It seems to me it would be naive to think that Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t aware of this ambiguity in writing the poem in the first place, she herself having always felt such ambivalence toward her own reputation as a “big fish.” Because Elizabeth Bishop didn’t want to be in the pond at all, in a sense, and shunned the publicity that would shine a romantic light on her as well, hanging her up on the edge of the boat.

There’s nothing romantic whatsoever about the fish in The Fish, I would say, so it should not be surprising either that the moment of intense vision at the end of the poem comes from a wholly other source. And that’s the key word, “wholly other”—the narrator turns away from the fish to the dirty water in the bilges, and in so doing has an insight into her own “wholly other” condition. Generic rainbows are what humanity sees at the end of the flood, and almost always have in them a glimpse of salvation. The rainbow in The Fish appears in the oily film on the water under the rusty engine at the bottom of the leaky boat, not as God’s gift to humanity way up in the sky. So the narrator glimpses her salvation by getting away from the horrible, obsessive, decomposing fish hanging on the outside in public, and moves back into the boat to be as she likes all alone. That’s why she lets it go, because the fish was such an outside intruder!

That’s a start on the fish that doesn’t want to be caught, but as this thread has slipped so far away, and I’m so out of the action at the moment, I won’t say more. If anybody is interested to take up my suggestion, or redirect it, I’d be delighted.

Christopher
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I admire those posters most on Harriet who wrestle with the language, partly because I take some risks myself. But I’m always embarassed when I get up the next mornng and find I wrote something the night before like that above.

I’ve been away for a few days and it’s very late. I’ll try to pick this up again tomorrow–maybe I can do better with the fish that doesn’t want to be remembered or described. Because that’s the crux in The Fish, it seems to me, or at least it’s another way of looking at the description upon which the release at the end depends.

It’s very, very odd. It’s very, very uncomfortable.

Christopher
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The whole problem on Harriet is people don’t want to believe what is actually said. They want to hear the lecture at Harvard, not what is said. They want their graduate school lecturers and mentors to have the answers, and the texts they pour over, and not what is actually said by their lovers once they’re deep inside the bed. Or by some old bird on Harriet.

Why are they so selective, why can’t they be alone and listen in a single bed?

Christopher
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I found the old photo
of the fish and on the back
it says it was a tautog
and weighed 21 pounds 11 ounces.
I felt so badly about catching it,
I remember, it was such a rude intrusion
into private nature. I think
that’s why I can’t remember
what happened to it,
and I truly let it go.

So much is ‘missing’ from this ‘poem,’ however; the dark, the crowd, your son being there, the touching impatience/eagerness of your young son for the ‘sport of patience.’

I could see ‘Creeley’ getting a lot of credit for this poem. Yet there’s no ‘art’ to it at all. It’s an intelligent man telling a touching story about catching a fish with his son.

Nicholson Baker says the ‘fish didn’t want to be described.’ No. How can that be? (thanks, Don, for that reference) Writers (and especially critics, who conspire with writers rather than understanding them) DO practice ‘pathetic fallacies’ a great deal–especially modern writers. We sell our authorial responsibilities and hoard our capital to be invested later by critics in bank account minds of gullible audiences.

When poetry was invented, people didn’t feel sorry for animals–they had no qualms about ‘intruding’ on nature; they kept and ate animals for survival; nature tried to kill Man every day. The sensibility/sensitivity Christopher expresses, Bishop expresses (and which I expressed in my ‘Fish’ poem) came about in Man gradually as an acceptable mainstream subject, and even today, most of the world eats fish and would never think to write or read a poem that evokes sympathy for fish.

This may be why modern poetry tends to be different and obscure, and why moderns will not accept the identity of the ‘acting’ author. Moderns have come full circle back to a primitivism which fears/accepts the dictates of Nature.

Thomas
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And then it’s interesting to take that idea back and look at Annie Finch’s feminist reading, which I found so exciting in the middle of the night. The similarities are extraordinary.

