 |
American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research journal |
 |
Jeanette Smith
May 5, 2013
The Fragile Sanctuary: My Journey to Understand
Elizabeth Bishop
Introduction
My first encounter with the poet Elizabeth Bishop was when I signed up to
present her poem “The Fish” in this class. I knew nothing about her or the poem.
I found “The Fish” to be complicated, but intriguing. I thought it strange that
a modern poem like “The Fish” would be included in an American Romanticism
course. Later, I understood why she might be considered both a Modern and a
Romantic poet. I decided that I wanted to do a research project on her to help
me get a better grasp on her challenging poetry.
As I began my research, I came across a video of a Yale professor, Langdon Hammer, discussing Bishop. I was instantly intrigued when Hammer called her a poet of “impersonal intimacy.” It also intrigued me when he claimed that her poetry was her way of “longing through looking.” If what Hammer said was true, then surely some of her poems would demonstrate the Romantic idea of desire and loss. So my journey began.
Desire and Loss
My search began in Susan McCabe’s book Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss.
Desire and loss was something that I was becoming familiar with in this class,
so I felt confident that I would find something in McCabe’s book. I was right.
I thought it was interesting that in the book’s introduction, McCabe states that
she believes Bishop’s poems are not as widely studied as they should be because
she is hard to assign to a particular movement, and her poems have an
“unsettling quality” about them. I found this to be true, yet that is what makes
her so interesting to me. McCabe claims that in Bishop’s poems “writing is a
way, not to overcome, but to come to terms with loss” (1). Bishop wrote in her
poem “One Art” that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem
filled with intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” Perhaps
viewing life in this unusual way helped her come to terms with the losses in her
life, or was she just cynical?
Soon I discovered that Bishop had some quite serious losses in her early
years. Her father died when she was eight months old, her mother was
institutionalized for mental illness and was never able to return home to care
for Elizabeth, and she was removed from her beloved grandparents’ Nova Scotia
farm to live with her late father’s “city” relatives in Massachusetts. This was
quite a lot for a young girl to handle. I knew I would need to look for her
personal losses in her poems.
McCabe suggests that while Bishop may be considered by many critics to have an
impersonal writing style, she often “disrupts” the impersonality of her poems by
“an interlacing of her life with her art” (2). In Bishop’s “In the Village,”
she writes that “the echo of a scream hangs over that Nova Scotian village…a
slight stain in those pure blue skies...it just came there to live…not loud, just alive forever.” To me, this was an example of her life interlacing
with her art. Perhaps she was describing her mother’s screams or maybe her own.
McCabe claims that Bishop is trying to “avoid and repress what returns and
echoes through the landscape’s very texture” (3). This is complicated because if
she wants to avoid and repress memories (especially terrifying ones suggested by
“screams”), why are so many of her poems full of childhood memories?
Later in the same poem, Bishop writes: “I am struggling to free myself/Wait.
Wait. No one is going to scream.” This suggests that she has the power to
stifle the screaming in her poem. It is interesting that she includes the fact
that she is “struggling” to do so. This leads me to believe that she realizes
that she has the power to stop writing the bad memories, but is having trouble
stopping. All of a sudden, her poems do not feel impersonal to me at all.
McCabe brings up the idea that Bishop was a fragmented individual. She states
that her “apparent objectivity and naturalism really represent an absorption of
the self in the environment and a dismissal of any sense of a unified self” (3).
This objectivity and absorption of self, as McCabe puts it, could make her
poetry seem impersonal, but I still don’t feel it. I do sense her fragmentation
as she changes quickly from one thought to another (a trait of Modernism). I
can see how her feelings of fragmentation could result from a lack of stability
in her childhood. McCabe suggests that this desire for a
unified self appears in Bishop’s poem “The Weed.” In the poem, the speaker
describes herself as having a dream in which she is “dead and meditating” (both
alive and dead?) and lying alongside her heart with “its final thought frozen.”
The poem goes on to say that “we remained unchanged together for a year, a
minute, an hour.” McCabe says that the speaker “suspended in a liminal
state, neither death nor life, neither sleep nor waking, rearticulates this
rupture [of self]” (88). Later in the poem, the speaker asks the weed “What are
you doing here?” and the weed responds, “To divide your heart again.”
So here were some of the desires that I was looking for: 1. the desire to rid
herself of painful childhood memories 2. The desire to feel like a whole person
3. The desire to “feel” or perhaps “love,” or was this “suspended state” safer
for her? The questions keep coming.
Sabbath Eyes
The idea of “longing through looking” that Hammer mentioned in his video came up
in Harold Schweizer’s article “With Sabbath Eyes: The Particulars and the Claims
of History in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems.” He claims that the gaze (longing
through looking) so often appearing in Bishop’s poems was “performed with
Sabbath eyes – eyes that rest on the object – Bishop’s gaze sees objects on the
verge of their vanishing” (55). Maybe he is saying that by gazing, Bishop felt
she could hold on to things that were slipping away. Or when her writing appears
fragmented (when the gaze is removed), as it often does, that it is a way of
letting go of things she knows are not permanent.
