Frederick Seidel
Poems, 1959-2009
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009
528 pages
£27.00
978-0374126551

Isbn

…

Combine a far-seeing industrialist.
With an Islamic fundamentalist.
With an Italian premier who doesn’t take bribes.
With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.
Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

—from “Milan”

With credentials like these, it should come as no surprise that Frederick Seidel has garnered little praise from the poetry establishment. But the establishment ought to be more wary of him. For the past 50 years, the reclusive Seidel has been assembling a kind of poetic dirty bomb targeted directly at the establishment’s most sacrosanct virtue: political correctness. Funded by the poet’s outrageous personal wealth and charged with lethal quantities of lust, loathing, arrogance, and gallows humor, Seidel’s bomb—Poems, 1959-2009—will deliver a prodigious payload (assuming there are enough poetry readers out there to register the impact).

By his own account, Seidel has “lived a life of laziness and luxury”, as he writes in the poem, “Frederick Seidel”. Dubbed by recent critics a “luxe, randy celebutante” and “laureate of the louche”, he seems to prefer the self-title “liar with a lyre”. At the same time, his friends all commend his generosity and interviewers often observe a shy, courtly man. Seidel, for his part, insists that what the reader struggles with “is that the man in the poems is the real man, while the man behind the poems just wants his privacy.” That said, it is hard to understand how a man like Seidel—equal parts playboy, hell’s angel, gentleman, and sado-masochist—can expect people to remain uninterested in him after reading his poems.

Frederick Seidel was born in 1936 to a life of privilege. The son of a wealthy coal magnate, he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard. In 1962, his first book, Final Solutions, was selected by Robert Lowell and other distinguished poets for the 92nd Street Y’s inaugural poetry award, featuring a cash prize and a publishing deal with Atheneum Press. But when the 26-year-old poet refused to remove allegedly libelous passages from his manuscript, the awarding body withdrew the prize and the panel of judges resigned in protest. Random House published Final Solutions the following year, though Seidel’s next book, Sunrise, was not to appear for 17 years. Since 1980, Seidel has published eight volumes of verse, including his latest, Poems, 1959-2009, which includes a short collection of new work titled “Evening Man”.

Like the scabrous persona (“Fred Seidel”) whom he tends to project, Frederick Seidel has a short list of hobbies: poetry, sex, dangerous machines (the “916” in the passage above refers to Seidel’s beloved Ducati 916 motorcycle), conspicuous consumption, and the desecration of liberal pieties (he has a poem titled “Feminists in Space”). If the phrase “the need for speed” didn’t already exist, Seidel would have been obliged to coin it. As he writes in “Dante’s Beatrice”, from Going Fast:

I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and I its.
All it lacked was tits.
All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.

This passage showcases Seidel’s love of excruciating, drumfire rhymes, other examples of which include “ready to get deady” (also from Going Fast) and “The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude / Made me lewd” (“Bologna”). “The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger”, he writes in “Climbing Everest”,

But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

I’m getting young.
I’m totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite
Which will turn me into light.
God is great! I suck her tongue.

I mean—my sunbursts, and there are cloudbursts.
My dynamite penis
Is totally into Venus.

No amount of Viagra could move most 70-year-olds to such a priapic frenzy. And while this might be the versified ramblings of a dirty old man, it is also refreshing satire. The irritating term “metrosexual” deserves to be deflated by a poem like “Climbing Everest”.

Seidel’s earliest work in Final Solutions, while already distinguished and calculated to cause offense, often reads like a racist pastiche of Robert Lowell’s confessional mode, penned by Woody Allen:

The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.

—from “Wanting to Live in Harlem”

In addition to his early debt to Robert Lowell (whom he interviewed in 1961 for the Paris Review), Seidel learned much from Ezra Pound, who promoted a poetics of intense compression and admonished poets always to seek the mot juste, the strikingly apt word or phrase. Seidel’s capacity for minting mots justes is off the charts, and his increasingly compressed work has only improved with each volume. In “The Pierre Hotel, New York, 1946”, for instance, he writes what might be mistaken for one of Pound’s short Imagist lyrics: “The bowl of a silver spoon held candlelight, / A glistening oyster of gold.”

