Elizabeth Bishop Poems

            Both poems written by Elizabeth Bishop caught my eye. I have familiarity with Bishop’s poetry and I have read her book of work Geography III but I have never heard of the “Filling Station” or “The Bight”.

The poem the “Filling Station” was intriguing because it was such an ornate description of a gas station. This is why I like Elizabeth Bishop’s work so much because she has such a beautiful way of describing ordinary everyday places in her poetry. She elaborates on her descriptions of the gas station, she states that it is dirty but goes onto saying that it is “oil-soaked”, “oil-permeated”, and “over-all black translucency”. Bishop could have left the description simple at “oil-soaked” or even as earlier in the poem in her first line “Oh, but it is dirty!” however, she continues going on describing it stressing the fact that the station is drenched in oil. The fact that Bishop does this gives a very clear depiction to the reader that there is no doubt this station is not messy. Bishop adds a bit of comedic commentary when she states in the last line of the first stanza “Be careful with that match!” Bishop again is able to reference how the station is covered in oil by emphasizing the fact that if a match were to fall on the floor the whole place would disappear into flames. Bishop uses the words “oil”, “greasy” and “dirty” throughout the rest of the poem.

The interesting thing about Bishop’s poem “The Bight” is that while I was reading it I never noticed the smaller font beneath the title that reads “on my birthday”. After reading this poem in the context of the setting occurring on the authors birthday my perceptions of the poem changed. I was able to understand the poem much more clearly and I was not confused anymore. I especially like Elizabeth’s description of “the frowsy sponge boats keep coming in with obliging air of retrievers”. I like these two lines because it is almost like Bishop is referring life to a “frowsy sponge” and it is like the sponge keeps soaking her up in this “boat” that she is referring to throughout the poem.

"In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned"

In this poem James Wright keeps his diction pretty low, using fairly simplistic language throughout. Instead of using a higher diction, Wright uses simple words and internal rhyme to create a world that seems vaguely mystical and elusive. In the first stanza, Wright starts the poem "I will grieve alone,/ As I strolled alone, years ago, down along", in a mixture of internal, slant, repetition, and assonance that give these two lines a whimsical feeling, leaving the reader feeling swept off their feet to somewhere different that doesn't quite seem of this world. The word "river" is used three times in the second stanza, and this is not an accident; by putting "river" in the first line and the last two lines of the stanza, it frames the stanza and anchors the reader to the river. By emphasizing the river so heavily, it seems as though it could possibly be a descriptor for the place itself: a fast-paced flow that stays in one place constantly. This is hinted at when Wright refers to the women "pour[ing] down the long streets" as if this town were the structure of the river and these women were the water. Going back to the simplicity of the language, everything in this poem seems to be calmly stated even when the subjects don't appear to be calm. Wright says that the river has "has only two shores:/ the one in hell, the other/ In Bridgeport, Ohio." Wright does not try and place the reader in the hell that was just mentioned, it is just factually stated and the reader must take it as such, that this place is somehow connected to hell. While Wright does not say that this place is hell, nor do I think it is implied that it is such, by juxtaposing it with hell, the reader is left with a questioning about why this detail was included and what it's supposed to say about this place.

Meditations in a Filling Station

                There were two poems that caught my eye as I read them, because they used different styles completely to portray more than a place. The description of their surrounding a much deeper meaning that hooked me simply because it made me feel something.

                First and foremost, the differing sentences in “Filling Station” caught my attention. The author instantly begins the poem using assonance with the repetition of the letter “o,” “Oh but it is dirty! ...oil-soaked, oil-permeated…over-all.” This simple language describes the gas station and therefore the last sentence ends up being more dramatic. Following that description with “Be careful with that match!” adds a sense of urgency to the poem, especially since it’s strategically placed at the end of the stanza. The reader can only imagine what would happen if a match is lit in a gas station that is soaked with oil. Furthermore, the exclamation mark catches my attention, since it is so rarely used. Furthermore, the author includes many questions such as “Do they live in the station?” to begin a stanza. This opens up the conversation to describe the surroundings by describing the people that inhabit it. More questions are later brought up that make up a whole stanza, to be answered later. And all of these questions are asking why, to not receive a sure response, but mere maybes.

                The structure of “Meditations at Lagunitas” I thought was ingenious. The poem has no stanzas. However, the sentences break right in the middle in order to create a very dramatic pause. Words such as “erases,” “justice,” “woman,” “holding,” “her,” stand alone in one line. These words read together, without the context of the poem, can make a sentence on their own. That leads the readerto understand the comparison between remembering this woman and remembering the land. Furthermore, there is the alliteration of the letter “b” throughout the poem, for instance “that black birch” and “the bramble of blackberry.” The author even chooses to repeat the word blackberry three times to end the poem. And it leaves me questioning why.  To the author, simple details such as a mere blackberry are what makes up the general memory of lagunitas. He states “it hardly had to do with her” instead he remembers details about her small shoulders and what she did with her hands. At the end, memory becomes unclear and the details are what keeps the old thinking from getting lost. 

