Elizabeth Bishop documentary

a presentation of the south carolina educational television network [Music] major funding for the voices and visions series is provided by the national endowment for the humanities annenberg media additional series funding is provided by the national endowment for the arts and the arthur vining davis foundations [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] ah [Music] ah there are too many waterfalls here the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow motion turning to waterfalls under our very eyes [Music] think of the long trip home should we have stayed at home and thought of here where should we be today is it right to be watching strangers in a play in the strangest of theaters what childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way round [Music] oh must we dream our dreams and have them too and have we room for one more folded sunset still quite warm but surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road really exaggerated in their beauty not to have seen them gesturing like noble pandemists robed in pink and never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians speeches two hours of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveler takes a notebook writes is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagine places not to stay at home [Music] or could pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room [Music] city country society the choice is never wide and never free and here or there no should we have stayed at home wherever that may be [Music] [Music] well elizabeth bishop is a great poet i'm not sure it's because she never wrote a bad poem she never wrote a bad poem i don't think i think of all poets elizabeth is most admired by the most varied group of poets i would like to have been elizabeth i think to have had those wonderful images those very amusing images inhabiting my mind just as i don't know i would like to have been mozart for the same kind of reason not for fame but because of the music she didn't want to be in the public eye she was a very shy very private person she you know left america for 15 years to live in brazil she never found a place in the world that she could really call home that she could be absolutely comfortable with she gave herself no heirs if there was anything the least bit artificial about her her character and her behavior it was the wonderful way in which she impersonated an ordinary woman underneath of course was this this incredible fresh genius uh who wrote the poems that you were doing ambassador i was class of 33 and she was class of 34. i entered the fall of the crash of september 29th so uh we lived through a college in the depression years and so we were rather i think more rebellious more different uh though not necessarily in conventional ways classroom was the way it always is and it was educating girls rather well in a sort of classroom way but i think also inculcating a certain notion of superiority that was very very vascular elizabeth had had a very amusing face she had amusing hair which was a very very electric and kinky alive she looked like somebody from the last century it was funny that a girl who was so shy and also so independent went out for things i think we had more sense of her as a comic writer i think of a poem she wrote about living next to the toilet and let's see if i can remember it ladies and gents ladies and gents flushing away your excrements i sit in here beyond the wall the sad continual waterfall that sanitary pipes can give to still our actions primitive now that poem was well known in the smoking room of our hall the fascinating thing about elizabeth as an undergraduate was how accomplished a writer she already was [Music] and of course marian moore was her great influence and someone who really took elizabeth under her wing for many years finally elizabeth met her and she met her through fanny borden ambassador librarian who was an old friend of marianne moore that she arranged the introductions they hit it off remarkably and became great friends they went to the circus together marion had a passion for circuses and of course wrote lots of poems about animals [Music] certainly between the bishop and marianne moore there are resemblances so the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience aspects of experience i think there is something a bit too demure about marianne moore and there's nothing to mirror about elizabeth bishop and of course it was a lifelong friendship and particularly important in elizabeth's career because it was marianne who got her first poems it was first poems were published in an anthology it was called trial balances and it consisted of new poets introduced by older poets and marianne introduced elizabeth her first book was called north and south it was published in 1946. i think north and south really does embody a kind of central idea in her work that these two things these two polarities and they are polarities both exist at the same time the first poem is called the map which was probably the first poem that she wrote after she graduated from vasser and was first published in 1935 whether she knew it or not the map raises questions and feelings that would be with her for the rest of her writing life it's the poem that dates from the early 30s and she was still able to call her her last book published in 1976 uh geography three she was fascinated by where things were in relation to one another the map land lies in water it is shadowed green shadows or are they shallows at its edges showing the line of long seaweeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green or does the land