A beautiful poem, thanks for posting it. What are your thoughts concerning the dust-up over the newly published book of Bishop's previously unpublished (some would say disgarded) work? I agree with Helen Vendler in her recent New Republic piece, in which she claims this matieral should never have been published. And I have yet to read a convincing argument to the contrary.

Bye-ya

My mentor at GW studied directly under Bishop, and told me many stories about her. She NEVER would have countenanced having unpublished work published after her death. Never. She was a notorious perfectionist. Her poem "The Moose" for instance, she spent more than 25 years working on that poem. I think she would be furious at what is being put out now.

I understand the objections to the publishing of these works, and I used to sympathise with the arguments against it. But honestly, I don't see the harm. A) Bishop is dead and can't be offended; B) It doesn't cheapen or dilute her achievement whatsoever, especially as they've been published 25 years after her death; and C) It's of legitimate interest to scholars and fans alike.

Would she be furious? Sure, if she was alive, she'd be furious, but she's dead, so who's harmed?

"It doesn't cheapen or dilute her achievement whatsoever, especially as they've been published 25 years after her death"

I disagree with that, it's a body of work. everything reflects on everything else, to some extent anyway.

I agree with Jon. And I'm not sure what "legitimate" use to scholars these unformed and disgarded poem and fragments serve. Listening to Coltrane practice--had we been able to, or if tapes existed of him doing so--wouldn't ultimately tell us anything about his work, just as error-riddled or aborted takes don't. It is the end result that counts. And even if Bishop isn't alive to be offended, it seems a bit callous to care nothing about offending her memory or wishes.

I for one won't have anything to do with it.

Outtakes galore of jazz sessions have made it the public.

Sketches and notebooks are significant parts of art exhibitions.

I don't see this as any different. If it's of interest to you, you'll dig it. If not, you'll ignore it. And Bishop's reputation will be affected not at all. No one is going to downgrade her achievement, no one is going to kick her out of the canon. Where's the bad effect? Do you know that this offends her wishes? And doesn't the entire published body of Kafka's work 'offend' his wishes?

I'm not always opposed to posthumous releases of works that were never specifically intended for publication, but in the case of Bishop, who had a long career and had very clear opinions about this, it feels like a violation to me. Obviously, those who think otherwise will be free to pick up the book if they want, but I still think it's wrong.

Adam: "And doesn't the entire published body of Kafka's work 'offend' his wishes?"

The Kafka case is rather different to Bishop's. When Kafka asked Max Brod to be his literary executor he also asked him to destroy any unpublished work. Brod said he would do nothing of the sort. Had Kafka been unhappy with Brod's refusal he could, in the years before his death, have nominated a different executor, but he didn't. Note that Brod refused to destroy work, but nothing was said about posthumous publication. Kafka seemed to like that kind of decisive indecision.

Brian, yes, they are all different cases. Augustus refusing to allow the Aeneid to be destroyed despite Virgil's wishes is also 'different.' The point, however is the same: posthumous release of unpublished work is an important aspect of our fuller understanding of artist and often provides us with more work to appreciate. When we appoint ourselves protectors of an artist's purity, we are, among other things, protecting a vague and abstract principle against some very specific, legitimate, and worthy reasons for publication.

There is no art form where an artist's original wishes and intentions haven't been violated in some way or another--was Beckett happy with all the productions of his plays? What would Mozart make of all the various renderings of his music? Does Kundera approve of all the translations of his novels? We could all go on and on, no?

We could go on and on, and of course in the end it's irrelevant. As you say, those who love indulging in the "alternate tracks" of art can do so, and ever more easily these days. But translations of Kundera and interpretations of Mozart have nothing in common with the posthumus publishing of work Bishop considered sub par. The analogy is off the mark.

Bye-ya

yeah, you're just clouding the issue with irrelevancies, Adam. the point is that she was very clear about what she wanted out and what she didn't, and that's now being violated.

on a related note, I'd love to know what Miles Davis would say about these endless box sets.

Paul, that analogy isn't to posthumous publishing but to honoring an artists's wishes. It's pretty clear, read again if necessary. We agree that all this 'stink' raised is irrelevant.

In the end, nothing can change a great artist's most remarkable achievements--not weak works they published while alive, nor weak works published after they are gone. We know what we value and we will continue to value it.