I found the old photo of the fish and on the back it says it was a tautog and weighed 21 pounds 11 ounces. I felt so badly about catching it, I remember, it was such a rude intrusion into private nature. I think that’s why I can’t remember what happened to it, and I truly let it go.

Christopher
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Nicholson Baker says that the thing about the fish in Bishop’s poem is that it doesn’t want to be described, it wants to be let go. Which, if so, justifies that non-epiphanic last line.
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I think the most impressive, and the most like Elizabeth Bishop’s, was caught in my presence by my young son, Noah, and very much with my assistance. It was in the mid 80′s, and we took a drive to Block Island. My son was obsessed with fishing but not very good at it, and certainly not patient about waiting to get out of the car and get his hook in the water, anytime, anywhere. It was off an old wooden pier somewhere on the island, and just getting dark. I was hardly watching as I only helped him Noah there because he’d been creating such a fuss.

And almost immediately the rod was bent double, and I had to catch my son and the rod before they both went down into the water. It took us almost an hour to get the thing in, and the sun was just going down so it was almost dark at the end. Quite a crowd gathered around us, and a photo was taken–which I still have.

I never weighed it but I’d guess near 10-15 pounds pounds, and hideously encrusted and scarred just like The Fish. Somebody in the crowd said it must be a world record and we ought to get it tested.

We never did, and I don’t even remembeer what happened to it.

That’s also the story of my life.

Christopher
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How many of you have actually caught a “tremendous fish”??

And – you may know that Bishop herself was unhappy with the poem, even threatening to redo it as a sonnet!
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Do not care
for you, for you, for you
William Carlos Williams
By the peach pit feeling
blue.

Maybe in December
modern poetry will come
Looking like a Bishop
With her
top
button
undone.

Where’s my big bass drum?
Boom! Boom! Know ye the land
where the pedants bloom?

I dazzled Molly
Ford with pistol
and gun I battered Don
Blueberry
And then some
Peace (peach?)
in a jar.
Victory wins but defeat
goes far

Many a bird has sung
By ornament and stream,
Many a bird has sung
In the middle of a dream,
In the
middle of a
dream

We don’t know you–
You knew me
So well
When time reversed,
it was
history,
it was hell
but creative writing–
knew–
who you were,
blurbed
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Can I post it, because if we want to look we’ve got to have it right on the table before us?
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http://www.kwls.org/lit/podcasts/2008/05/john_ashbery_on_elizabeth_bish.cfm

“Elizabeth Bishop is a poet in whom the two kinds of I/eye are fully, and beautifully, fused. We do not read her to discover the details of her biography, yet I feel that we end up knowing her…”
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Somehow I find your formulations here more sympathetic, more natural than I did those in the currect article, The Fish II. But you know, I’m perfectly willing to consider that maybe I’ve changed, maybe I’m less prickly, less suspicious of critical language. Or house-trained–maybe I’m learning where and how to go.

I think my initial statement of purpose had it’s heart in the right place. Very near the beginning of this thread I wrote: “I guess what I worry about, Martin, is that the search for an “epiphanic structure,” as you call it, may distract us from the things a particular poem does that no other poem has ever done before. Indeed, the search for any sort of pre-ordained structure can stack the deck against the particularity of a poem, and force the poem to participate in a game with a conclusion that’s rigged.”

I still think that’s good, but whether or not my attempt to talk about The Fish and High Windows in such a way that the poems can define their own critical parameters works, that’s up to all of you to judge. I apologize for the space I took up, and particularly to those of you who felt bored or intimidated. But I also thank those of you who responded to my efforts from the bottom of my heart.

I loved your third paragraph, Martin, and so look forward to responses to what you say there.

I was also thrilled to read Christian Wiman’s poem in The New Yorker, which made me realize that I don’t need to be such a Jeremiah after all. Any poetry scene that can produce a poem like that in the first place, and then get that poem into The New Yorker where it will be read by everybody, even me, that’s a healthy place for poetry. That’s my country too!

