Subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, known through our associations and histories, our scaffoldings of concerns and interests, the tones and shadings of our moods. We’re invited to form a sort of readerly alliance with Bishop’s speaker, brought close to what she’s feeling and seeing at a moment of intense clarity. Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself. “How it feels to be oneself” has a great deal to do with the experience of time. It’s oddly difficult to describe what subjective time feels like. The clock on the wall simply ticks, persisting in its steady progression, while those in the body and psyche call for a great variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions. The time of interiority pools, constricts, tumbles, and speeds. We live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory. And memory edits its records of the past like a brilliant auteur—cutting, juxtaposing, creating a pace determined by the direction and emotion of a story. What is memory but a story about how we have lived? In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse it takes dozens of pages to render the inner lives of a group of people sitting around a dinner table during a single meal; later in the book, decades pass in a few pages. This kind of shifting feels accurate because it replicates something of our internal sense of time, where the irrelevant portions blur while significant moments swell. But there is another sort of temporality, too, which is timelessness. In this lyric time we cease to be aware of forward movement; lyric is concerned neither with the impingement of the past nor with anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression. Such a state of mind is “lyric” not because it is musical (though the representation of these states of mind usually is) but because we are seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded. The parts of a narrative are contiguous, each connecting to the previous instant and the next, but the lyric moment is isolate. Though it most often seems to begin in concentration, in wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object, such a state leads toward an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action. Bishop herself described this sort of attention in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” Self-forgetful concentration is precisely what happens in the artistic process—an absorption in the moment, a pouring of the self into the now. We are, as Dickinson says, “without the date, like Consciousness or Immortality.” That is what artistic work and child’s play have in common; both, at their fullest, are experiences of being lost in the present, entirely occupied.
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