Bonnie Costello is a English professor at Boston University and a scholar of modern and contemporary poetry. Her first book was Marianne Moore: Imaginary Poet (1981), followed by Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991). Costello’s latest work is Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (2003).
Costello has been working at BU for 25 years. She is the director of the CAS Honors Program, and she teaches a freshman writing course and upper-level poetry classes. Costello is also actively involved in contemporary literary criticism. Following are excerpts from a recent interview:
Q: Did your scholarship on Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore contribute to your newest book?
A: Both Bishop and Moore are great describers — and particularly landscape describers. I’ve always been interested in description as a mode of expression in poetry, the way that things get said by indirection, the way that the self can be known by exploration of the physical world. Not just as a sounding board, but as a positing that the sense of self does not exist independently of landscape.
Q: What other work had been done on the subject of landscape in modern poetry?
A: At the time I was working on this ... I don’t know whether to call it a genre or a medium or a predilection toward landscape ... I was reading criticism of landscape as a genre that was very negative. Throughout the 80’s, really, there was a lot of cultural criticism and preoccupation with ideologies that underlie certain aesthetic movements — the idea of nature as something constructed and manipulated and the idea of landscape as a genre that legitimates a status quo or legitimates a sort of manifest destiny.
Q: How do you present nature poetry in Shifting Ground?
A: Contemporary poets seem to have moved beyond the ideology of nature as a construction of power. And they’ve moved beyond the erasure of history. That was another criticism — that nature poetry pretended history doesn’t exist. I was finding in contemporary poetry that history was very present and a sense of temporality and constant change. And so I was interested in the way modern and contemporary poets were modifying landscape as a genre and also rethinking the imagination’s relationship to nature.
Q: What are some of the major themes in your new book?
A: In Shifting Ground I talk particularly about themes like framing — the way that the frame of landscape is always being exposed, the acknowledgement that there is a frame and that it’s being revealed. Within the frame, the representation of landscape is one of surprising dynanism — that nature isn’t a state, it’s a process; that it’s always in transition and the mind in relation to it is always in transition.
Q: Do you talk about specific poets in your new book?
A: I try to work with poets who aren’t obvious candidates for this subject. They aren’t identified as nature poets as such. I’m interested in poets who often abstracted nature, but I don’t want to say that nature for them was only a metaphor. It’s also something that challenges and disrupts their metaphors. I think for them metaphor is inescapable. We all experience nature as a metaphor whether we acknowledge it or not.
Q: Now that Shifting Ground has been published, are you working on a new project?
A: My new project is called “Planets on Tables,” which is a nod to a title of a poem by Wallace Stevens. I have always been interested in relations between poetry and the visual arts. This time I’m interested in problems of a more intimate scale than landscape. It’s become mixed up with other things, so I’m really not exactly sure where it will go. After Sept. 11th I became very aware of how values of scale affect us — the sense that when all those towers were falling down and you were seeing that image over and over again ... the scope of it was too much for people, you couldn’t connect with it. And I think that that’s why — and Robert Pinsky has also said — there’s so much poetry on the air. Suddenly people were reading poetry who never would have thought about poetry. So that became of interest to me — how we deal with public phenomenon in our own personal space. And, in the arts, still life represents that space.
Q: Are you studying the still life imagery of any specific poets?
A: I went back to two of my favorite poets — Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. I found that both of them quite explicitly use still life in their work. Wallace Stevens wrote a series of poems towards the end of the Depression and the advent of World War II: “Study of Two Pairs,” “A Bouquet of Flowers” and “Dish of Peaches in Russia.” What struck me was how much violence was in them. One associated the still life genre as a sort of tranquil, decorative, even bourgeois kind of — what you put up to decorate your living room that had nothing to do with the public world. And here Stevens was using still life as making a connection between a desire for aesthetic arrangement on a personal level and how to address what he was reading in newspapers. So I’m interested in values of scale, and I’m also interested in questions of proximity and distance -—the way that still life brings things from far away into proximity, but still expresses their place of origin.
Q: What contemporary poets are you reading now?
A: There’s an African American poet who I really admire. His name is Yusef Komunyakaa. His real name, I think, is John Smith, and after the Vietnam War he changed his name. He is a poet who has won a Pulitzer Prize — not my year, but I would have picked him if it had been my year. He’s a poet who has really matured in exciting ways. He clearly came out of the movement in African American poetry that brought jazz and street language into poetry and energized poetry with those materials. He did this in a way that is particularly exciting because he is a Vietnam War vet. But he keeps pressing himself and doing new things. A wonderful book we did pick for the Pulitzer is Wild Iris by Louise Glück. I’ll always be reading her work.
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