[New-Poetry] Bishop's drafts cause uproar

[JforJames at aol.com]

http://www.slate.com/id/2143626/ 
Casual Perfection 
Why did the publication of Elizabeth Bishop's drafts  cause an uproar? 
By Meghan O'Rourke 
Posted Tuesday, June 13, 2006, at 12:43 PM ET   
Elizabeth Bishop 
Elizabeth  Bishop was a famously meticulous writer. In a poem Robert Lowell 
once wrote for  her, he asked, "Do/ you still hang your words in air, ten 
years/ unfinished,  glued to your notice board, with gaps/ or empties for the 
unimaginable phrase—/  unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?" It's no wonder, 
then, that the  recent publication of Bishop's hitherto uncollected poems, 
drafts, and fragments  in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, 
encountered fierce  resistance, and some debate about the value of making 
this work available to the  public. In an outraged piece for The New Republic, 
Helen Vendler labeled the  drafts "maimed and stunted" and rebuked Farrar, 
Straus and Giroux  for choosing to publish the volume. But  the posthumous 
publication of drafts is hardly an uncommon practice. What  exactly is it about 
publishing her drafts that seems so troubling to so  many?
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