Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments

published	October 31st 2006 by Carcanet Press
binding	Paperback
isbn	1857549015 (isbn13: 9781857549010)
pages	392
date added	05-12-07 edit book

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"Remind me to destroy my fragments folder before I die."	2	02/23/2008 03:29AM

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(review of isbn 0374530769)

06/01/08

bookshelves: gay-poetry

Read in September, 2006

Elizabeth Bishop was amazingly meticulous about her poetry: poems would go through repeated revisions and still not quite get there, at least as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Without a doubt, she was her own harshest critic, and perhaps because of her extremely high standards for her own work, Elizabeth's "official" oeuvre is a relatively slim volume; the Collected Poems offers a bit of her unpublished poems and juvenilia, yet it still clocks in at a brief 275 pages, which, I assur...more
Elizabeth Bishop was amazingly meticulous about her poetry: poems would go through repeated revisions and still not quite get there, at least as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Without a doubt, she was her own harshest critic, and perhaps because of her extremely high standards for her own work, Elizabeth's "official" oeuvre is a relatively slim volume; the Collected Poems offers a bit of her unpublished poems and juvenilia, yet it still clocks in at a brief 275 pages, which, I assure you, is short for a collected works volume. EAP&tJ-B attempts to remedy this shortage, and it succeeds, but only to a certain extent.

Often, uncollected works volumes will be published and the poems inside will be nearly finished works of art that simply missed out on publication. This is not the case with EAP&tJ-B. Most of the poems inside are barely poems at all; they seem more truly defined as notes in verse (I call them verse-notes) than a poem. It appears that Elizabeth knew early on in a poem's development whether or not its maturation would be worthwhile, and so she abandoned a lot of her work in its initial stages, and those abandoned pieces of work are what we find, for the most part, in EAP&tJ-B. If a poem has a completed thought, we are lucky. There are sentence fragments, random thoughts, unconnected tangents. Indeed, some of the poems feel downright schizophrenic, in the way they hop from one image or idea to another. (Had these poems been completed, the schizophrenia would have been annihilated in poetic birth.)

Yet, this is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for those of us who are a) extremely interested in Bishop, b) are poets ourselves, or c) all of the above. We get to see Bishop's thought processes as she composed, how she'd outline a rhyme scheme, perhaps, or re-order stanzas as she wrote. Perhaps the most interesting section is the appendix, where Alice Quinn has assembled facsimiles of the drafts for one of Bishop's most famous poems, "One Art." There are at least sixteen drafts of this one nineteen-line villanelle; that's sixteen separate drafts of a single poem, a poem that Elizabeth Bishop herself says practically wrote itself. Also included in the appendix is three pages of facsimile notes for an elegy Bishop wanted to write for her lover who had committed suicide. The notes are heart-wrenching, touching, beautiful -- and they are just notes!

Indeed, much of this book will be interesting only to those of us who approach Bishop with a critical gaze as well as a leisurely one. Over a hundred pages of the book house annotations for the preceding poems and drafts; for the most part, these are of interest only to those who intend to study Bishop in-depth, as they often play six-degrees-of-separation within Bishop's oeuvre. And again, many of the poems are extracted from notebooks that Bishop never intended to publish and so, indubitably, make the most sense (if any) to Bishop herself. Yet even so, there are ample diamonds in the rough, so to speak: poems that qualify as genuine poems, a line here or there in an otherwise chaotic verse-note, a poem that offers a glimpse into the personal life of Elizabeth. This is no Collected Poems, yet Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box offers much to the Bishop aficionado or the aspiring poet....less

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Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments

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