Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station": Word Choices, Sounds, and Silences

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

--Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979

I've always been struck by Bishop's craft expertise in her work, and "Filling Station" typifies her attention to not only what a poem means but how a poem means something.

For instance, most of us would probably not begin a poem with the exclamation "Oh": Bad poems often start with such ohs that signal to the reader the speaker's emotional and possibly spiritual state: "I'm in a state of rare sensitivity; I've reached the sublime and I want you to be ready for my oracular exhortations." But Bishop's use of "Oh" is quite the contrary: the speaker is a snob whose initial reaction to the scene at hand is one of disgust. Consequently, Bishop's word choice from the very first phoneme is an apt one. And, luckily for the poem and for us, the term "filling station" was a commonplace during Bishop's and even during my childhood; "gas station" wouldn't have the same effect that "filling station" can and will have in the poem. (And I'm old enough to remember that Exxon was once Esso: the penultimate trope in the last stanza wouldn't have the same soothing effect with the term Exxon.)

And I love how Bishop repeats various sounds for evocative reinforcement of the speaker's experience: Oh, oil-soaked, oil-permeated, and over-all echo the first utterance so that when a reader actually reads aloud the poem, the vowels harp upon each other just as popular songs dig into a listener's cognitive awareness that can't literally be defined but can be mouthed over and over. Music has that effect: certain vibrations in the air hit the eardrums and work their magic. (Was it William Carlos Williams who said that prose is written to be read whereas poetry is written to be heard?)

Such repetitions of words and sounds seamlessly work throughout the poem, and Bishop also utilizes modifiers in a masterly manner. For example, in addition to the hyphenated adjectives, she expertly inserts adjectives that some MFA graduates would never do (a certain "school" in the Midwest comes to my mind): the sons are "quick," "saucy," and "greasy"; the station is "quite thoroughly" dirty; the wickerwork is "crushed" and "grease-impregnated"; the doily is "big" and "dim"; the begonia (one of my favorite plant names) is "big" and "hirsute"; the automobiles are "high-strung." One might associate such adjective usage with Southern poets like Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey, but, in fact, Bishop's contemporaries were not shy of modifiers: Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead and John Berryman's Dream Songs have a multitude of modifiers that, if deleted, would be similar to taking out certain notes in Muddy Waters' music or limiting Georgia O'Keefe's palette to just blues and greens. Does this mean one should go adjective and adverb crazy? Of course not, but Bishop's craft awareness illustrates what's possible when one uses great care when writing and revising one's work.

And another craft element that's noticeable in Bishop's poetry is her awareness of the length of her utterances and where the pauses, the silences, occur. Look at the third stanza: She starts with a heavily end-stopped line; the second line has a natural caesura at the end; the third line has a medial caesura but ends with a run-on which lends a greater emphasis to the beginning of the fourth line; within the fourth line, a ever so soft caesura occurs after "crushed" and then the line utilizes enjambment like the previous one; the fifth line is heavily end-stopped; the sixth line is enjambed; the seventh line, like the third line, has a medial caesura. Bishop's utterances combine repetition and variation, the corrective push and pull of well-crafted lines; as Donald Hall notes, such tension is similar to what corrects one's teeth: "Damn braces."

Craft in the hands of someone like Bishop can make us all the more appreciative of what's possible when one hammers away until the result shimmers and eternally breathes.

Proposition 8 and Constitutional and Historical Awareness

Months of the year have unique historical or emotional associations for some of us. For example, ever since I was an elementary school student, August is the month that forever mushrooms over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a young boy in Fresno, I would connect such incredible, world-ending heat to the wilting August temperatures outside our swamp-cooled house on Poppy Street. Of course, no amount of my imaginative powers could ever come close to the reality that hundreds of thousands of Japanese experienced on and--for those who survived the blasts--after those two infamous days in August 1945. History often has that effect: Our human brains strive to make connections to what can seem almost as abstract and as memorable as a Pablo Picasso painting.

