Dog-Ear: Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III
A good deal of text is spent discussing Elizabeth Bishop’s deployment of narrative and of the relationship of her details with the subjects of her poems. Putting aside discussions of gender, sexuality and biography that are so common in critical work on Bishop, I would like to return to the poems themselves and focus on Bishop as a painter of words. Considering that Elizabeth Bishop herself often painted watercolours, one can see her love of detail and her attention to colour & space.
In Geography III, her last book, Bishop, as in most of her poems, turns out detail after detail. “In the Waiting Room” she uses narrative as a kind of detail where lines like “It was winter. It got dark/early” do more than merely set the scene but also provides a tenor in which the themes of her poems work. This turning over of the particular is similar to primitive painters or the Baroque painters in that the images subtly become more than themselves and act as allegorical surrogates to the picture revealed. The act of looking is more than an outward activity; it consists of reflection & identification. The protagonist, Elizabeth, reads through an issue of National Geographic, goes from the images of “awful hanging breasts”, “babies with pointed heads”, and “a dead man slung on a pole” to a moment of surprise (that is, the cry “oh!”) and looks to herself. She considers the waiting room and begins to sink into herself wondering who she or anyone really is. Elizabeth “scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was”; the images in the magazine, as do the images in the poem, draw her to consider what “held us all together/or made us all just one?” It is not uncommon for onlookers at any museum to find a work of art that draws them and causes them to think about themselves, their relation to the art, to the artist, to the whole act of making. “In the Waiting Room”, in plain language, in both the adult voice and that of a seven-year-old, performs the act of looking and reflecting from a set of photographs that might easily be about anything including us. The sense of confusion in the poem is not in the images but in the thoughts drawn from them; Bishop takes the reader into a psychological moment that is born not out of the confessional elements but from something that goes beyond the mere self and this is perhaps the great appeal of painting and why so many poets are often, if not artists themselves, great lovers of art.
The image is without a doubt an important & perhaps obvious element of poetry. It seems to be an altogether ridiculous idea that images in poetry might not evoke some kind of emotional or other mental process to take hold. What makes Bishop’s poems a bit different, besides her use of detail as a kind of narrative, is that they employ images in such a way to be more than mere representations of things but also as meaningful markers of thought. How we understand the reality of our surroundings is a result of many perceptions and we cannot but help to ascribe to our sensations a variety of descriptions. The prose poem “12 O’Clock News”, a Modernist masterpiece (even if it was published late in the game), is a clever landscape painting derived from an imaginative description of objects in a room setup in the way a television newsmagazine (à la National Geographic Explorer or Sixty Minutes) might describe a place & its people. Besides the usual muscularity enjoyed by much prose poetry, the poem is given stronger definition & physicality by the descriptive markers to the left of each stanza. One might consider how sculpture & assemblage, especially when using found objects, can be manipulated or given new context in order represent new things (one might think of Marcel Duchamp, for example). In this artistic spirit the poem resides. Rather than confronting the reader with a statement like, to paraphrase Magritte, “this is not a gooseneck lamp”, Bishop allows her painterly imagination to evoke a new place within a seemingly mundane room.
She writes, “Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.” The brilliant assignment of a gooseneck lamp as moon sets the light and tone for the rest of the poem. The next section named “typewriter” is a clever take on the work that she does, giving the typewriter new life as an escarpment with “elaborate terracing…What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.” This tongue-in-cheek remark is followed by more descriptions of objects in the room, each given their own place in the landscape with geological reportage and editorializing. In each of her descriptions we are reminded of the imaginative enterprise with which children transform their surroundings, turning couches into great fortresses or carpets into deserts; Bishop recaptures the imagination in much the same way as seen in her “typewriter eraser” and “ashtray” sections where she reveals the people of the land frozen in time in their all-too-human poses such as when cigarettes play the role of dead soldiers lying in a pit. The visual & physical qualities of her descriptions do more than describe but allow use to be present in the same way a good painting or photograph might thus demonstrating her qualities as both poet and painter.
It seems particularly important to look at her choice of translation in Geography III, Octavio Paz’s “Objects and Apparitions,” a poem for Joseph Cornell. Perhaps not one of Paz’s best poems, it fits appropriately into Bishop’s theme of visual representation. Her own poems suggest careful visual constructions much like Cornell’s boxes and she sometimes suggests other surrealists in some of her images & techniques (though that is not to say that she is surrealist). The poem is Paz’s homage to Cornell & his art, celebrating the careful creations he has made “out of your ruins,” “monuments to every moment.” On a sidenote, Bishop was friends with Paz and his wife, Marie José Paz, a visual artist (they were all friends of Cornell). Bishop, in paying homage to her friends, also pays homage to the duplicity of images & ideas, making reference through Paz to the idea that things may have both universal appeal and personal/subjective meaning where marbles and other collectables may be “tales of the time”. Just as Paz writes, “Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes/my words became visible for a moment,” Bishop’s images in Geography III become visible for a moment in her poems, small boxes containing seemingly random objects held together by memory, longing and imagination that go beyond being themselves to suggest something outside of the poems, something in ourselves and the world around us in much the same way all art does or at least should.
