Elizabeth Bishop: We can read her thoughts, but would she want us to?

"Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments"
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp., $30

Titans of the poetry world have been butting heads over a new book selected from material in the Elizabeth Bishop archives at Vassar College.

New Yorker magazine poetry editor Alice Quinn, who edited and annotated the book, and pre-eminent critic and scholar Helen Vendler stand at the heart of the debate over the publication of "Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments." In an outspoken review for The New Republic, Vendler wrote that the book should have been titled "Repudiated Poems," and planted a few other serious jabs at the book — and at Quinn.

So, what's all the fuss about? An issue as old as the printed word: Is work that a writer chose not to publish during her lifetime fair game after she dies? If so, how should the work be labeled and presented?

There are compelling arguments on all sides. Bishop is one of the greats of American poetry and anything she wrote holds interest and importance. On the other hand, it would be unfair to put forward work she considered immature, unsuccessful and/or incomplete as an equal part of her oeuvre, even though she didn't destroy it. As poet Charles Simic points out in his tactful review for The New York Review of Books, publication of the work "most certainly would have mortified her if she were still alive."

Simic is probably right. The work in "Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box" doesn't live up to Bishop's famously perfectionist standards. Many of the poems remain unresolved. Others are embarrassingly slight or in such raw form as to be little more than seeds. Few stand out as hidden jewels, most notably the gently ominous "For Grandfather." Yet it's so fascinating to see the machinery of Bishop's verse and to glimpse the poet's more intimate nature, that much of the work only serves to further endear her, like this little poem:

"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."

For me, the real issues "Edgar Allan Poe" presents are: Who is the book's intended audience and how well does it serve that audience?

Quinn writes in her introduction that "The drafts and fragments are now set loose on their own, so to speak, and it's my hope that this will provide an adventure for readers who love the established canon ... "

But will most readers who love the established canon of Bishop's poetry really want to know the gritty work behind it? I'm not convinced. It's comparable to watching ballet dancers sweat out years of work at the barre in their practice clothes, rather than catching them in the seemingly effortless magic of a finished performance. Quinn provided a brief introduction and copious endnotes to the material, but her words seem geared to the most devout Bishop scholars. For the book to be truly user-friendly, it would benefit from a more comprehensive introduction to the poet's life and work, rather than asides to other scholarship.

Yet Quinn has done a service for those who do want to study Bishop's behind-the-scenes work without making a trip to the archives at Vassar. There's plenty of illuminating stuff here for poets and scholars to consider. The most revealing part of the book for me is the series of facsimiles of 15 separate drafts that preceded the publication of Bishop's masterful "One Art." Here you can see the transformation of a great poem from amorphous thoughts to sheer elegance of expression.

Bishop began her first draft with the ho-hum line, "One might begin by losing one's reading glasses." Readers then get to experience the thrill as the poet unearths the potential shape of a villanelle, a repetitive form of six three-line stanzas. And the flash that produced her drop-dead opening line, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." After that, there was no turning back.

Sheila Farr is an art critic

for The Seattle Times.