Today is one of those days in history that will be added to my August consciousness: A federal court judge struck down California's Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.

Some might ask, "Why is this ruling so important to you, especially if you're not gay?"

I'm a believer in the Constitution of the United States and in The Bill of Rights, and I've always considered the Fourteenth Amendment and its "Equal Protection Clause" as crucial for people who are not members of "the majority." We have a history of the majority wanting to place restrictions on various minority groups; for instance, at one time we permitted slavery and we denied women the right to vote. And just because we have a U.S. Supreme Court doesn't mean inequalities can be quickly ended; past Supreme Court decisions led to various "Jim Crow" laws that manifested the so-called "separate but equal" mentality that I'm certain some people still crave (the Tea Party's mantra, "Give us back our country," strikes me as dangerously nostalgic for what were ugly times for people not in the majority). The 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education Supreme Court ruling still bothers some who don't want their children to attend integrated schools, and the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling, which put an end to anti-miscegenation laws, must still bother those who think that whites should not marry blacks for whatever sad, ill-conceived reasons.

And such people who don't like interracial marriages, integrated schools, or homosexual marriages have every right to hold such views, but today's ruling reinforces what we all must remember: Constitutional rights can never to be denied simply because a majority of voters deem them as deniable.

The United States of America was and still is an ideal on paper that with the passage of time struggles to become a reality, and today's decision is just one more step toward that reality.

Illness and Love

I've been ill lately; my body at times seems to belong to someone much older (at least in my head I'm still an awkward teen who longs for love but will settle for groping in a darkened theater--the prose of B movies swirling about private parts slightly tinged with the odor of moldy linen).

And, becalmed even at this hour of the morning as my dog sleeps on without me, I somehow know my health will come back, like the old French cinema classic where the boy approaches the sea, looks out, and turns back toward land, toward the humans despite the additional blows that await him.

I am in love, actually; no, not with another human, though she is nearing me just as deliberately as I swerve her way, but with this hour when the blood can't seem to fall asleep but nudges me: "Go ahead, it won't hurt, really."

Clearly, I'm strung out just as the heavens do their sleepwalk over my small rooftop; the hunter Orion has no choice but to clarify this dark patch of sky, for we all hunt for what we need, cleansed by God knows what, spurred by ill health and the promise of jam and cookies and a cool hand on our foreheads.

If I say, "This might be poetry," I would not win my case in court; if I say, "This is love," I would not win your heart. But why say anything at all if meaning is just subjective spark plugs firing in our brains; why say "I'm in love" if it matters, at best, only to me?

My doctor wants me to take tests that require induced sleep, a temporary "death," so to speak; a machine would breathe for me, but would a machine also dream for me? And in the tunnel that would surely guide me back, would I linger if only to scrawl on the walls just how much I love what can't be seen?

Arizona: The New Nuremberg

In 1935, Nazi Germany instituted the Nuremberg Race Laws that basically deprived German Jews their rights as citizens and demoted them to "subjects." Jews were banned from marrying anyone of the "Aryan" race; even young non-Jewish women age 45 and under weren't allowed to be employed by Jews as housekeepers. German citizenship would only be granted to those who were of Aryan, non-Jewish ancestry and such citizenship could only be proven by actual documents that German citizens had to carry. The Nuremberg Race Laws set into motion a legal ethos that would ultimately spur Hitler and his minions to embrace the "Final Solution": the extermination of all Jewish people within the Third Reich.

Hitler understood that the majority of non-Jewish German people would accept such laws and the resulting crimes against humanity if they could rationalize to themselves, "It's the law: We have to follow it." More importantly, the rest of the world idly sat by and did nothing to combat the Nuremberg Race Laws; in America, a number of states had anti-miscegenation laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court did not uniformly ban anti-miscegenation laws until 1967 in the Loving v. Virginia decision.

