I. Now "I" is a really good word. It's a useful word. For instance, Elizabeth Bishop starts off "The Fish" with "I." "I caught a tremendous fish." And I've begun many a poem with "I." Because you've got to. And what I understood was that my own dear students were destroying "I" for me. Which is another way of saying that they were destroying me.
SO I QUIT. I did it in the second month of the spring semester, on a Thursday. There was a new batch of students around the table. Same overbright classroom, same malevolent chairs. The one good poet had gone off to Taiwan, and I missed her faint perfume of promise. They all handed their week's work in, and I lifted the pile of fresh poems in the air to feel its weight. It was unusually heavy, because one of the poems was twenty pages long. I knew who it was by. It was called "Pythagoras Unbound," and it was by an overeager boy who talked a lot about Czeslaw Milosz. I skimmed the first page and I saw the word "endoplasm" and I went cold, like I'd eaten a huge plate of calamari. As the hour was ending, I said, "Folks, just a heads-up. I want you to know that I won't be able to read some of the poetry that you've just given me. I will be writing a 'U.R.' on some of your poems. What does U.R. mean? It means 'Un Read.' I will want very much to read every word of all your poems, because my duty as your instructor is to read them, but in some cases I will not be able to, because, I'm sorry, I can't. And so for some of you the grade that I give you will be based from here on entirely on class participation. Or if you're silent and shy and thoughtful and don't talk at all in class, that's all right, I fully respect that, I'll just grade you on those sudden gleams of thoughtful insight that I detect in your eyes. An alert look in your eyes is probably more predictive of your future success than any poetry you will write any time soon."
The students listened with hurt puzzlement. They didn't like the U.R. idea. They wanted me to read their poems. Who else would read them? And when else in their lives would they be so alive and so full of the wish to do something new and good? I realized I'd gone too far. "I'm just joshing," I said. "I'm looking forward to this new work. Thanks for it. Have a great weekend."
After that class I went to the dean and told her I wasn't coming back in September. And that was the end of my teaching career.
ELIZABETH BISHOP was a short woman. She wanted to be taller. She had amazing up-floofing hair with a streak of white. And she didn't like the idea of teaching creative writing. She wrote May Swenson: "I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this 'Creative Writing' business." But she did it anyway. She didn't want to be a drunk, but she was. Sometimes, she said, she drank like a fish. Lota, her Brazilian lover, wanted her to take antabuse and she didn't want to, and she left Brazil. Then Lota went into a gloom and killed herself.
Today I was punching down the garbage with my fist in the tall kitchen can, to make more room before I had to take it out to the barn-going, Yah, yah, punch it down!-and my right thumb caught on the wavy edge of the lid of a tunafish can and I sliced it. Not too badly. Not off. I rinsed the cut in the sink, and I thought, What's with all these minor finger injuries? What's happening to me? I'm wearing three Band-Aids now. I'm a three Band-Aid man.
Everyone always wanted Elizabeth Bishop to read aloud "The Fish," because it's good, and she grew to hate it and to dread reading it. She wrote to Robert Lowell that she was thinking of rewriting it as a sonnet. Its prosiness made her unhappy. She'd moved on and forgotten why the poem is so good.
The poem is in this book here. Look at this paperback. Just white and yellow and blue, simple as can be. Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems. Don't look at my Band-Aids, just look at the book. It's a Farrar, Straus and Giroux book and they always, in this era, had the most beautiful cover designs. Six dollars and ninety-five cents is what it cost me. Bob Giroux was her editor.
And here is the original bookmark, from the bookstore where I bought the book. The Grolier book shop in Cambridge. Little poetry shop on a side street off Harvard Square. It's had some tough times recently.
"The Fish" takes up three pages. It's long. It starts here, and it goes over here, and then it goes over to here. And every word on these three pages is worth reading. In her letter to I think it's Marianne Moore, she says that she feels very adventurous because she's not capitalizing the first letter of each line.
The way to read the poem is not to read it in the book, but to listen to her read it on a CD. She has a such a marvelously simple way of delivering it. She just seems to shrug it off her. It's of no interest to her that it's poetry. There's no fancy emphasis. It's almost flat, the way she reports it, and she has a slight midwesternness to her voice. It's so lovely, and she sounds very young and surprised that she's been asked to read it.
You know what "The Fish" is? "The Fish" is sort of like a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker if the Talk of the Town had died and gone to heaven. That's what it is, a perfect Talk of the Town piece. Except that it doesn't use the "we." And it didn't appear in The New Yorker-it appeared in Partisan Review. And I don't even care whether it's called a poem or not. It doesn't scan. She was a woman who was very capable of rhyming. Who liked rhyming. But this one is not a rhyming poem.
The Fish! The fish. "I caught a tremendous fish." Here's the situation. Elizabeth Bishop is in a boat, on her own, it seems, and she's caught a tremendous fish, that's come out of the ocean. What does the fish want to do? The fish wants to get back to the water. But she doesn't let it. She examines it very closely. She looks at its peeling skin and compares it to old wallpaper. She repeats the word "wallpaper" twice in two lines of a poem-an unheard-of prosiness. And then she bends closer, and she looks right into the fish's eye. She says it's larger than her eye but shallower. And that's true-we all know those shallow fish eyes. "The irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil." She's really peering at that fish's eye now. And then, whoa: the eye shifts. The fish eye moves. Terror. We know right then for sure that it's alive.
All that careful slow description suddenly has a kind of near panic in it, because we know that the fish is out of its element, breathing in the terrible oxygen. The fish doesn't want to be described. That's what gives the poem its pull. The fish resists description because it just wants to be back in the water, and not to be seen, but she's insisting on looking at it and coming up with one simile after another. All these wonderful similes take time, and meanwhile the fish is starting to suffocate.
So we look at his skin, at his scales, at his swim bladder, which is like a peony, and his eyes. And then, we get to "the mechanism of his jaw." And here's where we learn about the fish's history-the five pieces of broken-off fishing line. And she describes each kind of fishing line. One line is green, and the others are black, and we hear all about them. And those lines are allegorical. They're lines of what? Of poetry. Because we know that other people-other anglers, other hopeful poets-have caught this very same ancient, real fish. Their lines are there, hooked into the fish's jaw, all the many other attempts to rhyme this old fish into poetry. Rupert Brooke has a beautiful poem about this very same fish. But Elizabeth Bishop's hooked it now, and she's not going to rhyme it, she's just going to tell us about it.