In Geography III, her last book, Bishop, as in most of her poems, turns out detail after detail. “In the Waiting Room” she uses narrative as a kind of detail where lines like “It was winter. It got dark/early” do more than merely set the scene but also provides a tenor in which the themes of her poems work. This turning over of the particular is similar to primitive painters or the Baroque painters in that the images subtly become more than themselves and act as allegorical surrogates to the picture revealed. The act of looking is more than an outward activity; it consists of reflection & identification. The protagonist, Elizabeth, reads through an issue of National Geographic, goes from the images of “awful hanging breasts”, “babies with pointed heads”, and “a dead man slung on a pole” to a moment of surprise (that is, the cry “oh!”) and looks to herself. She considers the waiting room and begins to sink into herself wondering who she or anyone really is. Elizabeth “scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was”; the images in the magazine, as do the images in the poem, draw her to consider what “held us all together/or made us all just one?” It is not uncommon for onlookers at any museum to find a work of art that draws them and causes them to think about themselves, their relation to the art, to the artist, to the whole act of making. “In the Waiting Room”, in plain language, in both the adult voice and that of a seven-year-old, performs the act of looking and reflecting from a set of photographs that might easily be about anything including us. The sense of confusion in the poem is not in the images but in the thoughts drawn from them; Bishop takes the reader into a psychological moment that is born not out of the confessional elements but from something that goes beyond the mere self and this is perhaps the great appeal of painting and why so many poets are often, if not artists themselves, great lovers of art.
The image is without a doubt an important & perhaps obvious element of poetry. It seems to be an altogether ridiculous idea that images in poetry might not evoke some kind of emotional or other mental process to take hold. What makes Bishop’s poems a bit different, besides her use of detail as a kind of narrative, is that they employ images in such a way to be more than mere representations of things but also as meaningful markers of thought. How we understand the reality of our surroundings is a result of many perceptions and we cannot but help to ascribe to our sensations a variety of descriptions. The prose poem “12 O’Clock News”, a Modernist masterpiece (even if it was published late in the game), is a clever landscape painting derived from an imaginative description of objects in a room setup in the way a television newsmagazine (à la National Geographic Explorer or Sixty Minutes) might describe a place & its people. Besides the usual muscularity enjoyed by much prose poetry, the poem is given stronger definition & physicality by the descriptive markers to the left of each stanza. One might consider how sculpture & assemblage, especially when using found objects, can be manipulated or given new context in order represent new things (one might think of Marcel Duchamp, for example). In this artistic spirit the poem resides. Rather than confronting the reader with a statement like, to paraphrase Magritte, “this is not a gooseneck lamp”, Bishop allows her painterly imagination to evoke a new place within a seemingly mundane room.
She writes, “Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.” The brilliant assignment of a gooseneck lamp as moon sets the light and tone for the rest of the poem. The next section named “typewriter” is a clever take on the work that she does, giving the typewriter new life as an escarpment with “elaborate terracing…What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.” This tongue-in-cheek remark is followed by more descriptions of objects in the room, each given their own place in the landscape with geological reportage and editorializing. In each of her descriptions we are reminded of the imaginative enterprise with which children transform their surroundings, turning couches into great fortresses or carpets into deserts; Bishop recaptures the imagination in much the same way as seen in her “typewriter eraser” and “ashtray” sections where she reveals the people of the land frozen in time in their all-too-human poses such as when cigarettes play the role of dead soldiers lying in a pit. The visual & physical qualities of her descriptions do more than describe but allow use to be present in the same way a good painting or photograph might thus demonstrating her qualities as both poet and painter.
It seems particularly important to look at her choice of translation in Geography III, Octavio Paz’s “Objects and Apparitions,” a poem for Joseph Cornell. Perhaps not one of Paz’s best poems, it fits appropriately into Bishop’s theme of visual representation. Her own poems suggest careful visual constructions much like Cornell’s boxes and she sometimes suggests other surrealists in some of her images & techniques (though that is not to say that she is surrealist). The poem is Paz’s homage to Cornell & his art, celebrating the careful creations he has made “out of your ruins,” “monuments to every moment.” On a sidenote, Bishop was friends with Paz and his wife, Marie José Paz, a visual artist (they were all friends of Cornell). Bishop, in paying homage to her friends, also pays homage to the duplicity of images & ideas, making reference through Paz to the idea that things may have both universal appeal and personal/subjective meaning where marbles and other collectables may be “tales of the time”. Just as Paz writes, “Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes/my words became visible for a moment,” Bishop’s images in Geography III become visible for a moment in her poems, small boxes containing seemingly random objects held together by memory, longing and imagination that go beyond being themselves to suggest something outside of the poems, something in ourselves and the world around us in much the same way all art does or at least should.
posted by Ismael Ricardo Archbold at 11/07/2005 06:34:00 AM
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