Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop
 

It's Bishop's centennary year, and there will be lots of articles. Here's one from the Wall Street Journal.

Note how polite the first commenter turned when he discovered that the Dana G. wasn't a woman but a man.

Gioia's piece is excellent, apart from the copyediting lapse. Made me want to read Bishop's prose, though not the New Yorker correspondence--please, no, anything but that!

Thanks for this, Maryann! I enjoyed it very much.

I love her description of e.e. cummings - "the famous man of little letters". Very funny!

Cally

It may be obvious to some (I haven't read the article) but to those who don't know, Dana studied with Elizabeth Bishop at one point.

Thanks for pointing that out, Janice. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone looking for the comments. Sheesh unbelievable.

It's a good article, glad to have read it, but the business of writing closet poems grates on my nerves. As if the only way to be a successful poet as a lesbian is to keep the whole thing out of sight.

"One hundred years after her birth in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second-half of the 20th century. She is admired in every critical camp—from feminists to formalists—who agree on little else. Her work also attracts a wide general readership. Taught and studied in high schools and universities, Bishop is, for the time being at least, the most popular woman poet in American literature after Emily Dickinson."

It might be possible to compose a more idiotic and self-important paragraph on the subject of 20th century American poetry. But it would take some doing.

I don't know, Chris, there's a pretty big spectrum defined by feminists, on the one hand, and formalists on the other. Have you ever known a formalist who was also a feminist? It's remarkable indeed that they can join together in their common admiration of Elizabeth Bishop.

My favorite part of the article, though, is when he says "A small inheritance from her father gave Bishop a freedom few artists enjoy. She never had to work regularly." An interesting use of the word "small," don't you think?

Roger, I have to report that most of the participants on the Formalista listserve were pretty indignant about that pairing, as the majority of us are both feminist and formalist. Several people remarked that Gioia had let his love of alliteration get the better of his judgment.

That's a charitable view of things, Maryann. The term "free verse" would have allowed for the same alliteration.