Whether it be a village, church, ballroom, house with a clavichord, apartment, seashore or poem, spaces form chambers for Elizabeth Bishopâs music. In The Making of a Poem, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland project this idea while discussing âOne Artâ:
This sonic chamber (an abode for the mouth) is the forum in which this book reverberates. The lead chapter by Deryn Rees-Jones on Bishopâs clavichord makes use of this instrument as a domestic companion that mediates between inner and outer worlds, and thereby transforms emotion into harmony. Bishopâs poems resound in readers so that they become our own. Voices inside our heads become treasures âliving in the cave of the mouth,â as Robert Frost put it (Cook 223). How the poet manages to achieve this is on the one hand simple, for every decent poet does it, yet Bishop does it with such diverse and dazzling virtuosity that the poems firmly stick; they register so strongly that we need to look into their adherences further.it turns around and around, building an acoustic chamber for the words, the lines, the meanings: The art of losing isnât hard to master. As the villanelle gathers strength and speed, this codaâthe art of losingâmoves in and out of irony, grief, self-accusation, regret. ⊠This effect of the villanelleâto make an acoustic chamber for single wordsâwas particularly well understood by Bishop. (20)
Eleanor Cook prompts this quest in Elizabeth Bishop at Work with âcuriosity about exactly how she did it, this master poet of the twentieth centuryâ (1). And in her chapter eight, itâs the slippery notion of tone that Cook identifies as perhaps the most difficult register to describe and understand. âShe can alter the dominant tone like a musician. She can shift tones very quietly within a poem, like the slight altering of a repeating phrase in music. Or she can change tone fortissimo, like a change of key in musicâ (225). This book grew partly from Cookâs challenge as developed in an American Literature Association (ALA) conference double panel on âVoice, Tone and Music in Elizabeth Bishopâs Writingâ in Boston, in May 2017. Two of the papers focused on âAt the Fishhouses.â The musical and tonal diversity of this masterpiece was cast in the Symbolist poetic tradition by Lisa Goldfarb, who employs Baudelaire , Rimbaud and particularly ValĂ©ryâs musical poetics to observe Bishopâs distinct valences. Then in a meticulous, close reading of the same poem, Yuki Tanaka studies syntactic rhythms to reveal the poetic dynamics of unfolding emotional drama. A similarly acute ear from Andrew Eastman is âHearing Things in Bishop,â this time through reverberations of othersâ voices that echo her own voice as it comes back to her, and by sounding other voices the poem makes a place for the readerâs voice to emerge. This bookâs movement from inner to outer voices becomes a cacophony in Christopher Spaideâs âCauses for Excess: Elizabeth Bishopâs Eighty-Eight Exclamations,â in which her inimitable voice depends on the occasional excess that, paradoxically, arrives only in precisely controlled circumstances. Spaide takes note of how vocal practice changes throughout her career. My chapter focuses on âVoice Control in Late Bishopâ to show how her poetry develops prosaic utterances to disrupt musical harmony and thereby offer disjunctive cultural commentary through rhetorical voices with recognizable signals for readers.
This book unsettles Bishopâs old reputation for quiet reserve. Thomas Travisano charts âA Very Important Violence of Toneâ in âRoosters â and other poems. From her early verses and prose to late lyrics, Bishop carefully prepares for moments of violence that flash out from a seemingly calm or settled verbal environment. Physical place is always keyâfrom Newfoundland in âThe Mapâ and âCape Bretonâ in that Nova Scotian poem to the startling geographical range found in Brazil. Maria LĂșcia MillĂ©o Martins attends to âBishop and Brazilian popular music: from anonymous sambas to contemporary composers.â In Brazil Bishop wrote, âI suspect [sambas] are some of the last folk poetry to be made in the world,â and this study discusses the cultural and political implications, and resonances of Brazilian popular lyrical forms such as cordel, choro and bossa nova in her own poetry. Lloyd Schwartz extends Bishopâs music further by showing how her diverse musical settings have inspired global contemporary composers in an array of musical genres. By the end of this small book we will notice huge range from Bishopâs youthful and internal âneed for music,â her wandering cultural outreach and the numerous reverberations from musicians paying tribute to her ear through theirs.
