Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn

Thank You Claire can you hear me grace as Kerr said I'm Bernard Schwartz I direct the interpreter center of the 92nd Street Y in New York we've been around since 1939 I haven't been around since 1939 the recordings are cards started in 1949 with a reading by EE Cummings and since then everyone under the Sun I'm curious show of hands has anyone come to one of these events in the past couple of years great second question how many of you have heard the voices of Elizabeth Bishop and or Tom gun how many of you have seen was with Bishop or Tom Gunn read in person okay now the survey is over thank you the way that tonight will will work is very simple and straightforward column has selected Bishop and Gunn specifically some excerpts from a bishop reading in 1977 and Tom Gunn reading in 1992 will hear the bishop first three poems the map in the waiting room in santarém from across her career we've given out those poems so you can follow along and then there are two Tom Gunn poems from 92 to close as you probably well know column has written somewhat thoroughly on both Elizabeth Bishop and Tom Gunn and I think we'll start by him discussing why he's chosen to put the two of them together at a time um thanks Bernard it may it may not be obvious and Gunn was an English poet who lived in California for most of his life and Bishop was an American poet or at least was party from Nova Scotia and sort of moved down where it's going tourists from Nova Scotia to New York to Florida to Brazil and back to Boston and so they're from different countries and they're there's been a way they worked in different elements but oddly enough they coincided for a short period when Bishop lived in San Francisco and she kept if you follow the Carra Spanish she kept I think she really deplored the beats and all the freedoms available in San Francisco at that time she was against those sort of freedoms she loved restrictions and she was also in desperately against gay liberation she said closets closets and more closets and she but but you started noticing the currents but she keeps writing to people to say at the only poet I like here is Tom Gong and she says for example to Robert Lowell August 68 well I've met some of the poets and the only one I still really like is Tom gong October 68 she rose to marry on more one poet I've met here almost a neighbor I like very much tom done his poetry is usually very good I think he's English but has lived here for a long time and then the following year in February to reading with gun started guns pawns and nine were the best this is a letter she wrote to James Merrill and then she wrote to another friend same time but I like Tom gun best I think it almost sounds like an alibi for something gun remembered then there's a sort of oral biography of Bishop where a gun was interviewed and he remembered and yes he remembered meeting Bishop in the spring of 1968 and he said I asked for the phone one day and it was a very nice man I didn't know who asked me to come and have drinks with him and Elizabeth Bishop because she wanted to meet me Elizabeth had just moved to San Francisco so I went over and there Elizabeth and her female partner at the time his name was changed for just personal reasons Elizabeth was drunk out of her mind we made polite conversation all evening while Elizabeth occasionally grunted out a monostable the next day her partner phoned and wondered if I would like to try again this time I was asked over to their place and we got on wonderfully from then on Elizabeth and I talked quite a lot during that year it wasn't so we spoke much about our private lives that's what makes a real friendship a close friendship meaning not to talk about your private life to somebody she and I talked about poets we liked specific poems that we liked and disliked I never let Elizabeth know that this but I didn't particularly like her poetry myself at that time when I first got to know where I took another look at her poetry I wasn't greatly struck by it there seems to be something for a lack of a better word that are called deeper in her that that hadn't got into the poetry I wasn't until geography 3 with poems like the moose and these poems they were gonna look to of these poems or three poems that I saw that side of her in a sense with geography 3 I can find more virtues in the earlier poetry than I could before it reflects back on the early poetry and then he reviewed geography 3 and he he talked about it sort of it sort of changing the whole way we look at her career and what they what they had in common is interesting and I mean why they didn't discuss their personal lives why their friendship was formed about discussing things other than themselves was the both of them had something they didn't want to talk about and and we noticed this em in guns book bus kieffer'd where Hibiki writes a poem called the gas poker and in that poem he it's a problem about the suicide of his mother when he was about 14 and he just says any could it have been 43 years ago and it's the first mention of the suicide the first open mention of the suicide in his work 43 years after it occurs and if you look at the poetry you found that that you wonder if guns extraordinary control over stanza forms over rhyme schemes over meter and indeed his attempt to loosen a in under the influence of various American poets including Robert Duncan loosens are from these these sorts straight this form of straitjacket that he had got first under the under the care of fr leavis and then under the care of help me Iver winters and that M he simply did not want he as he said in an interview I don't want to be sylvia plath in other words that whatever he was suffering he did not want it to come into the public domain he wanted to keep it perhaps buried in the rhythm of his poems or perhaps not there at all just just just just just simply something he he that there was so much pain and difficulty with that I mean I mean what he did instead was his name and I I bought some of his books in a second-hand dealer in Bradley and the early is he writes his name on early books he owned as William Thomson because his name was Thompson and sorry his name was and his his name was I'm gonna get this wrong and his name was gone his yes his mother's name was Thompson so he's William Thompson gun in those books and he changes his name by deed poll eventually to thumb gun so his mother's name Thompson would be in his name and his brother Anders has a description of just how close he was to his mother his parents are divorced and seven his brother were being brought up by his mother and they found his mother and after she'd gastro self the two boys did and he was after that brought up by aunts until he went to Cambridge and then soon after he went to Cambridge he made his home in California and he on his death certificate it just says that he died from acute poly substance abuse in other words that he's seventies he continued to take drugs that even those of us around our 60s have stopped taking and this reticence this this idea in a time when everyone especially in the United States was affect deeply affected by Robert Louis but life studies in which you explored your own inner demons and your own inner demons became the subject of your poetry if you had a divorce in the case of WD Snodgrass hearts needle became your book about the divorce if you had depression as Anne Sexton your book became about that difficulty so - it's Sylvia Plath and in that in in that period of which was it was called confessional poetry gun stuck to his guns as it were and and simply would not describe any trauma in his life including for example it took him a long time to deal with his homosexuality there's a sort of wonderful moment where the you which he's used so beautifully up to then as a sort of disguise as a as a dove laying that the sort of ambiguity suddenly becomes he him and there's a moment in jackstraws Castle especially where you see it and you think oh this is a great moment not only in poetry but in the history of gay liberation Bishop had no interest in gay liberation as I said she had her own demons her father died when she was six months old and when she was about four or five her mother began to have serious nervous attacks so if she was put into a mental hospital and she was never released from that hospital in