AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM BISHOP

introduced by Steven Riel

At this past spring’s Rassemblement hosted by the Franco-American Centre of the University of Maine in Orono, not only did Jim Bishop participate in a panel discussion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Centre, but he also sold CDs of a recording of himself reading many of his published poems. As I listened to the disc in my car on my drive back to Massachusetts, I was deeply impressed by the quality of his poems and his reading of them. (Fortunately, these recordings can also be found freely available online. I cannot recommend them highly enough.) That experience provided me with the inspiration to seek out an interview with Bishop, because I wanted to draw our collective attention back to his work, especially since his one collection of poetry Mother Tongue was published 49 years ago. 

Listening to Bishop read his poems helped me to appreciate the full accomplishment of what’s embodied in them. By means of intonation, tone, and precisely modulated pauses, this poet makes clear additional nuances that cannot necessarily be conveyed on the page.

The recordings enhance our comprehension of how important syntax can be in Bishop’s work. The reader might expect that a poem is headed in a certain direction when a sentence then takes an unexpected turn or two. For example, consider this section of an untitled poem with the first line of “the turtle”:

the turtle

       its neck extended

                          like a thumb

       lets his eyes swim

                          shut

       & takes the slant

                          october sun

when

       as if everyone

                in a ballroom

       had stopped talking

                together

Bishop creates several effects via syntactic shifts, such as the stitching together of a patchwork of complexly related thoughts (as in his untitled poem beginning with the phrase “dying into a poem”). There are so many layers of intertextual commentary and suggestion embedded in this one poem that quoting any section of it would unfairly misrepresent the impact of its whole.

Another effect occurs when a speaker interrupts himself by interjecting self-correction:

one can see     sees

the islands not touching the water

where they should

By preserving (and drawing attention to) rather than erasing such adjustments aimed at finding the precisely correct word, the poet, through his speakers, invites the reader to witness the usually private process of rendering experience into exact language—to be with the poet “in that moment between / words when there is always a question” (“Final Exam”).

Bishop is a master of pauses. Whether they result from spaces within the poetic line or from line breaks, or from breaks in his voice as he reads a poem aloud, these rests often map to syntactic twists and turns, or the back-and-forth of themes in opposition. For example, in the poem “Daddy,” such pauses allow a stretched-out sentence to bounce between the imagined comfort of fatherly communication and its actual absence:

                          —warmed me should

have     these daddywords outthrough the room’s hearth-lit

air to my ears & would have,  Lord,  could he, could you, dad,

have said them […]

As this poem continues, spacing begins to indicate instead a halting utterance that the speaker likens to the sacred:

[…] one warm & holy word     out to (waiting,

       fatherless on the floor, your word)

                          your son

In Bishop’s spoken recording, the technology enables us to hear his inhaling and exhaling during the pauses, which underlines in a physical sense how close the reader/listener feels we are being allowed to approach what’s being contemplated and then voiced. This poet does not keep his audience at arm’s length.

The intimacy afforded in Bishop’s work is truly remarkable. I have the sense of being welcomed into the very spaces within which a soul mulls over its core experiences, perceptions, visions, struggles, dilemmas, and desires. But Bishop is too sophisticated, and his thinking too self-aware, to allow such personal sharing to slip into sentimentality. Instead, he turns sentimentality inside out and interrogates what it contains: “define ‘sentimentality,’” Bishop writes, continuing, “trace its roots in the notion of blood” (“Final Exam”). This poem’s speaker’s attempt to explore and convey the complex relationships he had with his parents is not allowed to resolve in nostalgic “notion[s].” (Given the content of Bishop’s entire oeuvre, the “notion of blood” its relationship to sentimentality mentioned here can be interpreted as applying not just to the familial in this one poem, but also to ethnic ancestry, including Bishop’s Franco-American bloodlines.) As a reader, I feel communion with the speakers of these poems because I am allowed such close access to this writer’s moment-by-moment grappling. And what Bishop in the end fashions to convey his explorations strikes me as particularly adept, and particularly brave.

My hope is that this interview provides a launching pad for anyone studying Bishop’s work. In addition to the above link to the recording of his reading, we’re also pleased to include in this issue three of his as-yet-unpublished vignettes: "Old Man River," "Red Roses for a Blue Lady," and "My Father's Teeth." We point interested readers as well to two of Bishop’s poems (“Night Mere” and “Revenant”) published in volume 3 of this journal.

