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  • Poetry: The 1940s to the Present
  • Frank Kearful

Reading diligently in order to write this annual chapter, I am repeatedly forced to realize how old and how resistant to change I have become. I came of age when we left it to the cops to “interrogate,” when only jazz musicians played “riffs,” and when nobody used “reference” as a verb. The adjectival double-whammy “conflicted, contested” was not part of our scholarly lingo, and “sites” were things you looked at on vacation. “Inflected,” now rampant in literary criticism (e.g., “a rather different approach, one inflected by the insights of post-structuralism and feminism”), we knew only as a grammatical term, and “the subject position” would have struck us as one, too, referring most likely to the s-v-o word order of the standard English sentence. I would love to upgrade my critical practice, but I fear I would sound like a fraud if I tried speaking in tongues. I would be flummoxed if I had to “interrogate questions,” which one erudite scholar makes a habit of doing. To be honest, though, I often read an entire scholarly article or book without a single “riff” in it. As long as I too can get by without the r-word, I will happily go on writing this chapter, gritting my teeth periodically. And learning something new, even at my age.

i Elizabeth Bishop

Who would not be grateful for the publication of an edition of “uncollected” poems by Elizabeth Bishop? Helen Vendler, for one, and if she is right, Elizabeth Bishop. In “The Art of Losing,” her review in the New [End Page 391] Republic (April 3: 33–36) of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (Farrar), Vendler objects for starters to the subtitle, which ought to be “Repudiated Poems” since Bishop never intended they be published and would be appalled to find that some brazen opportunist had seen to it that they were. Vendler notes that Quinn’s subtitle is also fraudulent, as “uncollected poems” indicates previous separate publication of some sort, although not in one of the poet’s collections. The “repudiated” poems did not meet Bishop’s exacting standards for any sort of publication, but Vendler concedes that a few of them, notably the love poem “It is marvellous to wake up together,” may have been withheld more on prudential than on literary grounds. Bishop died suddenly and unexpectedly without having made provision for disposal of her repudiated poems, but Vendler is certain that had she been asked whether they should ever be published posthumously, she would have replied “with a horrified ‘No.’ ”

Some poems in Quinn’s edition had earlier been appropriated for published use by scholars who also tapped the resources of the Vassar collection of Bishop papers, or came up with finds elsewhere, and Quinn herself saw to it that some poems were published in the New Yorker, where she is poetry editor, before her book came out. “Elizabeth Bishop” was given as author, without customary parenthetical reference to years of birth and death. Was this Elizabeth Bishop a hitherto unknown young poet who happened to have the same name as the poet who died in 1979? Had Elizabeth Bishop been in touch with Quinn from beyond, like Auden with James Merrill at his Ouija board? Then there is the matter of Quinn’s title, borrowed from one of the poems but about which Bishop had no more say than Plath did about Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. I wonder if Bishop would have repudiated it.

If Susan Rosenbaum has got it right about Bishop’s “Twelve O’Clock News” in her essay “Bishop’s Theater of War,” pp. 53–82 in Reading the Middle Generation Anew, then everybody else has had it wrong, despite some of them getting most other things right. How Bishop’s response to war energized her critiques of militarism, patriarchy, and “territorial aggression” against the natural and human worlds has been ascertained by critics such as Susan Schweik, Margaret Dickie, and Camille Roman. Rosenbaum does not object to any of this (e.g., Schweik’s contention “wars are...

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