For Elizabeth Bishop’s birthday: roosters and moths
Tuesday was Elizabeth Bishop‘s birthday. Here are some thoughts, inspired by the list-meditation thing that LiL has
been doing:
1. Chinese New Year also fell this week. It’s
the Year of the Rooster, so I can’t resist mentioning Bishop’s poem
"Roosters," which it took me multiple readings to realize is a war poem. (Then I couldn’t believe my density, what with all those details like the roosters’ "protruding chests / in green-gold medals dressed" and their cries "marking out maps like Rand McNally’s.")
2. Bishop borrowed the stanza form for "Roosters" from an
obscure poem, "Wishes to His (Supposed) Mistress," by the
seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw. She liked the metaphysicals.
George Herbert was a favorite poet of hers (he’s a favorite of mine, as
well).
3. She described one of her early poems, "The Weed," as an attempt at a metaphysical poem. One can hear Herbert’s presence in it, but it’s her own voice as much as any.
4. Recordings of poets reading their work always surprise me
because the actual voice never sounds like the voice I imagine while
reading. You can hear Bishop reading "The Armadillo" at Poets.org, and "The Man-Moth" at Bold Type.
5. I once taught "The Man-Moth" to a group of undergraduates. They were baffled until I told them the backstory about how she saw a newspaper misprint — "manmoth" for "mammoth" — and turned it into a premise for a poem.
6. My students helped me notice again how breathtakingly strange "The Man-Moth" is. Especially the last stanza:
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.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
But everything about it is defamiliarizing in the best way: the Man-Moth’s underground travels on the subway, "facing the wrong way"; the "shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him"; the lunar landscape of rooftops much too close to the sky.
7. I wonder what Bishop, with her interest in the animal kingdom, would have made of the star-nosed mole?
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