I remember seeing an old wooden-handled level with an inlay of beveled glass. Tools used to be made more prettily. Maybe this one had additional ornament.

Alan

Alan, that's what I thought originally. But that doesn't,er, square with the broken thermometer's escaping mercury, or the mirror's bevel. Hmmm. Each an escapee from glass, like the speaker's spirit? Still a mystery....(moments later) Dammit, the more I picture those old levels, the more it seems that there is only one image--was the liquid bubble mercury?

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Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited February 01, 2001).]

Look at these -- there's a suspended glass prism used to indicate slope.

But I'm inclined to the mutliple object school on this poem -- a beveled mirror can indeed act as a prism.

As much as I like this poem -- and I do -- why is it a sonnet?

Well, here I am, back again spreading dissension, muddying the waters, and causing all kinds of strife. My apologies!

On closing the sale, consider Bishop's famous villanelle
"One Art": villanelles are notoriously hard, but I think she gets the job done there. (And, incidentally, a poem dealing with the same theme we've sort of adumbrated here and that Alan sees as inescapable.)

Before abandoning that "gay" theme, remember the language of division, enclosure, and escape (freedom). "That Bishop--she's an odd duck"--or bird.

Yes, I definitely see the mirror bevel as doing what I'm pretty sure we've all scene prisms do--off goes the light in a rainbow--a rainbow bird set free. A bird imprisoned in the glass just as the bubble is in the level.

Not a "thud" or a "bump" to end this, but a powerful and
sad and poignant cry.

Why sonnet? Well, I once did a 14-line, metrical poem in rhyme (but without either Italian or English structure) and every luminary at West Chester I showed it to assumed it was a sonnet--but it was in tetrameter. Alan's point is well-taken: people shouldn't be criticizing Brad Leithauser for the monometer, but for the weakness of the thought and expression--i.e., the technique is neutral, the conception neutral, but the execution (no jokes, please) pretty limp.

Cheers to all http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

I think I've read, perhaps just recently, that Bishop was opposed to mirrors--hated, or at least disliked, the sight of her own face (which is surprising, for in the few photographs I've seen of her it's a fine face), so the bird escaping the mirror may have more than usual significance?

Or, I may be reading too much into it. :)

Julie

Ah, if so, Julie, that would explain much. Thank you for the illumination. And you too, Len. Always great to have you stop by.

Alan

I don't think this is where I ran across that information first, but here is a bit of information on Bishop from Lloyd Schwartz at Atlantic Unbound, who claims to have known her:

"The most poignant -- and frightening -- image in "Sonnet" is the empty mirror. Always shy and self-conscious, Bishop hated the way she looked, hated looking at herself. She'd grown heavier from the years of cortisone she had to take for her asthma; her hair had turned gray. She felt old and bloated, though everyone else thought she looked more elegant than ever. I was visiting her the day her copy of Richard Howard's coffee-table anthology Preferences arrived, with a beautiful full-page photograph of her by Thomas Victor. She excused herself, went into her bedroom, and tore the page with the photograph out of the book. She would have preferred to look into an empty mirror, even given the sinister implications."

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...ngs/bishop.htm


Julie

As I got into this thread, I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one who didn't fully understand the poem. But the various explanations have elucidated it for me.

I too find the ending disappointing. There is almost a Victorian quality to the ending, as if she were afraid to end the poem on anything but a happy note. This does feel like a punch being pulled to me.

I don't consider the poem to be a sonnet just because it has 14 lines. What distinguishes a sonnet more than anything else is the volta (the beginning of the second part, which provides the solution or answer to the problem or question posed in the first part). This poem doesn't have a volta or, indeed, two distinct parts.

I don't think the word "gay" is completely lost. If you use it clearly in context, it still has its original meaning. Incidentally -- and this may sound a bit defensive, since I am, um, gay -- it was heterosexuals who co-opted the word. "Gay" was the word used in polite company to identify a person as homosexual -- "queer" and "faggot" were too crude for polite conversation, and "homosexual" was too clinical and suggestive. The term "gay" implied irresponsibility -- that is, the freedom of not having to support a family (years ago, no one imagined that homosexuals might marry, as we know today that they often do). When the gay rights movement started, homosexuals adopted the term because it was less clinical (and therefore less suggestive of mental illness) than "homosexual", and less objectionable than the other terms.

Oh, gee! I didn't even comment on whether this poem is minimalistic. Minimalism to me is when you use as few words as possible -- by that definition, this poem would be minimalistic. However, true minimalists alter their syntax, eliminating portions of the phrases that most formalists would consider necessary. For example, when I brought my poem "The Rich Earth" (which I posted here a while back, and which starts "At first your glare made me perplexed") to a peer group in New York, a minimalist poet in the group suggested I drop "made me", to make the line read "At first your glare perplexed" (the reader would then have to make assumptions about who was being perplexed). That's the kind of things minimalists do -- they tear a poem down to its barest essentials.

I'd like to take this opportunity to correct a mistake I made a couple months ago in another thread. I said that the word "journal" (as a verb) means to apply a smooth surface to a sheet of paper (as part of the manufacturing process). I was wrong -- the word I was thinking of was "calender", as in "calendered paper". My apologies.

Sorry that this post is so long.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited February 19, 2001).]

"Gay" is a very old word, meaning "joyous".

Christopher, I know how old the word is and what it means. Did you understand what I was saying? A lot of people blame homosexuals for co-opting and "ruining" the word "gay", but it wasn't homosexuals who did that, it was heterosexuals.