It’s also an ideal poem for this thread, which has concerned itself not only with The Fish, High Windows and Whitsun Weddings but also with Robert Frost’s Directive. I’m also pleased personally because it helps me to understand better my own motives not only in writing Apologia Pro Vita Autistica, but for posting it here. My poem is so short by comparison, but it’s just as full of junk, including an old washing machine, a pinball machine, a mangle, a paint mixer, and a 78 crank up with a gospel choir.

So I’d love you all to get in there and sway back and forth to Christian Wiman, and will post it if I’m allowed to–I certainly don’t want The New Yorker on my back!

So can I , Martin?

Christopher
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The discussion in this thread dovetails with my previous thread on closure and the points I wanted to make there, but perhaps didn’t quite reach. This is the notion that poetic closure is not about snapping the door shut, case closed, etc. Poetic closure, formal closure, is often the moment of psychic opening, or release.

There is a gorgeous poem by Chris Wiman in the New Yorker called “Five Houses Down”.* Structurally, it is somewhat similar to the Bishop poem which we have been discussing, namely in the accretion of detail. And yet it is more satisfying to me because the narrator is intimately involved. The closure to this poem (I don’t known if I’d go so far as to say that Wiman is using the device of epiphany) is extremely delicate, almost understated. It can be because the energy of recollection and description is still coiled very tautly in the voice and emotion of the narrator. The poet only needs to push very gently at the end for the whole thing to fly. But the same elements are there, especially the light, the “ancient light” in this case. It speaks about the acquisition of knowledge and the cost of that. Its echoes and the archetypes that inform it are dealt with so serenely that they don’t even need to be mentioned aloud.

I would recommend the poem to all those who have been working on this thread, and anyone else for that matter.

Martin

*http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/06/29/090629po_poem_wiman
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I’m still trying to find a way to grasp the final image in High Windows–which is important to do because this thread is about final images, and how to read them. The irony is that I think we all have a sense of where The Fish goes, and though none of us would ever like to explain it in less words than have been spilled in this thread, I feel sure, there is a sense of closure in the discussion. But the other stirring event on this thread, for me anyway, is that almost everyone seems to have agreed that High Windows is probably the greater poem, and that its ending is even more elusive!

So here’s the ending of Philip Larkin’s greatest poem (or at least that’s the claim), Whitsun Weddings:

. . . . . . . We slowed again
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

The brakes are either drum brakes or caliper brakes (disc brakes hadn’t yet been invented), so there’s swelling either way due too friction, a filling up of the moving space, a tumescence, a ‘blooming,’ we sometimes say, in the sense of a pushing upward. Indeed, that sense of the word clarifies that rthe poem calls “a sense of falling”— which you can’t get, of course, unless you’ve got some altitude first, like on the playground apparatus. It’s a parabola, in other words, a swinging between extremes not unlike the slide in High Windows. And there you have it, down the chute “like free bloody birds”–the same creatures that are the subject of Whitsun Weddings, no less, and who are also, like the strange image of the arrows, being “sent out of sight”—on the train to oblivion and the disaster of marriage!

“An arrow shower”—what an image for falling! And then the clincher that makes Philip Larkin so great–”somewhere becoming rain.”

In High Windows it’s the “birds”/ “words” rhyme that propels the poem through the high window, “down the long slide / like free bloody birds” [flip upward] “and immediately / rather than words comes the thought of high windows.”

“And is endless.”

Christopher

And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
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That only shows Woody objecting in very specific terms that one can agree with or not; he’s not making vague insults, and saying ‘well, there goes the neighborhood!’

You take a little risk when you put one of your poems out there; that’s the way it should be. A poem is not an automatic ticket to some fawning blurb…

What, do you feel you are chained to a rock, now, and a bird is eating your liver? Shall we start calling you ‘Prometheus Fitzgerald?’

