{"id":38035,"date":"2012-09-04T14:12:28","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T18:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=38035"},"modified":"2012-09-04T15:23:58","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T19:23:58","slug":"map-quest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/04\/map-quest\/","title":{"rendered":"Map Quest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The draw of the Yeah Yeah Yeah\u2019s classic breakup song \u201cMaps\u201d is that it is as plainly sad as possible. \u201cWait,\u201d the band\u2019s lead singer, Karen O, sings over and over, \u201cthey don\u2019t love you like I love you.\u201d But \u201cMaps\u201d is also enigmatic: beyond its abject chorus, the lyrics are cryptic, with verses that are brief and opaque\u2014\u201cPacked up \/ Don\u2019t Stray \/ Oh say, say, say \/ Oh say, say, say.\u201d Karen O repeats maps<\/em>, plaintive and without context, stretching the word\u2019s aaa<\/em> over four bars.<\/p>\n

According to fan mythology, \u201cMaps\u201d is an acronym for \u201cmy Angus please stay,\u201d referencing Liars lead singer Angus Andrew, whom Karen O has said the song is about. There may be other ways to read the song\u2019s title, though. \u201cMaps\u201d evokes the physical and metaphorical distance that is felt from a lover who is leaving. It is a kind of emotional cartography, mapping two people\u2019s painful journeys away from one another. This will serve as our foundation: maps aren\u2019t impersonal, objective. They aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As a prelude to her 1976 collection of poems, Geography III<\/em>, Elizabeth Bishop quotes a kind of catechism from a textbook titled First Lessons in Geography<\/em>: \u201cWhat is Geography?\u201d it asks. \u201cA description of the Earth\u2019s surface,\u201d it answers. \u201cWhat is a Map?\u201d \u201cA picture of the whole, or a part, of the Earth\u2019s surface.\u201d \u201cOf what is the Earth\u2019s surface composed?\u201d \u201cLand and water.\u201d It\u2019s as if neutrality, a false remove, is something maps cultivate about themselves: a necessary fiction.<\/p>\n

Bishop\u2019s poetry deals crucially in the same illusion of neutrality centering on the idea of description. The first poem in her first collection, North and South<\/em>, published in 1946, is called \u201cThe Map,\u201d and it is as fortunate an introduction a reader could ask for to the concerns that would mark all of Bishop\u2019s work. It examines a world map with incremental care, noting the map\u2019s colors and the placement of its text, drawing associations in its forms. From the poem\u2019s first line\u2014\u201cLand lies in water\u201d\u2014to its last\u2014\u201cMore delicate than the historians\u2019 are the map-makers\u2019 colors\u201d\u2014she echoes the questions in First Lessons in Geography<\/em> and depicts herself as the mapmaker of the poet she would be.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bishop mainly provided \u201ca description of the Earth\u2019s surface,\u201d and she is a cipher exactly because her gifts appear so plain: How could a poet whose work seems so formal, quiet, and staid, whose mission was so straightforward as to describe, garner devotees from impossibly varying aesthetics, becoming one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century? And why does precise but impartial work inspire such pathos?<\/p>\n

Chiefly because the describer, as much as she might strive for invisibility, is never absent, and poetry and geography create more than they record. Description is a collection of concrete details that privileges a generative subjectivity: one vantage, one interpretation. Bishop\u2019s subjectivity asserts itself in the shifts in scale in her poems\u2014she zooms in and out liberally as in \u201cOver 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,\u201d where she unfavorably compares memories of actual travel to a book of historical illustrations. She describes pictures of \u201cthe squatting Arab,\u201d \u201cthe branches of the date-palms,\u201d and \u201cthe cobbled courtyard,\u201d and then how \u201cthe eye drops, weighted, through the lines \/ the burin made.\u201d Her perspective becomes simultaneously more minute and more broad as she is made aware of both the lines of the illustration and the tool that made them.<\/p>\n

With this mastery of perspective, Bishop\u2019s sense of scale is at times Alice\u2019s Adventures In Wonderland<\/em>\u2013style fanciful. In \u201cCrusoe in England,\u201d the title\u2019s explorer remembers the tiny volcanoes on his island: \u201cI\u2019d think that if they were the size \/ I thought volcanoes should be, then I had \/ become a giant.\u201d Her eye can also shrink objects and bring them close\u2014and in doing so she draws a conscious parallel to mapmaking, as she explains in \u201cThe Map\u201d: \u201cTopography displays no favorites; North\u2019s as near as West.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this Bishop recalls another poet-mapmaker, Richard Hugo, whose poems treated mostly his Montana home and the rest of the western United States. In his poem \u201cMap of Montana in Italy,\u201d Hugo studies a map of Montana where \u201con the right, antelope sail \/ between strands of barbed wire and never \/ get hurt, west, I think, of Plevna\u2026, \/ anyway, on the right, east of the plains.\u201d His muddled use of directional terms\u2014\u201ceast\u201d and \u201cright\u201d indicating the same thing\u2014points to one problem of maps, of a small object, lines printed on paper, standing in for an impossibly large one, land.<\/p>\n

