Elizabeth Bishop's Letters

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a poet who lost both parents at an early age and was raised by her maternal grandparents and paternal relatives. She was independently wealthy and traveled to many countries, which she later described with great subtlety in her poems. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (about one hundred poems). It's a pity because during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop was underappreciated and her work won the admiration of her fellow-poets but never brought her the wider recognition she deserved.

Source: www.poets.org

To get some insight into Bishop's life, you can take a look at “The Art of Losing,” a delightful, moving selection of Bishop’s letters, published in 1994, with a short biographical introduction by Alice Quinn, The New Yorker’s poetry editor at the time. (The title is taken from Bishop’s poem “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”). The first letter is from 1934, when Bishop was twenty-three; the last, from 1979, is the note she left on her classroom door when she fell ill, just before her death, at the age of sixty-eight. The letters capture her in many different phases of life, and show her hopeful, exhausted, struggling, and satisfied.

Or take a look at Thomas Travisano's Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2010). Bishop and Lowell never stopped writing letters to each other, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Lowell remarked in a letter to Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." And Lowell didn't stop writing to her until his death. 30 years' worth of delicious letters between two sensitive souls who, while their poetry could not be more different, inspired each other. It was an unconsummated love, as Bishop preferred women. Which of course, didn't prevent Lowell from almost proposing.

To conclude this entry, one of my favorite poems by Bishop, "One Art".

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I couldn't find a translation to Galician anywhere, so here is my attempt:

A arte de perder

Non custa moito aprender a perder;  

hai tantas cousas que parecen decididas 

a perderse, que a súa perda non é calamidade.

Perde algo todos os días. Acepta o agobio

das chaves perdidas, a hora malgastada.

Non custa moito aprender a perder.

Ensaia entón unha perda maior, máis rápida:

lugares, nomes, a onde tiñas pensado

viaxar. Ningunha desas perdas traerá calamidade.

Eu perdín o reloxo da miña nai. E mira! o último ou

penúltimo de tres fogares amados perdín.

Non custa moito aprender a perder.

Perdín dúas cidades, preciosas. E, mesmo,

algúns recunchos que posuía, dous ríos, un continente.

Bótoos en falta, pero non foi calamidade.

- Incluso perderte a ti (a voz algareira, un xesto

que amo) non tería mentido. É obvio

que a arte de perder non custa moito dominala

aínda que poida parecer (escríbeo!) unha calamidade.

Letters in Poems: The Letter

Curioso este poeta, porque primeiro, polo nome, Dana Gioa, pensei que era unha muller, supoño que estou condicionada por Dana International. Acordádesvos dela? Gañou Eurovisión no 1998, "Viva Maria, viva Victoria, Aphrodita...". Pois non, este Dana resulta que é un home.

E segundo, porque é un home cun currículo pouco convencional. Graduouse en Stanford Business School, e el mesmo di que é "a única persona que foi estudar administración de empresas para converterse en poeta". Chegou a ser vicepresidente da General Foods, e as súas experiencias no mundo corporativo disque lle axudaron moito na súa faceta poética. Gustaríame que explicase ese punto en máis detalle, non vexo a conexión entre as dúas disciplinas.

O caso é que estudou un máster en literatura comparada en Harvard, onde coincidiu cos poetas Robert Fitzgerald e Elizabeth Bishop e desde 1992 dedícase á escrita a tempo completo, tanto de creación propia como traducións do latín, italiano, alemán e rumano.

Mamou poesía desde pequeno. Naceu nun barrio de Los Ángeles, e súa nai, mexicana-americana que non tiña estudos superiores, líalle e recitáballe poemas desde neno. De feito di que nunca considerou "a poesía unha arte intrínsecamente difícil cun misterio que só un intelectual entrenado pode desvelar".

Aquí vos queda o seu poema sobre unha carta.

The Letter

And in the end, all that is really left 

Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable— 

That somehow we deserved something better. 

That somewhere along the line things 

Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s 

In charge, which certainly would have set 

Everything straight between us and the world, 

Never reached us. Got lost somewhere. 

Possibly mislaid in some provincial station. 

Or sent by mistake to an old address 

Whose new tenant put it on her dresser 

With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting 

To give it to the landlord to forward. 

And we still wait like children who have sent 

Two weeks’ allowance far away 

To answer an enticing advertisement 

From a crumbling, yellow magazine, 

Watching through years as long as a childhood summer, 

Checking the postbox with impatient faith
Even on days when mail is never brought.

Letters in Poems: Epistles

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter," are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. They can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. 

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.," for example, uses rhyming quatrains:

In your next letter I wish you’d say

where you are going and what you are doing;

how are the plays, and after the plays

what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,

driving as if to save your soul

where the road goes round and round the park

and the meter glares like a moral owl

The rigid rhyme scheme and structure of the poem belie its mournful, almost obsessive nature. Bishop employs the direct address to express her isolation and longing while maintaining formal distance.

This is counter to epistles that assume the more recognizable conventions of a letter, complete with a traditional opening address, such as Langston Hughes’s “Letter," which begins: “Dear Mama / Time I pay rent and get my food / and laundry I don’t have much left / but here is five dollars for you.” The simple intimacy of the epistolary form gives the poem a familiar ease.

The epistle form dates back to verse letters of the Roman Empire, and was refined and popularized by Horace and Ovid. Ovid’s epistolary explorations were adopted by the courtly poets from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. The Horatian epistles, however, more deeply influenced our modern understanding of the form. Horace drew on the familiar and confessional nature of letters to tackle lofty moral and philosophical conjectures. It is this tradition that produced what are generally thought to be the greatest epistles written in English: Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, an autobiographical defense of satire and poetry written in heroic couplets as an address to his friend John Arbuthnot.

Adapted from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-epistle

The appeal of epistolary poems is in their freedom. The audience can be internal or external. The poet may be speaking to an unnamed recipient or to the world at large, to bodiless entities or abstract concepts. 

We will present some of these epistolary poems in future entries of this blog