I’m sure you’ll be OK…

Thomas
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I have lost a word
and I will never
write it again

The word is wheel barrow.

I have lost my name
and I will never never
again know what I was called

Your name was Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
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POSTED BY: CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN ON JUNE 19, 2009 AT 10:28 PM

.
“Honestly, Tere. How could you? What possessed you to think that a post like Desmond’s should be sabotaged at 5am, and the whole Iranian Poetry Night sunk before dawn?”

POSTED BY: CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN ON JUNE 22, 2009 AT 12:18 AM

.
“No, my dear friend Gary, I’m afraid I don’t ‘get it.’”

POSTED BY: THOMAS BRADY ON JULY 5, 2009 AT 10:01 PM

.
Maybe now, Thomas

.
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Aru

He perdido una palabra
y nunca
volveré a escribirlo

He perdido una dicción
y sé
que no podré hallarla

He perdido una expresión
y nunca
voy a encontrarla

He vuelto a perder un vocablo
y nunca más
lo pronunciaré

He perdido mi nombre
y nunca jamás
jamás sabré cómo me llamaba.

Aru

I have lost a word
and I will never
write it again

I have lost a phrase
and I know
I will not be able to get it back

I have lost a figure of speech
and I will
never find it

I have lost an accent
and I will never
pronounce it again

I have lost my name
and I will never never
again know what I was called
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I am of such a philosophical nature, that I would rather talk about how to read a poem, than the poem. I admit it.

I suppose there is irony in praising ‘a poem’ for being ‘ineffable.’ And it may not be ironic; it may be plain stupid. Perhaps it’s a weakness in the critic (myself).

Or perhaps, to be plain and ineffable at the same time is the secret to great, or, popular poems.

I’m not going to go back and read your poem, just mention from memory that I think it’s about an autistic child, odd and clumsy in how they experience life and communicate, but find a glory, a ‘starry whiteness,’ –to paraphrase it as crudely as possible.

Here’s a similar thing–just two lines, which the authors Brooks & Warren of ‘Understanding Poetry’ praise by way of Yeats.

“The poetic effect depends not on the things themselves but on the kind of use the poet makes of them.

We have seen, then, that a poem is not to be thought of as merely a bundle of things which are ‘poetic’ in themselves. Nor is it to be thought of, as the ‘message hunters’ would seem to have it, as a kind of box, decorated or not, in which a ‘truth’ or a ‘fine sentiment’ is hidden.

Certainly it is not to be thought of as a group of mechanically combined elements–meter, rhyme, figurative language, idea, and so on–put together to make a poem as bricks are put together to make a wall. The relationship among the elements in a poem is what is all important; it is not a mechanical relationship but one that is far more intimate and fundamental. If we must compare a poem to the make-up of some physical object it ought not to be to a wall but to something organic like a plant.”

Mssrs. Brooks and Warren are FAR too prolix for my taste; I quote a sample to give you of how the teaching of the standard outlook of modern poetry must have looked to students during the time when roughly all of us alive today grew up. I suppose they are making ‘an extremely good point,’ but I feel they are protesting too much, and failing to say what is truly more important. But let’s get to the Yeats…

“Here are two lines by Robert Burns which have been greatly admired by the poet William Butler Yeats:

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!

Yeats has summarized…as follows:

Take from them [the lines] the whitness of the moon and of the waves, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colors and sounds and forms.

The remarks by Yeats here apply, as we can see, to the elements of the scene itself as well as to the rhythm. He is not praising the lines merely because the scene of the white moon setting behind the white wave gives in itself a pretty picture.”

(Brooks and Warren use the word ‘pretty’ whenever they wish to castigate the beautiful. A typical Modernist trick. The Modernists hate beauty.)

