"I was reading a lovely book called Poets on Painting, edited by
J. D. McLatchy, on the bus this morning, mostly the essays by Wallace
Stevens and by Elizabeth Bishop (hers is about the naive painter
Gregorio Valdes). I saw something in Bishop's essay I hadn't noticed
before -- she very clearly states that you can count seven palm trees on
each side of the road in the Valdes painting reproduced to accompany
the essay -- but, try as I might, I can only count six. And this
has led me once again to the place the so-called "inaccuracies" in her
poem "In the Waiting Room" have taken me on previous occasions: this
aspect of her poetry seems to me to be exploring the issue of poetic authority. We want
the poem to be true in a very naive sense -- and she prefers to show us
that the world is more about being at sixes and sevens."
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