lean 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 labradors yellow where the moonee eskimo has oiled it the names of seashore towns run out to sea the names of cities across the neighboring mountains the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause these peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard goods mapped waters are more quiet than the land is lending the land their waves own confirmation and norway's hair runs south and agitation profiles investigate the sea where land is are they assigned or can the countries pick their colors what suits the character or the native waters best typography displays no favorites north as near as west more delicate than the historians are the map makers colors the map is in a way an image of a whole natural emotional vivid passionate almost child-like world a more lovable enterprise than writing down the deeds of human beings which would be history when i came to edit elizabeth's prose i realized i didn't know much about her life she was a great friend but you don't necessarily know the biographical facts and it was a little mysterious [Laughter] she was born in worcester massachusetts in 1911 and her father died when she was eight months old she never knew her father elizabeth's mother had a very serious reaction to her husband's death and began to have uh sort of mental disorder the other serious breakdown occurred when elizabeth was only five years old it's from and she went into a sanitarium and she was there for the rest of her life and i think she died in 1934. so elizabeth was brought up by her grandparents in nova scotia [Music] life in great village was rather a tight community really we had a two churches presbyterian and baptist and they were all very friendly they had lots of parties they had to amuse themselves you know well there wasn't too much outside the communication in those days [Music] she went to the baptist church the baptist church was not very different from the presbyterian church here perhaps we sang hymns a little more vociferously than the presbyterians did i don't know i think the first poem she probably heard were hymns i think elizabeth concentrated on her childhood because it was a sacred period in her life it was a life of animals she was brought up on a farm there was nothing more magical to elizabeth than the appearance of animals the sudden appearance of animals because they connected one to a real and a natural world the great example of it of course is the moose [Music] the moose [Music] from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herring's long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in the bay not at home [Music] through late afternoon a bus journeys west the passengers lie back snores some long sighs a dreamy divergation begins in the night a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakiness and noises an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus grandparents voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity names being mentioned things cleared up finely what he said what she said who got pensioned deaths deaths and sicknesses the year he remarried the year something happened [Music] bishop description is never holy or simply description they are always moral landscapes they always embody an emotional journey [Music] the warmest image of peace and uh security in her work uh is the passage in the moose where she thinks about the grandparents voices um and it is an image of home but it's an odd home it's a home without a mother without a father she died in childbirth that was the son lost when the schooner foundered he took to drink yes she went to the bed when amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away yes that peculiar affirmative yes a sharp in drawn breath half grown half acceptance that means life's like that we know it also death and then the sense of resignation about all that bad stuff that bad news that's brooded about yes that peculiar affirmative yes a sharp in-drawn breath half-grown half acceptance that means life's like that we know it also death [Music] suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt turns off his lights a moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and sands there looms rather in the middle of the road it approaches it sniffs at the bus's hot hood towering antlerless it's a female high as a church homely as a house or safest houses taking her time she looks the bus over grand otherworldly why why do we feel we all feel this sweet sensation of joy the moose has appeared like a vision in the night and we are permitted this this this brief view but what is more important this sweet sensation of joy in the middle of our travail in the middle of this life of hardship it's it's just like elizabeth to make the moose friendly and female for a moment longer by craning backward the moose can be seen on the moonlit mcadam then there's a dim smell of moose an accurate smell of gasoline she was absolutely meticulous about her about her writing poems would take years to complete long poems would take even more years to complete i think she worked on the moose for 20 years something like that they're not poems that begin with conclusions or even come to conclusions that they're working something out i think it was her way of writing poems of thinking on the page [Music] she was taken away from her nova scotia grandparents she loved them deeply she really had affection and had a home there you see and she was taken back to worcester by her father's family a very wealthy family into a mansion where she was terribly unhappy and lonely its effect on her was having many illnesses which followed she