(no subject)
Had to narrow my Bishop thing to focus on just one of her kinds of ambiguously visible houses, the ones representing the shelter she'd expected, found, or never found in poetry and poethood. Narrowed that further still by kicking out her middle-period fish poems and was still 50% overlength. What was left was mostly about her conscious, significant revisions of two early prose pieces, The Sea and Its Shore and In Prison, in her late poems Crusoe in England and The End of March, which last are among her handful of perfect works.
I'd long loved Sea, probably without realizing its full significance for her, but I was just as impressed with In Prison, which I hadn't read before, and a few other prose pieces I was new to that I also lacked space to write about.
She's like Yeats in that a lot of bits of her prose need to be included in her poem collections or a kind of fraud has been perpetrated on readers - editors have long realized this about Sidney's and Shelley's Defenses, Keats' letters, and of course Wordsworth's Preface (even if I still don't). FSG in both their newer and older editions of her collected works have prose volumes matching the poetry ones, but they're still separated, and presumably the poems sell much better.
She did print In the Village, a long autobiographical story, in her Questions of Travel volume, but was later persuaded to take it out in her collected poems volumes. It contained most of Questions' word count, was I guess the problem, swamping the travel ones with questions of genre. Her Library of America volume corrects the problem, which I'm grateful for, but you just haven't read the Bishop that matters without adding Shore, Prison, The Country Mouse, and the more uneven Gwendolyn and Memories of Uncle Neddy to Village. And I haven't even gotten to some of the others yet myself.
Among other things, she has a habit of anticipating her own poems in these prose sketches. Not just intrallusions or repeated images, either, of which there's many, but whole poem-cores are buried here and there, "like Indian arrowheads." One reason it's crucial to assemble together the various interrelated parts of a poet's work is to render criticism more useless, putting as much of the project of understanding them back into the experience of reading them as possible. As well as the house transmutations I mentioned above, and the beginning of Country Mouse, which she borrows from in The Moose but is too long to quote, these caught my eye, respectively from Sea, Village, and Country:
Boomer held up the lantern and watched a sandpiper rushing distractedly this way and that. It looked, to his strained eyesight, like a point of punctuation against the "rounded, rolling waves." It left fine prints with its feet. Its feathers were speckled; and especially on the narrow hems of the wings appeared marks that looked as if they might be letters, if only he could get close enough to read them.
My grandmother is sitting in the kitchen stirring potato mash for tomorrow's bread and crying into it. She gives me a spoonful and it tastes wonderful but wrong. In it I think I taste my grandmother's tears; then I kiss her and taste them on her cheek.
After New Year’s, Aunt Jenny had to go to the dentist, and asked me to go with her. She left me in the waiting room, and gave me a copy of The National Geographic to look at...There were others waiting, two men and a plump middle-aged lady, all bundled up. I looked at the magazine cover--I could read most of the words-shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said: February 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt...myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs...“You are you,” something said. “How strange you are, inside looking out...you are you and you are going to be you forever.” It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being?