Panel 1A: Comedy, Humour, and Exclamation!
Rachel Trousdale (Northeastern University, USA)
Elizabeth Bishop’s Comedy of Self-Revelation
Elizabeth Bishop’s laughter often appears to be at someone else’s expense. But it
generally gives way to self-critique (as in “Maneulzinho”) and to a rethinking of the
observer’s position (as in “Filling Station”). Bishop’s poems combine empathy with
judgment: her speakers’ failures of symathy are to be both rejected and felt as our own.
This simultaneous heightening of sympathy and critique is possible because Bishop
rejects Henri Bergson’s model of humor, in which the self/other dichotomy is the basis for
laughter. Instead, Bishop suggests that subjective experience can be continuous between
observer and observed, and that laughter marks the infrequent moments when we
recognize that continuity. These moments of transcendent humor are partial, rendered
suspect by the very self-awareness that enables them: the act of speculating about
another’s interiority, for Bishop, carries with it a presumption of failure which it is the moral
burden of the poem to acknowledge.
Bishop suggests that communion must derive from the consciousness of all participants—
whether they are poets, gardeners, madmen, or dogs. In “Visits to St Elizabeths,” for
example, the tragicomic tension between reality and madness gives way to insight into the
impossibility of separating Pound’s madness from his sanity and the speaker’s distress
from the sufferings of the mad. In “Exchanging Hats,” the “flat” joke of an “unfunny uncle”
wearing women’s clothing leads to speculation about the possibility of a shared experience
of life after death. The “joking voice” Bishop adopts in “One Art” (1976) shows how pain
and joy, joker and audience, lover and beloved are not just simultaneous but mutually
constitutive. For Bishop, humor arises from the tension between sympathy and distance,
marking both the moment of revelation and the inevitability of that moment’s passing.
Bio: Rachel Trousdale is a visiting associate professor of English at Northeastern
University. She is the author of Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational
Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), and is writing a book on humor in modern
American poetry.
Hugh Haughton (York University, UK)
Questions of Humour: Elizabeth Bishop
In a letter to Anne Stevenson of 1964, Bishop, wrote she hated the ‘oh-the-pain-if-it-all
poems’ of Emily Dickinson and the ‘humorless, Martha Graham kind of person’ who likes
her. Commenting that the ‘sense of humor’ of Brazilians is all that makes Brazil ‘bearable’,
she said ‘I have learned most – from having someone suddenly make fun of something
one has taken seriously up until then...I mean about life, the world, and so on.’ The letter is
an improvised manifesto for the importance of being humorous, and it offers a fascinating
entry into her poetry, where humour plays as crucial a role in serious poems like ‘In the
Waiting Room’, ‘2,000 Illustrations’, and ‘Crusoe in England’ as in the avowedly playful
‘Invitation to Marianne Moore’ or ‘Exchanging Hats’. In her correspondence too
exchanging jokes is as important as exchanging confidences (indeed they are
inseparable).
Taking off from Freud’s essay ‘On Humour’ (1927), I will discuss the importance of being
humorous in Bishop’s poems and letters, dwelling particularly on her sense of vocal
comedy and comic timing, suggesting they are at the heart of her vision of ‘life, the world,
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and so on.’ In ‘One Art’ Bishop said that ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ (166) and
remembers her dead lover Lota’s ‘joking voice’, and I want to argue that a comparable
humorous voice is at work in her most resilient poetry and prose, exhibiting a form of posttraumatic mastery with a stoic comedy comparable to Freud’s. John Cage once asked,
‘How do you/ mAnage to live with/ just one sense of huMor?’, and I want to argue that
Bishop’s humour is comparably multi-dimensional. As Auden argued that in Don Juan
Byron the poet finally caught up with Byron the urbane, playful letter-writer, in Bishop, the
humorous peripatetic and peri-pathetic letter-writer offers us a key to identifying - and
identifying with - the searching and sceptical music of the poems.
Bio: Hugh Haughton is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of
York. He is co-editor (with Valerie Eliot) of volumes one and two of The Letters of T. S.