Like so many other poets of his generation, Seidel made a pilgrimage to visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for treasonous WWII radio broadcasts. Embraced by Pound, as he writes in “Glory”, Seidel stayed in D.C. for a week, discussing poetry and hearing the great poet “fill the alcove with [the] glory” of Provençal and Italian verse. The 17-year-old poet even had the nerve to suggest two small corrections to Pound’s Confucius translations, having very little Chinese under his belt. Surprisingly, Pound adopted the corrections and sent Seidel to an associate at Harvard’s Yenching Institute, a man ominously named Achilles Fang.

“Achilles Fang” would be a perfect name for Seidel’s poetic persona, capturing the ludicrous and terrifying quality of his work. Seidel casts himself as a kind of modern Achilles, a god-like, foredoomed hero racing to a violent death on his Ducati 916, while also cultivating a certain fangs-bared vampiric flair. Both aspects of his voice are on display in “A Vampire in the Age of AIDS”, one of his most unnerving and representative poems:

He moves carefully away from the extremely small pieces
Of human beings spread around for miles, still in his leather seat.
He looks like a hunchback walking in the Concorde chair,
Bent over, strapped in, eyes on the ground
To avoid stepping on the soft.
He will use his influence to get
The cockpit voice recorder when it is recovered copied.
He loves the pilot in the last ninety seconds’
Matter-of-factness turning into weeping screams,
Undead in the double-breasted red velvet smoking jacket Huntsman made.

Is the wealthy vampire who travels by Concorde and wears a Huntsman suit Seidel? Does Seidel identify himself with AIDS? As usual, the pieces do not add up to a real person or to a coherent scenario. This poem might offend us, but the offensive agents remain unknown quantities. Plane crashes and AIDS are terrible, but what have they got to do with vampires? Though callous, this poem is also frighteningly controlled. The phrase “to avoid stepping on the soft” would have been ruined had Seidel finished it. Such is the considered delicacy of even Seidel’s most brutal images.

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is Deputy Poetry Editor at the Oxonian Review.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

And then there were two.

The Washington Post went to press yesterday without its beloved Book World, the 16-page, tabloid-sized supplement that had been a Sunday staple of Washington-area breakfast tables for more than two decades. The Post, whose most recent quarterly report revealed that profits had plummeted 86%, folded its book reviews into a redesigned Outlook section. With that, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle are the only two major American newspapers that still distribute detachable book-review supplements.

The beloved Book World was a once-a-week intellectual stimulus package for the nation’s capital, and we’re sorry to see it go (unlike Terry Teachout, who says that “the fuss over this development is pointless”). Of all the Post-mortems, we think that Kelly Jane Torrance at the rival Washington Times had the most interesting take. In the post-Book World world, Washington will still be one of the most literary metropolises in the American Republic of Letters: it ranks third (behind Minneapolis and Seattle) in Professor John Miller’s intriguing ranking of “America’s Most Literate Cities”.

Moreover, the outlook for Outlook’s literary coverage is less grim than many had feared. Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli has said his paper would try “to have nearly as many reviews as we’ve had in the past”. The attempt appears to be genuine: yesterday’s Outlook section includes ten reviews—only a modest decline from the twelve that appeared in Book World’s final press run.

Included in Outlook is a fascinating review of Passing Strange, the historian Martha Sandweiss’s new book on the life of Clarence King. Born in the tony town of Newport, Rhode Island, the lily-white King, a Yale-educated geologist, ditched his patrician friends in 1888 and posed as a black man so that he could marry and live with an African-American woman. We still think that Janet Maslin’s review of Passing Strange in the New York Times earlier this month was more insightful, but it’s nonetheless a sign of the times (rather than a sign of the Times) that the two best US general-interest newspapers are both engaging in cliché-free discussions of race.

