Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I'm going to look at a poem

from 1946 written by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. In case you don't know Elizabeth Bishop,

she's something of a poetic ledge. I think it's fair to say certainly in America and she was not

massively prolific. I hold in my hand so complete poems and it's less than 300 pages. Her big

thing was polish and getting the thing precise and correct and working a poem until it was exactly

where she wanted it. I think you could define her approach as meticulous. So the poem I've chosen

is called The Man Moth. Why have you chosen this one from her sob 300 page complete poems you

ask me? Well, I was lured in by an asterisk. I love an asterisk. They float around the pages of books

like those dandelion seed things that fill the summer skies and this particular one had attached

to the title of this poem. Now you don't get that many asterisks in poetry and on a title is

is a lovely event. So why did she asterisk the title The Man Moth? Well because Elizabeth Bishop

wants us to know that the title came from a newspaper misprint. She saw the word mammoth

in a newspaper that had been written M-A-N for naughty M-O-T-H. So it became mammoth accidentally.

Why does she feel the need to tell us the genesis of this poem? Well, I think because she's

delighted by the idea that language plays tricks on us like that. The one tiny letter in the wrong

place can change a word which means gigantic which refers to these now extinct mighty ultra-tosked

hairy beasts. Tosked is a harder word than I ever thought possible. And that's been reduced to

what sounds like a tiny creature a mammoth just by one letter. So I think she is saying that

that's exciting to her and also I think allowing us to delight in the fact that she saw a mistake

and she's whipped it into a work of art. Okay, I'm going to give you... Well first of all,

I'm going to give you the first line of mammoth which is two words and two commas. So this will not

be overtaxing and then I'll give you the first stanza. The first line of the mammoth which is

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