POET

Frank Bidart (1939 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Frank Bidart first gained the attention of critics with Golden State and The Book of the Body, introspective verse collections that were published during the 1970s. On the basis of Bidart's early work, David Lehman, in a Newsweek assessment, called him "a poet of uncommon intelligence and uncompromising originality." In the early 1980s Bidart wrote The Sacrifice, which furthered his reputation as a prominent voice in American poetry. Much of Bidart's work, critics suggest, focuses on the origins and consequences of guilt. Among his most notable pieces are dramatic monologues presented through such characters as Herbert White, a child-murderer, and Ellen West, an anorexic woman. "Part of his effectiveness comes simply from his ability as a storyteller," commented Michael Dirda in Washington Post Book World. "You long to discover what happens to his poor, doomed people."

Bidart grew up in California, where he developed a love for the cinema. He entertained thoughts of becoming an actor when he was young and later, at the time he enrolled in college, considered becoming a film director. His plans began to change, however, when he was introduced to literature at the University of California—Riverside. While an undergraduate, he was introduced to such critical works as The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling and The Idea of a Theater by Francis Fergusson—both of which exerted a strong influence on his early attitudes toward literary expression. He also became familiar with the work of notable twentieth-century poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In a 1983 interview with Mark Halliday, which is included in Bidart's In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, the poet spoke of how reading Pound's "Cantos," long works which were first released in 1917, introduced him to the potential of poetry to encompass a wide range of subjects: "They were tremendously liberating in the way that they say that anything can be gotten into a poem, that it doesn't have to change its essential identity to enter the poem—if you can create a structure that is large enough or strong enough, anything can retain its own identity and find its place there."

After graduating from the University of California—Riverside, Bidart continued his education at Harvard University. He was not, however, certain of where his course of study would lead him. Bidart related in his interview with Halliday: "I took classes with half my will—often finishing the work for them months after they were over; and was scared, miserable, hopeful. I wrote a great deal. I wrote lugubrious plays that I couldn't see had characters with no character. More and more, I wrote poems." Bidart's first attempts at poetry were, by his own admission, failures. "They were terrible; no good at all," he continued in his interview. "I was doing what many people start out by doing, trying to be 'universal' by making the entire poem out of assertions and generalization about the world—with a very thin sense of a complicated, surprising, opaque world outside myself that resisted the patterns I was asserting. These generalizations, shorn of much experience, were pretty simple-minded and banal."

After honing his craft, Bidart submitted his work to Richard Howard, who was then editor of a poetry series at Braziller. Howard decided to publish Bidart's poetry in a volume titled Golden State, which was released in 1973. In the title poem to Bidart's debut collection, a son and father vainly attempt to understand and accept one another. The poem, presented as an address to the father, is divided into ten separate sections. Critics remarked on the autobiographical nature of the piece and on the sparse quality of the language that Bidart employs throughout the work. Other poems in the collection also touch upon the relationship between parent and child. In his interview Bidart discussed how he came upon the theme of family that enters into some of the poems in Golden State: "When I first faced the central importance of 'subject matter,' I knew what I would have to begin by writing about. In the baldest terms, I was someone who had grown up obsessed with his parents. The drama of their lives dominated what, at the deepest level, I thought about."

Also included in Golden State is "Herbert White," a poem which is presented through the voice of a psychopathic child-murderer and necrophiliac. In his interview with Halliday Bidart stated that his intent in writing the piece was to present "someone who was 'all that I was not,' whose way of 'solving problems' was the opposite of that of the son in the middle of the book. The son's way . . . involves trying to 'analyze' and 'order' the past, in order to reach 'insight'; Herbert White's is to give himself a violent pattern growing out of the dramas of his past, a pattern that consoles him as long as he can feel that someone else has acted within it." According to several reviewers, the dramatic monologue, which opens the collection, is the most notable work in the book. Sharon Mayer Libera, in her Parnassus assessment, stated that "Bidart's achievement, even a tour de force, is to have made [Herbert White] human. The narrator's gruesome adventures become the least important aspect of the monologue—what is significant is his reaching out, in a language both awkward and alive, for the reasons he seeks power over his experience in peculiar and violent ways."