Halifax and so she was brought up as well by aunts she was an orphan she was an only child she suffers from asthma she became an alcoholic and she she had a small trust fund and so she moved to Brazil but in but the poem's once more exude a great reticence a great way of needing to define the world of them no one has seen the world before it must be controlled by her the sentences and the rhythms of her poems there's when she writes her famous poem one art the poem the villanelle that begins the art of losing isn't hard to master it looks as though too plain sometimes mentioning small things like house keys that you can lose and then big things like a continent or houses or rivers but in the middle what's missing is mentioning that she lost her mother that she lost her father and that she lost her lover and who committed suicide and in New York when she was there and oddly enough you see that pawn repeating the lines the art of losing isn't hard to master and you come across in a letter where she just actually said it I lost my mother I lost my father I lost my I lost load him who is who is her lover that idea loss for her was deeply personal in the villanelle she makes it almost playful she leaves out the things that mattered to her that she lost and it isn't as though she didn't try you can see scraps of pawns that she didn't publish she didn't finish where she tries to deal with her mother but um she actually doesn't complete a poem about it so that both of them in a time when it was fashionable to write poems about trauma about the self about the dark spaces of the self both of them kept away from that so you can see them I mean that's wonderful first meeting where she's so drunk she can't speak and then when she gets to speak while she's what she doesn't say becomes more important that they talk about the erotic poetry I am anyone here who saw Tom Gunn reading will know what I'm talking about which was that he really had no interest whatsoever in being famous perhaps he was more interested being famous at certain bars in San Francisco than he was in the world of poetry when I saw him Fred I presumed there would be a huge crowd to see him in San Francisco the huge crowd to see Armistead Maupin and and those huge crowd to see Isabel Allende and in a side room of a 20 Ava's sat listening to Tom Gunn reading from the man with night sweats and it was an astonishing whereas talking to him afterwards he thought that was just the best idea just to have 20 and no more so he could slip off home as soon as possible it was a Saturday I think he had had famous Saturday nights I always wondered where he went but he would never tell anyone in the literary world because he thought the literary world was a strange thing that needed to be kept away from him and he he read sometimes in a sort of monotone he read as little as possible I saw him reading a second time in San Francisco with a much younger much less famous poet well he gave the other poet all the time in the world and he read three or four pawns and everyone had come to see him so there was a sort of reticence a distance from that world of poetry and it wasn't just it was the world of easy emotion and it's a phrase we're gonna find in this first pond by Elizabeth Bishop where as she talks about I think the thing that really made her and Gunn both afraid are you coming oh it was this em it's in the third it's in the second stanza the third last line of the map where she talks about emotion to far exceeds its cause I think that idea for both of them of sentimentality or an overreaction or a responding to an experience with too much rather than too little so that they're both were careful and restrained and the youth stanza form and systems of irony and systems of understatement so so is not to be the person who who exudes emotion and emotion that far to that to far exceeds its cause so let's just listen to this first poem at the Elizabeth Bishop at the map landed lies in water it is shadowed green shadows are the shallows at its edges showing the line of long seaweeded ledges where weeds hang the simple blue from green or does the land lead down to lift the sea from under drawing it unperturbed around itself along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under the shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still Labrador is yellow where the Moony Eskimo is old it we can stroke these lovely days under a glass as if they were expected to blossom or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish the names of seashore tones run out the see the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains the printer here experiencing the same excitement that one emotion too far had seeds it's cause these peninsula stake the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of your our goods Maps waters are more quiet than the land is lending to land their waves own confirmation and Norway's hair runs south and agitation profiles investigate the sea where land is are they assigned work in the countries pick their colours what suits the character or the native waters best typography displays no favorites North is near as West more delicate than the historians where the mapmakers colors and when is it and it's an early poem in the first book Oh 1977 yeah she she wrote this poem calm sure he knows this cleaning one single sitting in 1934 when she was 23 just contemplating a map under glass between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve I think and thought of it is the first sort of poem that was worth showing people there's a there's a new Bob do you want to know you could up I was gonna say there's a new biography coming out of Bishop by a longtime Bishop scholar named Thomas Travis song who put together a collection of the bishop low correspondence which is absolutely wonderful and he talks about a story that Bishop wrote of being in kindergarten in Canada and paying close attention it was a school where the kindergarteners were in with the older students and the older students the fourth and fifth graders got geography and she would pay attention to the geography lessons even though they were for the older students and the maps came down off a roll at the front of the classroom and she loved the way they snapped down and snapped back up and she describes in an early story of her was just longing to hold the map and touch the countries with her own with their own hands and imagining at that time that the the whole rest of the world fit into Canada rather than the other way around what were you gonna say and could you talk a bit about the reading she did that she didn't want to record that she didn't want to recording off sure so part I think of what calm saying earlier on about the the reticence of both Gunn and Bishop can be thought of as far as a skepticism where it comes to public performance there's a remembrance that Gunn partner Mike katay wrote after gun died he says you know gun didn't want to be Dylan Thomas there's a moment that he's thinking all along when katay and gun first met at Cambridge and Gunn was giving his first poetry readings and and of course the why and don't Thomas have a famous or infamous history and for Bishop to in this 1977 recording most most poets will read for half hour 40 minutes or so she reads for about 22 minutes the first sound you hear on the microphone when she comes up is a cough and then an apology saying that she's got a cold so why was trying to get bishop to read on its you know stage as early as 1947 30 years prior we know this because that first letter in words and air she writes to Robert Law is I was supposed to be at the Y two on Saturday night I hope my absence was more of a help than a hindrance they hadn't met yet they were soon to meet at Randall Charles house she then was pursued by the likes of me running the poetry Center through the 50s and 60s and there are letters she had a close friend who ran the poetry Center in the late 40s and early 50s named John Malcolm brinnin and she writes a letter to him she's on the schedule to read at the Y in the spring of 1950 and writes to him and says that she's sorry if some people some people like doing it she doesn't she's read in the papers how he's attracting crowds of hundreds of people and it's just not her thing you know she she writes from Brazil in the mid 1960s to another of my predecessors talking about how it makes