contracted asthma eczema as a result of this displacement in the waiting room maybe the most important part of elizabeth's in terms of elizabeth it's that moment in which she became aware of being herself a being conscious the moment of a child first experiencing her own his own identity and that moment of terror and panic and alienation and how that was a fundamental experience in the life of the child in the waiting room in worcester massachusetts i went with ann consuelo to keep her dentist appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room it was winter it got dark early the waiting room was full of grown-up people arctics and overcoats lamps and magazines my aunt 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 a volcano black and full of ashes then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire [Music] babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string black naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs 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 margins the date suddenly from inside came an oh of pain and consuela's voice not very loud or long i wasn't at all surprised even then i knew 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 1918 i said to myself three days and you'll 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 are and i you are an elizabeth you are one of them why should you be one too she falls out of this world that she thought she knew and she does things to try to hold on to the world to recollect herself to possess an identity again but on the other hand that very identity that she wants to hold on to uh is mysterious and scary in itself but i felt you were an i you are an elizabeth you are one of them why should you be one too and what is it to be and elizabeth one of them i scarcely dared to look to see what it was i was i gave a side long glance i couldn't look any higher at shadowy gray knees trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands what are the connections between us and what is it to be this strange creature with pairs of hands people have pairs of hands why should i be my aunt or me or anyone what similarities boots hands the family voice i felt in my throat or even the national geographic and those awful hanging breasts held us all together or made us all just one how i didn't know any word for it how unlikely the waiting room was bright and too hot it was sliding beneath a big black wave another and another then i was back in it the war was on outside in worcester massachusetts were night and slash and cold and it was still the 5th of february 1918. elizabeth often said that if she could be anything other than a poet she would be a painter in fact she often said that she would rather have been a painter than a poet and of course she did do watercolors you could read the poems and know that she was someone who loved paintings and loved art loved to look at things she has the eye of a artist three painters many times poets develop sometimes too much the ear she has she had a beautiful ear great ear to hear the voice to hear the words but better than that ice she loved joseph cornell and she did at least one joseph cornell box which is quite magical quite impressive i think what elizabeth loved about joseph cornell was the sense of fantasy and juxtaposition that heightened sense of real objects put together in totally unexpected even bizarre ways [Music] many critics have spoken about the influence of surrealism on elizabeth's work and she herself in in her in her notebooks and sketches was uh very drawn to the kind of hallucinatory uh nevertheless very clearly uh defined image that you associate with surrealism in the manmoth it's a misprint from mammoth and it appeared in the newspaper and that gave her the idea for a man moth elizabeth's created a character called the man moth who flits about cracks in the buildings it's a city bar she talks about it as her poem about new york and i think it's really her palm about being an artist here above cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight the whole shadow of man is only as big as his hat he does not see the moon he observes only her vast properties feeling the queer light on his hands neither warm or cold of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers but when the man moth pays his rare although occasional visits to the surface the moon looks rather different to him he thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky proving the sky quite useless for protection he trembles but must investigate as high as he can climb up the facades his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him he climbs fearfully thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through as from a tube in black scrolls on the light man standing below him has no such illusions but what the man moth fears most he must do although he fails of course and falls back scared but quite unhurt then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home he flips he flutters and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him the doors close swiftly the man moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full terrible speed without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort he cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams just as the ties recur beneath his train these underlie his rushing brain he does not dare look out the window for the third rail the unbroken draft of poison runs there beside him [Music] the most fascinating thing about her image of the artist is that there's always a kind of threat the third rail is always running alongside the artist is also different he always sits himself in