Eliot (2009), and editor of various books, including The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry
(1988) and Second World War Poems (2004). He is also author of The Poetry of Derek
Mahon (2007). He has published widely on modern poetry and is currently working on a
book on poets’ letters.
Peter Swaab (UCL, UK)
Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Exclamation
In 1977 Ploughshares published an interview between George Starbuck and Elizabeth
Bishop. It ended like this:
GS: Would you like to say something mysterious?
EB: !
How do you say ‘!’ ? Bishop ends the interview ends with a flourish, a wink, a raspberry.
The mystery here has turned into a joke. We might track down the original recording, if
there is one, to try to sound it; but it could never be fully sounded, since the written
exclamation mark lives, like a published poem, in the gap between what lies on the page
and what we can imagine hearing. The interview had started with an exclamation too, in its
title: ‘The Work! A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop.’
Bishop came increasingly to savour the many uses of exclamation marks, as even a bare
statistical count can show. In A Cold Spring (1955) only two poems out of nineteen
included exclamation marks; in later collections the proportion rose: 11 out of 19 in
Questions of Travel (1965), and all nine poems in Geography III (1976). This talk will
explore the creative uses to which Bishop put exclamations – and especially, in view of the
theme of the conference, exclamations of travel.
… do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen’s
skirt! There!
(‘Arrival at Santos’)
Bio: Peter Swaab teaches at UCL. His recent publications include The Regions of Sara
Coleridge's Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Bringing Up Baby (BFI Film Classics,
2010), and essays on the poetry and fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Panel 1B: Degrees of affinity: Bishop, Lowell, Schuyler, and Morrissey
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Grzegorz Czemiel (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland)
The Geographic Imagination of Elizabeth Bishop and Sinéad Morrissey
This paper attempts to trace the parallels that run between the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
and Sinéad Morrissey, delineating a common ground they share, i.e. a geographicallyinflected imagination underpinning the works of both writers. Partly shaped by the
peregrinations of both women, this dimension cannot be simply reduced to biographical
detail, for it produces a vital tension present in the works of the two poets. This tension has
provided a creative impulse manifesting in “poems that have successfully gone away from
home” (Mick Delap). Moreover, as Morrissey put it in an interview with Rebecca Slack, she
owes a creative debt to Bishop’s “meticulousness of attention” and “dedicated
craftsmanship.” However, Morrissey’s subversive tone, painterly eye and impressive
control over a wide range of verse structures are not just imitative, but reveal a deeper
affinity, which could be summarized as a preoccupation with points of view or framing, as
well as the paradoxes of the literary medium and the mind in movement. Thus, Jan B.
Gordon’s accurate claim that “Bishop’s poetry is always an expedition” could be read in
wider terms, i.e. as a speculative position in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, which
seem to be conveyed in works by both poets. In this sense, I read Bishop’s Brazil and
Morrissey’s Japan – aligning the former’s Questions of Travel (1965) with the latter’s
Between Here and There (2001) – not just as sources of new vistas, but poetic
“elsewheres” that facilitate discoursing with an otherness that both writers discover within
themselves and within poetry as an art.
Bio: Grzegorz Czemiel received his PhD at the University of Warsaw and teaches at Maria
Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. Specializing in contemporary Northern-Irish poetry,
he also explores such topics as cartography, translation and urban studies, as well as
psychoanalysis and speculative realism in philosophy.
Anna Warso (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland)
“Dearest Cal”: The Private And The Poetic In Bishop And Lowell
Robert Lowell’s frequently cited cover note for Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel
introduces her as a poet “too interested for confession”, a statement preceded by a
description of Bishop’s poetic tone, characterized as one that manages to “cut deeply”
because of its “large, grave tenderness and sorrowing amusement”. Lowell’s phrasing, and
his choice of adjectives in particular, while originally meant to provide material that will
simply “stick in the minds of reviewers” (Travisano, 580), reflects, in fact, not only the
qualities of Bishops work that Lowell held in very high regard but also certain
idiosyncrasies of his own poetic diction that Bishop admired greatly, even if she remained
skeptical of the “confessional mode”. The present paper aims to look closely at the
conversation that took place between Lowell and Bishop, in their poems (“Insomnia”,
“Crusoe in England”, “Skunk Hour”, and others) and in their correspondence, tracking and
outlining spaces of influence and hospitability toward each other’s literary Otherness
created by both poets.