Arizona's new immigration law (that gives non-federal Arizona law enforcement agencies the power to stop, question, and arrest potentially undocumented, "illegal" immigrants) takes it cue from Hitler's Nuremberg Race Laws. Numerous Arizonans and others across the country see the law as something they must accept; after all, it's a legal proclamation that was ushered in with an unusual amount of fanfare (most laws enacted by state legislatures don't receive such media attention); those who support the law say it's necessary to stem the influx of undocumented workers from other countries--namely, Mexican laborers.

Of course, supporters of the Arizona law would be terribly angered to be placed in the same catergory as supporters of the Nuremberg Race Laws and the National Socialists of the Third Reich. But the Arizona law has the same effect: Certain people will be targeted by law enforcement and the justice system and others will not simply because of their appearance, their physical surroundings, and their names. (Remember, often before police stop a vehicle, they call in a vehicle's license plate to get a tentative identification of the registered owner's name.)

In Germany, if one was blond, light-skinned, and blue-eyed--and didn't have a Jewish surname, one was above suspicion. In Arizona, if one is blond, light-skinned, and blue-eyed--and doesn't have a Spanish surname, that person can walk, work, and drive in Arizona without any fear of being stopped and questioned by local or state police about his or her legal right to be in Arizona.

And like the Jews in Nazi Germany, mostly Mexican undocumented workers are blamed for a host of ills: they're killing citizens; they're lowering the standards of living for citizens; they're taxing our educational and health systems. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda, made similar complaints about Jews. And this weekend, I heard radio talk show "personality" Bill Cunningham make similar complaints about mostly Mexican undocumented workers (and he's not alone; just listen to almost any radio talk show host on so-called "conservative" radio or on Fox News and you'll hear the same message).

Goebbels knew that the airwaves and print media had to be controlled and deluged with negative propaganda about Jews if Hitler's dream of an all Aryan society was to become a reality. Likewise, in America today one rarely hears a radio or television talk show host note how we benefit daily from undocumented workers: they harvest, pack, and ship our inexpensive food, they bus our tables in restaurants, they mow our lawns, they build our houses and replace our roofs and remodel our kitchens, they fix our cars and recycle our old tires, they take care of our children in daycare centers, they attend to our elderly in rest homes--and I never hear people complain about the money they routinely save when they benefit from undocumented workers' labor. Just as the Jews were scapegoated for most of the societal problems in Nazi Germany, so are undocumented Mexican immigrants scapegoated in the United States.

What can we do to combat this terrible return to a Nuremberg-like mentality that has been codified by an Arizona law? We can boycott Arizona; we can refuse to buy anything that comes from Arizona, especially things bought online, and we can refuse to visit the state to add to the state's coffers as tourists. Will this boycott hurt Arizonans? Yes, but Martin Luther King, Jr., realized when he organized the Montgomery bus boycotts that those in power will be more eager to rectify a wrong when they hurt financially.

On May 1, 2010, Cardinal Roger Mahoney of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles said to a crowd protesting the Arizona law that no one is "illegal" in God's eyes. Amen.

Are We Writing Toward Memorable Words?

As 2010 approaches, I realize that my main goal as a poet hasn't changed at all: I want to write memorable words.

And that's a difficult task when "po-biz" looms over many poets and writers. Often, without realizing it, we might think of ourselves as failures if we haven't published X amount in a year or haven't won an award recently. I remember one former creative writing teacher of mine who said the lines someone writes at this hour might be "the best lines written on the planet, but po-biz doesn't exist for such lines," and he might very well be right.

Imagine, for a moment, if Emily Dickinson had diminished her poetic ambition because she could only publish a half dozen poems and wasn't encouraged by the powers that be during her lifetime; the world would be diminished if we didn't have her verse that she wrote for the dresser drawer--and for the ages. Although Dickinson wrote approximately 1700 poems, at least two dozen of those poems would easily qualify as memorable words; others might find three or four dozen poems by Dickinson that are indeed memorable to them.