Schweizer also believes that Bishop uses “Creator eyes” like God – eyes that
“attend to the completeness and justness and legitimacy of that object” (55). He brings up the troubling idea that Bishop’s poems show an “indiscriminate
kindness toward all” and with it “carries the constant thread of indifference
and remoteness to all” (56). So this could explain why so many people feel that
her poems are impersonal. Is she watching over the objects in her poems, like
God, being benevolent, but not getting too involved with them? If so, is it
because she felt everything was temporary like the impermanence of things in her
own life? Was her isolation from her objects just her way of being a Modern
poet? I had lots of troubling questions now.
Fortunately for me, Schweizer went on to say that while he feels Bishop tries
to distance herself from the objects in her poems, she still seems to understand
that “within the fragile sanctuary of the poem, the world must not yet be
allowed to sever the connection to the individual in favor of the collection”
(57). I loved Schweizer’s term “fragile sanctuary.” The more I learned about
Bishop and her poems, the more I believed that she must have viewed her poems as
a kind of fragile sanctuary. I just wasn’t sure what she was protecting her
poems from.
Schweizer suggested that Bishop thought that if our gaze lingers too long on the
“particulars,” the truth about ourselves will become known (58). While Bishop’s
poems are packed with details, I began noticing the missing “particulars.” Was
she afraid of seeming too confessional or intimate? Schweizer said that
Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room,” is autobiographical. He suggests that “the
little girl in this poem, who is about to discover the miniscule size of her
abidance against a vast world at war outside, will become the long aesthetic
gaze of the poet [Bishop]” (58). This poem does allow the gaze to linger, and is
considered to be her most intimate poem.
The six year-old girl in the poem sits in a dentist’s waiting room with some
very “old” adults as she waits for her aunt’s visit to end. While waiting, she
looks through a National Geographic magazine, and is horrified at the images.
When she hears a scream, she thinks it is her aunt, and then realizes “it was
me: my voice, in my mouth…I was my foolish aunt.” Her epiphany that she is going
to be her aunt, her mother, or the “women with hanging breasts” in the magazine
terrifies her, and the waiting room starts “sliding beneath a big black wave.”
Later in the poem, the girl thinks “you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them…I
scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was.” The reader never knows what
“one of them” means. Some have said that this moment was a gender-realization
moment. Later on in her life, Bishop said she didn’t want her poems to be
put in either a male or female grouping. She just wanted to write poetry. Did
she feel isolated or “suspended” between genders? What were her internalized
perceptions at that moment? I was learning that Bishop’s poetry generated more
questions than answers.
The Inner Eye
In her article “Elizabeth Bishop’s Inner Eye,” Carol Frost explores the letters
of Bishop and the discovery in those letters of the things Bishop was
particularly fond of. She loved geography and nature, but there were two things
that Bishop mentioned in her letters quite often - fish and flowers. She loved
the sea and fish, knew how to identity fish species, and even saved their scales
as souvenirs when she found them particularly beautiful. She also adored roses,
especially red ones. In some of her poems, we can find a fish/flower connection
such as in her poem “The Fish.” It has been said of Bishop that she had an eye
for a poem, as compared to what most poets have – an ear for a poem. Frost
describes Bishop’s unique ability to create a visual poem by including the
objects she loved, and there were many. Frost said that “As the inner eye
visualizes one, hundreds of others flit by” (256). She felt that as Bishop began
to write a poem about one thing, her inner eye - her memories, loves, and
longings - would find their way into the poem, almost effortlessly. I began to
see her poetry as a piece of art. No answers. Just beauty.
Frost added that “as the speaker studies it [the object of the poem], we do, and
try to look inside, to where the meanings are” (257). That reminds me of
something Hammer said in his class lecture: “Bishop seems to be asking the
reader to come closer so she can “allow us to look over her shoulder” at what
she sees. That’s pretty intimate.
Readers in the Waiting Room
In Ann Hoff’s article "Owning Memory: Elizabeth Bishop’s Authorial Restraint," I
began to understand that while Bishop invites us to gaze into her poetry with
her, she still holds us at somewhat at bay.
Hoff claims that “she
[Bishop] seems to be telling us something personal, vital, crucial,
autobiographical, but she does not let us know exactly what it is. Bishop’s
poems, in particular, present a fascinating study of the autobiographical pact,
because they project the feeling that the author—in the very act of sharing a
memory—is hiding something crucial from the reader” (579). Ok. We’re back to the
impersonal again and now another desire – to keep secrets from her readers. And
I do agree with Hoff that Bishop is trying to share something personal, but is
she intentionally hiding something, or are we missing something in her
complicated translation?