In Bidart's second collection, The Book of the Body, he includes several poems which feature characters who are struggling to overcome both physical and emotional adversity. The book opens with "The Arc," in which the author presents the musings of an amputee, who at the beginning of the poem provides instructions on how to care for his stump. Bidart also gives voice to Ellen West, a woman with anorexia, a condition which causes her to starve herself continuously because she is dissatisfied with the appearance of her body. Based on a case study by noted psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, "Ellen West" was regarded by Edmund White in Washington Post Book World as "a work that displays Bidart's talents at their most exacting, their most insistent."

In the opinion of several reviewers, Bidart's work gains strength by disregarding the conventions of poetry. In an appraisal of The Book of the Body, Helen Vendler of the Yale Review stated that "Bidart's method is not narrative; unlike the seamless dramatic monologues we are used to, his are spliced together, as harrowing bits of speech, an anecdote, a reminiscence, a doctor's journal notes, a letter, an analogy, follow each other in a cinematic progression." Reviewers have also often drawn attention to liberties that Bidart takes when spacing his words and lines in his poetry and when punctuating and capitalizing the English. In his interview with Halliday Bidart explained that "the only way I can sufficiently . . . express the relative weight and importance of the parts of a sentence—so that the reader knows where he or she is and the 'weight' the speaker is placing on the various elements that are being laid out—is [through] punctuation. . . Punctuation allows me to 'lay out' the bones of a sentence visually, spatially, so that the reader can see the pauses, emphases, urgencies and languors in the voice."

The Sacrifice, released in 1983, received widespread praise from reviewers for its insightful poems, many with a guilt theme. Central to the volume is a thirty-page work titled "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky." The title character in the poem is a dancer who pays witness to World War I and eventually loses his sanity. Feeling responsible for the injustices inflicted upon humanity during the conflict, Nijinsky offers penance by performing a dance in which he enacts his own suicide. As with most of his poetry, "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" went through a series of revisions with Bidart experimenting with language and punctuation throughout its development. "The Nijinsky poem was a nightmare," he remarked in his interview. "There is a passage early in it that I got stuck on, and didn't solve for two years. Undoubtedly there were a number of reasons for this; the poem scared me. Both the fact that I thought it was the best thing I had done, and Nijinsky's ferocity, the extent to which his mind is radical, scared me. But the problem was also that the movement of his voice is so mercurial, and paradoxical: many simple declarative sentences, then a long, self-loathing, twisted-against-itself sentence. The volume of the voice (from very quiet to extremely loud) was new; I found that many words and phrases had to be not only entirely capitalized, but in italics." In reviewing the poem, Newsweek's Lehman offered praise for Bidart's technique of alternating portions of the dancer's monologue with prose sections on Nijinsky's life. According to Lehman, "the result combines a documentary effect with an intensity rare in contemporary poetry." Also included in Bidart's third collection is "Confessional," in which he presents the musings of a person who places himself in the role of a patient undergoing psychotherapy. The piece was regarded by Don Bogen of Nation as "one of the most intelligent and moving poems on family relations" to be published at the time.

Although he has written in a variety of forms, Bidart is best known for his dramatic monologues of troubled characters like Herbert White, Ellen West, and Vaslav Nijinsky. In his interview Bidart discussed how he is able to write dramatic monologues through voices different from his own: "Once I finally get the typed page to the point where it does seem 'right'—where it does seem to reproduce the voice I hear—something very odd happens: the ' being' of the poem suddenly becomes the poem on paper, and no longer the 'voice' in my head. The poem on paper suddenly seems a truer embodiment of the poem's voice than what I still hear in my head. I've learned to trust this when it happens—at that point, the entire process is finished." Later in the interview he commented on his approach toward expression through language as a whole, remarking that "again and again, insight is dramatized by showing the conflict between what is ordinarily seen, ordinarily understood, and what now is experienced as real. Cracking the shell of the world; or finding that the shell is cracking under you."

Bidart's Desire was nominated for the triple crown of awards—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and received the 1998 Rebekka Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress for the best book of poetry published during the previous two years. In reviewing the volume for the Boston Phoenix online, Elizabeth Schmidt wrote that "the use of autobiography in [Bidart's] work is a coded, highly intricate enterprise, and his poetry is some of the most difficult and painstakingly original written in America in the last thirty years, weaving quotes and philosophical fragments, vivid detail and stupefying abstraction, into a linguistic matrix that rarely follows the standard rules of punctuation and syntax." "Previously, most of Bidart's longer efforts were dramatic monologues," wrote Stephen Burt in the New Leader. "Here they are third-person narratives, unconfined by a persona's voice. Little else has changed, though, in his basic formula, least of all the initial shock of immersion that his poems occasion. To enter a Bidart poem is to enter a world of literal and figurative violence." Burt called "Adolescence," a found poem about sexual assault that Bidart created from anonymously published prose, "an extreme example."