The New Critics praise the ineffable COMBINATION of things in a poem, and put almost no stock in the elements themselves. One cannot paraphrase a poem, or point to elements in a poem; one must respect the COMBINATION. It matters not, in otherwords, if rhythm, rhyme, beauty and wit are absent, so long as the poem in question is expertly combining a ‘white moon’ and a ‘white wave.’

Thus ‘Understanding Poetry’ lavishes praise on ‘In a Station of the Metro’ by Yeats’ friend, Ezra Pound, and Yeats is seen lavishing praise on tepid, very un-Robert Burns-like, lines.

But the Burns we know and love never gets to speak in ‘Understanding Poetry.’

The Burns of

Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire
At plow or cart,
My Muse, tho’ homely in attire,
May touch the heart.

never makes an appearance.

Instead we get the professors swooning over

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!

Christopher, it all depends on th critic. The combination which the be critic is seein’ is ALL. The poem donna matter.

Burns, again:

Thou canst not learn, nor can I show,
To paint with THOMSON’S landscape-glow;
Or wake the bosom-melting throe,
With SHENSTONE’S art;
Or pour with GRAY, the moving flow,
Warm on the heart.

Yet all beneath th’ unrivaled Rose
The lowly Daisy sweetly blows;
Tho’ large the forest’s Monarch throws
His army shade,
Yet green the juicy Hawthorn grows
Adown the glade.

Then never murmur nor repine;
Strive in thy humble sphere to shine;
And trust me, not POTOSI’S mine,
Nor KING’S regard,
Can give a bliss o’ermatching mine,
A rustic bard.

Thomas
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Many, many thanks, Martin. You are the most conscientious of thread spinners, and this one spun away into some wild, uncharted orbits while you were, as you say, passing the other side of the moon.

We’ll survive in this universe that is Harriet precisely because we are as you say.

Christopher
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I certainly don’t see a problem, and I second Thomas’s drift in this comment. The thread is about open space, cornfield, Nebraska style space. Thomas has a point. You read what you want to read. Volume can only be stimulating, especially when the discourse is conducted at such a high level. I’m sure this is exactly what Ms. Lilly had in mind, free and open forums which grow organically. Any given post can sustain pointed commentary for only so long before drift, meta-commentary, opinion, personal ideology and the gifts of individual experience begin to take hold. I, for one, feel extremely lucky, as one of the hired perpetrators these last few months that the threads unfold the way they do. Maybe Gary has a point – some people could be scared away by the clobbering breadth of the most enthusiastic threaders. But perhaps not. I suspect a lot of people are reading just for the fun of it, for the spectacle, without necessarily feeling the need to contribute. And I’ve seen enough examples of people, late in the day, breaking in without any trepidation. Thomas has brought up a lot of good points here about the way things are supposed to work. And I would say, having observed this process over the last six months, that, given the lawlessness, there has always been a sense of decorum, even decorum threaded into the syntax of insult (a wonderful thing to see). We are all at a very lucky moment in the progress of letters. A kind of 18th century vibrancy is again the order of the day. We should all thank the circumstances that have led to this moment. We should drink a lot of coffee and get to work.

Martin
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Has anybody come up with that tag yet, by the way, or do I get the credit? “As Christopher Woodman was at some pains to show on Independence Day, 2009 on Harriet, The Fish is a fine example of Feminist Epiphany.”

But more seriously, Martin, I know I haven’t replied to the gist of your 4th complaint: “Everything is “fair” in the final analysis and I don’t see what politics has to do with it, nor do I consider myself a junk dealer.”

I’m merely saying, stripping away the polemic (cf. above), that your phrase “epiphanic structure” is a metric unit that’s unsuitable to measure a poem written in inches. And I still feel that about your interpretation of The Fish. To say that you, Martin Earl, are “responsible for the plethora of junk” that all such misapplications can lead to would be absurd–I’m just talking about the tendency in contemporary literary theory to produce poetry that satisfies theories rather than poetry that generates enthusiasm for reading it. You are a most wonderfully informed, eloquent and generous writer, Martin, which is evidenced in every word you write. But still you’re part of the problem, as I am too with my “feminist epiphany,” for example–or my suggestion that High Windows is a fine example of an “ubi sunt structure, or is in the great English mystical tradition (Vaughan, says Annie).

