Scott Samuelson: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Talking Like a Human Being

Nothing beats language "fresh-squiggled from the tube."

Portrait of the poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) taken by the photographer Rosalie Thorne McKenna ©The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation

By Scott Samuelson

I’ve been interviewed a few times for radio shows and podcasts. In the runup to the interviews, I used to fantasize about bubbling up with witty and insightful points in shapely speech paragraphs of grammatically flawless sentences. Sometimes (I’m embarrassed to admit) I’d even write out answers to potential questions and try to memorize them.

Then, in the wake of the interviews, I’d kick myself for all my stuttering, self-questioning, and awkwardness. Is that how I really talk?! Despite having struggled to learn the diction and grammar of civilized speech, I was afraid that my accent would always betray me as a native barbarian.

After one such disaster, I happened to be rereading some Elizabeth Bishop, one of my all-time favorite poets, and had an epiphany that both chastened me and cheered me up.

The poem I was reading is the one entitled “Poem,” which begins with a description of what’s depicted in an amateur landscape painting. It’s full of wonderful observations such as “a wild iris, white and yellow, / fresh-squiggled from the tube.”

As she’s describing what’s in the painting, Bishop sometimes hesitates—“a thin church steeple / —that gray-blue wisp—or is it? . . . A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” In the wake of my interview performances, my first glum thought was, “I’m just like that hack painter—making poorly executed points that leave people scratching their heads.”

Then Bishop has a thrilling realization:

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of a steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie’s house?

Here are lines that reveal a mind in action, a mind finding things out on the fly, a mind making sense of someone else in a—well, in a stuttering, self-questioning, and awkward way. The poem’s curious perfection is in accepting and even foregrounding the excited imperfections of how we actually talk, think, and paint. It shows that we connect through these imperfections.

So, maybe it’s a good thing that when I open my mouth the prose of Vladimir Nabokov doesn’t gush out. (As an aside, one of the things I find most unsettling about chatbots is their lightning-fast fluency.) I formed a whole new goal for what I want in my interviews and, far more importantly, what I want in talking and writing: language fresh-squiggled from the tube.

This has nothing to do with artlessness, much less with running off at the mouth. Bishop’s poems are anything but artless! She labored over practically all of them for years, sometimes decades. But her aim wasn’t to erase the way we normally talk and replace it with a flawless dispensing of beliefs and images. If anything, she wanted to get closer to the bumpiness and blurriness of how our minds naturally interact with the world.

Maybe when we’re students in Geography 101, we can indulge in the fantasy that everything can be neatly and nicely mapped. But by the time we get to Geography III (the title of her last book), we’re forced to realize that even a master geographer like Elizabeth Bishop can’t map all experience perfectly or even close to perfectly. It just can’t be done. It’s all too weird and ambivalent.

The first poem in Geography III is “In the Waiting Room,” which is about the wonder she experienced as a six-year-old, when she first asked herself the deep questions in a dentist’s office reading a National Geographic. Who am I? Who are we? Why are we who we are? Why are we where and when we are? For that matter, why is there anything at all? Little Elizabeth’s experience of the wonder behind religion and philosophy—and all our geographies of the metaphysical—threatens to throw her off “the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space.” Unable to map the scandalous strangeness of existing, she says (stutteringly, hesitantly, honestly), “How—I didn’t know any / word for it—how ‘unlikely.’”

The poems in Geography III are all about trying and failing to map the unmappable—and then somehow succeeding. For instance, my favorite lines from that book, in the poem “Crusoe in England,” are by normal standards about the worst lines a poet could write.

Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.

Friday was nice!? Seriously, that’s your adjective!? And then that’s the line you repeat! Oh, and thanks for letting us know that you were friends with Friday, who was nice.

Still, I’m moved by those lines. Those willfully, egregiously bland lines. Deeply moved.

The poem is about an aging Robinson Crusoe, a stand-in for an aging Elizabeth Bishop, reminiscing about his time on the desert island. He describes in detail its relatively boring flora and fauna: the pint-sized volcanos, the goats, the guano, the irritating hiss of the turtles inching along the beach, the nonstop cackle of the gulls, his homebrew, his one-note flute, his nightmares, his loneliness, his self-pity. He describes all this in great detail.

Then he gets to the arrival of Friday.

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.

That’s it. After so many masterful descriptions of the island, Crusoe describes practically nothing about what matters most of all: the relationship that saved him from suicide!

Yet a whole universe—a universe of love, sex, friendship, guilt, and remorse—swirls behind the repeated sentence “Friday was nice” and that repeated word “pretty.” Weirdly, only an abject poverty of speech could suggest just how unspeakably rich that universe is.

What I’m getting at is that anybody who talks without stuttering and silences about the great matters of life and love and getting through the day is being untrue to them. The real art lies not in flawless execution but in timing, pauses, hesitations, failures, stories, pointless details, tone.

Tone especially! There’s a part in the poem “The Moose”—another one from Geography III—where Bishop is remembering what it’s like to be a child in bed listening to the adults in the next room jawing about things like pensions and gall bladders and wayward sons. She recalls how they’d repeatedly respond to the gossip, “Yes.” For instance, “He took to drink. Yes.” Just, “Yes”—but with a certain tone.

“Yes . . .” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes . . .”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

A single half-groaned yes can say more than a whole stack of treatises.

According to Elizabeth Bishop (at least according to her poem “One Art”), there’s really only one art, and it’s not the art of getting things right. It’s the art of losing. We lose keys. We lose keepsakes. We waste precious time. Whatever the day bestows on us, we lose. Whatever youth or any age bestows on us, we lose. We lose houses. We lose islands. We lose continents. We lose our dear Friday. Whether or not we want to learn the art of losing, we’re always hard at work practicing it.

Our attempts to break out of the art of losing feel like disasters. But they’re not. Sure, we lose, but we carry on. At least most of us carry on. At least until death gets us. Even though it always bursts our best geographies, we keep on trying to map this world of constant loss. We keep on trying to navigate our way through it.

Sometimes we try righting it by writing it. As Bishop says,

It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I love the stuttered “like” in that last line. This one art of ours does look like like disaster.

Scott Samuelson is the author of several books. He currently teaches at Iowa State University as well as with the Catherine Project, where he’s doing a reading group on Geography III with a fabulous group of readers. His most recent book To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life comes out this fall.

This TFP guest essay is adapted from a piece first published in 3 Quarks Daily and appears here with the author’s kind permission.

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TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE

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