"Night, Death, Mississippi"

     This poem initially caught my eye because the title is has "Mississippi" in it, and that's where I'm from, so I was curious to read and analyze it.  After reading through a few times, it became clear that Mississippi is just a broad setting for the poem.  I think it's used to set up a general understanding of the times and events that have occurred there.  Mississippi and the south are notorious for terrible race crimes, which is what the poem is about.
     More specifically the setting is at night, which also has a lot of symbolism and imagery for the themes of the poem.  Night and darkness are usually used to symbolize evil, and to me, the last line in the poem really solidified this: "O night betrayed by darkness not its own."  It suggests that the usual evil or darkness of night is surpassed by the evil of the men committing hate crimes.  The speaker is also obviously an evil person which, to me, is more powerful than a story being told from the perspective of a victim.  
     Besides the dark/night imagery, there is also some light imagery.  While the speaker is thinking about what he's kind of "missing out on," there's a line, "white robes like moonlight," and it sort of suggests that the speaker supports and thinks that those actions are right and good.  In part II of the poem, there's an italicized line, "O Jesus burning on the lily cross," which points to the goodness and savior of the victim. 
     As far as place and setting go, I think that Robert Hayden uses imagery of light and dark (and night) through place to capture the broader picture: that Mississippi is and was a place where a lot of hateful crimes took place.

A World Revolved Under Each Man’s Eyelid.

         Komunyakaa’s poems, “Camouflaging the Chimera” and “Facing It” both have a similar underlying theme: war. In “Camouflaging the Chimera”, Komunyakaa describes the horrors of Vietnam war.

            The first three stanzas takes the reader into the dangerous terrain and captures the uncertainty that this terrain has and uses strong imagery that allows the reader to envision the riverbank in Vietnam. In the first three stanza, Komunyakaa uses literal imagery to describe the terrain and then, in the seventh, stanza, he uses figurative imagery, “wrestling iron through grass. / We weren’t there. The river ran/ through our bones. Small animals took refuge / against our bodies; we held out breath,” this stanza is embellished with abstract imagery and captures the soldiers’ fear. The soldiers are trying so hard to blend in with the jungle of Vietnam, that eventually the jungle becomes a part of them. The title of the poem, Chimera, is a mythical monster that is composed of one or more creatures. The title suggests that the Chimera is the jungle and the soldier’s surroundings but I think the Chimera can also be man itself and the war as well as the jungle because men were the one who created this war. Nonetheless, Komunyakaa does an outstanding job capturing the Vietnam jungle and its enigma.

            In “Facing It”, Komunyakaa takes the reader to the Vietnam Memorial. However, Komunyakaa does a brilliant job in revealing flashbacks and using the Memorial as a backdrop to recount the many memories that surrounded the war. By gazing at the memorial, the speaker (who I believe is Komunyakaa himself) that the memorial wall is not just some granite stone that has names engraved on it, but it is something he identifies with on a much deeper level. The speaker tries to fight to keep in his emotions but the wall triggers flashbacks of the past to come trickling back in the surface of his mind, haunting him.

            Overall, the technique Komunyakaa uses the most to make his poems come alive is visual imagery by using personification, metaphors, and other figurative language to take the reader to the place the poem takes place. These two poems are haunting and truly expresses the horrors of the Vietnam war.

58,022 Names (Facing It)

Facing it is one my favorite poems of all time. I love how emotionally intense it is, and how Yusef Komunyakaa beautifully expressed his intuition by using vivid imagery. At the beginning of the poem, Yusef uses the word "black" twice in order to emphasize his ethnicity clearly. The color is referred to both as his skin color and the color of the granite in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as a way to demonstrate a relationship between his ethnicity and the granite. This relationship continues as he mentions in the poem, "his face fades and hides inside the granite." The attributes of his face vanishes as the granite and him becomes one corresponding entity. His visit to the Memorial is clearly a very tragical experience. Although he promised himself that he will not cry portraying himself as a "stone" constantly but still fails to hold his tears. When I read this poem, over and over again, I only want to feel his pain, not to analyze why he described the place they way he did in his poem, or the way he described the granite which has those 58,022 names written down. I want to know why he relates his skin color to the granite, why doesn't he want to show the world his broken heart that is in pain, I want to know all of that through this poem. Yusef's description about the memorial is not just about how its built, it is about all those 58,022 people that he shares some form of emotional connection with. It shows how war has become a part of his entire life, and no matter how hard he tries to forget those horrific memories he is captivated by those 58,022 names, he is captivated by the black granite where his face fades away. He is haunted by those memories, yet he mourns for the dead, mourns by being strong as a stone, even though his heart is shattered by those 58,022 daggers. 