According to Hoff, “Bishop places the reader in the same untenable position she
was in as a child. We know that something tragic, crucial, and life-changing has
happened, but the adult voices speak in inscrutable whispers, and we cannot
quite decipher them. We are helpless as a child, kept in the waiting room of
Bishop’s memories. Now adult and author, Bishop has gained entrance to these
stories in full, filled in the gaps of her memories, but guards them and
controls them jealously. In so reversing this power dynamic, Bishop regains
ownership and authority over her memories, and... over her traumatic childhood”
(579). Now it seems like Bishop is a poetic control-freak. But in another
sense, her memories are hers, and they’re fragile. Why should we demand to have
them? I think Bishop understood that some readers would not handle her memories
with care.
Hoff goes on to say that “Bishop’s poetry often insists not on interiority, but
on exteriority—how she as a child was insistently kept outside the knowledge of
her own life’s events. In her poetry, she not only recreates that profound sense
of exteriority she felt as a child, but insistently keeps the reader outside her
meaning and her memory. Her reader remains in that same helpless antechamber of
half-knowledge in which young Elizabeth sat so long. Adult Bishop empowers
herself by restraining us” (580). Is Bishop manipulative and mean to put her
readers into an “antechamber of half-knowledge?” Do her readers always remain in
a “suspended state”?
According to Hoff, Bishop believed in honesty, but for her, it meant that is was
acceptable to hold some truth back for herself. She said that “honesty, be it
fragmented and incomplete, offers her some…control” (583). I didn’t want to keep
reading at this point. I felt like Hoff was being too harsh. I looked again and
found that Hoff felt that Bishop desired that her readers experience what she
had experienced as a child - “the disempowerment of not knowing”
(585). Wow. That is a strange idea, but perhaps Bishop felt like readers
couldn’t understand the physical experience but could understand the pain of the
experience.
Learning to Hide
I decided not to give up on Hoff totally, so I continued to read her article.
Continuing her idea that Bishop intentionally hides details from her readers,
she adds that she was taught this lesson early in childhood. She thinks this
idea is very clear in Bishop’s “Sestina” for it “imbues the reader with the
child’s bewilderment at her grandmother’s “inscrutable” grief. It is a sad,
quiet poem. A six-year-old Elizabeth has heard her mother screaming in the
night; has heard the adults whispering about her disappearance, and knows that
her mother is gone. She does not know why. She will not know the whole narrative
for years to come. Restoring the child’s lack of understanding, the poem offers
no narrative explanations. It only draws a picture of a grandmother and a child
both trying to hide their sadness as the “September rain falls on the house”
(586)… The grandmother—reading jokes from the almanac and going about the
business of making tea—thinks that she is hiding her grief from the young child,
“that her equinoctial tears . . . were foretold by the almanac, / but only known
to a grandmother.” She sees “the teakettle’s small hard tears / dance like mad
on the hot black stove, / the way the rain must dance on the house,” and her
grandmother’s teacup is “full of dark brown tears.” She draws a man “with
buttons like tears, / and shows it proudly to her grandmother,” going on with
the business of childhood the way her grandmother bravely makes tea.
Although they are everywhere, the tears become secret for the child just as they
are for the grandmother. The child has learned from her grandmother’s hiding.
What the almanac, the grandmother, and the author know, remains inscrutable to
the reader” (587). I see now that I don’t have to know what happened in
the poem; I can feel the sadness as it relates to my own life.
The Truth (Sort of)
According to Hoff, “The “truth” for Bishop was the experience of not knowing, of
being entirely in the dark about her own trauma. To depict accurately the impact
of those years, she had to demonstrate for the reader the bleakness of not
knowing. She found that in poetry it was “almost impossible not to tell the
truth.” Poetry’s form and its lyric nature allowed her to recreate the
fragmented, impressionistic, unhappy experiences without over-writing them,
without inventing a falsely cohesive narrative of a life deeply marked by
fragmentation and disjunction” (588). So, Bishop gives her readers the truth,
sort of, but truth as seen through a child’s eyes. It was her way of being
honest. How could we ever experience a child’s memory through an adult’s eye?
But how much will she allow us to see?
Still in the Waiting Room
Hoff continues: “The pictures at which she gazes are outside her world. The
weather is outside. The War is outside. The world is outside. She is outside.
The reader, too, is outside. We cannot find the pictures Elizabeth saw as a
child. Intentionally or not, Bishop prevents that intimacy by citing the wrong
month. We do not get to share the inside knowledge of her Aunt’s given name. We
do not, except through speculation, know why she found the women’s breasts
“horrifying,” only that she did. She has offered us an autobiography, but has
kept us in its waiting room. But we are intrigued; we want to read a biography,
to invite ourselves in… She invites us to visit, but not to live in her grief.
