New and Selected Poems

Foreword

Foreword It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams In poetry circles it has become de riguer to quote William Carlos Williams’ famous lines, but how relevant his sentiment still is, given our common experience of so much “news” passing by us unexamined, reckoned with momentarily or not at all, and put away without any sense of how we may be implicated by it.* I like to think of Elizabeth Bishop’s gentle “answer” to Williams, an elaboration, really, as she elegantly explodes assumptions we hold about the fixed nature of knowledge (an idea closely related to Williams’ “news”)—opening a vast ocean between certainty and doubt—in her unforgettable ending to “At the Fishhouses.” Williams includes his warning *Epigraph excerpted from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems, Volume ii, 1939–1962, copyright© 1994 by William Carols Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. xiv about the threat represented by our commonly-lived yet unexamined life within the context of a long love poem—a praise poem at heart—a poem arguing for the redemptive possibility of knowledge-as-sensory experience, his famous words about news and dying miserably all in the service of the love of “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower.” As with Williams’ flower, Bishops’ poem at first seems an unassuming description of the shore near the fishhouses of her childhood Nova Scotia. Yet this description becomes a complicated comparison between water and knowledge, hiding in its belly an important distinction .“It,” the water, is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.* Bishop reminds us here that hard-won “knowledge is historical ,” and because it is, it is always leaving us, “flowing and flown.” It would be a mistake to believe history, therefore; instead , one must experience the watery world, and experience knowledge’s flight. Her argument fits hand in glove with Williams ’ in that it requires the exploration of all that is “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,” and posits the witnessing of the thing (our experience) drawn“From the cold hard mouth/ of the world”as that which keeps not just the art of poetry, but “men”—if Williams is right—alive. It is the poet who must “derive” from “rocky breasts” this knowledge or risk dying from“lack of what is found there;”it is also the poet who must *Excerpted from “At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop from The Complete Poems 1927–1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strause, and Giroux, LLC. xv remind us “our knowledge is historical,” and therefore a moving , a participatory sport. Vigilance is necessary. Reader and writer are implicated in a beautifully sensual, but politically urgent, mutual gaze. It is from this tradition of the urgency of poetic exploration , the need to describe the world as she finds it, that Marjory Wentworth’s accomplished New and Selected Poems springs. Like her literary forebears, Wentworth addresses simultaneously political realities and personal ones, showing again and again throughout her collection the urgent relationship between the two through the use of concrete images that implicate the speaker and draw her into questions about historical knowledge. Sometimes, even stones have violent histories, as when “one stone” is “rubbed smooth in an earthquake.” It is through image that Marjory treats us to both the bitter and the sweet simultaneously, asking the reader, with her generous but persistently questioning intellect, to draw the finer and truer difficult conclusion. The stone may be smooth, but it has been through something to please our eye. Perhaps no pleasing thing is unharmed, the poem seems to suggest. The persistence of Wentworth’s inquiry is not immediately evident; early poems introduce major themes that develop and deepen in crucial ways during the progress of the collection . It is as if the early poems pose questions that the late poems answer, or warnings heard from a great distance in the early work are faced with all their threat and clarity in the later poems, which address issues such as human trafficking and genocide directly, and even blend such subjects with...