Alice Quinn's divisive new book on the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop is for the next generation of poets, she tells Belinda McKeon
In the offices of the New Yorker, high up over the tumult of Times Square, there is a small, windowless room. But, crammed as it is with books, papered as it is with manuscripts, piled as it is with pages fresh from hopeful envelopes, this is a room with a view. It needs no window onto flickering neon and darting cabs.
This year is Alice Quinn's 20th as poetry editor of the magazine. She came here by way of publishers Alfred A. Knopf, where in the 1970s and 1980s she vastly expanded the poetry list, and by way, too, of the Gotham Book Mart, where as a young student she discovered Elizabeth Bishop, and devoured every poem in her final collection, Geography III, standing wide-eyed at a stall.
In her office, which bursts at the seams with poetry, with its failures and with its triumphs, with its tentative beginnings and with its assured airs, with its masters and with its novices, there is always something to look at. Too many things to look at, arguably; traces of Elizabeth Bishop's "too many waterfalls", as poems cover every surface, clamouring for attention, demanding to be read. If Quinn's calculations are correct, the New Yorker receives an astonishing number of poems for consideration every year - "five or eight hundred poems for every one we publish", she says, which works out at nigh on 100,000. That's a lot of reading in a little room.
And although she has an intern and an editorial assistant, Quinn does a great deal of the reading herself. "I look, at least, at the beginning of every poem," she says. "I don't oblige myself to finish every poem, but I turn the page of every poem. I mean, I don't look at something that's cuckoo, but if a packet of poems comes from somebody who evidently has the mentality, then yes."
Quinn has published some 2,300 poems since "Mr Shawn" (William Shawn, the legendary editor of the New Yorker) called her at Knopf, invited her to a meeting in the Condé Nast building - "I never fretted about dressing so much as I did that day" - and made her an editor (she began in fiction and moved into poetry soon afterwards, when Howard Moss, the poetry editor, died suddenly). She reads around 40 submissions a day, and becomes fiercely excited, gleeful about a good submission - when first we meet, she shows me the poems which have just come in from one of her favourite poets, Louise Glück. Clutching the manuscript, she beams at Glück's lines. From the pristine pages of a brand new, polished poem, Quinn clearly takes a lot of satisfaction.
But she has found just as much satisfaction, if not more, from its opposite: from the messy, scribbled pages of a poet's unfinished work; from the time-stained, sometimes crumpled pages of a lifetime's worth of notebooks, journals and letters. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, Quinn's edition of the uncollected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, published last year, is the culmination of almost 10 years' work by Quinn in the Bishop archives at Vassar College.
Through facsimile, transcription and commentary, and through extensive quotation from Bishop's letters and journals, the book builds a biography which inches towards us by way of Bishop's own words, her own attempts at meaning, through the contours of her own hand, so that we acquire, almost without realising, a vivid, deeply felt portrait of one of the 20th century's most important poets.
BISHOP PUBLISHED UNDER a hundred poems (as well as 30 translations) in her lifetime, but her notebooks show that she had the beginnings - and much more than the beginnings - of many more poems. She was a perfectionist, unwilling to publish anything that failed to come up to her own highest standards; poems which other poets would have been happy to let go stayed hidden in her notebooks.
"Can you please forgive me," she wrote, while in her 20s, to the poet Marianne Moore, "and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?" "Which is why," says Quinn, "looking at the material, I didn't privilege the more finished drafts over the fragments." Some of the work, almost 120 pieces in all, remains as little more than a couple of sentences, attempted and soon abandoned, or at least never sanctioned as being good enough for publication, some as pages reworked and rewritten in different inks, at different times. "For me, it's all access to what Bishop was thinking and feeling," says Quinn. "It illuminates a range of her feelings and experiences and the tensions in her life."
But some say that Quinn's book illuminates chambers of Elizabeth Bishop's life and her art through which the poet never intended others to wander. It was vociferously denounced as a "betrayal" of Bishop - and, by implication, of poetry itself - by the critic Helen Vendler, who argued that the book should have been called Repudiated Poems, and asserted that Bishop would have responded to a request to bring to light her unpublished work with a horrified "no". Poets, Vendler added, would now be "incinerating their drafts", afraid of "an Alice Quinn in their future", delving into their archives.