The end of Book World doesn’t mean the end of the Short Stack blog, which the Book World editors had used as a sounding board in recent years. One Post editor, Ron Charles, points out that new US regulations on toy safety standards have put the children’s book industry in peril. The European Parliament has exempted children’s book publishers from rules that require toymakers to test for the presence of lead in their products. But children’s book publishers in the US have yet to win that concession. The lead-testing process could be a significant added expense for the struggling publishing industry in the US, which once put out more new titles than any other country but recently lost its top spot to the UK. In sum, a Washington without Book World might still be a literary metropolis, but bibliophobia reigns on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reminds us why we’re happy that the US still has two newspaper book-review sections, instead of having to rely on the hegemonic New York Times alone. The New York Times doesn’t touch Elie Wiesel’s new novel, A Mad Desire to Dance, which was released by Knopf last week. But the Chronicle has the chutzpah to speak truth to the publishing powers. Saul Austerlitz acknowledges that A Mad Desire is “one of the most impenetrable books published by a major author in recent memory…It is, in a single impolite word, unreadable…and admirers are advised to skip [it] entirely”.

On that note, here are the most penetrating reviews published by major newspapers in recent days—as well as a few that book-lovers are advised to avoid.

“I don’t think it would sustain a person’s attention for a moment,” Donald Barthelme said in 1981 when the Paris Review asked for his biography. But a new Barthelme biography is sustaining the attention of book reviewers across the US: Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal weigh in, but we recommend that you head to Barthelme’s hometown of Houston, where the local Houston Chronicle looks at the life of the city’s most celebrated literary luminary. Barthelme actually worked as a reporter for the now-defunct Houston Post, not the Chronicle, before he became a regular contributor to the New Yorker. But whereas Barthelme was a free spirit, the New Yorker places Louis Menand’s review of the Barthelme biography in a subscription-only section of its website. Non-subscribers will miss the opportunity to watch Menand explain the difference (différance?) between two strains of post-modernism, remark on the conflation of high and low culture, and practice torture by dropping excruciating Barthelme block quotes in quick succession on the (subscribing) reader’s brow.

Speaking of low culture: read this! The 27-year-old Britney Spears is set to sign a £10 million deal for her memoirs, and the Wall Street Journal has a syllabus for her to start with: a list of the top five actress autobiographies of all time (three of which are out of print).

The Guardian says that everyone should read these! As if “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read” was not enough to keep you busy, this week the Guardian offers us a hundred more, organized, like the first thousand, in rather odd thematic categories. Try the first and most capacious: love. It’s a definite improvement from Blake Morrison’s painful paean to romance literature last week, in which Morrison ended with the earth-shattering conclusion that “great literature…offers truths that lie too deep for greetings cards”. Unlike the first thousand-book batch, this week’s selections are recommended by Guardian readers rather than Fleet Street flaks, and the list is accordingly eclectic; it ranges from the unjustly neglected (Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love) to the justly over-read (David Copperfield) to the utterly forgotten (Fanny by Gaslight, by Michael Sadleir).

The New York Times tells us to read Bishop and Lowell ‘while squinting….’ David Orr argues that “over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business”. Elizabeth Bishop might have been a “great poet”, but Robert Lowell was “greater-looking” (though as an aside, Orr says of Bishop: “when her glasses are removed by the right man, she’s revealed to have been, all along, totally hot!”) Orr’s suggestion: “Bishop wrote the poems, Lowell acted the part, and if you simply look back and forth fast enough between the two while squinting, it’s possible to see a single Great Poet staring back at you.” Bishop scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran reviewed the Bishop-Lowell correspondence in the Oxonian Review this month and offered a less dizzying—though, in our unbiased opinion, far superior—suggestion: read these epistles as art in their own right.

Turning to the arts… Thanks to his now-infamous Obama “HOPE” poster, thirty-nine-year old graphic artist Shepard Fairey has landed has his own “retrospective” exhibition in Boston. Peter Schjeldahl reviews it in this week’s New Yorker, looking at other pieces by the artist who brought Barack to the silk-screen throne, where he has deposed the likes of Marley, Marilyn and Che.