the subway traveling backwards not the way everyone else would prefer to sit if you catch him hold up a flashlight to his eye it's all dark pupil an entire night itself whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back and closes up the eye then from the lids one tear his only possession like the bee's sting slips slightly he palms it and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it however if you watch he'll hand it over cool is from underground springs and pure enough to drink the tear at the end of the poem is what the artist has to offer his or her experience of life that becomes a kind of clarifying vision for whoever asks for it [Music] elizabeth met robert lowell in 1946 randall jarrell the poet introduced them and they became very good friends and remained close friends and tense friends for the rest of their lives elizabeth said that she was also uh tremendously attracted to robert lowe uh he was adorable he looked like james dean she said she wanted to uh you know fix up his clothes i think elizabeth was in love with him really in love with him oh she loved him because he was poet and she loved him because he was mad and she had a vein of madness as is known in her own family there was a point when he told people that he was going to propose to her she was his favorite poet he said that that many times i think she offered more criticism of cal's work than he did of hers i think her work was too perfect to invite criticism you know they had a good time together they had fun there was some instinctive connection that was obviously very deep and then never ended i think because of a mother's illness there was a certain reserve a certain restraint and a desire not to over dramatize anything well this there was certainly a lot of resistance in elizabeth and there's reticence in her work but you do sense uh the that it represents a very tight control and a certain kind of passionate feeling i think she was indeed uh capable of passionate feeling but also of coolness both both but uh i think uh yes i think it was a positive quality and the and the control makes you sense the tendons of control what's being held back the shampoo the still explosions on the rocks the lichens grow by spreading grey concentric shocks they have arranged to meet the rings around the moon although within our memories they have not changed and since the heavens will attend as long on us you've been dear friend precipitate and and look what happens her time is nothing if not amenable the shooting stars in your black hair and bright formation are flocking where so straight so soon come let me wash it in this big tin basin battered and shiny like the moon as in this poem the shampoo talking about this very daily uh matter practical matter to to to clean your air and who becomes a kind of cosmic meeting of not only two persons but i should say of two planets or two stars and that is also an insinuation of this metaphor of disguise and the shampoo is a matter of metaphor of love and she never talks about tough in this time but it's a love poem [Music] after her graduation from vasa she went abroad for the first time and for the rest of her life she lived in many parts of the world she lived in new york city key west she lived abroad there's always that the possibility of finding a place for herself that the travels will end and she will settle down but that of course is illusory i mean the possibility of home is what we need to keep going [Music] if we have home why travel and if our whole career is predicated on our movement from one place to another or better our identity is predicated on movement home is best as an ideal elizabeth went to south america to brazil in 1951. she had no intention of remaining there but she became ill she explained to that she ate the fruit of the cashew plant this made her deathly ill apparently so she was there for a long time then decided to stay [Music] in brazil uh must have represented for elizabeth a kind of clarifying mirror in all of its strangeness for the things that she needed to see freshly again in herself i mean she found correspondences in the landscapes between the subjects and images that had obsessed her all of her life but she could treat them in a way more freely thanks to the distance she was saying new englander from very puritan ancestry with difficulties to exteriorize her feelings and that perhaps for for her brazil in general south america but especially brazil was something to open not her mind but perhaps her heart and her sensibility i think she fell in love with brazil in the south as well as with a woman or loser and she lived with her friend lotta for 10 or 11 years after that first she lived in rio then they shared a house in the metropolis and her third residence the final residence of brazil was a beautiful 18th century colonial house in uropreto she recorded casa mariana after marianne moore and he described it as having five bedrooms a waterfall a panorama of seven baroque churches and just about everything except a [Music] telephone [Music] in santa rem we get one of these pictures of the brazil that elizabeth has already left when she writes the poem so that it's suffused with a glorious nostalgic almost biblical light it's so far back in in her history what she doesn't talk about directly in the poem or the of the colors of the two rivers side by side the blue and the brown river but these colors you notice get displaced onto the landscape itself the uh colonists who have left blue eyes in in brown faces that she sees on the street that the double-ness the the the beautiful exhilarating double-ness which she calls the watery dazzling dialectic santorin 