The Poet's Mistake by Erica McAlpine

Author:Erica McAlpine
Format: epub

CHAPTER 6

Fact-Checking Elizabeth Bishop

Journalists stick to the facts, but must the principle hold for poets? In workshops, poet-teachers tend to put it less dogmatically: “write what you know.” But then, what do we know—even about ourselves? Elizabeth Bishop was a poet who adored facts but in other ways claimed to know very little about anything. She was both autobiographical in her writing yet also extremely reticent about her private life. Her tone in poems often feels personal and impersonal at once; to many readers, her way of describing things, always down to the tiniest detail, gives the verse an encyclopedic, prosy feeling—something like, or toward, reportage. In “The Bight,” for instance:

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