Elizabeth Bishop

      In "At the Fishhouses," Elizabeth Bishop writes-half-playfully-that she's "a believer in total immersion." In "Arrival at Santos," she exchanges the unsatisfying port city for "driving to the interior." This descent or expedition to the
inner life of things has been one of the continuing qualities of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry-neither relinquishing the pleasures of the passing landscape nor evading the possibility of the "shuddering insights" at the center. Her language delights us with the precision and intensity of a medieval genre painting. In "Faustina, or Rock Roses," a dying woman's "crooked / towel-covered table / bears a can of talcum / and five pasteboard boxes / of little pills, // most half-crystallized." But that language also has the power to provoke-and face-the hardest questions: "Oh, is it // freedom at last, a lifelong / dream of time and silence, / dream of protection and rest? / Or is it the very worst, / the unimaginable nightmare / that never before dared last / more than a second?"

      "Style," Proust wrote in
The Past Recaptured, "is for the writer, as for the painter, a question, not of technique but of vision." Elizabeth Bishop's "vision," though she has disclaimed that as "too serious a word," is one of the deep and encompassing ones in modern poetry-ranging from the existential surrealist world of the Man-Moth to a "real" dentist's waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts, on "the fifth/of February, 1918"; from Crusoe's nightmare of proliferating islands-"infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands"-to the "oil-soaked" yet homey family filling station, offering "high-powered automobiles" the consolation that "somebody loves us all." Like Proust, she gives us-to use her own words again-"life and the memory of it so compressed / they've turned into each other."

      And all without pretension, academicism, or self-promotion. Proust compares "true art" to "a really well-bred child [who] hearing some people with whom he has been sent to have luncheon say, 'We speak right out, we are frank,' feels that this remark indicates a moral quality inferior to the good deed, pure and simple, which says nothing." "True art," he goes on to say, "has no use for so many proclamations and is produced in silence." Out of
that silence come the poems we are privileged to read and are especially privileged to listen to tonight.