Publishing the Poems You Didn’t Want Published

As I read this essay about the book of Elizabeth Bishop drafts, I could not help but personalize the situation. What if I had no control over what was published and someone published the drafts I don’t even consider poems? A small quote from the essay:

“I am surprised, each time I read an article about the book or an interview with Ms. Quinn about her efforts, that no one airs serious qualms about a book that exhumes work “crossed out entirely by Bishop” and drafts on which the poet noted, for example, “Tone all wrong.” The New Yorker published its share of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box in precisely the same format it uses for poems about which there can be no question regarding impropriety of publication. A colleague of mine who has flipped through the book tells me that it presents the writing just as a new edition of Bishop’s finished, authorized works might appear: the notes are at the end, and the substantial editorial apparatus is kept backstage. In other words, I am told, one might mistake the book for a book of poems Bishop had wanted us to read.”

And from a review by Helen Vendler:

“Students eagerly wanting to buy ‘the new book by Elizabeth Bishop’ should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known….In the long run, these newly published materials will be relegated to what Robert Lowell called ‘the back stacks,’ and this imperfect volume will be forgotten, except by scholars. The real poems will outlast these, their maimed and stunted siblings.”

Read the whole review here before the link expires.