I think this is great, partly because it’s delicate, and partly because I am indeed in the mood to burn shit.
Anyway, I’m sharing an excellent poem by Timothy Donnolly (who also happens to be the poetry editor at the excellent Boston Review). I’m reading his second book of poems just now, The Cloud Corporation, which is pretty excellent so far.
Personally, I find it difficult to get down with my ekphrastic self. Fundamentally, this is because I don’t interact with a whole lot of visual art, so it makes sense that I don’t frequently have the urge to respond to a painting or sculpture or photograph in poetry. So when prompted to write an ekphrastic poem, I was stumped. Totally coming up with nothing from the get-go, because I couldn’t even choose a sodding painting. Well, not strictly true. Obviously the initial thought was to respond in some way to a favourite painting… except none of my favourite paintings have people in them. Between Pollock’s ‘Lavender Mist’ and Jane Frank’s ‘Crags and Crevices’ I just couldn’t see a way in. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doubting the links between the New York School and abstract expressionism, or that the poets and artists of these vague but vivid movements did not engage with one another to produce a satisfying and rich conversation, I just know my limits: it would take a much better poet/ art viewer than me to connect with Rothko or Newman in a poem.
So, as ever, I exploited my ever-knowledgable friends to find a subject, a portrait,Supper, by Leon Bakst. Her expression is hugely provocative, and while I think most people will have their own inner monologue they will apply to the woman in black, it is not difficult to respond to it. The poem was made.
This is where things get tangled, and get interesting. So we have the subject, and the painting, and then the poem. Can the poem stand apart from the painting?
It depends on a few factors, as there seem to be some broad ‘types’ of ekphrastic poem.
The narrative / monologue type: like W.H. Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’ or Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942′. The poem writes the scene, imposes narrative, or creates a dialogue for the subjects within the image. In a sense, the poem really is a starting point. In both of these examples, it isn’t strictly necessary to have seen the original works of art in order to understand and enjoy its literary offspring.
The artifact/ object type: like Monica Youn’s Stealing the Scream. (Seriously, this poem is great– read it). In which the poem interacts with a piece of an art as a cultural artifact. The poet does not go inside the painting, but rather the painting is experienced in some way by the poem’s subjects. This gives the poem more prominence than the painting, and the painting becomes an allusion of a kind. This type of poem is more of a grey area when it comes to standing alone– Youn’s poem interacts with a painting most people are familiar with. If the painting is just a passing reference, maybe it doesn’t matter, but if the poet is going about stealing famous paintings in a poem, maybe the reader should know what it looks like.
The meditation type: like Keats’ On Seeing the Elgin Marbles. In which the poet truly responds to the painting. It is not the painting as object or its subject that is the poem’s focus, but the speaker’s own reaction to seeing it. Obviously, Keats is pretty much the master of this stuff, but of poem is illuminated by the viewing the original piece of art.
The creation story: this type of ekphrastic, like the narrative / monologue type, goes into the painting, but into its canvas not just its characters. The most famous example (and I’m trying to think of more so I don’t just drop O’Hara every frigging post but he really is just great) is O’Hara’s Why I Am Not A Painter. Now I don’t know if this needs to be partnered with its point of inspiration. I didn’t see Mike Goldburg’s Sardines until I’d read this poem many, many times. But not I’m not going to trust every poet as much as I trust O’Hara.
There is not end to this story! Should we keep the poem and the painting together, or can they swim alone?
So I’m late to her birthday party, but I think that’s ok. A couple of week’s ago was Elizabeth Bishop’s HUNDREDTH birthday. I hope you all celebrated by having a drink or reading one of her poems or moving to Brazil or briefly exploring lesbianism. All appropriate responses to the great lady’s century.
I wonder how she will continue in her next century. Will the critics still love her? And why do we still love her?
This is why I still love her:
I am involved with a great project at Emory, in which a group of students attempt to anthologise influence. We each choose five poets who have influenced us (you want to guess mine? shall I just tell you? — Louise Gluck, Mary Ruefle, Charles Simic, Beth Bachmann and Frances Leviston) and ask them to provide 5 texts that have influenced them. Frances Leviston in her wonderful collection included Bishop, specifically her poem ‘Crusoe in England’. And I read it, maybe I have before, I am not sure but I reread it and I shared it with Chris. I said ‘This feels like it could’ve been published yesterday’. It is so fresh, and so great, and that red goat! So I still love her because Elizabeth Bishop reads as if she were writing yesterday, I hope that continues in her new century.
