Frank Bidart’s ambivalent appetite

SVEN BIRKERTS — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:23:44 GMT

The poet probes human opposites in his latest collection
Frank Bidart adores the savage Catullan paradox.

ART IS LONG: Bidart’s brevity is relative. To those accustomed to his distances, these poems may feel short. But not fast.

Watching the Spring Festival | By Frank Bidart | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 72 pages | $25

Frank Bidart adores the savage Catullan paradox. In his 1983 collection, The Sacrifice, he included a reframing of “Odi et amo” that in 13 words told us all we need to know about the violence of appetite: “I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even/wants the fly while writhing.” In Watching the Spring Festival, his seventh and most recent book, Cantabrigian Bidart — now a fully emerged, Bollingen Prize–winning American poet — offers a riposte of sorts. “Catullus: Id Faciam” in its entirety reads: “What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds/the nail that now is driven into itself, why.” This poem removes pleasure from the equation, but then it opens the deep question of the redemption of suffering.

It also gets us close to the ongoing dynamic of the poet’s vision: the clarification and underscoring of ambivalence. If human opposites, those binary formulations we are said to live by, have a point of contact, that is where Bidart applies his probe most forcefully. In the powerful long works that have made his reputation — “Ellen West,” “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” and “The First Hour of the Night” — madness and vision, desire and self-destruction, and sin and its expiations are of imagination all compact. And they are no less present in the mostly shorter poems that make up Watching the Spring Festival.

Bidart’s brevity is relative. The poems are not short; mostly, they are simply (and here I confer Bidart-style italic emphasis) not long. To those accustomed to his distances — the pages and pages of staggered-line assaults on the big questions — they feel short. But not fast. Like all of Bidart’s poems, they make the line break almost a category of consciousness. Every enjambed line, every bit of white space, every pause is the product of a decision. Every ounce of the unnecessary has been lopped away with one of those razor-sharp Japanese fish knives, and you can feel the fresh face of language greet the air. Or, to use Bidart’s own words, turning them into unintended self-description (from the opening stanza of “Sanjaya at 17”): “As if fearless what the shutter will unmask/he offers himself to the camera, to/us, sheerly — /vulnerable like Monroe, like Garbo.”

Bishop, after all

SVEN BIRKERTS — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:24:18 GMT

The ‘poet’s poet’ gets canonized
To enter a Bishop poem with the mind and senses wide open is to be scrubbed back to first principles.

BISHOP’S DICTUM? “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.”

Although she has in recent years broken through to a wider readership, Elizabeth Bishop was always first and foremost a poet’s poet, a touchstone of uncompromised excellence and integrity, a fastidious maker of verbal occasions that become more resonant with each reading. In her lifetime (she died in 1979) these were gathered slowly — frugally, one might say — into thin books bearing titles like A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, all of which took on the status of classics even while the ink was still damp.

Bishop aspired to absolute craft, an idea of perfection, her dictum succinctly encoded in her poem “North Haven,” which she wrote in memory of her dear friend Robert Lowell: “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.” Such aspiration requires the most implacable exertion of control, and it assumes the maker as ultimate arbiter. But it was this very assumption that was called into question several years back when New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn published Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. That set off a minor literary ruckus, volleys exchanged between those who saw any hitherto unseen work by Bishop as bounty and those who felt the poet’s core æsthetic intentions had been ignored. I would put myself in the second camp — such publication seems a violation of the very principle that brought us the dazzling rightness we so admire — but at this point I won’t argue further, citing instead the old adage about the horses having fled the barn or the other one about the milk having been spilt.

Maker of occasions and fashioner of thin books that Bishop was, I wonder how she would greet the publication now of the thick Library of America compendium. It’s as close as an American writer can come to being canonized — and even modest Bishop would not have repudiated that: to be modest is not to be unambitious. On the other hand, a volume like this enfolds an austere private practice into a numbingly public aura. My guess is that she would have been ambivalent about the whole business, and possibly distressed about the display of her correspondence.