her miserable and she doesn't think that people like to see other people being made to feel miserable when she finally gets to the Y it's in 1973 with James Merrill and she immediately writes to the Y Merrill couldn't have been happier to read with Elizabeth Bishop at the Y and he had first been at the Y and in the mid-1940s because he was close with the one of the earlier directors of the post and this is a little inside baseball but he said no no better dance partner could I have imagined that Elizabeth Bishop Bishop on the other hand writes the poetry Center after the reading complaining that on the out evening she'd had some combination of bronchitis and dysentery and that she must sound like a hyper contract but that she's been put off and it's lingered this experience of having had her photo taken and her voice recorded the response that returns to Bishop now in Seattle we haven't we have the letters in our archive from the Secretary of the poetry Center says I've seen to it myself that the recording has been burned and the negatives of the photographs have been destroyed some of the photos still exist and there are backstage moments of of almost you know kind of lightness and joy someone had come in and given Bishop and Meryl laurels crowns and they are seen kind of just giggling with each other but the recording in 73 what was destroyed upon Bishop request we don't do that anymore if somebody says don't record me we just kind of secretly do it don't release it to the public this is this is a nice moment to give a shout out to our website for example we're only hearing a portion of the bishop reading from 1977 tonight if you google the poetry Center elizabeth bishop you you'll be able to hear the the entire reading so she appearance in 1974 the following year to to read from her memoir of Mary Ann Moore and it isn't until 1977 when she reads with Howard Moss who was her longtime New Yorker editor and that's that's the one that we're listening to today and as I say that reticence carries over into a kind of skepticism the end of the reading has her saying after again of twenty some odd minutes I think that's enough and we're leaving the stage Howard Moss in contrast reads for you know 45 minutes or so everyone was there to see Bishop have James Merrill said about her that she did a lifelong imitation of an ordinary woman and that that business of what she did and I mean how she moved to Brazil how she was just simply out of the loop how she constantly the letters are great just no matter what event is occurring she doesn't want to be at it and if she has to even go to United States for any purpose it's always heavens she uses heavens and it's a it's I discovered it to Nova Scotia it's it's a Halifax it's the think you do Nova Scotia you say heavens I think we're gonna rain tomorrow or heavens I have to go to the London review workshop heavens and I was listen to the radio one morning in Nova Scotia and I'm so delighted that woman kept saying heavens sewer today is something and she used it the word heavens in a poem it's a poem called poem where she talks about a painting and she says suddenly in the palm says heavens I recognized the place I know it and this idea heavens is always when she realizes that in the United States the poetry world is being dominated by Robert Lowell by Randall Jarell by John Berryman and by James Merrill by Howard mast by various other people but and you know being created as this great eccentric figure was her friend Mary Ann Moore I mean not one of the boys sort of strange living with her mother in Brooklyn everyone knew all about the strangeness of Mary and more and there's a Beth bishop either consciously or unconsciously realizing only thing to do with this world must have get as far away from it as possible was to become a mystery was to live outside it was to depend on Robert Lowell get up prizes if the prizes were going or to get her whatever could be God and in the poetry world without having to compete with the big boys but you had a sense always and she loved saying this to in letters that poems often took her 20 years often took her more her pond a moose for example you can see a letter describing the experience of seeing the moves from a bus and then you're talking twenty years later or more when she writes to her aunt to say I'm dedicating them loose to you you are not the moose and then she and then she reads the poem and to her to it to a graduation ceremony and then someone tells her some great frenemy tells her afterwards you know that student had said to another student I was the poem like he said it was good as far as pawns go as she looked back she thought it was the nicest thing anyone had said about a work for a long time that I was as good as pawns could go and be the he begins with us I was an idea of an exquisite helplessness at the heart of her poetic self that somehow the world is beyond her reach beyond her control that she's either too ill or too hard to help us to broke to last to actually be in the world so the world has to be described as a dough it will soon move and not the things in it will not be there so that in so that this second line of the problem map is one of the things she does all the time in her rock and we'll see it later on the other problems where she makes a statement and then wonders if the statement is true she corrects herself in poems it's one of her modes it might seem like a trick except that you notice for example when Robert Lowell produces imitations his book of translations she writes to him with the tiniest I mean I think I don't know if this is true and you correct me if it's wrong but I think the greatest pleasure you can have in life is correcting someone else's French you know that there's nothing more enjoyable thing means rather than him and then that she really really wrote a beautifully savage gentle letter to low just pointing out how wrong his French was not just simply that he was he was you know taking risks with the translation he was simply wrong and she thought why does it matter being wrong and she's another letter about this well it matters enormous if we don't pay attention to the small things in the world it there could be something an enormous at stake if we do this but we mustn't do it so this poem the map is is one of the early poems of statement where where almost everything is taken as though nothing can be taken for granted if you'll excuse that sentence and M but also the playfulness also the fact that she has bit she's really interested in surrealism she's really just what dreams can do when she was at the University somebody noticed that she stood to eat a quantity of cheese every night to see if her dreams could just be bigger and better and more strange and this idea of taking an ordinary thing she does it later on with with her desk she makes her desk into a into a poem every object is part of a battlefield but as though seeing and then from the seeing beginning to actually begin to sort of or almost and manage the world by finding a way of looking at it which which further estranges it and every so often I mean she's really good I mean similes are the hardest things to do because nothing is like anything Wordsworth I mean you know the city just like a garment where the beauty of the morning well no it doesn't the city does not wear anything like a garment but when Bishop has that M that that if that a duck or some is moving through a pond and it's making a scissors shape in the water like a scissors opening but this one that she does here when she talks about peninsulas take the water between the thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard goods and just that the idea of a startling image which she loved of course precedes of the things are seven love talking about with George Herbert and she loved those sort of ways of we seeing the entire world where you're talking about a peninsula you know jutting out like that but but but am actually thumb and finger and she thinks Freeman you can see her thinking what's Tom and finger how did how her mind works oh she thinks back to the to the to almost Nova Scotia childhood women feeling for the smoothness of yard goods so the pawn them is essentially playful but it's also at its heart some idea that nothing can be taken for granted that even land even water even the names for things must must each one be written down in as I