Vendler, one of the most powerful of American critics, did not use the word "betrayal" lightly; Bishop was a friend of hers (she died, in fact, on her way to a dinner party in Vendler's house in 1979). But Vendler was also a teacher of Quinn's, when she attended a Harvard Summer School for poetry in the late 1970s, and she was a valued teacher, introducing Quinn to poets from William Carlos Williams to Robert Lowell, as well as to some of the Bishop poems Quinn had not discovered for herself at that stage. So the criticism stung when it emerged last year, and it continues to sting.
During our meeting, she is aware that an attack on the New Yorker and its approach to poetry is about to be published in the New York Times Book Review - ironically, written by the critic who praised her Bishop book in those pages, David Orr. She knows the content of the piece, knows that it will accuse her of running "bad poems by excellent poets", citing a Michael Longley poem dedicated to his grandson, with a line about a "fluffy chimney" as an example. And when it appears, a week after our interview, Orr's piece hurls another stinging criticism Quinn's way, accusing her not only of blandness, but of a sort of nepotism, based on the frequency with which the magazine has published poems by one of its own staff writers, Dana Goodyear.
But Quinn is pragmatic about the Orr piece. It's the accusations of Vendler which continue to haunt her, it seems; real distress shadows her face as she discusses them. Even a year later, her manner, as she talks about the book, seems a little cautious, a little coiled.
The book gives access to a private world, onto the most private and difficult moments of the creative process which was such torment for Bishop. It reveals a landscape mined with sensitive material; drafts which speak so rawly and so plainly of the anguish of Bishop's relationships, of her struggles with her work, of her alcoholism. To handle such sensitive material, in the preparation of this book, and to shape its presentation to Bishop's readers, and to readers new to Bishop's work, was a massive responsibility, Quinn agrees. But the very rawness of the material was the key to its meaning, and to her confidence that the book, as it came together, was a window onto the poet.
"I think working with this material, I became more intimate with powerful forces at work within Bishop emotionally and psychically that were now available to me in an unmediated way," Quinn says. "I wasn't reading about them in a biography, or reading them formally described by her in a letter to somebody. Only the tendrils were accessible, the underbelly of these things, and I tried to surround them with meaningful prose, letters and journal entries, in Bishop's own handwriting."
An attempt at a book of the unpublished poems had been made before, by the poet and critic William Logan, with whom Quinn, once she began her own project (commissioned by the same editor, Robert Giroux), remained in regular correspondence.
Logan had done a "pristine job", Quinn felt - too pristine, beginning with the more finished pieces and progressing on to the rougher drafts, adding no commentary. Quinn decided to take a different approach. "To me, the work became pleasurable as I followed Bishop through time. Even if I could only assay the date of composition through detective work, through looking at the letters, through looking at her journals."
The project took nine years, in the course of which Quinn immersed herself in the poems, in the drafts, in the journals, in the letters; she has large chunks of the archive by heart now, and quotes from it constantly, spontaneously. Bishop's words are part, almost, of the timbre of Quinn's own voice. She immerses herself and learns by rote like this, to bat off an encroaching insecurity about her lack of credentials as a scholar.
"Scholarship is a precinct," she says, "and I don't have my passport." She is wary, at the same time, of scholarship and its authority; of the "synthesising footnote" of academic writing, the approach which "takes command of all the interpretations of something", which "smothers the adventure for other people". She sees the Bishop book as a resource for those who read Bishop as well as those who study her, and the young reader, the high-school student or apprentice poet, is foremost in her mind.
"I kept hewing to this idea of a kind of book that would be just a complete, joyous adventure for somebody young, falling in love with Bishop's poetry. And also perhaps wanting to be a poet his or herself. And seeing that the tentativeness and the stuff that gets thrown away . . . that all that is part of being a poet."
Alice Quinn will give the keynote address at the Poetry Now festival at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire on Thursday . Booking: 01-2312929
