[New-Poetry] Bishop's drafts cause uproar

[Michael Snider]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 6:21 PM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> I haven't seen the whole Vendler argument against...has others
> read it?  (There is just about a paragraph or two on the New  
> Republic's
> online site.) Vendler seems to be arguing that the book is engaging
> in 'false advertising'...that the pieces published in the _Edgar  
> Allan Poe_
> collection were never meant to see the light of day. But it would seem
> that the state of the manuscript copies, evidence from letters, the  
> way
> the material was organized, etc., should be able to tell a scholar or
> careful editor something about how Bishop felt about an unpublished  
> piece.
> And certainly there is precedence for books tracing the successive  
> drafts
> of famous poems...so I don't know what the gripe would be about that.
>
> A poem, obviously a successive draft, organized with other
> poems in similar state in a binder or folder of some kind, poems
> sent in a letter to another poet (like M. Moore) for comment, etc.,
> may very well be 'finished' (or abandoned per Auden via Valery)
> but, for this or that reason remained unsuited for collection.
> A few scribble lines from a notebook or on a lipsticked stained
> cocktail napkin might be stretch to call 'unpublished'.
> Finnegan
>

The entire review is online here: http://www.powells.com/review/ 
2006_04_06

It seems entirely sensible to me; Iv'e looked though the boojk a  
number of times at bookstores and not bought it once--and I love  
Bishop's poetry. Of course particular scholars might need access to  
this sort of material, but I think it does Bishop no good.

Mike S