Jon, the principle of your defense is rather vague in the face of the "irrelvancies" (aka: useful examples) I've cited. I say, violate away, the world of the arts has survived despite all these barbaric violations of an artist's wishes. In fact, it's even thrived because of rather than despite an artist's wishes. That's what my examples are meant to illustrate.

As for Miles, I'm guessing he'd say something like "show me the money."

Not to drag this out, but Milan Kundera never said he didn't want his novels translated, nor did Mozart say that he didn't want others to play his music. Yes, both might (or might not) have qualms about the results, but the acts themselves--translations and interpretations--were not violations of any stated will of these two men. There are varying levels of this notion of "violated intent" in art. I still think your analogy is a false one, but even granting it, this situation with Bishop's work is on the extreme end of it.

And while Miles might love the cash flow from the endless issues of work from the vaults, he might well have cursed it under his breath as well. Just my .02.

To be clear, Elizabeth Bishop DID NOT express her wish that her papers never be published. So all this lawyering has no ground to stand on.

In fact, despite her sudden death, she had already arranged for her papers to be ultimately collected at Vassar and did not include any wish that these papers not be published.

not leaving specific instructions doesn't negate the moral responsibility of whoever is administering her estate to deal with that in a way that she would have seen fit, as best they can. as Paul said, this situation is at the extreme end of the spectrum.

"In the end, nothing can change a great artist's most remarkable achievements--not weak works they published while alive, nor weak works published after they are gone."

it doesn't change the most remarkable achievements, but what it does change is people's perception of the artist's career as a whole. if Bob Dylan had died in the late seventies, shortly after Blood on the Tracks, people's perception of his career as a whole would be decidedly different, I think. the thirty years of mostly subpar work he's issued since then hasn't tarnished his previous accomplishments, but it has decidedly changed the perception of him in general.

"Kafka seemed to like that kind of decisive indecision."

