BU professor Bonnie Costello on poetry and Pulitzers
Katherine Hala
Issue date: 4/17/03 Section: Muse
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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.
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.