Bio: Anna Warso, PhD is currently Assistant Professor teaching courses in literature and
translation at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS) in Warsaw. She
wrote her doctoral dissertation on figurations of loss in John Berryman's The Dream
Songs.
Mikołaj Wiśniewski (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland)
Here and Elsewhere: The Poetry of James Schuyler and Elizabeth Bishop
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In “The Morning of the Poem” James Sschuyler writes: “Wallace Stevens, Marianne
Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, I found for myself.” Elizabeth Bishop found Schuyler in the early
1970s thanks to a recommendation by a friend and fellow poet – James Merrill. She
complimented the author of Freely Espousing in letters to John Ashbery and the pianists
Arthur Gold (Schuyler's partner for many years) and Robert Fizdale. Readers often point
out similarities between Bishop's and Schuyler's writing, but few critics have offered a
more detailed analysis of what it is exactly that connects their poetic sensibilities. We hear
that both are poets of “inwardness and isolation” (Sherod Santos); that although they
eschew confessionalism, they remain deeply personal; that Schuyler shares Bishop's eye
for detail and that their modes of attention and description are consonant; finally, they
often make use in their poetry of the figure of epanorthosis, i.e. “whimsical adjustments
and corrections” (Michael Hoffman). This last similarity points to an epistemological crisis
which both poets struggle with but ultimately – I will argue – react to it in different ways.
What I mean is that Bishop and Schuyler believe in what might be called, in reference to
Bishop's famous statement on Darwin, the heroism of observation – of the careful
gathering and refining of perceptions. At the same time, however, both often reach a
moment of vertigo, in which they start feeling “the strangeness of [their] undertaking” and
begin to doubt the power of language to adequately grasp reality, or even begin to
suspect that poetic description mutilates the living phenomenon (of fact or feeling) which it
attempts to capture (as in Bishop's “The Fish”). The crucial thing is to see that Bishop and
Schuyler respond to this anxiety in quite different ways: whereas Bishop – in John
Ashbery's formulation – insists on continually rediscovering “the strangeness, the unreality
of our reality” (or in terms of travel – on exploring the elsewhere), Schuyler pursues a
poetics of familiarization (he stays put, refrains from travelling, and focuses on the
quotidian and the boring).
Bio: Dr Mikołaj Wiśniewski studied English and Philosophy at Warsaw University. In 20042005 he was a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley. Dr Wiśniewski is an editor and cofounder of the Polish philosophical quarterly KRONOS. He regularly writes for the
renowned literary monthly Literatura na Świecie. Dr Wiśniewski teaches literature and
history at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.
Panel 2A: Bishop and Animals (1)
Daniela Chana (Independent Scholar, Vienna, Austria)
The Power of Silence in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry
Many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems deal with lonesome and isolated protagonists.
Nevertheless, there is room for dialogue. Bishop’s first person narrators often have highly
valuable conversations with silent creatures like, for instance, objects or animals that are
unable to respond. Being challenged by a silent presence, the thoughts of one’s own can
travel towards the most exciting insights.
Animals are often bearers of mute wisdom. The speaker in “The Fish” learns about victory,
fight, strength, and fairness by a look in the fish’s face. His silent presence enables the “I”
to develop deeper reflections. Human language, on the other hand, is often doomed to
banality and repetition, as in “The Moose”. The trivial and boring talk of the travelers in the
bus is ironically silenced when the moose appears. The animal’s silence is filled with grace
and presented as superior to human language. In “The Riverman”, the protagonist feels
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better understood within the wordless company of creatures of the sea than among
talkative human beings.
Not only animals but also abstract concepts such as time and distance speak silently to
the “I”. In her poem “Argument”, Bishop’s first person narrator addresses personifications
of Day and Distance who separate her from the beloved one. These concepts “argue” with
her and challenge the strength of her love.
