Theories of Origin

​Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil in 1964.
Public domain (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop#/media/File:Elizabeth_Bishop,_1964.jpg)

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People sometimes ask where an artist’s ideas come from. It’s a hard question to answer; “it depends” is probably the most accurate answer, though hardly illuminating to the questioner.

On a few blessed occasions, the answer is, “from everywhere.” I like this comment from a letter by Elizabeth Bishop to her friend, Robert Lowell:

Your poems “have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch … when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience)—that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.” (Elizabeth Spires, "One life, one art: Elizabeth Bishop in her letters,” https://newcriterion.com/issues/1994/5/one-life-one-art-elizabeth-bishop-in-her-letters)

An amusing side note comes from Cole Porter’s many stories explaining the origins of “Night and Day” (see William McBrien, Cole Porter, 1998). I’ve captured his various accounts, with poetic license, in my poem, “Theories of Origin,” recently published in Skating Rough Ground:

Theories of Origin

Zanzibar, ’35--
a little hotel, a patio,
ivory dealers in burnouses,
the barkeep simpatico,
a round on the house,
night and day the phonograph playing
Night & Day
while Porter’s in the corner saying
I wrote that in a taxi
in the roar of the traffic--
no, at lunch with the Astor’s
in Newport, when it was raining
drip drip drip—but no,
it wasn’t so prosaic--
I took the wife (no, lover)
to the starry mosaic
vault of a mausoleum--
no no no, it was the plaintive
cry of the muezzin
from a mosque in Morocco--
and no it doesn’t matter
darling where it was
on the Black Sea or a bus’s
backseat—doesn’t matter
if in a bar in Zanzibar
or on far out Antares
or in patent dancing shoes
under a nightclub moon.

That’s the best answer perhaps—it doesn’t matter. ​