Bishopâs early musical foundation was made from the hymns she sang and heard in Great Village, Nova Scotia, piano and harmony lessons at Walnut Hill School in Massachusetts, as well as her studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she planned to major in music and took a senior course in Music as a Literature (Marshall 36), which inspired this bookâs title. Bishopâs reading of other poets cannot be underestimated in her carefully formed ear, and experiments with formal poetics from sestinas to sonnets to Romantic ballads to the sprung rhythms of Hopkins , prose poems of Baudelaire , Rimbaud and Stein, the innovative Modernist techniques of Eliot , Stevens, Moore and Auden, as well as contemporaries such as Swenson , Lowell and Rich. See Bonnie Costelloâs chapter on âBishop and the Poetic Traditionâ in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop for thorough exploration. In her adulthood, Bishop listened to the blues-jazz of Billie Holiday, Brazilian sambas, the folk songs of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and in the 1970s she attended orchestral concerts and chamber music by the likes of Elliott Carter in Boston.
Many tones spring from Bishopâs poetry. Her voice manages to control them so tightly that as readers we are sometimes taken aback by the musical interpretations of others, whether that may be a complex modern composition or just a different extrapolation from another reader. As Gillian White has written, Bishop creates âspace in artâ where together we can hear things. And yet we may hear different things. As Rachel Trousdale suggests in a forthcoming essay on humor, one reader will hear âFilling Stationâ as crude class snobbery, while another will register love. Bishopâs tones enable us to see both perspectives and more, as Trousdale explains in a paper recently presented at the 2019 ALA annual conference in Boston:
In the case of âFilling Station,â some readers identify with the greasy family, others laugh along with the speakerâs snobby judgments, and others do both. The poem itself appears to form this latter kind of fusion with its last words, âSomebody loves us allâ (PPL 123).Her humorous asides, wry ironies, and satirical critiques help her hold competing ideas in double exposure: her levity presents varying viewpoints without necessarily taking sides. Her humor fuses empathy with judgment, as her subjectsâ and speakersâ frailties are to be both rejected and felt as our own.
The mystery is how accurately Bishopâs words ring spontaneously in our heads. It is different music from the steady sonorities of Yeats, the philosophical meditations comically punctuated by Stevens , the busy clamor of Eliotâs polyphony or the firm control of Moore . I suggest that we hear Bishopâs music in a more pronounced way that sticks in the ear largely because of her careful narrative guidance. The poetic voice takes readers into âThe Mapâ so that â[w]e can stroke these lovely bays,â and the same reliable narrator gradually and momentarily morphs into âthe printer here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its causeâ (PPL 3). This storytelling leads us on a stroll of the mapâs tactile peninsulas grasped âbetween thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.â In a way, Bishopâs poetic narrators resemble Whitman hooking the waist of the reader so he can point to democratic vistas and new horizons. Moreover, Bishop often amalgamates the senses into a synesthesia of bodily music that is felt and conceptualized simultaneously. Yet this power is fleeting and provisional, often through her use of simile, but also due to her modulating, revisory narrators. In âThe Map,â just after we feel âthe smoothness of yard-goods,â the next stanza begins with an intellectual step back from sensory immersion so that we trust the balanced narrator: âMapped waters are more quiet than the land is,â and it almost does not matter whether her actual statement makes sense; the authorial tone has us believe it. We become pawns for her voice to lead us through the land and water of âThe Mapâ on which âNorwayâs hare runs south in agitation,â which is comic fancy we can picture.
Similar modulations permeate the narrative of âThe Monument,â which we view from the tour guide and touristâs voices until the old statuary form is deconstructed so we can begin to put it back together againâas any evolving artform. Music here is not just what we hear from the voices; itâs in the undulating, modulating, revising, adding, subtracting, qualifying, asserting and demonstrating. Bishop goes a step further than Stevensâ âpoem in the act of the mindâ by taking the poem out of the mind to see it functioning in the social wo...