The interview that follows is particularly valuable because in it Bishop sheds light on his goals and intentions when composing creative work. We gain insights into his development as a writer as well as the “cultural schizophrenia” he experienced as a young Franco-American.

Even based on the relatively limited number of poems and vignettes by Jim Bishop that we have currently available to us, he must irrefutably be viewed as one of the bright stars of present-day Franco-American literature. He informs me that he is “beginning to assemble a ‘collected work’ of previously published writing,” so we may soon have access to more of his compelling work. I urge us to listen carefully to all he has to say and how he says it. 

***

SR: When did you start writing poetry? Do you perceive separate phases in your life work as a poet, and if so, how would you characterize them?

JB: I think my early “creative” writing was mostly short fiction, until probably grad. school at Florida State in my mid-twenties where I took a course in modern poetry from a professor under the spell of the New Critics and began trying my hand at poetry. I think of everything I wrote there as a kind of “juvenilia,” for lack of a better word. I wouldn’t want to show any of it, but it did get me experimenting with poetic forms, and a more distilled and charged language than my previous discursive writing.  

 I began writing more as a conscious practice during my first stint as an English instructor at UMaine, Orono, where I co-taught a wonderfully energetic poetry seminar with Burton Hatlen and began meeting regularly with an offshoot writing workshop of faculty and students. The real turning point for me was deciding to take a one-year leave from teaching (Sept., ‘68–May, ‘69) to write. There I began discovering my own poetic voice, and certain themes began to emerge: fears and haunts dating back to childhood, revealed often in dreams; and a relationship with the natural world, with its fundamental terrors:

Nature does not shy from the appalling. The stalking, the chase, the taking down of the prey — the fact we eat one another, while overhead, creatures with beautiful wingspans soar, waiting their turn[.]

But also as solace and instruction (everything being born, minute to minute, in a kind of sublime orchestral communication).

 And the sense in many of the poems of wanting to penetrate the socially acquired persona one develops to interact with the world, to trust more in that deeper place, the ground of dreams where our secret fears and yearnings reside, to find voice for what hangs out there.

This phase of my writing continued through early 1971, when my world pretty much fell apart, and I experienced a kind of psychic free fall. Then, a kind of self-exile, six months of backpacking in Europe, ending with a three-month stay in Ios, Greece, where I was able to purchase a used manual typewriter and write some of the poems later included in Mother Tongue (Contraband Press, 1975). You can feel a spiritual displacement in many of these poems, a sense of loss, a suspended state. When my clunky godsend of a typewriter gave out, I was ready to head home.

Since then, I’ve tended to write in in creative bursts, including a productive six-month stay tending the Pemaquid Pt. lighthouse-keeper’s house; an extended period of teaching at UMaine, Orono; and another six-month stint in a writing retreat on the bank of the Penobscot just down river from my childhood French Island home. Much of this later writing, including hybrid fiction/nonfiction vignettes and poems, some of which I’ve read at various Franco-American Rassemblements, arises from dreams centered on French Island, often invested with a dark and disturbing energy, reflective of latent childhood insecurities and fears. Also, in some poems of that period, a conscious effort to reach out to the spirits of my deceased parents, imagining a liminal space where I might engage them in a conversation we were unable to have when they were alive. For me, some of these poems (“Night Mere,” in particular) were revelatory—liberating and cathartic—and a true gift of the writing process.

SR: Which poets’ work influenced you when you started writing poetry, and later?

JB: The question of “influences” is a complex one. I’ve been influenced by many poets and writers but not always in a way that would be discernable stylistically. I think that whatever enlivens our spirit, feeds our soul, shapes us in ways not always apparent in the moment. In that sense, I’d say I’ve been influenced by legions. To mention a few:

Rainer Maria Rilke, for the beauty of his language (even in translation) and his porous access to a sometimes terrifying angelic domain, in keeping with my own sensibility.

William Wordsworth, for his sensitivity to the numinous qualities of the natural world and his sense of a lost innocence (“trailing clouds of glory”), which artists are constantly trying to re-access through their work. Some have called it a second innocence.

Walt Whitman, for his freedom, his explosive breaking free of traditional European poetic constraints, and his compassionate all-embracing spirit.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, the free flight and sheer music of his language.

W.C. Williams, for his use of vernacular language and attention to the innate poetry of his daily surroundings and occupations.

César Vallejo, his willingness to confront his personal shadow and the brokenness of the world, the tension between flesh and spirit implicit in the human condition.

George Oppen, a kind of prophetic presence, a dignity, the sober clarity and integrity of his work.