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, ten miles away;
and then a black fleck–basalt probably–
rose in the mate’s binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly.
They named it. But my poor old island’s still
un-rediscovered, un-renamable.
None of the books has ever got it right.
Well, I had fifty-two
miserable, small volanoes I could climb
with a few slithery strides–
volcanoes dead as ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
and count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.
I’d think that if they were the size
I thought volcanoes should be, then I had
become a giant;
and if I had become a giant
I couldn’t bear to think what size
the goats and turtles were,
or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers
–a glittering hexagon of rollers
closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.
My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters–their parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was that why it rained so much?
And why sometimes the whole place hissed?
The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,
hissing like teakettles.
(And I’d have given years, or taken a few,
for any sort of kettle, of course)
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove
to be more turtles.
The beaches were all lava, variegated,
black red, and white, and gray;
the marbled colors made a fine display.
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass…I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.
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.”
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 sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything:
one treesnail, a bright violet-blue
with a thin shell, crept over everything,
over the one variety of tree,
a sooty, scrub affair.
Snail shells lay under these in drifts
and, at a distance,
you’d swear that they were beds of irises.
There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. I’d drink
the awful fizzy, stinging stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.
Because I didn’t know enough.
Why didn’t I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I’d read were full of blanks;
the poems–well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss…”the bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.
The island smelled of goat and guano.
The goats were white, so were the gulls,
and both too tame, or else they thought
I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa…shriek…baa… I still can’t shake
them from my ears; they’re hurting now.
The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies
over a ground of hissing rain
and hissing, ambulating turtles
got on my nerves.
When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.
I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.
I’d heard of cattle getting island-sick.
I thought the goats were.
One billy-goat would stand on the volcano
I’d christened Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair
(I’d time enough to play with names),
and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.
I’d grab his beard and look at him.
His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up
and expressed nothing, or a little malice.
I got so tired of the very colors!
One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.
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 frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs
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 goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
–Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.
Now I live here, another island,
that 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
beg 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 in 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 museum’s asked me to
leave everything to them:
the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,
my shedding goatskin trousers
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the ribs should go.
It still will work but, folded up
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
–And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.
It’s the new noise in poetry. And it’s completely necessary to shout about.
Basically, the numbers are in and they’re pretty shocking. Women in literary magazines? A much rarer creature than you might think.
VIDA is a fairly new organisation dedicated to women in the literary arts. Their recent ‘Count’ examining the submission and publication statistics of major literary magazines has birthed some outrageous results that demonstrates the kind of gender bias one would more associate with the mid 20th century. However, a full decade into the 21st century and some of the most prestigious publications are displaying a crippling bias and VIDA’s arresting pie char representations really push the message home.
Vida examined The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Boston Review, POETRY, London Review of Books, Granta, Harpers and The Threepenny Review among others. Many were found wanting. SERIOUSLY wanting. Take a look for yourself here.
Among the worst offenders is The New Yorker, with an overall publishing ratio of 449: 163 of men to women writers in their pages. The New Republic is worse with an overall 256: 49.
Of course, an initial reaction to these stats is ‘DAMN EDITORS’. And yes, I suppose the simplest way of considering the problem is to blame the editors. They should be selecting more women for their pages, yes? Or at least reviewing the slush pile in some kind of blind review system. But what about the slush pile? Can we really solely blame a magazines current editorial staff for only publishing 30% female writers when only 30% of the slush pile is submitted by women writers? This kind of question really points to the need for fuller data. Yes, Vida’s pie charts are arresting, but in order to move forward to a more equal kind of publishing, the problems need to be understood properly. Because if the slush pile has a gender bias, too, we really are in the shit. For women to have internalized the prejudice they observe on the pages of The New Yorker, or The Atlantic (The Atlantic! I know, they are meant to be HIPPIES!), and to simply not even think of submitting to such publications means that gender bias is still culturally embedded and accepted in literary societies.
This all sounds like a lot of hesitance to get angry. And I am hesitant. Because, as a female who writes, I never want my writing to be rejected because I’m a woman, but I also never want my writing to be accepted because I’m a woman. Affirmative action, positive discrimination, diversity quotas…. call it what you will the idea makes me uncomfortable. Yet, if this kind of disparity is the norm (and it appears so) maybe that kind of radical shake up is what is needed.