The first part of Desire consists of thirteen short poems, including a memorial to artist Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS. Daphne Kutzer wrote in Lambda Book Report that this section "includes the few overtly homosexual poems in the volume, although the underlying premise of the entire volume—that we cannot choose what will bring us to ecstasy, it chooses us—certainly resonates for gay readers." William Logan said in New Criterion that these poems "prepare the psychology of 'The Second Hour of the Night,' a masterwork whose first part is as good as anything Bidart has done, juxtaposing the memoirs of Berlioz, whose wife died slowly and horribly, with the death of the poet's mother. The not-so-subtle merger of Bidart's mother and Berlioz's wife, in the erotics implicitly embraced, is the most important psychological gesture in these poems."

The second part is a recounting of Ovid's tale of Myrrha's incestuous love for her father, Cinyrus. In an Antioch Review article Molly Bendall compared Bidart's translation with that of Horace Gregory, saying that "characteristically, Bidart has chosen to make the psychological tension more available and succinct rather than allowing it to remain latent." Nation reviewer Langdon Hammer wrote that the poem "is, in a sense, the worst case that could be made against desire: Sex makes people miserable; it leads them to destroy others and themselves. Yet Bidart converts his poem into an affirmation of embodied love. The 'precious bitter resin' into which Myrrha's tears are changed tastes bitter and sweet, like Desire as a whole. That it is a gay man who has created this book, many years into the age of AIDS, makes the balm a little more bitter, a little more sweet." Hammer noted that the "pre-existing forms" in Desire include writing by Dante, Marcus Aurelius, and Catullus. "Bidart's mind," continued Hammer, "like Ezra Pound's, is full of writing. The experience he records is first of all the experience of a compassionate, intensive reader. What he cares about most is not the content of prior texts but what it feels like to enter them, and then to carry them inside you."

Poetry contributor David Yezzi wrote that Bidart's message is that "it's our inner struggles that inexorably define us." Kutzer said, "In a short review like this, I cannot possibly do justice to the beauty, horror, complexity, and passion of this poem, and indeed of all of Bidart's poetry." Adam Kirsch wrote in the New Republic that "while Bidart's poetry is, on the surface, about unpleasant things and people—monomaniacs, anorexics, transgressors—his treatment of them is not at all repellent; it is positively glamorous. His ostentatious violation of decorum and conventional morality is not shocking to the reader, but actually flattering to him, because it suggests that he, too, contains dark and tumultuous depths. The awe that the reader feels at Myrrha, or Nijinksy, or West, he is allowed to feel also at himself."

Bidart told Lambda Book Report interviewer Timothy Liu, "I think 'The Second Hour of the Night' is a poem I've been trying to write all my life. . . . I wanted to write a poem that questioned love, and in some sense, to punish love as far as one could—and see what remained. Not out of the illusion that one could destroy the desire for love, but to devour as many sentimentalities and delusional aspects as possible, certainly to question the traditional assumptions about love."

Andrew Rathmann wrote in Chicago Review that Desire shows Bidart "to be perhaps less agonized and more resigned to the existential, erotic, and familial contradictions that had occasioned so many of his earlier works. These contradictions are no less intolerable than before (and his exposition of them is no less shockingly, daringly articulate), but Bidart in this book seems at least somewhat attracted to the idea of praising what cannot be altered. This takes the form of accepting desire as one's fate." Booklist reviewer Ray Olson called Desire "literature of the highest order, written to be carefully and slowly read and rewarding such reading with wonder-struck appreciation of human love."

CAREER

Poet. Wellesley College, Department of English, Wellesley, MA, faculty member, 1972—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY COLLECTIONS

Golden State, Braziller (New York, NY), 1973.
The Book of the Body, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1977.
The Sacrifice, Random House (New York, NY), 1983.
In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1990.
Desire, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1997.
Music Like Dirt, Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2002.
Star Dust (poems), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2005.

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