Sunday, February 7, 2016

Elizabeth Bishop

This article was published in the Written Word supplement of the Irish Independent January 2016.


''All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper—just running down the edges of different countries and continents, "looking for something" ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.''


Over her 15 years on the Leaving Cert course Bishop has appeared 5 times and consistently proves a popular choice with students. Her conversational tone, eye for detail and exploration of themes such as the search for identity, coming to terms with loss and childhood memories, make her poetry very accessible for all ages, especially adolescents.  She was greatly feted in her lifetime and won many distinguished accolades such as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Bishop had an incredibly tough childhood; losing her father to Bright’s disease as a baby and losing her mother to mental illness over the following few years. She was raised by relatives and inherited money that allowed her to live independently but her poetry is characterised by a longing and search for home. She also, paradoxically, greatly enjoyed travel; as Niall MacMonagle noted she: ‘preferred geography to history’, and, rather than wallowing in self-pity in her work, she tended to turn her attention outwards to study the world around her in incredible detail.

The Fish, Filling Station, The Armadillo, The Bight and At the Fishhouses all display her skillful use of this razor-sharp attention to detail. In these poems she invites the reader ‘to focus not on her but with her’ at some element of the natural or man-made world that catches her eye. In The Fish she delivers a masterclass in painting a word-picture of the ‘tremendous fish’. She recreates every inch of his ‘battered and venerable’ body, from the ‘brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper’ to ‘the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood’. She makes comparisons with ordinery domestic objects so that those of us who have never set foot in a fishing boat can see what she sees: ‘the irises backed and packed with tranished tinfoil’.

Often she is so eager to get her description right that she corrects herself in the middle of the poem: ‘It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.’ Michael Schmidt said of her voice that it ‘affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it came clear to her.’ In Filling Station she puzzles over the contradictions of sight before her: ‘Do they live in the station?’ ‘Why the taboret? Why, oh why, the doily?’ She poses questions that occur to her in the course of her observations and then attempts to answer them: ‘Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant… Somebody loves us all.

In the course of her travels she explored exotic locations in Europe, North Africa and South America, some of which pop up in her poems. The Armadillo details the celebration of St John’s Day (24th June) in Brazil with traditional (but illegal!) fire balloons and the havoc they inflict on the local wildlife: ‘Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house…The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.’ In The Bight she examines Garrison Bight in Key West, Florida recreating both the man-made and natural elements of the scene vividly: ‘Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar on impalpable drafts and open their tails like scissors on the curves.’

She also investigates the nature of travel itself, most memorably in Questions of Travel. This poem explores the experience of being a tourist in a foreign country, looking at waterfalls, mountains and ‘old stonework’. She wonders if tourism is really a good thing: ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?’ or if our fantasies of exotic places are actually ruined by visiting them: ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?...Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them too?’ She celebrates the beauty of the place she is visiting and feels sad at the thought of missing out on the experience:
                        But surely it would have been a pity
                        not to have seen the trees along this road,
                        really exaggerated in their beauty,
                        not to have seen them gesturing
                        like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.’
Ultimately her ponderings bring her back to her own elusive search for home: Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?’

It was later in life when she finally felt able to write about her childhood experiences. Sestina, In the Waiting Room and First Death in Nova Scotia were all written in her 50s and explore a variety of memories from her childhood. In Sestina she chooses to use a rigid, traditional poetic form to explore probably the most difficult experience of her life; her mother’s permanent confinement in a mental hospital. It details the scene in a kitchen of a grandmother looking after her granddaughter from the perspective of the child. Superficially a warm, cosy domestic scene, the child, although sheltered from the truth, knows something is wrong and sees tears wherever she looks: ‘the child is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove.

In all her poems Bishop maintains a slight distance from the material, the complete opposite of Sylvia Plath’s approach. While there is a little autobiography in her work she mostly acts as an objective observer. Colm Tóibín said of her: ‘She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling’ which suggests she was like a scientist in her approach, always open to learning something new. Overall her poems on the Leaving Cert course offer students a great opportunity for deep insight and huge enjoyment.


