Listening to Elizabeth Bishop

The current issue of Poetry (July/August 2009) contains a remembrance of Elizabeth Bishop by Katha Pollitt, who first encountered the poet when Pollitt audited one of her courses as a student at Harvard in the early 1970s. Pollitt recalls Bishop with fondness and appreciation for her generosity towards students: “What strikes me, having taught a bit myself, is how kind she was. We can’t all have been budding poets, yet she talked about our work as if we were.” Additionally, Pollitt’s recollection of Elizabeth Bishop includes a memory of attending the poet’s appearance at the Guggenheim Museum in the late seventies, a reading I also experienced as a student and about which I wrote thirty years later in a piece previously posted on “One Poet’s Notes” in 2007, “Elizabeth Bishop: The Poet’s Voice.”

Although details in our accounts of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1977 reading are somewhat similar, our reactions to the poet’s performance differ a bit; yet, our conclusions about the importance of listening to Elizabeth Bishop seem to coincide.

Katha Pollitt recounts Bishop’s Guggenheim Museum reading: “Bishop is sometimes described as a notoriously poor reader of her own work—flat, low-key, lacking in presence. After all, she was a short, gray-haired woman who wore nondescript wool skirts that fell below the knee, the antithesis of what a poet was supposed to look like. I thought she was a good reader—I dislike theatricality in poetry readings, and that super-sensitive breathy chanting thing poets get into where every line ends with an upward lilt like a question. But more than that, her reading was a kind of gift; it made me see that whatever way a poet reads his or her own work is fine, is, in fact, perfect, because the way they read is part of their sensibility, their own personal expression of their poem.”

As I wrote at the time of my post: “I was a student who thoroughly admired Bishop’s poetry, and I still do. However, I remember my disappointment at the presentation, in which Bishop’s voice seemed weak and without much inflection or enthusiasm, appearing almost as if she believed she had been compelled to endure an unpleasant experience.” Nevertheless, in my 2007 article I also link to a few recordings available online of Elizabeth Bishop reading her poetry, “a more youthful voice in ‘The Fish,’ recorded in 1947, and a bit more invigorated voice in the other poems (‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘The Moose’) than I had witnessed.”

Like Pollitt, in my article I concluded students in poetry courses would find value if they “listen to Elizabeth Bishop’s readings and hear the poet’s voice.” I recommend readers of “One Poet’s Notes” do the same as well, noting the importance of each carefully chosen word in Bishop’s wonderful poetry.