Objects as well can serve as silent teachers. In “One Art”, the “lost door keys”, “mother’s
watch”, and “two cities” teach the protagonist the important lesson of how to lose. Silent
companions also appear in “Crusoe in England” where, again, the “I” suffers from the
failure of words and finds more sense in animal’s talk, the silent presence of the
landscape, and the company of objects such as a knife and a flute. This paper will
examine in detail the power of silence in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry.
Bio: Daniela Chana, born in 1985, holds a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from
University of Vienna, Austria. She is an independent scholar and author of fiction. Her
short stories and poems have been published in international literary journals and several
anthologies. Recent publications include essays on female authors and singer-songwriters
Amy Waite (Pembroke College, University of Oxford)
Rolling our r's: Elizabeth Bishop's Posthuman Communities
This paper examines the encounters between the human and the animal in Bishop’s
poetry, re-classifying these face-to-face confrontations – whether between man and
moose, man and armadillo or man and fish - as moments of posthuman potential. Through
such curious encounters, Bishop both practises and endorses a regressive ‘selfforgetfulness’ that – negotiating the twofold anxieties of democratic culture, resisting
Whitmanian narcissism and dissolving the borders of the human – activates new
posthuman entities and expansive, inclusive communities. Drawing on the critical
language of Rosi Braidotti, particularly her controversial notion of ‘Zoe’, this paper offers a
close reading of the ‘gasoline’ trope in Bishop’s poetry, identifying a generative, vital lifeforce capable of shifting the lyric ‘I’ to an extraordinary and ever-changing ‘we’.
Bio: Amy Waite completed her BA, MSt and, most recently, her DPhil in English Literature
at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her DPhil thesis is titled ‘Mongrel Girl of Noman’s Land’:
Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Posthuman.
JT Welsch (York St John University, UK)
Curious Creatures: social and beastly encounters in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The
Moose” (1976) and Krzysztof Zanussi’s Kontrakt (1980)
This paper will re-visit the climactic encounters with non-human animals in Elizabeth
Bishop’s poem ‘The Moose’ and the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1980 film, Kontrakt
(The Contract). In either case, I’ll argue, the cow moose stopping the bus in Bishop’s poem
or the stag confronting two women at the end of Zanussi’s film work to disrupt a certain
complacency towards the social encounters in which these characters find themselves.
The comparison of Bishop’s meticulous language with Zanussi’s raucous satire helps draw
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out the class politics latent in the former, while also allowing for the productive contrast
between late 1970s North American and Polish cultural and economic contexts.
Eco-critic Robert Boschman criticizes ‘The Moose’, perhaps rightly, for its echoes of
westward expansionism and the extent to which its bus passengers are finally reassured
by their meeting with the wild animal, which offers them ‘a nature that is gentler [and] more
approachable, precipitating joy, for us, for all of us’ (2009). However, I’ll suggest that
Boschman and other critics’ emphasis on the encounter between ‘culture and nature’ in
the poem risks overlooking more complex dynamics between the speaker and other
passengers (and driver), whose language is subjected to Bishop’s typically understated
satire before the moose’s interruption.
In contrast to Bishop’s provincial journey, Zanussi’s film follows a wedding party through a
night of very bourgeois debauchery at a doctor’s country villa. Yet, the animal’s disruptive
appearance there, in a more starkly class-conscious text, helps us appreciate what Steven
Gould Axelrod calls Bishop’s ‘particularly compounded relation to issues of class’ (2014).
Bio: J.T. Welsch is a Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at York St John
University. His current research focuses on manifestos, letters, and other supplemental
texts around modernist poetry. He has also published five chapbooks of his own poetry.
Panel 2B: Bishop’s (Cosmopolitan) Influence
Evan Jones (Bolton University, UK)
Questions of Nationality: Elizabeth Bishop and Contemporary Canadian Poetry
This talk will examine ways in which contemporary Canadian poets have taken on the
influence of Elizabeth Bishop. Writing to Anne Stevenson, Bishop declared herself, ‘3/4ths
Canadian, and one 4th New Englander’, and yet she is – with one significant anthological
exception – primarily discussed and categorised as an American poet. Over the past
fifteen years in Canada, since the publication of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada
(2002), which includes Bishop’s Nova Scotian landscape poems, attitudes towards her
identity have been changing (even as in America there appears to be some resistance). In
this way, Bishop becomes part of the landscape – not a traveller but a resident.