These challenges of language highlight maps\u2019 artificiality, their distance from what they are supposed to represent. After the litany of her travel memories in \u201cOver 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,\u201d Bishop is unsatisfied with the disjointedness of it, of \u201ceverything connected by and and and.\u201d Like memories, maps are artificial because they are self-contained\u2014real experience and terrain are not discrete but continuous. But maps are so self-serious that they are almost adequate. When looking at a map, its falseness is nearly invisible, forgotten\u2014and John Ashbery calls the world of Bishop\u2019s poems \u201calmost as inevitable as \u2018the\u2019 world.\u201d Almost.<\/p>\n

There is the phenomenon while reading Bishop similar to her description of the experience of reading Charles Darwin: \u201cone admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic\u2014and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one \u2026 sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts or minute details.\u201d The forgetful phrase, the sigh, the moment when the mask slips\u2014these lapses carry enormous weight. They are when the world of the description is revealed to be distinct from reality, because the world of the description is contained to the mind of one lonely subject.<\/p>\n

For all her endeavored accuracy, these lapses are surely moments Bishop consciously cultivated\u2014the interaction of the real and the artificial is part of the game she is playing. We have in her poems a world that at times matches nearly seamlessly with \u201cthe\u201d world and one that at other times is a barely disguised performance. In \u201cOver 2,000 Illustrations\u201d she describes \u201cthe specks of birds \/ suspended on invisible threads above the Site \/ or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads,\u201d exposing the riggings that support the scene. A mysterious second voice in \u201cThe Monument\u201d redescribes the scene the first voice has set\u2014beach, sea, sky, and a \u201cmonument\u201d \u201cbuilt \/ like several boxes in descending sizes\u201d\u2014and explicitly highlights its theatricality. \u201cThat queer sea looks made of wood,\u201d the speaker says, \u201chalf-shining, like a driftwood sea. \/ And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud. \/ It\u2019s like a stage-set; it is all so flat!\u201d<\/p>\n

Discontinuity with reality can become a source of pathos: the poem aspires to more than can be contained or expressed. In an essay on Bishop, Ashbery quotes critic David Kalstone as saying that Bishop\u2019s poems \u201cboth describe and set themselves at the limits of description,\u201d and, providing us with a map metaphor, \u201cdetails are also boundaries for Miss Bishop.\u201d The ultimate failure of description, or the failure of details to describe, exposes a surplus of desire. \u201cThe names of cities cross the neighboring mountains,\u201d Bishop describes in \u201cThe Map,\u201d \u201cthe printer here experiencing the same excitement \/ as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

When emotion exceeds its cause, there is the potential for it to transform the objects it encounters. We are told that Bishop\u2019s poem \u201cNight City\u201d is narrated \u201cfrom the plane\u201d and this distance from the ground morphs the city grotesquely. The lights of the city become the body\u2019s systems, \u201cthose flaring acids \/ and variegated bloods\u2026 \/ Diaphanous lymph, \/ bright turgid blood.\u201d Similarly, the roads on Hugo\u2019s map of Montana are \u201cred veins full of rage.\u201d In \u201cMap of Montana in Italy,\u201d the associations Hugo draws are overtly subjective, personal, even possessive: \u201cGlacier Park\u2019s green with my envy,\u201d he writes. We see clearly that description is a kind of projection\u2014to inadvertently return to the lexicon of maps.<\/p>\n

In his treatment of Bishop, Ashbery relates her project as illuminating \u201cthe way we as subjects feel about the objects, living or inert, that encircle us.\u201d How he frames it, this is importantly a relationship predicated on emotion, the way we feel about the objects changing the way we see them\u2014think of how transformative emotion is when the subject and the object are an \u201cI\u201d and a \u201cyou,\u201d Karen O singing, \u201cThey don\u2019t love you like I love you.\u201d Ashbery explains of the fraught existence of the subject that we \u201cconfusedly feel ourselves to be part thing and part thought,\u201d and this confusion is expressed in the acts of describing and observing. \u201cLooking, or attention,\u201d he writes, \u201cwill absorb the object with its meaning.\u201d In this way, the poet\u2019s looking is a more complicated activity than it first appears: meaning and object marry in the poem to create another hybrid of thing and thought, a picture of the self.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Alice Bolin<\/a> is a writer living in Missoula, Montana.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

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The draw of the Yeah Yeah Yeah\u2019s classic breakup song \u201cMaps\u201d is that it is as plainly sad as possible. \u201cWait,\u201d the band\u2019s lead singer, Karen O, sings over and over, \u201cthey don\u2019t love you like I love you.\u201d But \u201cMaps\u201d is also enigmatic: beyond its abject chorus, the lyrics are cryptic, with verses that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":344,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[8567,4228,7184,6034,629,5234,8566,8424,165,7521,8565],"class_list":["post-38035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-angus-andrew","tag-cartography","tag-charles-darwin","tag-david-kalstone","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-john-ashbery","tag-karen-o","tag-maps","tag-poetry","tag-richard-hugo","tag-yeah-yeah-yeahs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMap Quest by Alice 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