POETS Day! Bullfighting and Elizabeth Bishop

Pectoral sandpiper by the JBWR East Pond

I just saw a clip of Dick Van Dyke skipping at age 98. It’s an awkward skip, not because he’s hampered by age, but because he’s exaggerating his high step more in imitation of something from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch than what you’d expect to see on a playground.

Van Dyke gets made fun of for his “cockney” accent in Mary Poppins. Eddie Izzard said he sounds cockney by way of Australia, but Izzard says it “Australiyur.” I don’t think that’s fair. What do we know about this Bert character he played? Did he immigrate? What’s his backstory? We’re not being fair to Van Dyke as an artist. Dick Van Dyke in his trailer, imagining himself into the role, Stanislovski in his ear. Who is Bert? Images run past. A small boy with a stuffed koala. Fast as a leopard. Sharks. Ping-pong balls. Inevitably he conjures Adelaide and Bert rises from the paper as flesh. Don’t assume everyone in London is British and don’t fault an actor for thinking outside the page.

I think about that a lot.

The thing is, he was spritely skipping about. Not spritely for 98. Just spritely. We aren’t all going to be so lucky, a) to make it to 98, and b) to have so many options at that age, such mobility. Time is fugiting. Take advantage of what little you’ve been allotted. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. But first, take some time for a little verse.

***

William F. Buckley wrote an essay called “Party Pooper.” I have it in a collection of previously published work called Buckley: The Right Word, itself published in 1996. In the essay, he recalls chatting with Bart Giamatti at a party, calling him the “president-elect of Yale University” so he wrote it somewhere between 1978 when Giamatti was elected and ‘96 when the book came out. I would have mentioned that Giamatti later went on to be commissioner of baseball in 1989 if that was information I was privy to. I can’t speak for Buckley, but it seems like an easy enough and interesting enough bit of information to include, so maybe before ’89.

I badly want to say I read this in high school so I can say “I read this essay and it’s stuck with me since high school.” At best, I can say that given what I know about Bart Giamatti, “I may have read this essay in high school, certainly shortly after, and it has stuck with me.” The essay is not about Bart Giamatti.

It begins “… There is a special problem raised by the party at which you have a social objective,” and then goes on to remark on mingling or pretending to. The ellipses isn’t mine. In the middle of “Party Pooper,” he arrives at what caused this particular column – I’d swear I remember reading it National Review – to be so memorable in content if not circumstance.

“Yes, and that raises the question of one’s querencia, a favorite word of mine, one that I learned many years ago from Barnaby Conrad and have tirelessly used. The word describes a tiny area in the bullring, maybe fifty square feet, within which the fighting bull fancies himself entirely safe.”

The matador’s life depends on figuring out where his bull’s querencia is and ensuring that he doesn’t get stuck between it and the animal. Putting ourselves as partygoer into the analogy, Buckley writes that our querencia might be a spouse, a potted plant, a friend. It’s wherever, whomever, or whatever you wander to when one conversation ends and there isn’t an apparent one waiting. Buckley recounts taking an exaggerated interest in the books on the host’s shelves to hide a moment of awkwardness. Querencia is a fabulous word and “tirelessly” should be joined with “expansively” describing my use of it since high school… roughly.

I’m sitting in my internet-less house waiting for Spectrum to repair a node, the reach and impact of which I know about from previous outages. I was ready to wander around the web, looking at poetry sites and hopping from one biography to another via underlined-in-blue mention of who taught whom or who was sleeping with whose wife until a poet tempted me with something salacious or wonderful for this week’s post.

As it happened, before I got home and found myself isolated from non-human contact, I stopped at the library and picked up Elizabeth Bishop / The Complete Poems. I was there to pick up a novel I had a hold on and started wandering. Bishop only published one hundred and one poems in her lifetime, and some of those came after The Complete Poems was released in 1970. It’s not a long book and her style is airy. She’s an easy read. I’ve checked it out three times now and sat with it at the library more times than that. I’ve never read the whole thing through.

Each time I read a few poems, reread them, consider, and reread the same. I’m in no hurry to be done and if I’m honest, I don’t want to be. With Bishop I set aside my thoughts on meter and free verse – subjects that I think important – and listen to her write. I’m sure others have writers like that. I mean the plural.

