News at Eleven: So, too, in her [Elizabeth Bishop's] poem 'Trouvée',

about a white hen run over on West 4th Street, she was forced to make clear that the hen, while once white, is 'red-and-white now, of course'. In 'Poem', when she used the word 'visions', she instantly wanted to change it: '"visions" is too serious a word'; she found a calmer one--'our looks, two looks'. In 'The End of March', she described an urge to retire and 'do nothing,/or nothing much, for ever, in two bare rooms'. In one of her last poems, 'Santarém', she mentioned a church and had to correct herself: 'Cathedral, rather'. This urge to correct also appeared in her letters: in 1973, for example, she wrote to [Robert] Lowell that 'James Merrill and I gave a joint reading--no, a sequential reading--at the YMHA.'

This enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to follow the poem's casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it saw, or what it knew.

from London Review of Books: Follow-the-Leader

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