And certain poems in particular: Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”; Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”; Louise Gluck’s consummate poem, “Parable”; Kinnell’s “Avenue C.,” which I performed to jazz with Black Upward Bound youths in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1966, and the following year with a college instrumental combo at UMaine, Orono. Again, the power of these works to summon us to a higher order of attention and engagement.

Also, certain stage plays come to mind that impacted me powerfully when I first saw them:

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for example, probably the first play I’d ever seen staged by a proficient cast, shook me to the core. As did a production of Robert Lowell’s Benito Cerino, set largely on a slave ship, which I saw in Atlanta, Ga. In 1966 with a large contingent of Black Upward Bound students. Wow, when a physically imposing slave breaks free of his chains and hurls a white crewman violently to the stage, the audience reaction was explosive. Sitting a few feet from the stage, I could feel the hair raise on my neck. Unforgettable.

I was also very moved in a far different way when I saw Antonine Maillet’s one-woman play, La Sagouine, enacted by Viola Léger”—in English one night and in French the next. I saw the French version with a group of Franco-American senior citizens from Old Town, Maine, including my mother. The Franco audience related so demonstrably, often responding out loud in complete solidarity with Léger’s character. So at odds with the much tamer audience reaction at the English showing. Instructive of how any creative act is a meeting place between creator and beholder, in that sense, always a co-creation.

And seeing Greg Chabot’s Un Jacques Cartier Errant in Bar Harbor, Maine, with faculty and students from several French universities in attendance was a trip. One graduate student from l’université d’Angers, commenting after the play, said, “Jacques Cartier, c’est moi.” What an astonishing testimony, a native Parisian French speaker taking stock and acknowledging his own similarities to the pompous and dismissive linguistic attitudes of Jacques Cartier in Greg’s satire. 

SR: Have other arts influenced your poetry, and if so, how?

JB: I couldn’t say how other art forms have influenced my poetry stylistically per se, but just as we read poetry to find spiritual community and to be enlivened in that exchange, so I would understand the ways I am spiritually accompanied and refreshed by other art forms, with and without words. And that I carry those influences importantly into whatever I create.

You can find specific references to certain visual artists in some of my poems: Chagall, Rembrandt, Maine-based Andrew Wyeth, for example. But again, I think less of direct stylistic influences, which are hard to chart, but rather, how certain artists have affected me, what I absorbed from them and was inspired by, and what I then took into my own creative process.

I remember seeing a painting by Wassily Kandinsky at MOMA in New York in my early 20s. I couldn’t tell you which of his works I saw—what I remember is the effect—the explosion of color, and form, the aliveness, the breaking free. In the same sense, the immediacy and vivacity of Van Gogh; or the hush and calm of Vermeer’s interiors, and the majesty and immaculate control of his View of Delft; Bruegel’s village scenes and his astounding Fall of Icarus, which prompted W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” And just happening unexpectedly upon Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa in a dimly lit chapel in Rome, the sudden drama, the spokes of heavenly light, the exquisite (if angelic) eroticism in St. Theresa’s supplication. Or encountering the exuberance and vivacity of Minoan frescoes created five thousand years ago. Or the elegant dignity and compassion of ancient funerary stelae seen in Athens. Closer to home, the loneliness and quiet angst of Edward Hopper’s work.

What did I take from any of these disparate works that I later brought to my creative process? Impossible to quantify, but in the ways they nourished me in the moment, enlivened me again and again, their assimilated contrails continue to inspire and inform my writing and my life.

Certainly the same is true of music, which becomes a kind of subliminal soundtrack of our daily lives:

The pop/ folk/ blues/ gospel/ rock/ jazz stream from the ‘60s & ‘70s is always bubbling somewhere in my circuitry. Something comes alive even now when I hear, say, Ray Charles, or Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, the Band, to name a few. And I’m no opera buff but find myself welling up when I hear certain arias—Pavarotti’s transcendent “Nessun Dorma,” for example, seems as close to proof of some divine presence as we are likely to get in this world.

As for novelists, I remember the impact of reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel when I was twenty-years-old, Eugene Gant’s unbridled romanticism and youthful angst (“a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, and all the forgotten faces”)—I was completely swept up; and later, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, distrustful of the “phonies” & phoniness that seemed to be in charge of everything, fiercely protective of what remained of innocence in the world. It made you feel you were not alone in these self-contained attitudes and that it was possible to include it all, if you could find the right notes, in your writing.

