Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     A poem creates an interior – Frost’s “strange barn” with its own laws and geometry, but laws and geometry all the same. What it contains is also interior; that is fundamental, ordinarily ungraspable things here given shape. However far it may reach, a poem should be arranged so that once inside it, you can see everywhere at once. There should also be a door or window: a hint of the long view.

     Elizabeth Bishop described her watercolours (collected in William Benson’s Exchanging Hats) as “Not Art, NOT AT ALL”. While skilful and delightful, they are less remarkable as paintings than as a vivid illustration of her poetics. ‘Interior With Extension Cord’ is a strange barn indeed, and I turn to it as a picture of how a poem might be built.

     While “not art”, this picture is ebulliently artful. The white (clapboard?) walls and ceilings that take up most of the space are watery and only faintly striped. This tenuous structure is glued together by hard black lines that delineate the edges of the walls and door and act like arrows, directing the eye into the corner. Showing us how to see as she sees, what it is that interests her here, is more important to the poet than realism.

     It’s not just the composition that interests Bishop, but what it does to the eye. The ridiculously long extension cord is an even thicker black line tacked from the little lamp it serves, all the way up one wall and across the ceiling in the foreground, skewing the perspective. The lines of the floorboards reflect those of the ceiling, adding to the pull into the corner but stopping abruptly just before meeting the edge of the foreground, arrested by a couple of impatient horizontal strokes that align with the extension cord instead. This creates a frame within the picture like those found in seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, reminding the viewer that what they see has been mediated and limited.

     For me, the impulse to write a poem often comes from making sense of how things work. This might be a play of forces or a visual conundrum like that created here by the corner and the cord. Painting is another way to explore pattern, machinery and design, as Bishop did in her poetry all the time, turning the realignments of daybreak into the coupling of trains and switching of tracks. Her patience with exact detail is seen here in the four-legged stool with its twelve struts – the most solid object in the room. Bishop learnt a great deal about observation from Marianne Moore, of whom she said, “If she speaks of a chair, you can practically sit on it when she has finished”. Moore may have been more elegant, but Bishop’s wobbly stool is no mere prop.

     Description on its own, however beautiful and precise, is not enough. There must be drama. In a Bishop poem, the landscape and furniture are part of the dramatic action and it is the same in this picture. That stool sits between a table and a doorway, accentuating human absence by indicating the two different directions in which someone who had been sitting on it might have gone. It is as austere and uncomfortable-looking as the room itself, adding to the air of transience created by those diluted walls; the bare floor; and the careless tacking not only of the extension cord but also of a couple of indiscernible paintings and a lopsided sign, to the walls. The table is an adapted ledge on which the lamp is precariously balanced. The sturdiest piece of furniture is a white cupboard which, though firmly outlined, sinks into wall, unsettling the picture’s gravity and echoing Bishop’s poem ‘Love Lies Sleeping’: “As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away/ through ninety dark degrees/ the bureau lies on the wall”. This is also reminiscent of Vuillard, whom Bishop admired and whose interiors are similarly galvanised, in one case by his sister dissolving into the wallpaper.

     The muted colours of the picture are as misleading as Bishop’s modulated poetic tone. Beneath the smooth surface are extremes of mood and perspective: the black stool and white walls; the solid warmth of the yellow lamp; and the cord upsetting everything, more like a fuse leading to a bomb. It seems to me that the more coherent the surface, the more intensity it can contain, and that disturbance that takes some discerning is simply more interesting. But the skin of a poem must be taut enough for the reader to be able to trace what lies beneath it or it remains a cool surface. Bishop was expert at this balance, able to sustain excitement while remaining coherent and clear. I am still weighing it up.

     Apart from Bishop’s sweep across the floor and the things hung on the walls, there are other frames in the picture. A bulky rail on casters is included, but only its very edge. Instead of allowing the lines of the room to wander away, Bishop stops them with this abrupt vertical that directs the gaze up towards the source of the extension cord in the top left-hand corner. The sliver of wall you can see through the rail is almost like glass, making the thing into a mirror. I thought it was a mirror until I made out the boards behind it, a doubletake Bishop would insist on remaining part of the picture, as in “Shadows, or are they shallows”; “inverted and distorted. No. I mean/ distorted and revealed”; “It may be solid, may be hollow”.

     There is also the doorway, heavily outlined and with no visible door. Beyond it is what might be a bush in flower or a heaped-up wilderness. Either way, this is certainly more than a garden. The faint dark wash behind is given scale by the thin line of sky that tops it. This is a mountain, faraway hills; in any case, the long view.

     The excitement of this picture, of Bishop’s poems, is in the open door and the extension cord: the distance one can travel and the doubletakes that make the journey so surprising. Above all, it has the dynamic perception Bishop enjoyed in Hopkins, “the releasing, checking, timing and repeating of the movement of the mind”. Bishop encourages a poet to let slip and then set to, as she said to Miss Pierson, “There is a mystery & a surprise and after that a great deal of hard work”. And as with the lucky unknown Miss Pierson, it makes a difference if you remember to enclose a stamp.