Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

For fans of poet Elizabeth Bishop ’34, the recently-released book Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, edited by New Yorker Poetry Editor and Poetry Society of America Director Alice Quinn, provides a glimpse into the workings of this private writer’s mind. Bishop was known for her scrupulous attention to detail and published only those poems which met her exacting standards. Now, readers, scholars, and critics alike are debating whether Quinn’s book, which uses primary sources from Vassar’s Special Collections, misrepresents Bishop’s work.

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box was published on March 7 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and includes 108 of Bishop’s poems, 11 of Bishop’s prose pieces, as well as 120 pages of Quinn’s notes. A review from Publishers Weekly claims, “This book is as much Alice Quinn’s as Elizabeth Bishop’s,” and describes Quinn’s notes as “excellent.” The review acknowledges that these ephemera were not intended for publication, but Quinn suggests in the book that Bishop scholars quote these texts so frequently that they were already relatively well-known.

The Elizabeth Bishop Papers, housed in Vassar’s Special Collections, is one of the College’s many pieces of writing by great thinkers. There are only a few other notable manuscripts in Special Collections, including works from author of The Group Mary McCarthy ’33, historian Lucy Maynard Salmon, Albert Einstein, and astronomer Maria Mitchell. The Bishop Papers are far larger than the approximately 90 poems in her oeuvre, as it includes her class notes from both high school and college, letters, financial statements, calendars, diaries, photographs, as well as the unpublished poems that comprise the new book.

Associate Director of Special Collections, Donor Relations, and Outreach Ron Patkus said that Bishop’s drafts are the most frequently used. The Collection serves alumnae/i, faculty, and students first, but receives requests from researchers and scholars around the globe. Patkus said that Special Collections operates on the “principle of equal access” to all scholars who submit written applications. This will not change in light of the controversial book.
In an e-mailed statement, Patkus wrote, “We received a total of 2,072 requests for information, up from 1,767 requests last year.”

Some of Bishop’s unpublished poems have also recently been published in issues of the New Yorker. Helen Vendler, regarded as an esteemed literary critic, reviewed Quinn’s book in the April 3 issue of The New Republic. She called Bishop’s “Washington as a Surveyor” (which was printed in the Dec. 5, 2005 issue of The New Yorker), “a rhythmically awkward and semantically inert Petrarchan sonnet.” In her review, Vendler points out that Bishop had crossed out the poem in her journals, and commented, “Maybe it should have been printed in the New Yorker entirely crossed out.” Later, New Yorker Editor David Remnick said that a note accompanying this Bishop poem would have clarified that the work had not been previously published.

Publication of deceased writers’ notes and drafts has become more common as fans clamor for more information about the inner lives of their favorite writers. This is true in other artistic fields as well. A recent exhibition of Michelangelo’s sketches and studies of the Sistine Chapel at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London drew record crowds, but critics say that the artist had made profound efforts to ensure that these preliminary works would avoid the public gaze.

In Bishop’s case, Vendler noted in her review, “Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems…should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified ‘No.’”

Although Bishop graduated in 1934, her influence on the College remains alive and well. The English Department sponsors an annual poetry reading in her honor, and Vassar’s current Writers-in-Residence (Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser) both studied under Bishop at Harvard University. In an interview with The Miscellany News on Feb. 17, Salter characterized Bishop as a poet who reveled in the writing process. Salter said, “[Bishop] took her time. She was not obsessed with publication. She was obsessed with getting the word right.”

Quinn has said that she expected backlash against Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, but stinging words from Vendler and front-page coverage on the April 1 New York Times Book Review show sentiments that go beyond Bishop’s unpublished and uncollected papers. Vendler wrote that some poets today “are incinerating their drafts” to hide preliminary writings from the public gaze.

According to Patkus, it is improbable that Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box will tarnish Bishop’s lauded reputation as one of America’s finest poets. “[The drafts] should be published,” said Patkus. “It gives us a chance to see the process taking place, and we can learn from it. [It is] part of the scholarly endeavor.”

“One Art”

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.