More recently, rereading The Brothers Karamazov, I’ve been struck by how Dostoevsky is able to drill into and inhabit such a range of states of mind—in the dissolute father, Fyodor; the convoluted passions of the elder son, Dimitri; the cynical Ivan, ever at war with himself; the pure spirit of Alyosha, the acolyte;  and his saintly but “corruptible” mentor, Father Zossima. All brought to life with nothing but words on the page.

And to name a few others that have affected me in very particular ways:

Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist; Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Robert Pirsig, The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance; James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, more recently, Cormac McCarthy—many others.

SR: How do poems come to you? What is your usual method of composing them?

JB: They come in very different ways. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a phrase, sometimes as a visual. Examples:

Poem “6:10”: Written during my year of house-sitting at Pemaquid Point. I’m sitting alone. My wife and two children have just left to return home after their weekly weekend visit. I am feeling the acute pang of their absence. I look at the clock, it is 6:10 p.m. That is how the poem starts and proceeds as I imagine where they must be on their drive home by now. And then the poem almost wrote itself.

Or the poem which opens, “Mrs.  you are / always in my way,” also written while house-sitting in Pemaquid, began when I accidentally knocked over a framed photo on a desk of a woman, perhaps the grandmother of the homeowner. I picked it up and likely observed her face for the first time—began imagining her as someone I might have known in another life, speaking to her directly in the poem.

Or the sight of two fisherman standing near the dock, talking to one another while looking out to sea. How located they seemed, how secure in their psychic anchorage. How at odds with my own sensed dislocation.

Or sometimes, sensory triggers—just the sound of a distant bell buoy, or the smell of eucalyptus, sights, sounds, smells that wake up echoes of the past in some way. Or dreams, several begin with dreams. And one poem grew out of a psychedelic experience—I’ll let you guess which one. Some initial prompts die on the vine, others realize themselves, take shape, and often take me to unexpected places.

SR: I’m curious to learn more about what calls you to write poetry. In your poem “Disturbance,” I watch your speaker tackle the ineffable—try to speak about something that’s very difficult to signify via language. Conversely, in “They Stand,” another speaker expresses a longing “simply to say what is mine” with the confidence of being wholly understood. Tell us your sense of how the distance between the ineffable and the wholly understandable factors into your desire to compose poems.

JB: I’m hearing two interesting questions here. We often use the term “a calling” to suggest a predilection to some activity or chosen practice. In my case, I was drawn to words from early on, first as a high school and collegiate debater who thought he might become the next Clarence Darrow, and eventually as an English teacher, a writer, and poet. The “calling” was always, in one way of another, to the possibilities of words.

I think, whatever one’s chosen practice (calling), you become engaged in the daily challenge of creating something of quality, recognized as such by your own standards, and by others beyond your immediate circle. For me, that challenge involves feeling my way into a composition, a verbal force field that feels alive and has the ring of truth. I don’t generally have a reader in mind when I’m composing, beyond the hope the poem might resonate for a kindred spirit out there somewhere, engage the heart and mind of someone I will never meet, make a difference in that way. Maybe “poetry makes nothing happen,” quoth Auden, but, “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” (W.C. Williams, “AsphodeI, That Greeny Flower”). What is found there. If you don’t believe in something like that, why keep writing?

I like your word, “ineffable” in reference to the “disturbance” poem (“this disturbance in the air…”), which attempts to capture a state of mind in a particular moment, besieged by felt vibrations in the air (a TV signal, the furnace kicking on) at odds with the natural world and with the evoked image of the mother, caring for her child. The poem suggests but doesn’t specify a context beyond its own frame. It inhabits a moment, an agitated interior state we are left to ponder. In a way similar to an Edward Hopper figure, sitting alone in a hotel room, whose particular haunts we can only infer.

And yes, the second poem you mention (“they stand…”) does express a “longing” on the part of the implied narrator to express his most heartfelt thoughts as confidently as the long-planted coastal fishermen, standing shoulder to shoulder on the shore, sharing their worldly wit. But, as you suggest, the  speaker expresses less a confidence in that regard than a plaintive desire to sound his own thoughts and find voice for them with the same self-assurance (“I must/ find it/ that place on which they stand/ to speak/ & look off”). What the narrator within the arrested moment of the poem cannot yet realize, the poet will come to understand, that the very practice of writing will provide the ground—that “place to stand”—where his authentic voice will come to recognize itself. That’s the blessing and the gift of writing, is it not?