What we’re all trying to do everywhere on Harriet, I would say, is liberate ourselves from everything that predetermines our judgements, aren’t we? Is it so bad to say mea culpa when the stakes are so high?

Christopher
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If you can call getting thoroughly lost in a ruined place where all that remains is a dent in the dough o.k., o.k.

I’d say that if you can’t tell the difference between prayer and a good scrubbing and are haunted by things not so nice besides even when you’re trying your best to sort all the crap out—I’d say then its more like “perspires” than “aspires” or, hey, why not, “expires!”

Thank you so much for noticing, Tom. I say we’re all in this bother together but don’t realize it until we get well into high windows.

Christopher
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I queried you on this mysterious little word when I first saw you use it it in a similar situation on Annie Finch’s “Farough: An Evening of Persian Poetry” thread. You explained to me:

“This.” (with period) in my other active Net community (a passel of simulated historical baseball managers) is a handy tag to indicate agreement with the last speaker. What he said.”

So I assume you are agreeing with the post by Thomas Brady just preceding, and to which you were replying.

In the very same reply to me on “Farough” you went on to write:

“Probably a gentle nudge in the direction of the original thread is more effective than a scold. I should talk. Wonderfully well-read one-trick-pony Tom pushes my buttons, and I can’t read Desmond’s novella-length rants (mostly I take his advice and scroll on down).”

So you’re wonderfully forgiving in this This., John—I just wish you’d said a bit more. I get a thrill from all your posts even when I don’t have any background in what you’re talking about. You make me realize how much I’ve missed by losing my hemisphere at 16, among many other things.

Christopher
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So five people are holding a seminar in an open room and somehow preventing thousands from getting in to see the Stones? How does that work?

It’s physically impossible to talk over someone in this format. Everyone has their own separate bubbles of air. No one is stopping you from talking.

I think the ‘reply’ feature is working well. Sometimes a series of long posts makes a thread rather time-consuming to catch up on, but that goes with the territory. I wouldn’t want to tell those people who have posted in that thread–for my convenience that they should write less. I would never presume to do that. And I can always skip comments. No one is making me read them.

Your m.o. is to make brief, funny remarks and post your own poems. I would think you would appreciate substantive talk, simply as a contrast. Imagine a room full of Gary Fitzgeralds. Enjoy the variety!

Christopher Woodman has seen a lot of things, done a lot of things, and his literary opinions are informed, passionate, and sincere. I just have to sadly shake my head at your objections.

There are many threads with only a few posts, waiting for you and your Stones-fan friends. Why doesn’t anyone comment in those near-empty threads? We few, who you somehow feel are spoiling it for the thousands, have no presence in those near-empty threads. You say you can’t get a word in edgewise, and yet there’s no one in those near-empty threads to prevent this–and yet you and your friends don’t comment there. Why not?

Can you be specific about a thread in which you dearly wanted to say something and were prevented from doing so, because there simply were too many comments for you to…you see, I’m really trying to understand this, to see this logically…was it someone’s opinion that made you so mad that you were unable to reply?…what was that opinion? Can you point to a place in a thread where you felt you were muzzled by someone’s presence…?

This is hardly worth a lengthy reply, because, frankly, I can hardly bring myself to take your complaint seriously, but then I don’t like to respond in a half-hearted manner…

Thomas
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We had to wait for the Moderns to clear the way for vulgarities in polite discourse–as Thomas points out in his analysis of High Windows.

Fortunately, whatever the origins of “bloody,” with these “birds” the English weren’t coming (“les anglais ne sont pas arrivés”)! That’s all I meant.
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