said in a poetry of statement something is something something is land lies in water it is shadowed green that that that that idea of of dating controlling seeming to fix things because they might unfix if you didn't fix them so that the entire syntax here is the syntax that is involved in in a form of let's say we seen the world in order to further controller or another further that it might not unloose itself from one's grasp and that that is part of the sort of game of the poem given in grad to that no I think it doesn't sum it up but it says enough for now of thinking along the lines and segue into in the waiting room of her you know fanaticism around things like accuracy in the correspondence with Howard Moss at the New Yorker who ends up publishing this next one in the waiting room she preempts the fact checkers who possibly were the only people more fanatical than she would have been about about what was right or erroneous in the poem they the fact check poems I guess they still probably do but but she preempts it by saying you'll notice in the waiting room she calls out National Geographic and she goes back and checks that the issue she has in mind is the issue that she writes down but then admits to moss in the letter that she has conflated a couple of them yeah in the poem as if she's confessing surely it should be here no just one more thing I'm just I wanted to say about fact-checking am i I once said that M it is a piece for The New Yorker that Connor Cruiser Brown was the kiss of death and the fact checker called him up at home and said are you the kiss of death just checking and he and then did call me back saying he's denied this and then another time I said that Seamus Heaney was a Catholic you know just jamesina Catholic and the fact checker faxed him and he said out of his fax machine quite late at night about 11 or 12 o'clock a new fax came and it was a fact-checker to say are you a Catholic and so anyway that's just fact-checking but it just it just about this poem and the just noticing this porn how the word em inside is used and are under second page just notice when she says suddenly from inside came an over pain I think the best book written on em on Lizabeth Bishop saving microphone presence is David Cal stones book called becoming a poet which is about Robert Lowell Marianne Moore and Bishop and cast stone was in communication with Bishop and he said that inside the word inside here should be read ambiguously should be read as suddenly from inside meaning from inside the the little girl's head as much a star inside the other room Bishop was incandescent with rage I think she must have been drunk and she called him up long distance just say inside means inside I supposed to outside the girl is outside in the waiting room her aunt is inside in the dentist surgery that is what inside means it does not mean anything else and if you go on thinking it does I would change the word because I mean I want words to mean what they say I'm not having this suggested just is an interesting letter today ricasso let's rate this product this recordings about four minutes long in Worcester Massachusetts I went without Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist waiting room it was winter got dark early the waiting room was full of grown-up people arctic sand overcoats lamps and magazines my hat was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic I could read and carefully studied the photographs the inside of the volcano black and full of ashes then it was spilling over in river lots of fire OSA and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches laced boots and pith helmets a dead man slung on a pole long Pig the caption said babies have pointed heads wound round and round the string black naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the next of lightbulbs their breasts were horrifying I read it right straight through I was too shy to stop and then I looked at the cover the yellow emergence of the date suddenly from inside came an oath of pain that consuela voice not very loud or long I wasn't all surprised even then I know she was a foolish timid woman I might have been embarrassed but wasn't what took me completely by surprise was that it was me my voice in my mouth without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt I we were falling falling our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic February 18:18 I said to myself three days and he will be seven years old I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round turning world into cold blue-black space but I felt you're an eye you're an Elizabeth you're one of them why should you be one too I scarcely dare to look the seat what it was I was I gave a sidelong glance I couldn't look any higher shadowy gray knees trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened nothing stranger could ever happen why should I be my aunt or me or anyone what's the molarity boots hands the family voice I felt in my throat or even the National Geographic there was awful hanging breasts held us all together or made us all just one oh I didn't know any word for how unlikely how did I come to be here like them and overhear a cry of pain could have got loved and worse but hadn't the waiting room was bright and too hot it was sliding beneath a big black wave another and another then I was backing it the war was on outside in Worcester Massachusetts were night and slush and cold and was still the 5th of February 1918 [Applause] [Music] the thing with Robert Lowell and I mean the first things we learn about Bishop and that are I mean as I said it was so little in the poem is about the self but in the book is book history and the previous book notebook which is she was a version of Robert Laurel has his number of sonnets for Elizabeth Bishop one he talks about he uses the phrase words and areas that she would hang her poems you know like as though in a line and you know keep them there for years and he said he called her someone who makes the casual perfect he also has a has a sonnet for he's using a letter from Bishop where she's talking about being at the end of her tether emotionally and saying to him your letter helped like being mailed a lantern or a spike stick vision of course was a very uneasy about her letters letters being used by low as poems but we get some sense for the first time this is in the early 70s of that there was a great deal behind these poems of Bishops that seemed so casual and that it's so easy to read this poem is just being about a girl in a waiting room with her aunt inside remember that the I think Bishop was one of those people where the more you learn about her the more the poem seemed deeper and stranger that him no one knew what to do with this strange little girl once her mother was put away and her father died the bishops were very rich they were there were big builders they had built a lot of the main public buildings in New England and she did a trust fund but no one knew where she should be when they came to great village just just in Nova Scotia the founder and barefeet wandering around with chickens and stuff and the bishops wanted to her to get a proper education but when they moved her from her mother's family to their family and she became really ill and seriously I'm happy and then they moved her to an aunt where she was sort of better but there was always is longing to go back to great village in Nova Scotia and back somehow to a past that was of course irrecoverable so that this this pond which begins and if you notice her reading where she refuses to read a line as iambic I mean she refuses to go the I mean you could go and to keep her debt it just doesn't do when she has to keep she won't stress the keep of it she'll go her reading system is as though this is prose as though this is casual as though this was written over you know another wise busy weekend that she just remembered that yeah I went my aunt Consuelo and sat him waited for her and this is why it's so important that the word inside means inside because it's just quite happened written down as a matter of fact and it's it's this and she does it as also in her inner poem at the fish houses just describing something making something ordinary seem even more or in me that it might have been just getting getting the language of poetry and bring it down to a level where I bothered no rhetoric involved