SR: I know that in your years working with the Franco-American Centre you published several pieces in Le Forum, some under your own name, others under pseudonyms, including Jean-Pierre Levesque, for example. Could you talk about the significance of these pseudonyms and their possible relevance to your writing?

JB: Sure. But that’s a complex subject involving a kind of cultural schizophrenia, an inheritance from my French Island working class origins. And the fact that my father changed his surname legally from Levesque to Bishop shortly before I was born and that my French-speaking parents intentionally sent me to (English speaking) public school rather than the (bilingual) Catholic schools that several neighbors’ kids attended. And stopped speaking French to me after the age of five. Like many working-class Franco-Americans of their generation, they were acutely aware of the social stigma attached to Franco identity markers (French names, speech accents) and wanted to avoid passing on this stigma to their own children, wanting us to be recognized as full-fledged, unhyphenated Americans. So, after the age of five I lost access to my parents’ home tongue and subconsciously shed any socially identifiable tip-offs as to my cultural roots.

Except, of course, the contrails, which leached into that psychic underground where we store stuff we don’t know how to acknowledge or integrate into our daily lives, stuff which often crops up years later to be reckoned with. So, although my classmates in high school would have been aware that I lived on “French Island,” I doubt if any of them identified me as Franco in any way. And I took well to the English language, particularly as a competitive high school and collegiate debater. So, no problem there, until, as a student at UMaine, I chose French as my language requirement, and the static in my head became pronounced as I tried to integrate the Parisian French then taught exclusively in academe with the “patois” echoes of my home French rattling around in there. No dice. I had to put the language issues back to bed.

But life had other ideas.

After three years in the south (grad school & teaching), I returned to UMaine as an instructor of English in my late 20s, and ironically, it was there that I became actively involved with Franco issues through my association with the Franco-American Centre. And it was through that engagement that I eventually read articles by Maine-born writer Gregoire Chabot in which he liberally bounced from English to vernacular French—there they were, my long-stored echoes, on the page. Shamelessly resurrected, reified, validated—in print! I can’t be sure of the exact timeframe here, but it was around then that I began submitting pieces to Le Forum, in English but under French pseudonyms, including J.B. Nouille (half-frog) and Jean-Pierre Levesque, and publicly exploring linguistic and cultural issues. And it was a bit later that I began writing vignettes involving my Franco-American family background (see three accompanying examples). [we will provide hyperlinks to those]

So, although I never achieved fluency in French (even after French-immersion in Quebec), and never was able to bring my cellar-dwelling Franco self into integrated alignment with my workaday public persona, I was finally able to allow the deeply embedded cultural and family issues side-door entrance into my writing.

And speaking of the French-immersion course in Quebec reminds me of how my buried French side emerged quite dramatically there. First, as my then partner Joanna (now my wife) observed, my body language shifted visibly, looser, more springy—almost as if my interior sound track had slid from andante to allegro. And surprisingly to me, my Jean-Pierre self began emerging so assertively that when the program staff distributed forms asking us to indicate our preferences for attending certain activities, Jean-Pierre insisted on his own preferences, distinct from Jim’s, so I went along and filled out two forms, one in his name, one in Jim’s. I remember, while sitting around a campfire one evening, a perceptive staff member saying to me en français, “I don’t think you are like this at home, are you?” Mostly not, I had to admit, but Jean-Pierre was staking his claim.

SR: You mentioned earlier studying in grad school under a modern poetry professor influenced by the New Critics for whom close readings of written work should never consider biographical elements from the authors’ lives. And more recently, so-called “confessional poetry,” which focusses centrally on the actual lives of the writer, similarly came under the gun of certain  literary critics. You've shared with me the question of whether inclusion of biographical elements in your work could be deemed "confessional” in that sense. Would you tell us more? 

JB: “Confessional poetry” is a loaded term and covers a multitude of sins. Technically, it refers to poetry that includes specific references to the life of its author, a rather neutral descriptor, but the word “confessional” suggests a kind of purgative function, or discharge of one’s messier biographical features. Sometimes, including the messes of one’s compatriots, in the sense of exposé (readers can readily supply their own examples).

Some of my poems do refer specifically to autobiographical incidents and personages, most often mother, father, wife, sons. And the first-person singular (lower case i) is often used throughout the Mother Tongue poems and later work, indicating a personal context to the particular observations. So in the strictly technical sense of the term, I guess one could call those poems “confessional.” And certainly the focal moods and states of mind described are my own. But to make an important distinction, my poems don’t share much with early “confessional poets” like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton. And even some of the poets so labeled have bridled at the designation, with good reason, I think.