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 wanted to stay a while in that complex of two great rivers tapijos amazon grandly silently flowing flowing east suddenly there had been houses people and lots of mongrel riverboats skittering back and forth under a sky of gorgeous underlit clouds with everything gilded burnished along one side and everything bright cheerful casual or so it looked i liked the place i liked the idea of the place two rivers hadn't two rivers sprung from the garden of eden no that was four 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 would have resolved dissolved straight off in that watery dazzling dialectic [Music] two rivers full of crazy shipping people all apparently changing their minds barking disembarking rowing clumsy dories after the civil war some southern families came here here they could still own slaves they left occasional blue eyes english names and ores no other place no one on all the amazon's 4 000 does anything but paddle a dozen or so young nuns white habited waved gaily from an old stern wheeler getting up steam already hung with hammocks off to their mission days and days away up god knows what lost tributary in the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasp's nest from a shelf small exquisite clean matte 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 swan dutch the retiring head of phillips electric really a very nice old man who wanted to see the amazon before he died asked what's that ugly thing there was always a subject in her work of economic disparities and the relation between rich and poor but i think it heightened all those issues it made them more dramatic more savage and pink dog is a poem about the brutality uh with which outcasts are treated and she obviously throughout her life to a degree identified with outcasts it's a poem written in three line stanzas in which every line rhymes so it's it has a kind of nursery rhyme feeling about it it's another one of her animal poems but it's a poem about a creature who is harmless and poor and ugly and ill i think it's partly a poem about being female about being a woman but i think that reduces it i think it's about there's a kind it's about a kind of horror of isolation a horror of not fitting in with a world that is that seems to be having a good time or that is forcing itself to have a good time the sun is blazing and the sky is blue umbrellas clothe the beach in every hull naked you trot across the avenue oh never have i seen a dog so bare naked and pink without a single hair startled the passers-by draw back and stare of course they're mortally afraid of rabies you are not mad you have a case of scabies but look intelligent where are your babies a nursing mother by those hanging teats in what slum have you hidden them poor while you go begging living by your wits didn't you know it's been in all the papers to solve this problem how they deal with beggars they take and throw them in the tidal rivers yes idiots paralytics parasites go bobbing in the beam sewage nights out of the suburbs where there are no lights if they do this to anyone who begs drugged drunk or sober with or without legs what would they do to sick four-legged dogs [Music] in the cafes and on the sidewalk corners the joke is going around that all the beggars who can afford them now we're life preservers in your condition it would not you would not be able even to float much less to dog paddle now look the practical the sensible solution and then we won is what will the solution be well it's to dress up it's to go to the carnival [Music] now look the practical the sensible solution is to wear a fantasia tonight you simply can't afford to be an eyesore but no one will ever see a dog in mascara this time of year ash wednesday will come but carnival is here what sambas can you dance what will you wear they say that carnival's degenerating radios americans or something have ruined it completely they're just talking carnival is always wonderful a depolated dog would not look well dress up dress up and dance at carnival elizabeth left brazil for good in 1970 and before she was installed at harvard she wanted the kind of security he would come from a regular teaching job so she moved to boston and it was there that she spent the last years of her life [Music] by the time elizabeth published geography 3 in 1976 it seemed to me there was nothing that she couldn't write about directly or imply in her work the human being here who writes these poems is wiser sadder there are many elements that combine to make a poem this poem crusoe in england one thing certainly is elizabeth's lifelong love of darwin who uh traveled to the galapagos as elizabeth herself did uh some of those details certainly contribute to the poem but i think it's really a poem of that draws a tacit connection between crusoe as an old man back where he began having been to all of these strange places and elizabeth uh coming back from her years in in brazil a new volcano has erupted the papers say and last week i was reading where some ship saw an island being born at first a breath of steam 10 miles away and then a black fleck basalt probably rose in the mates binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly they named it but my poor old island still unrediscovered unrenamable none of the books has ever got it right well i had 52 miserable small volcanoes i could climb with a few slithery strides volcanoes dead as ash heaps i often gave way to self-pity do i deserve this i suppose i must i wouldn't be here otherwise was there a moment when i actually chose this i don't remember but there could have been [Music] what's wrong about self-pity