there's no poetry involved there's no beef in the line but it's just a set of statements which are about ordinary experience and what she's doing is she's actually holding her breath as it were she's actually building up a set of expectations that nothing of any significance can happen in this poem other than the little girl will read a magazine and the aunt press will come back out and it's always fascinating to watch where exactly she does the change I mean this is on the second page where where she goes you know and when she says I might have been embarrassed but wasn't I mean I mean that is probably the least you know if you compare this to the to to the American prom has been written in the same year but almost no one is willing to be to be in possession of this sort of ease with a line this sort of ease with the conversational tone and what took me completely by surprise was that it was me me my voice in my mouth without thinking at all and the crucial word becomes the word I where actually that whole idea of who she is becomes almost in container as she moves with the word I and the the word I've instead of being the single consciousness who merely remembers a single event there was not a much importance the eye becomes surrounded with mystery with question with M wonder so I was my foolish on eye and then the word eye has to be corrected here we were falling falling her eyes glued to the cover and she's always moving back as though for full protection to fact the date February 1918 the this business of M where she mentions the war was on it which is in the last stanza and the in November 1917 the largest explosion that had ever taken place in the world took place in Halifax Harbour where ammunition ship and was was crashed into by another ship and blew up and and large numbers of people were killed her mother was in the actual mental hospital there and the windows were blown in so you can just imagine this M six-year-old and the war that wasn't nothing that the war was on but um but what's fascinating is the fact that what she's doing the tone how she's using tongue almost to manipulate the reader into a state of ease and then using the same tongue to unsettle the reader totally to get the word one of the one in a way one of the crucial words in poetry in these year the word eye and get the word and tarnish and tarnish and see where I will take you correct us and under - so the whole idea of personal identity will in this very real place named in this very real time named with with all the details described the very thing of the center the eye the person the idea of personhood Salford is to be undermined questioned and made dramatic I think also maybe worth pointing out that the kind of characteristic downplaying is there in the lines how had I come to be here like them and over here a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't it's that's a kind of bookend to I might have been embarrassed but wasn't sort of turning the temperature down on the stove before it gets before it gets too hot and the that the next poem is an ambitious had it had an enormous interest in geography almost sometimes that she was desperately interested in geography as a way of keeping history at bay and and of course the idea of traveling in Brazil for her and keeping Diaries and writing letters so her I mean I mean her letters from her journeys actually marvelously you know filled with deep description I think this time in Santa we've got to watch how the extraordinary precision of the detail adds up to something much more than mere travelogue but it does so subtly strangely in a way that's not obvious I mean the way you don't say oh this is where she starts to make a poem from casual travel experience that it's almost imperceptible at times of something happening in the rhythm here which I think that's the sort of thing that tongue gun began to notice in her work that underneath what was casual was something that was much more deliberate but still hidden and was to do with actual rhythm the sound of words the the gaps where the commas come how the lines end and and and that whole idea of the power but what's buried in understatement how much you can do with the short sentence and and it's not I think it's not nothing that she was M you know in Florida and knew some of the people Hemingway knew and was aware of what what Hemingway was doing in prose of pairing things down to very little to see how much emotion you could get if he didn't name the emotion but get the emotion from the rhythm that's buried and in in prose as much as in I mean in poetry as much as in prose so we listen to us yeah one one brief comment I think one of the the themes of these series is always what what is the what is similar in what is different about reading a collection of poetry and maybe attending a live reading and this is true of both the gun and the Bishop recordings that we're hearing if you were able to hear them in fall you'd be able to I think appreciate the poet's choices as as maybe skeptical as each of them would have been about saying yes for an invitation and showing up before a crowd of people the reading the bishop gift starts with the map it ends with Santorum and there's a poem in between so there's her kind of moving from from kind of theoretical travel through the looking and contemplating of the maps reanimated and then this kind of actual travelogue but similarly among the six poems that she reads one is and speaking of Florida and Hemingway and the Cubans living down in Key West there's a hieronymus house and one of the images in that poem is kind of she goes the I in hieronymus house is not was with Bishop it's it's her anima and she goes through the house and and describes his prized possessions and they're not there not many of them but what one of them is a wasp's nest and when the Hurricanes come it's one of the things that he takes with him to higher ground and a wasp's nest shows up in this poem as well as something to watch out for of course I may be remembering it all wrong after after how many years that golden evening I really wanted to go no farther more than anything else I want to stay a while and that conflux of two great rivers tapas Jos an Amazon grandly silently flowing flowing east suddenly they're dead houses people and lots of mongrel river boats skittering back and forth under a sky of gorgeous under clouds with everything gilded burnished along one side and everything bright cheerful casual or saw it look I like the place I like the idea of the place two rivers hadn't to ever sprung from the Garden of Eden no that was for and they diverged here only two and coming together even if one were tempted to literary interpretation such as life death right wrong male/female such notions what resolve dissolves straight off in that watery dazzling with dialectic in front of the church cathedral rather there is a modest promenade and a Belvedere about to fall in the river stubby palms flamboyant like pans of embers buildings one-story high stucco blue or yellow one house faced with azules buttercup yellow the street was deep and dark gold river sand damp from the ritual afternoon rain and teams of zaboo's plotted gentle proud and blue with down curved horns and hanging ears pulling carts with solid wheels the Sabres hoofs the people's feet weighted in gold and sand Danford buy gold and sand so they own almost the only sounds were creaks and shush shush shush two rivers full of crazy shipping people all apparently changing their minds embarking disembarking rowing clumsy Diaries after the Civil War some southern families came here here they could still own slaves they left occasional blue-eyes English names and ours no other place no one on all Amazon's for thousand miles does anything but paddle a dozen or so young nuns white habited waved gaily from an Ulster and wheeler getting up steam already hung with hammocks off to their mission days and days away god knows what lost tributary side wheelers countless wobbling dugouts a cow stood up in one quite calm chewing her cud while being ferried chipping wobbling somewhere to be married a river schooner was raped mass and violet card sales tact in so close her bowsprit seemed to touch the church the cathedral rather a week or so before I had been a thunderstorm and the cathedral was struck by lightning one tower had a widening zigzag crack all the way