But trouble is brewing in pop-art paradise: the Associated Press is seeking compensation from Fairey, claiming that Fairey’s decision to doctor an AP photo to create the faux-vintage Obama graphic violated copyright laws. Fairey, for his part, has filed a counterclaim, saying that his work falls under “fair use” laws—which is either audaciously hopeful or perfectly post-modern, we’re not sure which.

Trouble is brewing in the Big Apple as well. In the New York Times, Walter Kirn defends “irreverent laughter” (and his co-workers) against the “neo-Victorian” David Denby’s new book Snark. Denby, a critic for the New Yorker, takes aim at the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen. It is turning into a no-holds-barred brawl straight out of West Side Story, with the press Gangs of New York sending their meanest street fighters. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott responds that Denby’s diatribe is “less than suave”, and New York magazine hits back with a blistering critique by Adam Sternbergh.

On this side of the Atlantic, in the Times Literary Supplement, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard reviews St Andrews scholar Stephen Halliwell’s new book, Greek Laughter. Having just delivered the Sather lectures at UC Berkeley on the topic of “Roman Laughter”, Beard knows whereof she chuckles. Perhaps a bit too much: it sometimes reads more like a rehash of her own lectures—or a Toga Party stand-up routine—than a review of someone else’s book. But she has room for a few howlers, ancient and modern. (“An Abderite saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked if she was his wife. When he replied that eunuchs can’t have wives, the Abderite asked, ‘So is she your daughter then?’”)

David Denby tries to trace “snark” back from Sarah Palin to the Roman poet Juvenal; we’d like to hear Beard’s take on that claim. We think it would be withering. After all, Beard has a well-deserved reputation for many things, but “tactfully dressing it up” is not one of them.

Speaking of “dressing it up”… and of stand-up comedians, and of actresses-turned-authors, Joan Rivers has taken a shot at mystery-writing with her new Murder at the Academy Awards, a whodunit about a fashion critic-turned-sleuth named Maxine. Words flow from Rivers’s pen at a rapid pace: it has been but a month and a half since she published Men Are Stupid… And They Like Big Boobs. Book reviews might be going the way of the dodo, and children’s books might be banned by overzealous legislators, but the prostitution of publishing lives on!

Thomas J. Travisano
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence
Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Faber and Faber, 2008
800 pages
£40.00
ISBN 978-0571243082

…

…

On November 16, 1960, the celebrated mid-twentieth century American poet Robert Lowell sat down to write a letter to his contemporary, friend, and equal, Elizabeth Bishop:

Dearest Elizabeth:

This letter might have been written under very odd circumstances: trying to be natural while Cartier-Bresson sat in my study taking occasional pictures. He’s left now, but I still feel the strain of dutifully trying to forget he was here—I really did forget at times, but now realize that was more of a stunt than I realized.

Minutely textured by its specific historical moment, this self-conscious tidbit from Thomas Travisano’s new collection of Lowell and Bishop’s correspondence also stands more generally as a portrait in miniature of the poet-as-letter-writer sitting down to write to a friend and “trying to be natural”.

Can the poet, accustomed to writing for a dedicated audience in the most formally self-conscious of literary genres, really “forget”, even for the duration of a personal letter, the practised rigour of his style? Lowell in particular doesn’t always get the balance right. When he describes himself lounging in Castle Maine “enjoying the liquidity of a peach”, his style emulates that of John Keats, perhaps English literature’s most celebrated correspondent, famously describing a nectarine in his own letter-prose: “It went down soft pulpy slushy oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry”.

Compared to Keats’s off-the-cuff brilliance, Lowell’s self-regard is merely cloying, but the wrought echo does show him treating the letter form as a literary genre in its own right, one he wants to succeed in as Keats canonically has. At their best, Lowell’s letters share with Keats’s an enabling, campy tone which progresses beyond mere posturing towards what Theodor Adorno described as “that cunning intertwining of pleasure and work [which] leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society”. They show the poet-as-letter-writer’s refusal to take seriously society’s alienating distinction between public and private life, work and play, casual and literary writing.