Filling Station

"Filling Station" by Elizabeth Bishop uses the camera shot technique that Burroway described in chapter 5, starting from the long shot to a close-up.  The long shot of the gas station reveals that it is dirty (you can't get more blatant than the first line of the poem) and so soaked in oil that there's nothing but black.  The warning "be carful with that match!" tells you just how unkempt and disgusting the place is.  In the middle shot, she describes the family that works the gas station, the father and sons, and they are a reflection of the filling station.  All of them are oil-soaked, greasy, and saucy and she asks if they live at the station?  In the close-up, Bishop reveals a different side to the gas station, one that has color from comic books, a begonia, and wicker furniture.  The tidy and colorful contrasts the dirty and oily that she presented earlier in the poem and it catches the reader off-guard.  Then she adds another layer of depth by stating that someone there must be someone keeping these things tidy: "Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody watered the plant".  Bishop reveals place by beginning with a general view and then hyperfocusing on the one section of clean in this oil-permeated station and in doing so also reveals the character of whoever it is that cleans that section.  That character is a somebody who loves us all.

Facing the Blight

In “The Blight,” Elizabeth Bishop establishes a sense of specific place through her endless lines of description.  Just from the first line, “At low tide like this how sheer the water it,” it can be deduced that she is observing serine seashore. The low tide indicates that the water is not turbulent, but calm and almost empty. This explains why the water seems so sheer. However, many of her descriptions have some violent connotations, implying that the blight is not as peaceful as the opening lines lends itself to be. She speaks of Pelicans crashing into the gas that surrounds the blight “unnecessarily hard, it seems to me like pickaxes” (11-13). Her usage of the word “pickaxes” is interesting because pelicans and pickaxes are not usually corresponding. When she describes them as “pickaxes,” she is describing the way that the birds penetrate the gas. Like a pickaxe, the pry through the air with sudden force, instead of gliding in a more natural manner.

            In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Facing It,” He uses the place that he is currently standing it to transport himself to his past. He standing at a Vietnam War memorial, and as he sees the names etched upon the stone, his emotions about the war rekindle themselves in contrasting blows. Through alternating lines of end-stop and enjambment, the text reflects his conflicting emotions. When he says, “I said I wouldn’t, / dammit: No tears” (4-5), the short, detached sentences show how even through he is no longer at war, he is still fighting a lifelong battle. The memories that the memorial brings up causes him to try and fight back tears of remorse because he knows that a war like Vietnam should make him stronger than the tears he cries.

Poems and Place

The setting of a poem can be conveyed to the reader in various different ways. The three poems that stuck out to me the most were “Night, Death, Mississippi” by Robert Hayden, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright, and “The Bight”, by Elizabeth Bishop. In both “Night, Death, Mississippi” as well as “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”, the place where the poem takes place is given right in the title. Elizabeth Bishop also uses this approach in her poem. I researched the term, and found out that a bight usually refers to a bay or a coast. Because these authors title their pieces with an obvious reference to the place they plan on describing, it makes the actual poem easier to understand. For example, from the title “Night, Death, Mississippi”, one can infer that the poem is about a violent event that occurred in Mississippi. The line “White robes like moonlight...In the sweet gum dark”, not only tells us what Hayden is referring to-and therefore gives us the time period of this piece-but also paints a strong image of the juxtaposition of the night sky and the clothing of the offenders. This gives us the setting for the occurrence that Hayden is talking about. James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” is full of setting. Practically the entire poem is describing what is around him with the exception of the very last line-“I have wasted my life”.  Wright is very specific in this piece of the location of the things that surround him. For example, “To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones.” He wants the reader to know exactly where everything is. To him, this is the only accurate way to convey his setting. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, the title is a little less revealing, and therefore the setting may be harder to decipher. However, the author opens with a comment on low tide, and then makes various references to boats throughout her piece. This is an indicator that “The Bight” takes place on a coast or at a beach. 

