Essential Essays by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

THE EYE OF THE OUTSIDER

Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983)

I knew Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry very well before I ever met her, and I always knew the poems better than the woman. I had early been drawn to the timbre of the voice in her first two books, had met her once or twice in literary groups, not the best place for breaking through shyness and differences in age and reputation. Much later, in the early 1970s, I offered her a ride from New York to Boston, where we were both then living. We found ourselves talking of the recent suicides in each of our lives, telling “how it happened” as people speak who feel they will be understood. In the course of this drive I forgot to take the turnoff at Hartford, and drove as far as Springfield without noticing. This conversation was the only one approaching intimacy I ever had with Elizabeth Bishop and almost the only time I saw her alone.

I had felt drawn, but also repelled, by Bishop’s early work—I mean repel in the sense of refusing access, seeming to push away. In part, my difficulties with her were difficulties in the poetry, of Bishop as a young poet finding her own level and her own language. But in part they were difficulties I brought with me, as a still younger woman poet already beginning to question sexual identity, looking for a female genealogy, still not yet consciously lesbian. I had not then connected the themes of outsiderhood and marginality in her work, as well as its encodings and obscurities, with a lesbian identity. I was looking for a clear female tradition; the tradition I was discovering was diffuse, elusive, often cryptic. Yet, especially given the times and customs of the 1940s and 1950s, Bishop’s work now seems to me remarkably honest and courageous.

Women poets searching for older contemporaries in that period were supposed to look to “Miss” Marianne Moore as the paradigm of what a woman poet might accomplish, and, after her, to “Miss” Bishop. Both had been selected and certified by the literary establishment, which was, as now, white, male, and at least ostensibly heterosexual. Elizabeth Bishop’s name was spoken, her books reviewed with deep respect. But attention was paid to her triumphs, her perfections, not to her struggles for self-definition and her sense of difference. In this way, her reputation made her less, rather than more, available to me. The infrequency of her public appearances and her geographic remoteness—living for many years in Brazil, with a woman as it happened, but we didn’t know that—made her an indistinct and a problematic life model for a woman poet.

Some of the poems in her first book, North and South (1946), I found impenetrable: intellectualized to the point of obliquity (e.g., “The Map”), or using extended metaphor to create a mask (e.g., “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “The Monument,” “The Imaginary Iceberg”). That first book contains traces of Miss Moore—for example, the coy use of quoted phrases within a poem, a mannerism Bishop soon discarded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.