While literary critics usually read poets’ letters for biographical information, or to pinpoint throwaway données later transfigured and refined into their poetry, the case has been made within recent criticism for seeing letters themselves, as Elizabeth Bishop once remarked to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, as “an art form or something”. Reading Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence, one is amazed repeatedly by what Travisano calls their “sustained colloquial brilliance of style”, as two masters of prosodic technique let their imagination play and range discursively over matters of literary interest, personal gossip, and historical speculation. If the school of confessional poetry inaugurated by Lowell (and frequently derided by Bishop) worked in just this manner, bringing the poet’s private life into the realm of art, then the achieved intensity of these letters does something similar but in the other direction, recording the artfulness and genuine creativity behind anybody’s experience of life.

Yet Bishop and Lowell are not just anybody, and those familiar with their poetry will find much here that is co-extensive with it, in both style and content. Situated by gender, social class, and temperament right at the heart of mainstream American literary culture, Lowell’s letters specialise in those brilliant, acidic, measured sketches of literary figures recognizable from his poems. Empson is “heroically odd”, Flannery O’Connor has a “face formless at times, then very strong and young and right”; Lowell on the minor poet William Burford thrills like Hazlitt on Coleridge and Wordsworth, bringing this likeable, slightly absurd figure to life as we read:

He was full of himself because he is writing a long autobiographical poem, and as you know his conversation is a pure centerless flux. The three of us spent a long night. Burford managed to drink an entire quart of Dutch gin, so one had the contrast of unimaginable coherence and unimaginable incoherence. The next day my Dutch friend said, “You always felt he was about to make a point.”

The quietly devastating final spoken aside punches out the paragraph like the end of one of Lowell’s unrhymed sonnets in History (1973).

Yet if such casual sniping at his contemporaries is a guilty pleasure, there is also a deep generosity to his and Bishop’s fascination with individual character. One must always bear in mind that this is the correspondence of a manic depressive and an alcoholic, both all too conscious of their own and the other’s frailties. The acuity of Lowell’s literary gossip is set off by the sensitivity and detail with which he discusses his manic episodes, repeatedly managing a clear-eyed, self-deprecating tone that may strike readers who dislike his poetry’s repetitive morbidity as a breath of fresh air. Writing to Bishop after a gap of several months in 1954, he admits:

I have been sick again, and somehow even with you I shrink both from mentioning and not mentioning. These things come on with a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of “enthusiasm”, one becomes a kind of man-aping balloon in a parade—then you subside and eat bitter coffee-grounds of guilt etc.

The trademark string of three successive adjectives is sincere; Lowell is describing himself at his lowest ebb, but his style is still there, he is still being himself, and the effect is admirable.

Lowell and Bishop’s letters have already been published in separate editions but, by restoring the dialogic integrity of their correspondence, Travisano’s new book brings out the shared intimacy of letters like these. The image of Lowell not only shrinking “both from mentioning and not mentioning” his illness to his friend but also admitting such vacillation is genuinely touching. Perhaps the most poignant moment occurs in the letters of August 1957, when Lowell, briefly glossing Bishop’s lesbian partner Lota de Macedo Soares, blurts out his (former?) desire to propose to her: “asking you is the might have been for me”. Her reply gently ignores his admission, convivially describing highway trips and New York life instead.

While Bishop and Lowell’s emotions toward each other are unarguably sincere—though she clearly holds back from fully criticising his later work—Travisano’s book also provides us with the illuminating, matter-of-fact chronicle of two poets pragmatically going about their business in the literary world, ensuring and extending their (justified) reputations. This is something Lowell does directly, Bishop more obliquely.

Excepting occasional trips to the United States, Bishop lived much of her adult life in Brazil, where sheer geographical distance on top of her almost neurotic shyness left her isolated from the literary culture Lowell thrived upon and came to exemplify. As such, he could often show his affection best by helping her career onward in her absence, getting her grants and posts she hesitated to apply for. Self-consciously playing the passive female to his (arguably less self-conscious) active male—for there is indeed an element of flirtation throughout these letters—she acknowledges his support with frequent gratitude. In a letter written in October 1960, she registers her delight at a grant received from the Chapelbrook Foundation with a characteristic aside: “It seems to me that I have a lucky streak every once in a while that I don’t deserve—or perhaps it is awfully good friends.”

