Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart is a prominent American poet recognized for his significant contributions to contemporary poetry. Born in Bishop, California, in a dysfunctional family setting, he became the first member of his family to attend college, graduating from the University of California, Riverside, before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard University. Throughout his career, Bidart has been influenced by literary greats such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter of whom appointed him executor of her estate. His poetry, characterized by dramatic, free-verse narratives, explores deep psychological themes, often drawing from personal experiences and historical contexts.
Bidart's notable works include "Golden State," "Desire," and "Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016," the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2018. He is known for his unique typographic style and his exploration of guilt, often blurring the lines between personal and collective human experiences. His poetry incorporates various speakers, reflecting a range of voices and perspectives, and engages with complex themes such as familial relationships and human suffering. As an educator, he has taught literature at institutions like Brandeis University and Wellesley College, further influencing the landscape of American poetry.
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Subject Terms
Frank Bidart
Poet
- Born: May 27, 1939
- Place of Birth: Bakersfield, California
AMERICAN POET
Biography
Several prominent critics and fellow poets have recognized Frank Bidart as a major voice in American poetry. He was born Frank Leon Bidart Jr. to a hard-drinking Bishop, California, potato farmer and a mother who escaped from this abusive marriage only to repeat the experience and die ridden with fanatic religious fantasies approaching psychosis. Frank became the first Bidart to attend college, graduating from the University of California, Riverside, in 1962. He moved across the country to attend graduate school at Harvard University. There, he met Robert Lowell (and worked as his secretary for a while) and Elizabeth Bishop (who made Bidart an executor of her estate at her death in 1979). Bidart went on to teach literature at Brandeis University and Wellesley College.
Bidart’s early works include Golden State (1973), The Book of the Body (1977), The Sacrifice (1983), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (1990). His 1981 poem "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" won the Bernard F. Conners Prize. In 1997, Bidart published Desire to much acclaim after a period of silence. The collection was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems draw heavily upon the history of the Roman Empire and Greek and Roman mythology, arguing in various ways that one is what one desires. In 2000, Bidart received the Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets. The judges were Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, Wendy Lesser, James Longenbach, and Carl Phillips.
Bidart's most characteristic work is in fairly long free-verse psychological "narratives" that explore his memory of suffering in his dysfunctional familywith his father in "California Plush" and "Golden State," and with his mother in "Elegy" (1990) and "Confessional" (1990). His poetry plumbs the psychological depths of his own experience—familial, bisexual, intellectual—but it would be misleading to see his work as belonging to what is often called the confessional school.
Bidart rejects a merely biographical concern, generalizing his awareness of human suffering and achieving historical reverberations in dramatic monologues. Among his poems' speakers are a fictional murderer and necrophiliac ("Herbert White"), a one-armed homosexual amputee ("The Arc"), an anorexic neurotic borrowed from the psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger's clinical notes ("Ellen West"), and the great ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky ("The War of Vaslav Nijinsky"). His own experience of suffering, in other words, is merely another case of a far more general human condition. If his family was dysfunctional, Bidart's often shocking verse explores that as an example of a dysfunctional modern society. Indeed, even that larger concern is but a recent historical example of a human condition that includes the Roman poets Virgil and Catullus.
Much has been made of two of Bidart's concerns, one about form and one about substance, and some critics regard both as obsessions. The first is his typographically curious attempt to score the music of "voice" in his dramatic poems through varying typefaces from ordinary Roman to all caps, to italics, to all-cap italics. This, along with eccentric punctuation and placement of line beginnings and endings on the page, and the use of prose documents along with his own verse, provides a disjunctive appearance on the page. The other is what has been regarded as his fascination with guilt. Guilt is Bidart's deepest subject, and his success as a poet must be measured in terms of whether his stunning dramatic poems conflate the personal and historical dimensions of psychological experiences.
Two examples are "Confessional" and "The First Hour of the Night." "Confessional," dealing with Bidart's relationship with his mother, consists of two parts: one expressing his hatred and rejection of an unfortunate woman whom he cannot, as the injured son, pity ("one day/ she hanged my cat. . . . Forgiveness doesn't exist"). This was written in the 1970s, but Bidart knew it was unfinished. Part two, which took him several years to compose, juxtaposes his relationship with his mother with that of Saint Augustine and his mother. The point is that Bidart and his mother are not of themselves important except as examples of a general condition of human beings, of which the very contrary example of Augustine and Monica, who struggled out of a somewhat similar dysfunctional family to a transcendent and divine unity of souls a few days before Monica's death, is another. One has the sense that the two parts of the poem merge in a definition of the intensity of this primordial relationship, and that suffering undergone and suffering resolved may be part of one another. The poem concludes darkly: "Man needs a metaphysics;/ he cannot have one."
"The First Hour of the Night" is the thirty-five-page conclusion to his collected poems, a dream sequence in which Bidart remembers Raphael's Vatican fresco, The School of Athens, whose severe and elegant sense of the order of antiquity is invaded in the poem by the moderns, from René Descartes to Charles Darwin. Scheherazade also appears, perhaps providing the key: no ideas but in tales, in dreams. The world is full of disorder, but also of the imagination's vitality. As in his rendition of the Creation in Genesis, Bidart succeeds not so much in rejecting traditional notions in order and certainty but in holding them in abeyance and providing a modern terror-struck sense of the necessity of life, whether in dream, psychosis, social actuality, cultural fantasy, or history.
The intensities of Bidart's dramatic poems, through a mingling of voices and perspectives, provide an interesting expression of modern dilemmas and achieve the passionate concerns of religious experience without any suggestion of orthodox belief. If Bidart has the experience of belief, it is, like that of his mentor, Elizabeth Bishop, a belief in the necessity of awareness of the here and now and how these are ambiguously embedded in personal and historical memory.
Bidart continued to publish notable works in the 2000s and 2010s. These included the poetry collections Music Like Dirt (2002), Star Dust (2005), Watching the Spring Festival (2008), and Metaphysical Dog (2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award. He also co-edited The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (2003) with David Gewanter. In 2014, Bidart was honored with the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.
In 2017, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 was published, presenting a newly authoritative look at Bidart's work. The collection received much acclaim, earning a 2017 National Book Award. That same year, Bidart was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. In 2018, it was announced that Half-light had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Bidart published Against Silence in 2021.
Bibliography
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