But even those who bask in "po-biz" can find themselves wondering about their accomplishments. Robert Frost, probably the most heralded poet in the 20th century, had misgivings about the quality of his work; one need only read Donald Hall's fine pieces on Frost to discover that even multiple Pulitzer prizes couldn't keep Frost happy. And that's probably why Frost never let up on the ambition he had for his poems even into his old age--he wanted his work "to last."

How does one know if one's words will last? Well, one will never know; that's history's business, but it's still a good thing to nudge one's self when revising (when the real writing begins) and to step back and ask (especially after months have passed during a poem's creation), "Are those words still as interesting as they were when I last inspected them?"

If poets routinely asked themselves such a question, the world would be an even finer place than it already is.

Let us start 2010 by asking ourselves such a basic question every time we think a poem, a short story, a play, or a novel is ready to be let loose upon the world.

What's the Appeal of AMC's Mad Men?

I've viewed AMC's Mad Men for at least a few episodes (partly because of the success the show had at the latest Emmy's), and I think I've ascertained the series' appeal: Like most 1950s fare, people of color aren't visible or viable as equals, and homosexuality exists elsewhere.

The series certainly has a lot of sex appeal, for one aspect of the so-called Eisenhower years is the mistaken belief that sexual lust and longing didn't exist (even Eisenhower had a mistress, a female soldier who was his aide during his military years). The women on Mad Men wear those bullet-shaped bras that remind me of those worn by my second grade teacher, Mrs. F, who always struck me as a sexy witch of sorts (yes, little boys do have sexual fantasies). I was--and probably still am--in love with Mrs. F partly because even then I sensed she represented the "ideal" woman of that era: physically beautiful, well educated, and white.

But, I suspect the series' main attraction is the viewer's ability to immerse one's self into a world that must seem simplistically nostalgic: The main actors and actresses are all white. If one were to complain about such an apartheid-like series, those in control could use history to validate the cast: "Why, people of color rarely worked in the advertising arena back then."

And there's the main appeal of Mad Men: It allows viewers to remember--and vicariously participate in--a simplified existence that wasn't complicated by difference other than the eternal tensions between genders--heterosexual tensions, that is, which also reassures those who voted for Proposition 8 in California.

The series should be titled Mad White Men, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs are ardent fans of the show, for I can't imagine those men and other like-minded individuals to even be aware of the negative effects such "nostalgia" television might have on all viewers: Does it help us minimize the importance of race and diversity in our lives? Does it reinforce heterosexuality as the "norm"?

Will I continue to view the show? I doubt it, for I ultimately find it boring because of the stereotypes and the blandness of the world depicted. But I'm sure others will look forward to each episode precisely because of what it doesn't depict: The world we live in.

How to Select an M.F.A. Program

An ambitious creative writing student recently asked me to give my opinion about a specific creative writing program. Instead of giving information that might not be useful, I passed along advice given to me (by someone whose opinions matter to me) some time ago when I was nearing the end of my undergraduate years.

First, he suggested that I ask myself one very important question: "What do I want from a graduate creative writing program other than an M.F.A.?" (I had already decided that I didn't want to pursue an M.A.; such degrees generally don't meet the minimum requirements for tenure-track positions in creative writing at most four-year colleges and universities.)

I wanted a mentor whose work and personality appealed to me. When Richard Hugo was alive, I had decided to make the University of Montana my ultimate destination; he struck me as not only a wonderfully talented poet but also as a very giving human being, someone I wanted as a mentor (I fell in love with the guy after he gave a reading at Fresno State). I had already studied with Phil Levine (and I think I hold the record for taking Levine's poetry workshops: five semesters over a number of years). Hence, I was lucky to have had one great teacher, for Levine was great (and Hugo's great teacher was Roethke and, as Hugo noted, such a claim is impossible to prove--so be it), and I had heard that Hugo was Levine's equal in the workshop: tough to please, incredibly well-read, and a blast to be around. But when Hugo died, my desire for another mentor like Levine diminished (this isn't to say that great mentors aren't out there; nevertheless, greatness in any discipline is a rarity).