down it was a miracle the priests house right next door had been struck too and his brass bed the only one in town galvanized black grasses adduce he had been in billing in the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps nest for Michelle small exquisite clean mat white and hard as stucco I admired it so much he gave it to me then my ship's whistle blew I couldn't stay back on board a fellow passenger mr. Swann Dutch the retiree had a Philips Electric really a very nice old man who wanted to see the Amazon before he died asked what's that ugly thing [Music] didn't that it and what we notice here is the is the anti-heroic nature of the voice that she's interested in small things as almost as though she's no she's writing a poem within the poem a porn to say you know I will not make large statements about life but don't think I can't if I really wanted to you know I could use the word dialectic in a poem which is more than you could do and I could make it work in a poem but other than that I have no interest in making philosophical statements I want to notice things and and and and and I want to find a rhythm whereby if I notice enough and I find a rhythm enough I actually manage to create a level of feeling around noticing that will be almost exquisite that will be with that will have a sense in it office herbs or a density and purity but but you will never know where that came from what moment that began and also I know how to end upon which is on a dime for which is defined almost nothing at the end to say and I will not make this wasps nest into a symbol I will do anything to stop that it's a wasp's nest but nonetheless despite the fact my efforts not to make it into something that you can say it really is standing for something else it is something that she wants to bring with her it does have a mysterious presence in the pond as object we cannot be sure what it means or even what it does here but nonetheless the fact that everything else has been in a state of flux and that this somehow has hardened that nature has hardened it into becoming an artifact it seems as much and as a as a thing in nature and that that has to mean something but but she has no intention of saying what and then and again this joke about the Cathedral you know there's not a Church's the Cathedral you know it's repeated twice as though her correcting herself is actually you know it is a fundamental part of her system that in other words in the same way as rivers crazy crazy shipping all people all apparently changing their minds there's always a sense in her poems that the poems came as a result of her changing her mind that that that noticing something and feeling she hadn't noticed it enough and coming back through it and back to it to see there's one more color or one more detail that can be described yeah I think I think it's worth underlying that you hear the audience is laughter Bishop is funny in this is poem with the parentheticals in her self correcting and the through line of Cathedral in church but also the cow getting married as the priest having the only brass bed in town I don't know if I had been in the audience that night that I would have laughed out loud but there it is on on the recording I don't mean that I wouldn't have laughed out loud because it's not funny but rather because sort of takes you by surprise you're not exposed the feeling that she must have smiled she must have done something it's because you can hear her a little laugh under her voice and you wish for the video and in that respect too because the there you inch closer by having her there her voice uttering she would have made you ripe that video you know would have been so just so sad because you would have had it have been not there's not a lot of time should we move quickly yeah yeah I just wanna say that M just how much are we doing we're doing badly no we started late no you started just and it really is impossible to say Tom Gunn was one type of poet and not another and that and may end up being the poet for us of state of dreaming of waking from sleep of being of those that first power of consciousness he may be a poet about gay experience he may be a 16th century poet in the twentieth century he may be the great Ella just the greatest allergist of his time he may be you know that those those poems in the man with night sweats may be poems were the best read in conjunction with some points in the sixteenth century some prolific Thomas Hardy and this first one anyway is when I mean people felt that there were people in this very barrio who felt that he had gone to hell in San Francisco that he had loosened his rhythms that he had a stop being precise that he had stop being this great poet of his first books fighting terms and that that he was and that he had really given up the game and he himself really hated this view of his own work he felt that he had he had found something golden in the golden state and for his poetry but then then he produced in the time of age he produced a man with night sweats where he went back to using rhythm we started using stanza form using strict meters and using rhyme and he was probably the only poet in California in that time to know what a rhyme even was I mean we're talking about the time of Gary Snyder and of Allen Ginsberg so let's just listen to one of these allergies one quick note sorry to jump in is this this is another instance where it pays to know what has come before in the reading that gun has adapt like musician who arrives at a setlist some of these recordings you listen to in the the poet will be bumbling trying to figure out what it is he or she should read next in this instance it's very deliberate so this is a poem that is about a friend of his called Charlie Hinckley who dies of AIDS there's an earlier poem in the reading which is about it's called differences and it's about meeting Charlie Hinckley for the first time and one of the the lines is I think worth having in your head when you listen to this recording it's conscience and courage stood fleshed out in you memory unsettled yep your pain still hangs in air sharp months of it suspended the voice of your despair that also is not ended when near your death a friend asked you what he could do remember me you said we will remember you once when you went to see another with a fever in a like hospital bed with terrible hut house cough and terrible hot house shiver that soaked him and then dried him and you perceived that he had to be comforted he climbed in there beside him and hugged him plane in view though you were sick enough and had your own fears to M what he did here is that he found that the relaxed rhythms he'd been using in in his free verse suddenly could be used again and he could relax them and tighten them knows he could use the meters he had been using as a young poet bring them back but but as instead of as a formal maid poem he could make it sound like a voice speaking he could give it a natural sound that I think came from the work he had done in between being a formalist and being M I'm much more relaxed poet August plans out her who was a close friend of his and did the press selected poems and said nah stuff you're all wrong about him he was a great part of the city he wrote Street poems these are the poems we should be attending to you know the elegies are fine the early fall upon but the street poems notice the street tones and this prawn is called do not all things well and I I don't want to read the whole time because we're missing out of time but that's what that line is is from a poem called now winter nights and large by Thomas Campion there's a sixteenth century problem I think it has the greatest last line if you forever I mean it's just so uplifting and so if you're depressed and also anyway just just just just just listen to the second stanza of this poem at Toms Campion it's a problem at love this time does well dispense with lovers long discourse much Spieth much speech had some defense the beauty no remorse all do not all things well some measures calmly tread some not as riddles tell some poems smoothly read the summer had his joys and winter his delights the love and all his pleasures are but toys is shorten tedious nights so that this pawn is one of the pawns that it's it's showing gun relaxed in San Francisco just watching the street just enjoying his life I am there it's like oh I was