Bishop's Fiddlesticks

And speaking of dead geniuses, what's the deal with all these new poems by Elizabeth Bishop? First there were three of them in the Jan 23 / 30th issue of the New Yorker. Then another one in the Mar 6 issue. And I just discovered two more in the NYRB. What's going on?[1]

Look, I have as much admiration for Bishop's work as anyone else (even though these new poems are, in my opinion, a far cry from her best work [2]). But the woman's been dead for over a quarter of a century now - isn't it time she stopped publishing her work in periodicals and gave some younger poets a chance? I mean it's supposed to be the undiscovered country from whose bourne no man returns. They're not supposed to have e-mail.

I think there should be a law that says after you've been dead, say, five to ten years, you have to stop sending your poems to magazines. It sounds harsh on dead people, I know, but trust me, it's for their own good.

Notes

[1] Okay, so the reason is apparently that there's a new book called 'Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected poems, Drafts, and Fragments' coming out in March. Great. Now she's getting book deals too.

[2] Though I have to say some of them read very unlike the Bishop I remember. Consider this sample:

In a cheap hotel
in a cheap city
Love held his prisoners or my love
brought the pitcher of ice -
dropped the quarter in the spidery old electric fan -
Love the Night Clerk, the Negro bell-boy
I remember the horrible carpet
& its smell, & the dog-eared telephone book

with its ominous look,
full full of the names
of strangers close to my head,
my head with one name in it
or a nameless embarrassment -
the bed, the motor-court below us

Six
Five yrs. ago still
Almost every night - frequently
he drags me
back to that bed.
The ice clinks, the fan whirs.
He chains me & berates me -
He chains me to that bed & he berates me.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Categories: Poetry