Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
or ‘project’ in mind” for them. Instead, she “transcribed and/or materially reproduced [them] after years of living with them and feeling in contact with them in ways not clear to myself,” including them in the book as an attempt “to understand why they became necessary to me, how they were functioning, what they have to do, for me, with writing or with the possibility of writing.” Flower Cart is not imagined by bodying forth “forms of things unknown.” Fishman has found things, and seeks in her poetry to prevent them from becoming unknown.
How I conceive of poetry (what I think poetry is) will go a long way toward determining what I can and cannot do in my poems. By keeping “live” the question of how to conceive of poetry, my practice of poetry will have not only the technical aspect we name “craft,” which asks “What means will help me achieve my ends?,” but also a conceptual aspect I have here named “metacraft,” which asks “What ends might I, or ought I, embrace?” As exemplified by the ways Rankine, Osman, and Fishman realize in their poetry possibilities not available to the most common models of poetry, a practice of metacraft (my reconsidering what I think a “real poem” is) might, no less than a practice of craft (increased mastery of anaphora or metonymy, say), create for my poetry possibilities not previously available to me, expanding the range of what I can “just make up myself.”
Article 2:Double stance, double vision.
2.1: Poetry For Relationship
Ambiguity can sometimes make things murky. “Her recommendation letter was ambiguous,” I might grouse. “I couldn’t tell whether she was praising him or sending us a warning signal.” But ambiguity includes, as William Empson observes, “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language,” and sometimes presenting alternatives makes things clearer, not murkier. That giving of room for alternative reactions can clarify instead of blurring; it can make things more specific, not less. The ambiguities in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry perform that clarifying, specifying function well.
It matters that there be such ambiguity. Customarily, we think of our world as a world of things. Asked “What is this world made of?,” a person might respond by listing things. “Look around you,” she might suggest. “Our world is made of chairs and coffee mugs and windows and shirts and trees and people and such.” This common-sense view is sanctioned by the grammar of the English language, which stocks our sentences with things: subjects and objects. The horse galloped across the field, we might say. The things there, the horse and the field, are the “substantives.” We say that “galloped” gives information about the horse, but it would sound awkward and odd to say that the horse gives information about “galloped.” In English, the horse and the field are the realities. Even that word, “realities,” embodies the common-sense notion: “reality” comes from the Latin word res, meaning thing. What is real has thingness; it is real because it is a thing.
But what if the common-sense view (that the world is made of things) is misleading? We easily recognize it as misleading in certain contexts. If I’m trying to account for the earth’s apparent stability, I’ll soon err if I appeal only to things. Atlas is holding up the world, I might postulate. And what about Atlas? Ummm, he’s standing on top of… a turtle. And the turtle? For a satisfying account, what we need is not a thing but a force: gravity. We need, that is to say, a relationship. “Gravity” does not name a thing that occupies the space between the earth and the sun: it names a relationship that holds between the earth and the sun. “The world,” Wittgenstein reminds us, “is the totality of facts, not of things.”
If the world consisted, first and foremost, of things, then in our language uses (our poems, our stories, our essays) we would want always to disambiguate. We’d want to analyze, to take things apart so we could see each thing on its own, separated from the rest, taken out of its relationships. We would want our words to pick out one thing at a time, and ambiguity would impede and corrupt our analysis. If, however, our world consists not so much of things as of relationships, then we want ambiguity. We need it. Only ambiguity, itself a relationship between meanings, could hope adequately to signify relationship. We can’t say what holds between things if we’re too exclusively intent on separating things. Ultimately, we’re after not analysis but synthesis: not taking things apart but putting them together. We don’t want to eliminate ambiguity, we want to get good at it. And Elizabeth Bishop is very good. Her ambiguities are a form of truth-telling, a very rich and apt means toward better understanding ourselves and our world. The various forms of ambiguity in Bishop’s work matter, because they enable her poetry to reveal — to clarify — a truth about Being (the world, and human experience in the world) that the very grammar of our language works to distort and conceal.
The first form of ambiguity to note in Bishop is lexical ambiguity: double entendre, using a word (or words) in a way that enables it (or them) to sustain more than one meaning. One example occurs in Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” with her use of the word “correspondences.” The poem presents itself as little more than a quiet (if quirky) description of the bight at a particular moment, identified by its being at low tide. The speaker simply observes the bight with all her senses. She sees the colors of “the little white boats” and the “[b]lack-and-white man-of-war birds” and the “[w] hite, crumbling ribs of marl”; she hears the “little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock” as it noisily “plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves”; she smells the water “turning to gas,” as if to match its visual resemblance to “the gas flame turned as low as possible”; by identification with the birds, she feels the crash of diving “unnecessarily hard” into the water, and (despite her declaring them “impalpable”) the drafts of rising air above it; and indirectly, by extension from “the blue-gray shark tails” that “are hung up to dry” on the “fence of chicken wire along the dock,” she tastes the sharktail soup in a Chinese restaurant. But the poem’s very first line alerts us not to think that the water’s surface exhausts the bight. “At low tide like this” we can see into the water, under its surface, because it is so sheer, and of course we can see a great deal that at high tide is submerged. The reader is invited to recognize that if there is much going on beneath the surface of the water, there may be much going on beneath the surface of the poem, too.
Lexical ambiguity creates some of that sub-surface activity. When the poem declares the bight “littered with old correspondences,” the word “correspondences” can be taken in at least two ways. Bishop has just introduced the metaphor of letters: the previous line describes piled-up, unsalvaged white boats as resembling “torn-open, unanswered letters,” so the most obvious meaning of “correspondences” is letters, as in “I still maintain regular correspondences with two friends from school.” The bight at low tide, strewn with all those boats on their sides, resembles, Bishop suggests, a desktop strewn with letters. But “correspondences” also designates ways in which things resemble or reflect one another, as in “There are many correspondences between poetry and film.” Both meanings are “live” in the poem, and the double entendre is not just a gimmick, a flaunting of verbal dexterity. It inflects the rest of the poem: the fact that this word has two meanings entails that the whole poem does, also. In one, the unsalvaged boats alone are the correspondences: they litter the bight as unanswered letters litter a desktop. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with these old correspondences.” On this reading, we are told what the correspondences are. On another reading, though, the boats are representative correspondences. They themselves are correspondences, but they also suggest the presence of additional correspondences. We could specify this meaning by rewriting Bishop’s sentence to read, “Some of the little white boats are still piled up… like torn-open, unanswered letters. / The bight is littered with old correspondences like these.” On this reading, we are told that the correspondences are numerous, but not told what they are. We must discern for ourselves what items