Regarding biographical elements in my own work, I believe that the more acutely and tellingly I can frame specific references in my work (biographical or otherwise), the more deeply those details will come to life for others, strike a kind of universal chord. When I mention in one vignette, for example, the little detail of catching something of the gait and bearing of my father in my own reflection in a shop window in passing, calling up so much about my father’s psychic stance in life, and my inherited qualities, that specific detail should call up timeless issues of fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, for which most readers will experience their own variations. And the point is not to put my father, or any father, “in his place,” but, at least momentarily, to enter into his space, to witness him sympathetically in the context of his own being. And to be informed and deepened by that experience.

Though let me be clear: the “shadow side” of human existence is avoided at great loss. It is where the hungry ghosts reside, across the mythical River Lethe, and where poets immemorial have dared venture to encounter those ghosts and extract their secrets. I think much of my writing, my later writing in particular, almost instinctively, gravitates into that foreboding but enticing realm. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, and persistent, the ghosts relent (e.g., “Night Mere”), and writer and reader emerge a bit less encumbered for the endeavor. That’s been the experience from my end anyway. And worth the price of the ticket.

SR: You earlier referred to a year you took off from teaching to write and discover your writer’s “voice.” And here you’ve suggested certain qualities of that voice, consistent with your native state of mind. Can you talk a little more about your understanding of “voice” in poetry, and your poetic voice in particular?

JB: When you think of how different the voices of some of the poets I mentioned earlier—Whitman, Dickens, Hopkins, Williams, Plath, for example—there seems little common denominator. You’d think you wouldn’t have to think much about it—after all, don’t we all have a voice? Why not just spit it out onto the page? Well, maybe poets like Frank O’Hara, say, or a Kerouac, a McClure, could reel off their “first take, best take” impressions straight onto the page, but even that kind of “spontaneity” is usually prefaced by sustained ardent immersion in the writing of a wide range of literary traditions. And even the plain-spoken, demotic quality of W. C. Williams’s work, which I mentioned earlier, conceals much careful deliberation in the making.

I said that I found my voice as a poet when I went to Pemaquid, but I didn’t go there with that express intent. I went there to write every day and see what might come of it. What happens is this: you listen as the voice in your head transmits words, phrases, lines onto the page. And the words look back at you and begin to tell you what they’re after, and where they’re falling short. You rephrase, delete, reassemble—a tone and structure begin to emerge that feel integral to the poem’s intention. And as you repeat this process over days and months, a characteristic tonality emerges from poem to poem that becomes your signature imprint, your “voice,” how you are recognized and distinguished on the page.

There’s more than a grain of truth in the cliché, “How do I know who I am until I hear what I have to say?” I think those intense periods of writing helped reveal something to me about how I receive and perceive and assemble my vision of the world. A certain “split-screen” view of things became more evident in my writing than I had been aware of beforehand in that way. And in turn, it’s made me curious about the source(s) of that bifurcation. What part that working-class Catholic boyhood may have played in this, seeing things from ground level and some more celestial perch at the same time? Or the turbulence of my family home, having to suspend part of myself in a safer interior space while avoiding the domestic land mines that could go off at any time. And for that matter, what about my attraction, as a writer, to the “shadow side” of human experience. I don’t know, but it’s been useful having certain native tendencies echoed back to me in print, and having the chronological distance now to consider them anew.

SR: What are you working on now?

 JB: Not to be flip, but I’m basically working at staying alive. Time catches up with one sooner or later. Faculties erode. Appreciation for life remains, gratitude even, for longevity, possibly a little wisdom.  But my own creative powers, while still burbling in there on most days—words, words, words, seeking shape— seem less inclined to issue discrete new poems, or ones I would care to share anyway. Still, I’ve been working with revisions and reworkings of stored files of incomplete drafts, poetry and prose, of which there are quite a slew. It’s slow going and there’s always a question of what pieces warrant further attention and what just needs to be let go. I’d very much like to pull together a “complete works” manuscript to leave when I go off to my next assignment. I’m in no hurry—haven’t called it a day quite yet.

Finally, let me note, Steven, that this interview process has reactivated my thinking about a number of issues related to my work, and might even jump start a new stream of writing, so thank you for that infusion. And I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of readers of Résonance on any of the topics we’ve touched on. I regularly check my email at: jbishop@maine.edu