Circling

I was fortunate to take a course in poetry writing from Elizabeth Bishop while in college, an experience severely tempered by two subsequent events, the far-more tragic being her untimely death just after teaching a few classes.  At the time, it seemed other-worldy to me, and I was ill equipped to appreciate the magnitude of the loss to her friends and to poetry.  History continues to be kind to Elizabeth Bishop, and her stature as one of the world's great 20th century poets seems to grow with each passing day.

Much later, in the wake of several biographies and the publication of a sampling of her voluminous letters, I learned -- to my deep chagrin -- of her deep dislike for teaching, and, it turns out, the students at MIT, the school which hired her just a few months prior to my taking her class, after Harvard ended its relationship.  In one letter or relation, she is reported to have asked why these students (i.e., me and a few others) were taking her class at all, instead of science courses.  The biography quotes her as follows:  "Why would they want to write poetry, anyway?"  It was a sobering rejoinder, delivered, as it were, from the grave.  Today, in the wake of the death of Steve Jobs, I wonder what she would have said to his claim that computer science is a liberal art.

Nonetheless, I have always harbored a love of poetry, hers in particular, and have, on this voyage, again returned to the risky business of memorializing poetic efforts on these postings.  One of the early, and as it turns out, only, lessons she gave to our small course was the importance of form in poetry.  Not for her the free verse and lower case obsessions of many beat poets; she favored strict, traditional forms, extraordinary attention to the exact word, phrase, and spacing, and, unusually for poets of these days, a definite rhyme scheme.  The exactness of her writing style, and her comparatively sparse lifetime output, might best be reflected in a quote attributed to Paul Valery, the French poet and critic:  "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

I do not begrudge her dislike of teaching, or even her offhand quip about my fellow MIT students; she kept alive in me a love a poetry and a deeper appreciation of form and rhyme.  To that, below is a villanelle, a traditional form of poetry.  The notable poems in this form that readers may recognize are Bishop's own One Art, and the John Donne classic Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night, whose timeless quality each serve to remind me that Bishop may have been right about me and my fellow MIT students ... maybe we should have stuck to the science classes!

Circling

We set out on this boat across this ocean,

just we two again, through sun and rain,           

to avoid or some say chase the lonesome

sense of oneness when you feel the motion

of sameness everywhere:  a wheat field plain,

an interstate highway, or these swells atop this ocean.

It was time to sail when we felt the clouds encroaching,

gathering around us, circling and calling our names,

beckoning us from or some say toward a lonesome

togetherness, where we can see the most in

each other, embrace the silent process of change,

and construct a new joining of selves on this ocean.

Here, we yield to weather, and see the water hosting

our memories of calms and storms, as waves explain

how we mark or some might say ignore the lonesome

birth of this common voyage, this fanciful notion

of sailing around the world, of leaving the game.

It's halfway gone, this voyage lovely lonesome;

we’re halfway there, across an undulating ocean.