed off a selection of Bishop's poems more or less at random -- "Poem," "An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore," "Love Lies Sleeping," "North Haven," and "Cirque D'Hiver," which at the moment is my favorite of the set. I stuck them into a bulldog clip and scribbled Selected Works of Elizabeth Bishop / ed. R. Fracture on the front so I'd remember what they were.
(I went just now to find the poems to see if I'd accounted for them all, and finding an apple instead, began to eat it absent-mindedly, as though that were more or less the same thing as reading a sheaf of poems.)
Yesterday I went in to Munro's to look at Bishop's Complete Poems. They did have it, and for a reasonable price, but the cover* was so ugly that I couldn't bring myself to get it. I went to browse those remarkable sale islands instead -- only at Munro's would every book on those islands be readable. And there on the poetry shelf (right rear island apparatus as you go in, upper shelf) Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox, for a slim shard of its original (hard)cover price. So I bought that instead. And two of my acquaintance were clerking that day, though of the two I spoke only to the Excellent E. I really only nodded to the youth who is bound for Trinity. It took nearly the very last of my ready money, but you know how that is.
The more fragmentary stuff in Jukebox has an intriguing open-work modernist feeling to it, probably undesired, but possibly even more interesting because of that.
{rf}
*The image on the Amazon page seems to be cropped: the edition I saw had quite a lot more peach to say for itself.