just gonna say and having earlier read a poem called in time of plague which is about two junkies named John and Brad who are trying to tempt him to I guess shoot up heroin with their needle on a park bench she declines to do their are John and Brad the the true junkies in time of plague and in this poem we have the auto junkies for his next-door neighbors his poem called all do not all things will [Music] it's the title is quotation from a poem of champions turn of the sixteenth century new now winter nights enlarge the number of our hours it's about the winter occupations of the great house in Elizabethan times he says all do not all things well some measures calmly trade some knotted riddles tell some poems smoothly read and go it goes on through the occupations that they were doing well this is about coal Street in San Francisco and about two of my neighbors in the early 1970s who like demand cars I didn't write about it till about fifteen years later the title is also the first line all do not all things well implies that some therefore do well for its own sake one thing they undertake because it has enthralled them I used to like the two auto freaks as I called them who labored in their driveway it's concrete black with oil in the next block Bette year one hurt in Jungle war had a false leg the other raised a huge beard above a huge Hell's Angel belly they seemed to live on beer and corn chips from the deli always with friends they sprawled beneath the ruined car in that inert but live way of scrutinizing innards and one week they examined an eight sari and one week they extracted an engine to examine transplant shining like tar fished out into the Sun it's all that I enjoy said the stiff legged boy that was when the officious realtor had threatened them for brashley operating a business on the street and outside of that woman who wanted them evicted wanted the neighborhood neat to sell it that was when the boy from Vietnam told me that he'd firebomb her car he didn't of course she won I'm sorry that they went quick with a friendly greeting they were gentle jokey men certainly not ambitious perhaps not intelligent and less about occurr their work one thing they knew they could for certain do with a disinterest and passionate expertise to which they gave their best desires and energies such oily handed zest bypassed the self like love I thought that they were good for any neighborhood [Applause] one question for column before we open it up to the floor which is are you really the first one who's who's taken bishop and gone and begun to look at them side by side I hadn't found anything else that did that well in the or a lot of biography they do interview gun you know about her yeah but no I don't think anyone else had noticed that the that they're there I think the time they spent together and was significant because I think their poetics had a great deal in common and and the fact that I think they both were interested in Biggers like George Herbert or in figures like Campion what they were reading and poetry and the fact that they think felt like Outsiders in their world I mean there was no one in California writing as gun was writing and of 2010 wrote his free verse poems it was known in England writing like he was writing so he was always on his arm as a poet he didn't come into school even though he was associated with Ted Hughes he had really very little in common with me with Hughes and Bishop Bishop was the same in C with his last one so much is casual so so much it's just something ordinary just being written down and said and then and then he can get away with M such oily handed zest which is you know just something bypass the self like laugh and you're back with the Campion with the whole idea of of trying to say something mysterious but putting it in a context which is so ordinary that it seems to actually repel mystery and the mystery could enter all more powerfully for that you say in love in a dark time that these were writers who meant a great deal to you as a teenager chiefly for the the secret of their homosexuality and how they concealed it or how it manifested itself in the work in other ways I'm interested because you're no longer a teenager in your heart give me a give me a break your relationship to these poets and their their work has deepened you said earlier that the more you know about it was at the bishops life the more you see what's lurking between the lines and would you just say something about living with these writers work across the years and that I certainly didn't know the bishop was gay and when her selected poems were published by chatto and windus and when jog Rafi three came out I I did still didn't know I didn't know gun was gay even though it was staring me in the face and I had a friend who was doing a thesis on him who didn't know he was gay so there was something in in the poetry and at first in love and at our time I said well that must be that sort of gayness you know if you think all gayness was in poetry and you read a poem and even though the you don't know point gain something about the lines or the phrases or the way that cause is a gay way of writing commas are the gate is the thing called a gay semicolon and I really had to rethink this in the light of reading about both of them and what was of course at him they both lost parents in childhood and that that may be what I was finding in the work in the phrasing in a sort of melancholy in a tug up emotion that was in the poems but not actually mentioned in the pons was in the rhythm of the poems and I may have misunderstood when I read them first thinking it was a night when I found out they were gay thought that was why I was interested that it may have been at least something else should we take a few questions just a few there's a microphone but right Clara's gonna spring around and because it's being both video and audio recorded it's not called video anymore but we destroy your later story will will write you if we write a long letter complaining about something please wait for the mic hi thank you for sharing all that the amazing knowledge I mean it's very generous indeed do you think that it's always better to hear a perp read there in pertree or is it just a separate thing can you get re readers of perms who do it better does that make sense and I mean I this is about reading poetry and it really made a such a huge difference to so many people in Ireland and I presume here also when they saw Seamus Heaney reading and the way he introduced upon and his his own accent in the poem so that that would never be one real example of hearing somebody and it's making an enormous difference to the poems and the problem of actors is that they act and you can hear Bishop and Gunn just deciding I'm not actually I'm not doing that for you you know this this problem is filled with emotion but I'm burying it it's for you and that in itself is an interesting idea they're sort of bad reading by the poet of the poet's own poems so it's an you know it's an interesting one because I think everyone lives in fear of becoming Dylan Thomas you know going on a circuit filled with alcohol drink yourself to death with huge audiences every night as you once more in tongue do not go gentle into that good night you know and him but it's also it's also marvelous to hear Philip Larkin reading and the so extraordinary turn he takes yeah but but but she isn't she isn't trying to make you a Moche isn't emotion on the stage of the why she's on unloading is just such a it's such a word or not yeah and then and to just one of the the real privileges of my job is going into the audio archive and often it's the case that we have the poets for decades and decades and then there'll be some kind of tribute after they've passed or on some big anniversary and that will be some combination of poets who are paying tribute then actors right so there's this data set of any number of actors taking the work that you've already heard the poet do across decades I think there are all sorts of interesting academic answers that what's going on with self performance just in the in the examples that we've had in in this series you know Ted Hughes came as close to being Dylan Thomas and succeeding maybe I think at least to my ears and then we've had we featured Eliot in this and it m'appelle extra-- Matic in and it's it's worth having you know braved