'From Masks to Self-Mythology': Major Jackson Reviews Frank Bidart's Collected

Frank Bidart's hot off the presses Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016 is the subject of a review by poet Major Jackson in the New York Times's Books section. Of Half-Light, Jackson writes "The publication of 'Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016' gives readers a chance to see how Bidart, ill content merely to 'say what happened' in prefab stanzas, performs a poetry of 'embodiment' first by adopting personas — most famously those of the necrophiliac murderer Herbert White, the suicidal anorexic Ellen West and the Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinksy — then by dropping the mask altogether, adding layers to the self-mythology of 'Frank Bidart' as he interpolates his life with those of such figures as St. Augustine of Hippo, Maria Callas, Benvenuto Cellini and Walt Whitman." From there: 

“Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves,” Bidart writes in “Advice to the Players,” suggesting that poetry is the means by which he constructs himself — or deconstructs himself, since each new persona replaces an earlier one. Thus poetry for Bidart also represents an extinction of personality, if not quite in the way that T.S. Eliot formulated.

When I began this poem, 
to see myself 
as a piece of history, having a past
which shapes, and informs, and thus 
inevitably 
limits— 
at first this seemed sufficient, the 
beginning of
freedom ... 
The way to approach freedom 
was to acknowledge necessity:— 
I sensed I had to become not merely 
a speaker, the “eye,” but a character ... 

Throughout his career, Bidart’s self-devoting genius has been his ability to transform a poem into a vocalized (albeit anguished) performance of consciousness and moral interrogation, an occasion for metaphysical speculation as intense and oracular as any Shakespearean monologue or philosophic treatise.​ 

His most famous utterances carry that kind of ore: “Love is the distance / Between you and what you love / What you love is your fate” (“Guilty of Dust”). “There was no place in nature we could meet” (“Confessional”). “We are the wheel to which we are bound” (“Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City”).

Like Frost, Bidart is chiefly recognized as a New England poet, and, like Frost, he actually arrived there from California. Born in 1939 in Bakersfield, Bidart moved east to attend Harvard and subsequently entered the thriving community of writers and poets in Cambridge, among them Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (for whom he serves as literary executor).

Read more at the New York Times.