Which is perhaps why I return to Kafka more than I do Elizabeth Bishop. I can’t say I like this poetry very much at all but the issues involved in this discussion are kind of crucial in terms of the freedom to interpret the historical record in the light of reason. Take Emily Dickinson as an example: a case where the critical work on the text completely structured the reception of what the poetry was. It is only within the past few decades that people (like Susan Howe, for starters) have begun to see her in a very different light: perpetual indecision. Often 3 or 4 word variants* for 3 or more words per poem which often makes for radically different statements altogether. She was as suspect of publishing as she was desirous of it: “publication is the auction/of the soul of man” (paraphrasing, of course, as I sold off my library years ago when I became a confirmed peripatetic). I don’t think that any kind of strict parallel to musical recording and textual remains can be easily made without distortion of the realities attendant to either. The argument for paying attention to remains is of course that they contain suggestions and ideas that may be of extreme interest. We all know that what we listen to now and read now are conditioned by contemporary trends and politics of the moment that will doubtlessly change and, for my own way of thinking and operating, I am more drawn to ideas and sounds than I am to purist artistic intentions. (Why does a digital software like Ableton have an effect plug-in called “vinyl distortion” if not precisely because things we discard become of interest again to us?). I am different now than I was twenty years ago. I no longer find the early Rilke important to me and perhaps I will even come to a decision soon that even the Sonnets to Orpheus are nothing more than esoteric exercise in vanity by a bourgeois who stayed on the perch of the Goethean royalist bird-cage long after the door had been opened. Put another way, intentions are just conscious constructs and often I find conscious decisions of meaning to be terribly blinkered and obvious and maybe of more interest is an idea that someone throws away thinking it is nonsense. Rejectamenta. This is of fundamental importance for what Eco called the open work and for the idea of improvisation itself.** While it may not be a “nice” thing to have Bishop’s "unintended" work available, we also take a different attitude if a new Sappho fragment is dug up somewhere. Sappho again is probably always going to interest me more than Elizabeth Bishop ever will but that is also maybe owed to something that David touched on in his other recent allusions to poetry in his pillow-book essay about “Too beautiful to burn”), namely that the fragmentary is often more evocative than the complete. Rilke points this out in this very poem. And I do not think Rilke is grieving over the lost completeness because there are hundreds of more complete torsii to look at and after the first hundred you start to get a little idea of how fixated the classical Greeks might have been. The interesting thing is that Rilke never uses the most common word for head (Kopf) but instead says “Haupt” which has more implications—as in the center, the authority. The author(ity) that is missing for this “great work” is the issue. The archaic torso is like the angel that looks out over the rubble of Dresden: the ironic meeting of the works of “God” and “Man” mirroring one another in pitiful disaster and dismemberment. The one who finds evidence of divinity in a stone angel that managed to not get destroyed in that pointless American blitz of the Florence of Germany is perhaps no more blind than the ones responsible for its near annihilation. To return to the Rilke: I see foreshadowings of the headless Orpheus here in the Archaic Torso, echoes of the song that has no source of the later Sonnets, the Angel of the Elegies, the rose without center of the later French poems and the epitaph (but alas, no relationship to the music of the two Martin’s, as much as I might dig it). What I take to be one of the most radical statements of the Rilke poem is that it is nature or accident that has the final say about what becomes of a work of art, not any human being. And the greater the artist the greater is their understanding of this and better yet their ability to grasp it and put it into their own process. Witness Duchamp’s completion of the large glass by it being broken. Any artist aware of all the forms of historical reflectivity (another person might “any good Marxist”) will incorporate these processes into the work, just as Pasolini did with his final novel Petrolio, a work (which I argued elsewhere) is created as a parody of the process and objective fact of it being published as an annotated scholarly edition of an incomplete novel. Lukacs would have been proud. Of course it is precisely poets notebooks, juvenile diaries, fugitive manuscripts, paramouric letters, false bankdrafts, demonic cartoons of secretly detested best-friend benefactors and similarly used Kleenexes that furnish the fuel of the Academic publishing industry. And I have no problem really with scholarship. I personally never throw out a potato just because its grown a few eyes in the cupboard. Charles Olson’s posthumous papers are at least as interesting as the whole of his published corpus. Who wouldn’t read a new Wittgenstein manuscript if it turned up? If an author wants to clear the track of the drafts he or she should burn them of course. What other than vanity (or the desire to sell them to a library later on) keeps us hanging onto these things? (Answer number one and two: the idea that we have forgotten something or that it is the only thing remaining to reconstruct what is lost in the fires of Alexandria). Look at Rilke’s papers: completely sealed by the family for at least another 75 years. But you can rest assured that the minute the last family member dies you will have scholars all over it showing how rough and deep or shallow the waters were for him. What Jon above calls the body of work could and in my opinion should be thought about in a radically different way: it is nothing if not everything the artist did or thought. And every scrap of paper is yes a scrap of intention, a transcation with time. It is the paper trail that will be able to tell us the truth of development no matter what the editors of good taste have censored from the record. And if you want to argue for keeping fragments and drafts all you need to say is that they better clarify the intentions of the author when we do a comparative analysis. My argument of course is that fragments and drafts will contain maybe even better ideas, seeds more fruitful ideas for the future, that were beyond the grasp of the author trapped in their “focus” (“Intensity is narrowness” said Whitehead). One of the Beuys chalkboards reads: “Art is divided from life / Away with this modern lie.”).

footnote
**Whether it is Keith Rowe turning on a radio of violin quartet music to end a set or a wildly erratic Marshall Allen solo, the event of primary importance is the preposterous proposition of it and the challenge made to any standards that it might not fit to do it that way. Intention in improvisation is lightening in action. Poetry--in its Gutenburg manacles-- winds up being more like staff composition: ideas come in a flash but their elaboration takes sometime to formulate. But there are other poetry models closer to improvisation. The secret behind Ginsberg’s “first thought/best thought” is that the first thought you are having is the one you have just as you are writing, even when you are revising, you are still in the first thought, even if you think it an afterthought. This means that presence of mind is the most important thing. If thought is a path, as Heidegger suggested, then it is movement from one foot to the next that counts. Walking is not swimming but Charles Olson once said “who shall teach another how to accomplish the swimming” (oh, again, I cant recall the exact words, but you must be able to see what I’m saying).

Sorry, another long one, And sorry I dont like Elizabteh Bishop so much David. (But this is nothing compared to the essay I wrote about Sun Ra on the train ride from Amdam back to Berlin--and which I am still weighing in my mind before transmitting--the edit of the lucio and rhodri collab is waiting in between)

Who wouldn’t read a new Wittgenstein manuscript if it turned up?

Well, if it's an answer, I've got several manuscripts of his here that HAVE turned up that I've never opened and probably never will. ;>}

As for Miles, I'm guessing he'd say something like "show me the money."

Oh, yeah. Mozart too!

As for this discussion, I'm going with Joni---"Never mind the questions there's no answers to."