In the movie "Reaching for the Moon", the poet Elizabeth Bishop heard someone reciting a poem of hers and felt terribly mortified. If that is true, I can now see her spinning in her grave, because "Reaching for the Moon" is not interested in her work, but in her messy personal life, and manages to make her a very dull person. (A truly unforgivable sin!) That said, even a bad movie can have a few redeeming qualities. To me, they belong to the moments where Miranda Otto (who played Bishop in this movie) reads Bishop. Her throaty voice gives Bishop's lines a palpable intimacy, haunting, beautiful. Oh, how I wish the movie had stayed in those moments!
After watching this movie, I dug out my Bishop collections and went over the poems referenced in the film. Since the movie mostly focused on the early days of Bishop's staying in Brazil (around the publication of "A Cold Spring"), most of the poems are Bishop's early work (other than "One Art", which bookend the movie). Personally I prefer Bishop's later work, but through this rereading I realized how much I had missed in my previous reading. Here are some of my thoughts on the poems appeared in the movie:
One Art - the movie covered the time span of 1952-1969, but Bishop didn't write this poem till 1976, three years before her death. (Shall we call it the poetic license of movie making to change certain facts?) This is one of Bishop's most famous poems. The poem was written in a form called villanelle. (Here is a link to more details about the form: what is villanelle.) Unlike "the art of losing", the form is extremely hard to master. Bishop had done it beautifully. In the Vassar library, which houses most of Bishop's manuscripts and notebooks, you can see Bishop's early revisions of the poem (the final published one was the 17th edition). The fragment cited in the beginning of the movie seems to be taken from revision 10 or 11.
Sleeping on the Ceiling - this is where Bishop felt mortified when she heard Carlos recite it at the lunch scene. The poem is one of Bishop's really early work. (I roughly remembered she wrote it in Paris during a trip when she was about 25.) Like many her early work, it's set in a surrealistic landscape. I find the poem much more interesting when it was cited by Carlos and Lota in the movie.
The Shampoo - probably the only "erotic" poem E.B. had ever published in her lifetime. (Bishop was a very private person and believed in "closets, closets, and more closets".) Needless to say after watching the movie you know where she got the inspiration.
Insomnia - its last stanza showed up beautifully in the movie, and it's my favorite scene. Here are those beautiful lines:
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.
(When I read the poem for the first time, the last "and you love me" struck me as an amazing surprising ending. At that time, I interpreted it as (note the world is inverted) "you don't love me". Watching this movie I suddenly realized it could also mean "and I love you". The meaning of the poem suddenly changed.)
At the Fishhouses - I totally missed this one in my early reading, now I consider it my favorite in E.B.'s early work. It is such an incredible poem, fully sensual (you will smell, touch, and taste the sea in the poem). How could I have missed these lines?
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(It is a poem I promise myself one day I will read on the coastline of Nova Scotia.)
As for the "close close all night...", where Bishop read to Lota after the Pulitzer night. It was actually an unpublished poem E.B. gave to a friend as a wedding gift (discovered posthumously). It is not what E.B. would consider a "publishable work", but gives this movie such a gentle and loving moment:
Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,
close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.
Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.
Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,
close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.
Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.
The melancholy ending. The movie starts and ends with Bishop's "One Art".
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