By Stuart Mitchner
And what curious flower or fruit
Will grow from that conspiring root?
—Elizabeth Bishop
Those lines are from the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s reimagining of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Bishop has admitted that she was hoping someone would compose tunes for her suite “Songs for a Colored Singer” (an acceptable title in the 1940s). “I think I had Billie Holiday in mind,” she said in a 1966 interview. “I put in a couple of words just because she sang big words so well — ‘conspiring root,’ for instance.”
The Bishop-Holiday connection was pointed out by Paul Alexander in Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, the subject of last week’s column. In fact, a misprint in that article (“Back” for “Black”) is the reason I’m returning to Holiday and rereading Bishop with particular attention to “The Man-Moth,” a great New York poem inspired by a newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” more
I was going to begin with some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — about “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts” — except that setting the passage as an epigraph would have been typographically unsightly, and the only thing it has to do with Billie Holiday is that I can hear her singing it, beautifully, in her special way, making new words of old words. I can also hear her singing of “something given and taken” from the same sequence, and of “selflessness and self-surrender” and “the moment in and out of time.”
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