Personal Essays – Finding Your Authentic Voice

This article was first published in the Written Word supplement of the Irish Independent in January 2016.
Writing a personal essay is, very simply, about writing as yourself. Unlike in a short story, where you might pretend to be a cowboy, astronaut, doctor or spy, in a personal essay YOU, an Irish teenager about to finish school, are the star of the show.
See the personal essay as a chance to reveal your personality. It is a chance to explore your attitudes, emotions, hopes and beliefs; the more original the better- show off what makes you unique and make your essay memorable as a result. Personal anecdotes can greatly contribute to revealing personal memories and feelings and can also be hugely entertaining. You also have the option of exploring your opinions and thoughts on more universal themes.
You can be flexible in the style of writing you use– try descriptive writing in one paragraph, anecdotes in another, argue a particular point of view in another. As long as your true personality is shining through the style can vary. People generally write better when they’re writing ‘what they know’ so the personal essay is a great choice for most LC students.
Here are some examples of titles that have come up over the past few years:
2015: Write a personal essay about your response to an ending, or endings, in your life that you consider significant.

2013: Write a personal essay about the tension you find between the everyday treadmill and the gilded promises of life.
2012: Write a personal essay on what you consider to be the marvels of today’s world.
If you’re stuck for ideas think about how the topic relates to you under some of the following headings:
  •        You in a personal way
  •        Family
  •        The Local community
  •        Ireland – national level
  •        The world – global level
  •        A humorous angle
  •        Popular culture
  •        Literature and History


Here’s a sample introduction for the 2012 title about ‘the marvel’s of today’s world’ written from my personal perspective:
When I was a child I watched ‘Star Trek’ with avid fascination. Giant spaceships that could take you anywhere in the universe in total comfort; magical handheld devices that could let you contact someone else instantly; machines to which you could say ‘Earl Grey tea, hot’ and get your drink instantly – amazing! Along with many children of the 80s, I fantasised about hoverboards and videophones and all the other futuristic gadgets TV could dream up. Would they exist when I was grown up? I fervantly hoped they would but didn’t expect it to really happen. Now I look around me in 2015 (the ‘future’ in “Back to the Future”!) and my hopeful inner child is utterly amazed at the marvels of today’s world. From the International Space Station to smart phones, from 3D printers to bluetooth headsets; so many science-fiction gadgets have become science fact and are affordable for most people to access. We have also made great strides in the fields of medicine, food production and human rights. We are the first generation that is genuinely capable of ending world hunger. Pope John Paul II said “The future starts today, not tomorrow” and, for me, 2015 is the great, glorious future that I anticipated when I was young.

The following techniques can be used to great effect in personal essays:
·      A Conversational Tone: imagine you’re chatting to someone when writing a personal essay and that you’re telling them all about yourself. (This doesn’t mean you should use slang or textspeak) Using a conversational tone creates intimacy with the reader and draws them in to your writing. You can pose questions and then answer them just as would happen in a conversation.

·      Use personal pronouns: It might seem obvious but use the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ throughout the essay. Saying ‘this is how I see things’ is a more pleasant way to voice an opinion than saying ‘this is how things are’.

·      Quote: A well chosen quotation from a piece of writing/song lyric that you love can set off an introduction or conclusion to a personal essay really well. E.g ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done,’ Nelson Mandela. Start collecting them now!

·      Be honest: Be frank about your thoughts and neuroses – the personal essay is all about TMI! (That’s ‘too much information’ for any remaining pre-internet readers out there). Tell anecdotes from your own life – you may think that nothing interesting happens to you but curiosity about other people’s lives is a key part of the human psyche (hence our passion for soap operas).


·      Humour: Take the truth and exaggerate it (hyperbole) to add humour to your work. If an examiner is laughing and enjoying a piece of writing they’re less likely to be picking holes in it. Test out your laugh-inducing writing skills on your teacher over the coming months as a humorous tone can sometimes be tricky to convey on paper.