the rain in December 1950 to go on heard somebody like I really read although he says I don't know why you would have done this you know he comes out on stage and immediately is undermining the experience for the audience but the performance he doesn't sabotage the poems but I would say even today you you you hear people read you think oh I that the work the work on the page deserved a lot better whatever better is to your ears or in the other direction somebody's performance will quote unquote sell the poem and I think that same idea is true if you've been to any number of readings but also because a reading is is set in a very specific time in place you know somebody could have had a late night or had a frazzled commute and I think that's some of the the moment and timeless of these recordings that is that is lost we treat them with a certain reverence because they were carefully preserved and it's many years after the fact and in a lot of instances it's a given that these are authors who've already ascended there there are a lot of for example in in any given year that these recordings would have been plucked out of there would have been a reading series with thirty forty some times more events and if you just look at the season brochures and across 80 some odd years you know who made it and who didn't make it who are we continuing to service or who to our surprise sort of comes around again I before reading calms book which is on Elizabeth Bishop I never read Tom gun and was very happy to discover that we had multiple recordings of Tom gun in the archive and then to have the opportunity further to come and talk about him which entailed me you know thinking seriously about his work in learning about about his life that's old long answer which I'll cut off you talked very interestingly about Elizabeth bishops life and Tongans life do you think knowing about the background of a poet or the life they've lived adds anything to the poetry oh do you understand yes by the perfect I mean I mean I mean oddly enough I think even more for a poet than a prose writer biography can really enrich a poem and I think it's certainly true in the case of Yeats for example and with Roy fastest geography but with with Bishop just simply knowing the amount of loss and the amount of last they might've lost in the light and the amount of last not mentioned in the poems and you realize the pawns are almost bulwarks or anchors or ways of keeping the other thing at bay and then you watch as feeling comes in it comes in in a strange way so yes I think it really matters that that we know about the life the the problem I mean for me the problem is that I thought I read em Sylvia Plath before I knew much about her and I read a little bit of the same so I had the good experience of finding out later I think the problem becomes if you suddenly think the only thing interesting about Sylvia Plath is her suicide and it's her relationship to Ted Hughes I think yet then you think what you miss the actual poetry so there's a it's a it's a it's a difficult one because sometimes you need not to know anything and their parts we don't know much about take note go ahead please that Thomas Campion porn for example II don't need to know how he was in love with or why he was a lover what was going on that made him have tedious nights we just don't need to know it's just one of those lyric moments that belongs to us all but about if he won't help us read and so that's an example of one where it doesn't matter in two just give one example of that which was Bishop it's sort of where you put the weight and it's interesting to see when new biographies come out where the weight is placed there's a there's an anecdote in the one that's coming out this fall she wanted to be a professional musician she studied in grade school in high school and she gets to Vassar and one of the earliest part of being a serious music student Vassar where that's true anywhere is that you had to regularly perform in public and one of the first time sir not the first time that you had to do it I think it was the first time she freezes and these were pieces that she'd been practicing and knew how to play and it it is not a minor crisis in her life at that moment and word gets back to her music teacher who had been her instructing her for years prior to that moment but you think about something as local as her skepticism in terms of performance or how much she discloses up herself on the page or just what her persona is and how much do you weigh in a moment like that where she thought one of if not the central future for her was was to be I mean yeah the idea of Elizabeth Bishop as a concert pianist is almost unfathomable but there you know there in the record is the the facts of the case and was she diverted utterly was this the moment where things were in a different way there's a similar instance later where she moved to New York and enrolls in medical school at Cornell and Marian more apparently talks her out of it so how much do you weigh so which do you want the Elizabeth Bishop the concert pianist or the Elizabeth Bishop you know neurosurgeon or something so that I think it's it's the tally you you you weigh it and you sort of you you think about what your sources are and from what you're gathering this information well I was just going to say that in a sense or bishops poems autobiographical in that they're all true she wasn't interested in writing poems that weren't true and all the details that she writes about she has seen and makes you see them and but because she was a very reserved person and didn't like confessional poems at all she said I just wish they wouldn't say those things about confessional stuff it wasn't until she wrote last poem solid which actually she says who she is and the New Yorker wouldn't take it even though it is a very subtle little poem sonic isn't it yes so this is one of the I mean it's a skinny little sauna and there hardly any words in it at all and you feel that it's almost a way I still letter to Robert Lowe who's been writing thousands of soliton and revising them and he was sonnet lad he was sounded crazy and often with her she's often sending a message to low calm down honey just calm down honey you know it's fine just just you know keep keep it down and with with her little solace to feel it's a message too low saying and this is the sonnet you know I just wrote one and she loved of that idea I just you know I take 20 years you ride in a frenzy you know I am the real artist and of course she's the one you're talking about that who makes it who doesn't I thought it was a funny she did say to someone about I loved afraid I don't think would make a great villain out there isn't anyone I couldn't make there's no woman I couldn't make meaning you know and I loved the idea that somehow uh that that behind all this reticence there was that she was a cement tremendous drunk and quality people late at night making crazy phone calls and poems just didn't did she do that you know I love that distance between the poem itself well they both abused substance and one of the things that you could you know talk about although we haven't is you know where they composing work do they ever compose work under under the influence the characteristics of this work would would lead us to think that that was not the case I don't know nothin gun has something very interesting to say about that he's saying that that this that the controlling imagination which he certainly had one often comes from vast chaos and that he would think he was talking about Christopher Marlowe and he was talking about figures who whose who seemed to have had lead usually untidy lives you often found that somehow or other as that gets distilled onto the page it gets to still the great great exercise of fierce control which is I think what both of them did and it's a very interesting dichotomy you know between the actual surface self which is untidy and E&E some hesitated say inner self but the self as artists which one wants to make actual very very reticent tidy perfect that's where it forms what's in there thank you all for coming thank you very much you

Channel: London Review Bookshop

Views: 6,847

Rating: 4.9487181 out of 5

Keywords: Colm Toibin, elizabeth Bishop, Thom Gunn, poetry

Id: EdiYwXwU790

Length: 81min 27sec (4887 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019