anyway with my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater's edge i told myself pity should begin at home so the more pity i felt the more i felt at home the crucial passage is the passage about the flute and making the flute she said i'd drink an awful fizzy stinging stuff that went straight to my head and play my homemade flute i think it had the weirdest scale on earth and dizzy whoop and dance among the goats homemade homemade but aren't we all i think there's a way in which everything in bishop is homemade that is it is centered in uh her own perception there's a kind of absolute authenticity about every word spoken at every time and there's a sense that well perhaps this is modest perhaps this is not the insight one needs or wants but it's what i have and that's what i can make dreams were the worst of course i dreamed of food and love but they were pleasant rather than otherwise but then i'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat mistaking it for a baby goat i'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine infinities of islands islands spawning islands like frog's eggs turning into poliwags of islands knowing that i had to live on each and every one eventually for ages registering their flora their fauna their geography just when i thought i couldn't stand it another minute longer friday came accounts of that have everything all wrong friday was nice friday was nice and we were friends if only he had been a woman i wanted to propagate my kind and so did he i think poor boy he'd pet the baby goat sometimes and race with him or carry one around pretty to watch he had a pretty bobby and then one day they came and took us off now i live here another island it doesn't seem like one but who decides my blood was full of them my brain bred islands but that archipelago has petered out i'm old i'm bored too drinking my real tea surrounded by uninteresting lumber the knife there on the shelf it reeked of meaning like a crucifix it lived how many years did i bake it implore it not to break i knew each nick and scratch by heart the bluish blade the broken tip the lines of wood grain on the handle now it won't look at me at all the living soul has dribbled away my eyes rest on it and pass on the local museums asked me to leave everything to them the flute the knife the shriveled shoes my shedding goatskin trousers moths have gotten the fur the parasol that took me such a long time remembering the way the rib should go it still will work but fold it up looks like a plucked and skinny fowl how can anyone want such things and friday my dear friday died of measles 17 years ago come march she leaves it to us to to uh to make whatever kind of intimacy uh we would like best to imagine between crusoe and friday she doesn't spell it out she says that crusoe thought friday was it was it was a pretty young man and and uh the rest is left to our imagination what happens to crusoe when he goes back to england is that he's rescued but he is almost more alienated once he's back in civilization and that there's something terribly moving and sad about elizabeth's identifying with this situation in 1976 she won the neustadt international prize given at the university of oklahoma this was the first time this prize had been given to an american and it was also the first time it had been given to a woman miss bishop i have the great pleasure to present to you this award which is sizable and handsome but carries with it we believe the high regard of the literary world thank you very much it is extremely gratifying that after having spent most of my life timorously pecking around the coastlines of the world i've been given recognition from so many different countries and also from norman oklahoma a place so far inland i think she annoyed some people because they they thought she was deliberately coy or evasive or quaint i think she observed a kind of decorum and uh in the end was very generous because she gave whomever she was with lots of room and lots of leeway and never embarrassed them elizabeth died october 6 1979 of a brain aneurysm she was writing her best work her public readings were better than ever were warmer were more conversational i think she was becoming more and more confident and less and less shy so it was a terribly tragic loss to everyone who knew her and loved her work people use the word great writer i don't think great is the adjective i would use for elizabeth which is not derogatory to elizabeth to say that maybe it's derogatory to great to say that i i really do not like the formula a great writer and it suggests somebody very big while all her gift is in precision in needness in smallness she made you feel at once welcome in her work you felt the work didn't aspire to be grander than her own dimensions she was master of silence and that is very important this communication of not only of the evident things the sad things but the onset things because i think our lives are made not only for the things that we said but the things that we don't say that we cannot say and the job of the poet is to show it to show the silence and elizabeth was a master in this difficult 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 [Music] except 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 is not too hard to master though it may look like write it like disaster [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music]

Channel: Author Documentaries

Views: 51,445

Keywords: elizabeth bishop, elizabeth bishop documentary, elizabeth bishop biography, voices and visions elizabeth bishop, elizabeth bishop poetry

Id: 7XB6sJ-PeLo

Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021