In addition to a mentor, I wanted training and experience in teaching composition. Most M.F.A. degree holders often have to teach composition simply because there's more need for composition instructors than creative writing instructors. Consequently, I made sure that the program I attended had to give me at least an opportunity to teach composition: The University of California at Irvine requires all M.F.A. candidates to not only take the seminar in rhetoric and the teaching of composition but also to teach composition for several quarters. That training (which also involved weekly meetings with various composition course directors) has been an invaluable aid to me over the years.

But I also wanted experience teaching creative writing. And, lo and behold, the program I attended also expects all of the M.F.A. candidates to teach creative writing in their specific genre. Fortunately, I got to teach beginning poetry writing for two quarters (and I was not alone: the majority of my fellow M.F.A. candidates taught such workshops for at least two quarters). I couldn't imagine earning a terminal degree and not get some teaching experience within my area of specialization.

Of course, a number of schools offer mentors, composition training, and opportunities to teach creative writing. But I was also given advice about how to distinguish a college from a university: "Your seminars should be geared toward Ph.D. candidates: You want the level of rigor to be worthy of a terminal degree." And, I must admit, the graduate literature seminars I attended were valuable to me partly because I knew I was competing--yes, graduate school is a form of competition: You're trying to distinguish yourself from and among your peers--with Ph.D. candidates at a school known for its critical theory emphasis (sadly, poets and fiction writers are stereotyped as "not scholarly" or as "non-academics" by some professors of literature).

And most universities (and not simply colleges renamed as universities) require teaching loads of no more than five courses a year; some more enlightened universities require their tenure-track faculty to teach only four courses a year. In contrast, most state colleges (regardless of what they call themselves) require their faculty to teach six or more courses a year. Lighter teaching loads result in more time for faculty to do research (which benefits students) and to meet with students.

True universities offer terminal degrees in numerous disciplines. Hence, if you're contemplating getting an M.F.A. from a school that does not offer a Ph.D. in English, that school is probably a state college, not a true university. As a result, the faculties at such schools often have trouble securing positions at Ph.D. granting institutions for a variety of reasons: They haven't made names for themselves in their areas of expertise; their publication records or awards often aren't as impressive as their peers, etc.

Paul Fussell, author of the humorous yet insightful text Class, notes that very few universities actually exist; one sign of "normal" schools posing as universities involves their departments of education: If the greatest number of graduates leave with single or multiple subject teaching credentials, the school is definitely not a university.

If this all sounds somewhat snooty and downright snobbish, the harsh reality is that hiring committees often interview--and ultimately hire--applicants who attended prestigious graduate schools.

No wonder various publications that rate graduate schools (such as the guide published by U.S. News and World Report) sell in the thousands each year and for good reason: Graduate students want the best educations they can afford. And that means some will have to attend a nearby Podunk U. or Ag Tech out of sheer financial necessity--not the worst thing in the world, for such schools (like the one I attended as an undergraduate) just might have a Phil Levine or a Richard Hugo (I think of the University of Montana at Missoula as an Ag Tech--forgive me former and current residents of Missoula).

However, exceptions exist that might cause us to ignore such advice.

Considered by many to be one of the best schools in the nation, the University of California at Berkeley doesn't even have an M.F.A. program in creative writing. Hence, if I were considering M.F.A. programs, UC Berkeley wouldn't even rate a look. But I do know that Bharati Mukherjee teaches at UCB; she's one of the best contemporary fiction writers in the world (I'm waiting for her to win the Nobel, just as for years I waited for J. M. Coetzee to win--and he finally did), so if I were a potential graduate student, I might postpone my need for an M.F.A. until after I've studied with Mukherjee (I'm a greater fan of her short stories than of her novels, though this is quibbling on my part: She has the "right stuff" regardless of the length of her works).

No matter what criteria we utilize to guide us, if we consider our uppermost needs, we can make the right decisions.