Finding the right metaphor for metaphors requires ... a lot of other metaphors, since who they're used by and for what purpose and to what effect are necessary context, sans which the chosen metaphor-metaphor will fall back into mere vesselhood, thinghood. And all those other elements must also be metaphors, or how else would they plausibly ( Read more... )

Much further into Harmonium. I love this book. It is the best book in the world some days ( Read more... )

Rereading Harmonium for Bishop purposes ( Read more... )

Past the obvious Keats bird, a touch of Lycidas & co. in the form and flora and presumably some bits of Lowell himself, I'm wondering how much Diffugere Nives lies behind North Haven. Maybe even Housman's version, since she was a fan of his ( Read more... )

From Bishop's diaries, I assume sometime between 1935 and '38:

The window this evening was covered with hundreds of long, shining drops of rain, laid on the glass which was covered with steam on the inside. I tried to look out, but could not. Instead I realized that I could look into the drops, like so many crystal balls. Each bore traces of a ( Read more... )

So Ashbery claims "Soonest Mended," one of the handful of poems even those of us generally unthrilled by Ashbery are thrilled by, grew out of a fan letter to Bishop in the late '40s and her postcard response. The letter was motivated by "2000 Illustrations," which in Ashbery's summary is describing an atlas ( Read more... )

Despite crossing it with Ozymandias, 2000 Illustrations' debt to Sunday Morning is kind of alarming. There's a bit or two that seem like they might be tributes to Stevens (the burnoose line, the sepulcher one), but to be taking so much, and of the main, not incidentals - surely you can't do that consciously, can't proceed with that weighing on you ( Read more... )

( More rolls of how I roll these days, when rolling. )

( Also re. Bishop: )

Getting to write about Bishop again was fantastic.

I remain flabbergasted that Karen Horney psychoanalyzed her, though. Colliding world vertigo.