Widely acclaimed by both critics and readers as one of the most bracing and intense poets working today, Frank Bidart is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including, most recently, Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013), which won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2014 PEN/Voelcker Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965—90 (FSG, 1991). His many awards and honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for The War of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1981. From 2003 to 2009, Bidart served as a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
About Bidart’s work, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has said, “More fiercely, more obsessively, more profoundly than any poet since Berryman, Bidart explores individual guilt, the insoluble dilemma.” And The New York Times notes that Bidart “writes through passion, leaving out all but the statements that seem essential to the soul, the desire, the wisdom or the memory at hand.”
A friend of both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Bidart’s first books, Golden State and The Book of the Body, both published in the 1970s, gained critical attention and praise, but his reputation as a poet of uncompromising originality was made with The Sacrifice, published in 1983. Essential to that originality are Bidart’s trademark dramatic monologues — including poems written in the voices of dancers, victims of bulimia, and murderers — as well as his long, episodic “Hour of the Night” poems, of which he has published four so far in his lifetime.
Raised in California, Bidart attended the University of California—Riverside and Harvard University. In 2007, Bidart’s work was the subject of Fastening the Voice to the Page, a book-length discussion of Bidart’s work that features contributions from Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, Robert Lowell, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and many others.
Selected poems
by Frank Bidart
was exorcism.
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Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.
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Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.
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He read “The Case of Ellen West” as a senior in college and immediately wanted to write a poem about it but couldn’t so he stored it, as he has stored so much that awaits existence.
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Unlike Ellen he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.
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Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise, reconciliation is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reaches at last, in an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.
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He was grateful he was not impelled to live out the war in his body, hiding in compromise, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.
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The particularity inherent in almost all narrative, though contingent and exhausting, tells the story of the encounter with particularity that flesh as flesh must make.
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“Ellen West” was written in the year after his mother’s death.
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By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on which his life was founded he had no right to live.
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No use for him to tell himself that he shouldn’t feel this because he felt this.
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He didn’t think this but he thought this.
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After she died his body wanted to die, but his brain, his cunning, didn’t.
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He likes narratives with plots that feel as if no one willed them.
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His mother in her last year revealed that she wanted him to move back to Bakersfield and teach at Bakersfield college and live down the block.
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He thought his mother, without knowing that this is what she wanted, wanted him to die.
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All he had told her in words and more than words for years was that her possessiveness and terror at his independence were wrong, wrong, wrong.
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He was the only person she wanted to be with but he refused to live down the block and then she died.
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It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone
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Out of the thousand myriad voices, thousand myriad stories in each human head, when his mother died, there was Ellen West.
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This is the body that you can draw out of you to expel from you the desire to die.
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Give it a voice, give each scene of her life a particularity and necessity that in Binswanger’s recital are absent.
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Enter her skin so that you can then make her other and expel her.
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Survive her.
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Animal mind, eating the ground of Western thought, the “mind-body” problem.
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She, who in the last months of her life abandoned writing poems in disgust at the failure of her poems, is a poem.
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She in death is incarnated on a journey whose voice is the voice of her journey.
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Arrogance of Plutarch, of Shakespeare and Berlioz, who thought they made what Cleopatra herself could not make.
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Arrogance of the maker.
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Werther killed himself and then young men all over Europe imitated him and killed themselves but his author, Goethe, cunning master of praxis, lived.
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Frank thought when anything is made it is made not by its likeness, not by its twin or mirror, but its opposite.
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Ellen in his poem asks Without a body, who can know himself at all?
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In your pajamas, you moved down the stairs just to the point where the adults couldn’t yet see you, to hear more clearly the din, the sweet cacophony of adults partying.
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Phonograph voices among them, phonograph voices, their magpie beauty.
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Sweet din.
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Magpie beauty.
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One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something out of not knowing enough.
Copyright © 2013 by Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog, Farrar, Straus and Giroux