If there is one gesture that defines Bishop’s epistolary prose, it is her tendency to this kind of dashed-off final clause, a little prose excrescence that strikes the reader like an afterthought. While this device repeatedly buoys the jokey, affectionate, sensitive vernacular of her letters, it perhaps comes to the fore in what Lowell calls her “tremendous descriptions” of natural or urban beauty. On her partner Lota’s apartment in Rio:

It is such a wonderful apartment that we’ll never rent it again, no matter what heights rents soar to, I think. Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people walk their dogs—same dogs same time, same old man in blue trunks every morning with 2 Pekinese at 7 AM—and at night the lovers on the mosaic sidewalks cast enormous long shadows over the soiled sand.

This description captures what Tom Paulin calls the “taut nowness” of Bishop’s epistolary style, which conveys experience with an extraordinary poetic immediacy, always aimed, however, at her correspondent: “I’m sure you’d like it”, she continues, “… now that we have the apartment we can really invite you and Elizabeth at the weekends.”

Later in the same letter she mentions her aunt writing her “long descriptions of the ‘fall colors’ in Nova Scotia”, and wonders if that’s where she “shouldn’t be, after all”, back in Canada where she lived as a child with her grandparents. When we take this apparently casual remark and focus it back on the felt sensuousness of her take on Rio, we get the full sense of what these descriptions meant to Bishop, who also notably refers to her late masterpiece “The End of March” as a mere “bit of description, for what it’s worth” when she sends it to Lowell in September 1974. To describe one’s surroundings in all their vivid multifariousness to friends is to give them a unique gift, to somehow make one’s own sustained act of attention, with all the personal effort that went into it, imaginatively transferable; it’s not just a party trick. For Bishop, such descriptions provide the closest one can get to seeing through another’s eyes, and she is putting herself on the line whenever she enables her closest friends, like Marianne Moore or Lowell, to do so: “all letter-writing is dangerous”, she tells him.

One could go on citing such “tremendous descriptions” of Bishop’s, or Lowell’s witty anecdotes; Travisano has put together a treasure trove of such pleasures which, despite his contention that the collection be read as a kind of novel, is perhaps best appreciated in small doses. There is an extraordinary density to this kind of writing, and the complex emotional states circulating beneath the correspondents’ magnificent sprezzatura occasionally become overbearing. For although Bishop repeatedly mentions her delight at reading other writers’ letters—Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Santayana—and although Travisano argues persuasively that Bishop and Lowell would have known their own letters were bound to be read one day, there remains something voyeuristic about our interest in such writing. How can we justify this to ourselves? Bishop may supply the answer, when in May 1960 she tries to differentiate Lowell’s brand of confessionalism from Anne Sexton’s:

She is good, in spots,—but there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been—what would be the reverse of sublimated, I wonder—anyway, has been made intensely interesting, and painfully applicable to every reader. I feel I know too much about her, whereas, although I know much more about you, I’d like to know a great deal more, etc.

Once again, we get that typical “etcetera” sprinkled throughout Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence, a friendly, unpretentious dismissal of a discourse that could be endlessly extended by academia. Enough of that, she seems to be saying—but she’s also saying so much more, proposing a form of self-revelation which is not morbid but an act of generosity, a way of helping others come to terms with their own singularity. Reading through this hefty book, our gossipy desire to “know a great deal more” is balanced by what its accumulated deep subjectivity tells us about ourselves. There is much in the range of experience Bishop and Lowell so painstakingly, exuberantly record—and in their own fluctuating, long-distance relationship—that will be “intensely interesting, and painfully applicable” to both the academic and general reader.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is a graduate student and lecturer at Balliol College working on Elizabeth Bishop’s poetics of prose.