A conversation started on GoodReads in response to my line “Remind me to destroy my fragments folder before I die” when I was commenting on Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, the volume of fragments and unpublished poems Alice Quinn put together.
It’s funny, some would argue that if a writer really didn’t want their fragments or unpublished poems to see the light of day after their death, they would have destroyed them during life. But that would require a preparation based on the knowledge of the day and hour of your death.
Some writers leave notes to destroy their unpublished work after they are dead, or leave notes on the work that it is “not for publication.” Literary executors and academics then decide if the work is worthy of print or should remain out of the public eye. I worry that with authors who have huge posthumous followings and literary legacies, the desire to read more trumps the actual quality of the unpublished work.
Perhaps it’s the writer’s ego, some secret desire to see those fragments printed that stops them from destroying them, even if they leave a note to do so. Perhaps it’s just a matter of unfinished business–I mine my fragments for material during dry spells and keep my early work in a folder for those moments when I want to humble myself and see where I’ve been and how far I’ve come.
Regardless, the Bishop book is pleasurable to see what could have been, what else was left out there. They are small gems, nothing on the level of the work in The Complete Poems, but they do show us a Bishop, a side of Bishop she kept pretty private in her work: her sexuality. In some respects some of these unpublished love poems constitute an “outing” of her through her own verse that she had often only obliquely addressed in the published work.