This first is a favorite, so not a step for me towards a world without new Bishop poems. “Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child.”

Electrical Storm
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.
Cra-aack!—dry and light.
The house was really struck.
Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.
Tobias jumped in the window, got in bed—
silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.
Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child,
thunder began to bang and bump the roof.
One pink flash;
then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.
Dead-white, wax-white, cold—
diplomats’ wives’ favors
from an old moon party—
they lay in melting windrows
on the red ground until well after sunrise.
We got up to find the wiring fused,
no lights, a smell of saltpeter,
and the telephone dead.

The cat stayed in the warm sheets.
The Lent trees had shed all their petals:
wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eyed pearls.

This next one is on to a heavier precipitation. I’m rewatching Dark on Netflix to catch the screenwriters being clever with time travel now that I know how it all winds up. My son is watching with me; the first time seeing it for him. Early on birds – a lot of birds – fall dead from the sky and it bothered me because wondering why so many birds happened to be flying in the air column right over the characters took me out of the story. My son laughed because they picked up the dead birds with bare hands. He’s joking about avian flu and I want to know why one hundred birds happened to be flocking over different characters in different scenes at the same time the birds’ hearts gave out.

That’s what the first line of this poem made me think of and it took me out of the narrative before I could get into it. Now I’ve done that to you, assuming you’ve seen Dark. Even if you haven’t, you’ll probably be thinking about hazmat suits and mom telling you not to touch that, “It’s dead! You don’t know where it’s been!” now. Sorry. It’s still a great poem on the second read through.

Some Dreams They Forgot

The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly,
or could guess from where. They were black, their eyes were shut,
and no one knew what kind of birds they were. But
all held them and looked up through the new far-funneled sky.
Also, dark drops fell. Night-collected on the eaves,
or congregated on the ceilings over their beds,
they hung, mysterious drop-shapes, all night over their heads,
now rolling off their careless fingers quick as dew off leaves.
Where had they seen wood-berries perfect black as these,
shining just so in the early morning? Dark-hearted decoys on
upper-bough or below-leaf. Had they thought poison
and left? or—remember—eaten them from the loaded trees?
What flowers shrink to seed like these, like columbine?
But their dreams are all inscrutable by eight or nine.

Last time I checked out The Complete Poems, I found “The Map” so interesting that I scanned and printed a copy and left that copy in the book with annotations and notes written on it for whoever checked it out next. This wasn’t an ego thing as none of the notes were my original thoughts and I didn’t sign it or anything. I found all sorts of stuff professors and critics had written and figured someone might enjoy that sort of thing. Apparently, I’m not alone in doing that.

“Sandpiper,” on page 153, struck a note with someone because they taped (!) a photocopy of a page from another book to the opposite page. The addition was trimmed unevenly with scissors; a very helpful, very well presented commentary on the poem. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who found the commentary very helpful, very well presented because it looks like the photocopy was once taped to page 152 at three points but two were removed. It looks like whoever did the tape removal, as evidenced by slight tears on 152, removed only connections necessary to read the last two stanzas of “Sunday, 4 A.M.” which wrapped around from page 151. They chose to leave it in.

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focused: he is preoccupied,

Looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

The makeshift bookbinder added a bit of their own to the page in a sexless handwriting that tells me nothing about the author other than that he or she was educated before cursive fell out of fashion. He or she wrote “the bird runs along the shore” at the top of the page, doubtless the beginning of the sentence from page 182 of whatever book that picks up with “ignoring the sea…” on this Xeroxed copy of page 183. In the second line, “disregarding” is underlined and “focused” is adamantly circled in the next. The anonymous critic from the unknown book makes a connection between the line “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,” from Bishops poem “The Fish” and the line “Looking for something, something, something,” in “Sandpiper.”

“Like the rainbow of colors that the sandpiper discovers, the poet here discovers beauty; the…” The rest is presumably on page 184, but you get the idea. Drown out the background noise, pay attention, and wonders are revealed.

The internet came back on a while ago. I have other options, but Bishop is always a welcoming retreat, a poetic Querencia.

I scanned the taped in “bonus” commentary. If you want to read it, follow this link. An Easter egg from one poetry book note leaver to another to others. But don’t tape things in library books. C’mon.