Life Unpromising?

In the November 3, 2009 New Yorker, Dan Chaisson, whose articles, essays, and poems I'll stop and read anytime, anywhere, reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, a 900-plus page tome edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

Reading the review earlier today I felt bereft, somehow, lonely, off course—really, I can't explain it, save to quote for you this paragraph, which foists upon me questions about my own writerly ambitions and constraints and operates as a smack across the mind. Because I write life, whether in memoir, fiction, or poem. I write life. I seek to make life promising.

"Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn't mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so 'life' is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowel, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems."

Read the whole thing here, for yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_chiasson