She keeps careful possession of her memories—they were hard won. But she also,
through her careful withholding, keeps the poetic stories of her life infused
with possibility— like pictures of tantalizing, foreign lands (592). So visit
me, but don’t move in with me. Intriguing. We did get an invitation, anyway.
That’s quite an honor.
Personally Speaking
To find out a little more about Bishop, I discovered a few poets online that
were speaking about her. The first person I found was Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. He had a connection with Bishop because she had translated some of his poems
into English. In a video called “Elizabeth Bishop – One Art,” he said something
interesting about her: “The job of a poet is to show the silence, and Elizabeth
Bishop was a master.” She was indeed. After reading some of his poems, I think
he may have been just a little influenced by her. The following excerpt from the
poem “Between What I See and What I Say” (1976) by Paz reminded me of Bishop:
Between what I see and what I say/Between what I say and what I keep silent,
Between what I keep silent and what I dream/Between what I dream and what I
forget: poetry.
Next, I found an audio of poet Jane Shore, a former colleague of Bishop’s at
Harvard, discussing Bishop’s poem “One Art” which I felt that I had to include
the entire poem in this journal because it speaks so loudly for her life and her
poetry.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
So many things seem filled with the intent
To be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
Places, and names, and where it was you meant
To travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or
Next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Shore points out that Bishop begins with the everyday things we lose like door
keys, places, names, and destinations. Then she moves on to personal items like
her mother’s watch and houses. Shore says to notice how the losses become larger
- cities, rivers, continents, and ends with the loss of “you.” Of course, I
expect that Bishop will not tell us who the “you” is. But I am learning that
it’s ok. Shore believes that the speaker is saying, “I will comfort myself” with
my words, and maybe one day she hopes this “one art” [poetry] “will be the art
that will help her.” I found this to be very profound and
comforting. The fact that Bishop added “Write it!” in the last line made me
understand her a little more. The business of writing our desires and losses is
difficult but something she felt she had to do.
McCabe brought to my attention that not everyone appreciated Bishop’s writing
style. Poet Adrienne Rich wrote about “One Art” in this way: “The art of losing”
is “for [her] no art/only badly-done exercises” (McCabe 34). Wow! A very harsh
criticism, indeed. Rich went on to mock Bishop’s poetic style when she wrote
this poem:
Trying to let go
Without giving up yes Elizabeth
A village there a sister, a comrade, cat
And more no art to this but anger
(McCabe 35).
Conclusion
In my research, I arrived at a different conclusion about Bishop than Rich did.
I do not believe Bishop was angry, nor do I believe that her poems were
“badly-done.” On the contrary, I believe Bishop was dealing with her desires
and her losses (and they were great) in the best way she knew how – by writing
them down and sharing them with the world. Yes, I see her as protecting herself,
and keeping her readers at somewhat of a distance. Despite these problems and
all of the questions, I have discovered her poetry to be an invitation into that
“fragile sanctuary” of her memories. I feel honored, really. I would not have
known about this incredibly gifted poet if I had not signed my name to present
on “The Fish” in this class. The poet was unknown then, but I no longer can say
that.
Do I have advice for readers that don't know what to do with Bishop or a poem
like “The Fish?” First, don’t let her complications scare you away. I
would suggest that when you get to the part where the fish doesn’t return her
stare, do it for him. Look a little longer. Perhaps gaze. Or maybe…well, read
the last lines of her poem “The Man-Moth” and perhaps you’ll understand what I
believe Bishop really desires:
If you catch him,
Hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. NY:
Literary Classics, 2008. Print.
Frost, Carol. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Inner Eye.” New England Review Vol.25,
No.1/2 (Winter-Spring, 2004): 250-257. JSTOR.
Hammer, Langdon. “Elizabeth Bishop.” Lecture. Dec. 6, 2012. Yale Courses.
http://youtu.be/MD76w3buznE May 5, 2013. Web.
Hoff, Ann K. "Owning Memory: Elizabeth Bishop’s Authorial Restraint."
Biography 31.4 (2008): 577-594. Project MUSE. May 4, 2013.
Web. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. PA: Pennsylvania
UP, 1994. Print.
Paz, Octavio. “Elizabeth Bishop - One Art.” Nov 2, 2011.
http://youtu.be/0gMVffgkpfQ
May 5, 2013. Web.
Schweizer, Harold. “With Sabbath Eyes: The Particular and the Claims of History
in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems.” Journal of Modern Literature Vol.28, No.2
(Winter, 2005): 49-60. Print.
Shore, Jane.
“Jane
Shore on Bishop's "One Art."” Audio. Poetry Radio Project.
www.poetryfoundation.org›
Poems & Poets.
May 4, 2013. Web.
|
|
|
|
