The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

FRANK BIDART

317 Frank Bidart Ø A moments-of-past-happiness quilt is too delicate. It won’t wash. It won’t wear. It won’t do to wrap babies in. You are lucky to have touched it, even once. It cannot be sold; it does not last. Do not hope to use it on your bed. 2007 FRANK BIDART b. 1939 Frank bidart has written some of the most powerful poems of the postmodern era. Unlike some of his peers, he chooses to make himself vulnerable rather than seeking a cool, ironic perspective. His poems possess a passionate intelligence that is all their own. They have the dignity of tragic drama, the weight of a philosophical meditation, and the complexity of a Tolstoy novel. They immerse us in interior landscapes of desire and regret, blankness and yearning. Suggesting the inability of our culture to sustain and support, they tell of personal and artistic struggle. In a review collected in On Frank Bidart, Louise Glück observed that “the importance of Bidart’s work is difficult to overestimate; certainly he is one of the crucial figures of our time.” Of Basque-American heritage, Bidart was born in Bakersfield, in California’s Central Valley. He received his B.A. in English from the University of California , Riverside, and his M.A. from Harvard, where he studied with Robert Lowell . At Harvard, he developed close friendships with both Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. His poems reveal the influence of those two poets—and many other American and European writers. Yet as a poet of intricate thought and deep feeling, Bidart is in many ways unique. As critic Lloyd Schwartz noted in On Frank Bidart, Bidart’s poetry “is characterized by unusual, eccentric, even bizarre punctuation and typography.” Bidart’s odd punctuation allows us to hear innuendos in the relations between words that the words themselves cannot Ø Frank Bidart 318 convey. The punctuation helps produce what Schwartz calls the “tragic power and urgency” of Bidart’s verse. Jeffrey Gray adds that Bidart can be grouped with neither the Language poets, who assimilate subjectivity to the status of language, nor the poets who retain a traditional, cohesive lyric voice. Rather, Bidart’s poetry explores language and subjectivity at once, exposing the limits and incompleteness of each. A professor of English at Wellesley College, Bidart has won many prizes, including the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Shelley Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Throughout his career, he has written highly original and often disturbing poems. In a style never quite seen before, they plumb the depths of guilt, suffering, passion, remorse, creativity , and love. They interrogate our darkened world, and they pray for insight that often does not come. “The artist’s problem,” Bidart has said, “is to make life show itself. . . . A great deal of Western art has made life show itself by dramatizing crisis and disaster.” Telling of our failures to fathom the opaque worlds outside of and within ourselves, Bidart’s haunting poems come to us, as Herman Melville would have said, with the shock of recognition. further reading Frank Bidart. Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. — — — —. In the Western Night. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. — — — —. Star Dust. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. — — — —. Watching the Spring Festival. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. Anne Ferry. The Title to the Poem. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Jeffrey Gray. “‘Necessary Thought’: Frank Bidart and the Postconfessional.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 714–39. Liam Rector and Tree Swenson, eds. On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Alan Williamson. Eloquence and Mere Life: Essays on the Art of Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Self-Portrait, 1969 He’s still young—; thirty, but looks younger— or does he? … In the eyes and cheeks, tonight, turning in the mirror, he saw his mother,— puffy; angry; bewildered . . . Many nights now, when he stares there, he gets angry:— something unfulfilled there, something dead to what he once thought he surely could be— Now, just the glamour of habits . . . Once, instead, To My Father Ø 319 he thought insight would remake him, he’d reach —what? The thrill, the exhilaration unravelling disaster, that seemed to teach necessary knowledge . . . became just jargon. Sick of being decent he craves another crash. What reaches him except disaster? 1973 Although “Self-Portrait...