Place in Poetry

In the poem “The Bight” by Elizabeth Bishop, she portrays the recession of waves across the coastline that make the reader envision being across the waves or being in the water.  She sets the scene up as if one were traveling across the coastline.  She explains the “crumbling ribs” and the dry boats that come across the area as if one were experiencing it or viewing it from a movie screen.  Yet, the narrator notes that the “water in the bight doesn’t wet anything” (5).  At this point, one becomes curious as to what sort of water comes across the coastline that doesn’t “wet anything.”  It makes the water seem almost sacred or so completely tranquil that it barely comes up along the coast – it just barely dips at the shore tiptoeing its way across the sand.  This is until the narrator mentions the unsettling gas that “Pelicans crash into” and is “unnecessarily hard” (11, 12).  She continues with her depiction of birds as she also describes an extreme tense-like “tremble” to their open tails like the breaking of a wishbone.  The beautiful location masked with tense imagery makes the scene all the more interesting as she ends the poem by admitting that the entire area is an oxymoron in the making – it’s “awful but cheerful” (36). 

In the poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass he considers the etymology, or derivation of words, as subject to the “thinking” of the time, suggesting the differing and multiple meaning behind words.  The first line of the poem exemplifies just this, reading “all the new thinking is about loss” (1).  Hass insinuates that many concepts and ideas that people believe are “new” are ideas taken from previous concepts.  In this respect, Hass suggests that “thinking” is all derived from the thinkers before our time as people choose to shape those concepts.  One can also look at this line as Hass mocking the innovators of his time, suggesting that the newer ideas are actually older ones, admitting, “it resembles all the old thinking” (2).  These “new” thinkers are at a loss for their own ideas.  Since ideas are fabricated and “resemble” this “old thinking” then words, since they attempt to portray a person’s thoughts, are just as easily fabricated.  Hass further explains that these ideas are not only fabricated from previous ideas, but “that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea” (3,4).  As Hass suggests, people “erase” one aspect of an idea to formulate his or her own understanding of a concept. 

At this point, these “general ideas” are warped into multiple ideas from which Hass suggests, “erases” this “clarity of a general idea”.  Hass further exemplifies a person’s need to continuously probe at a word, through the symbolization of a woodpecker continuously pecking at a “dead sculpted trunk” (5).  Hass’ imagery depicts this “clown-faced woodpecker” not only as a type of bird, but purposely as the foolish person that continuously tries to pick away at the meaning of a word.  Hass suggests that this pecking away completely defiles the word as the woodpecker ceaselessly pecks at a trunk already “sculpted” through other meanings.  The woodpecker tries to sculpt more shape into the trunk, although it is already “dead” from over-defining a word.   Yet, it is “tragic” (7) since the clown-faced woodpecker will continuously peck at a “dead” concept as if it is trying to gain a new means.  This scene depicts a struggle between wanting to attribute so many different qualities to words, and being stuck in a place where, as the narrator states, “a word is elegy to what it signifies” (11).  Hass also recalls how a woman in this poem is able to remind him of his childhood memories, describing in vivid details his “childhood river” (20) to “muddy places where [they] caught the little orange-silver fish called “pumpkinseed” (22, 23).  Since Hass is able to retrieve memories from seeing her, he parallels the imagery to how words are able to provoke memories.  Furthermore, Hass creates a certain place where words grant qualities that are capable of resurrecting memories, thus creating so many different places and experiences for him and the reader.  

Back in 'Nam

I chose to do the poem "Camouflaging the Chimera" by Yusef Komunyakaa. I chose to do this poem because from the first line "We tied branches to our helmets." I already understood it was a war zone and by "from Saigon to Bangkok," I knew it was Vietnam. I googled who Yusef was and found out he did serve in the Vietnam War. His imagery and message were clear by the fourth stanza out of nine. 

When thinking of the Vietnam War, it is popular opinion to think of the tall grass and wet lands. Vietnam is a tropical climate and in movies like Forrest Gump and Across the Universe, you see that there are deep rivers with tropical plants resembling palm tress and bamboo. We also remember that we were not welcomed in Vietnam not only by the Vietnamese, but by Americans themselves because we didn't want to be there. So in the sixties, we think of the peace/hippie movement where there were protests of the war and for peace. 

Yusef uses these popular ideas and morals in the imagery of his poem. He gives examples of the soldiers camouflaging themselves ad their weapons with "mud from a riverbank". The place is set up with the details of the branches being tied to helmets, the riverbank being used for disguise, blades of grass in their clothing, the presence of bamboo, and the breeze off the river. Then, one can argue the desire of not wanting to be in Vietnam the line "We wove/ourselves into the terrain,/content to be a hummingbird’s target." The soldiers were okay with being a target. They infiltrated the land and were fine with being someone's target. When you weave yourself into a certain place and after are okay with being someone's target, it has implications that the location a person is in is causing the "content" with being somethings target.

     To me, Yusef was the most successful in creating imagery because within three stanzas without saying the exact setting, he was able to tell me that the place of the poem was Vietnam in the sixties. The first line in the fourth stanza that mentioned Saigon and Bangkok was just a confirmation of my thoughts.