For a number of women poets in Canada, Bishop becomes a cosmopolitan figure – in an
age of high nationalism and suspicion of American cultural dominance. Both Anne
Compton (b.1947) and Robyn Sarah (b.1949), most notably, incorporate distinct elements
of Bishop’s poetics into their writing. For Compton, Bishop is a poet of place, of the
Maritime backdrop that Compton herself calls home – the physical and psychological
geography that maps Compton’s poems and interests. Sarah in some of her most recent
poetry picks up on Bishop’s note to Robert Lowell, that ‘Art just isn’t worth that much’,
especially in her poem, ‘Make Much of Something Small’ – in which she seems to be
responding directly to Bishop’s words, using a form that emulates elements of Bishop’s
‘One Art’.
Bio: Canadian poet Evan Jones has lived in Manchester since 2005 and is Lecturer in
English at the University of Bolton. He is co-editor of the anthology, Modern Canadian
Poets (Carcanet 2010); his most recent book is Paralogues (Carcanet 2012). He has
published in Poetry Review, Guardian, TLS, Poetry London and PN Review.
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Danielle Petherbridge (Columbia University, USA and University College Dublin, Ireland)
Encountering the Other: Travel and Cosmopolitanism
Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel has inspired what might be termed a form of
‘cosmopolitan literature’, a form of literature that as Katherine Stanton suggests, explores
not only diverse experiences and practices of ‘being in the world’ but also a ‘multiplicity or
diversity of belongings” (Stanton, Cosmopolitan Fictions, 2006). Bishop’s poem is notable
for raising the existential question of ‘where we are at home?” It is suggestive of the idea
that we live in a world of contingency and dislocation, one characterised by ‘geographical
promiscuity’, of movement and change rather than stability and certainty. Bishop however,
also gestures towards a kind of ‘cosmopolitan imagining’, of ‘encountering others’ in all
their specificity and mulitiplicity. The poem, then, gestures towards a form of
cosmopolitanism which transcends national borders and inward-looking forms of
nationalism, one that imagines beyond narrowly defined limits of culture and nation. In this
paper, I explore Bishop’s influence on ‘cosmopolitan fiction’, particularly the work of the Sri
Lankan born writer Michelle de Kretser. Tracing these themes in her recent novel
Questions of Travel (2012), which takes its title and inspiration from Bishops’ poem, De
Kretser, explores the idea of ‘home’ being both everywhere and nowhere, a form of ‘liquid’
modern life that creates new forms of both ethical and aesthetic dislocation. De Kretser’s
work questions not only where it is we are at home but what designates this sense of
home – notions of shared history, a sense of welcome or belonging, an accident of birth or
a loved one? Evoking Bishop’s poem, the novel suggests that travel is both ‘marvellous
and sad’; an experience of both beauty and melancholy, of enrichment and displacement.
This form of ‘cosmopolitan fiction’ emphasises both interdependence and irreducibility
between contexts and cultures. It also takes up the Jamesian idea that we need to take
account of multiple perspectives in order to try to piece together a narrative, one that often
remains incomplete or particular. De Kretser gestures towards a form of cosmopolitanism
that fosters critical reflection and hospitality towards others, a form of hospitality that is
unconditional, in the sense that it is given freely with no expectation of reciprocity. The
paper, then, questions the way in which Bishop’s poem lends itself to such a reading and
the way in which its translatability across contexts has resulted in productive
reinterpretations developed in ‘cosmopolitan fiction’.
Bio: Danielle Petherbridge is IRC Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of
Philosophy at Columbia University, New York and University College Dublin. She works in
the areas of philosophy and literature, social philosophy and critical theory. She is
currently working on a project entitled Encountering the Other and has written on Henry
James, Elizabeth Bishop and Michelle de Kretser, as well as extensively in the areas of
German and French philosophy and critical theory.
Francesco Rognoni (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy)
Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Italian Travels
Having glanced at the first appearance of “Visits to St. Elizabeths”, with facing-page Italian
translation, in the special 1956 Ezra Pound issue of the Italian literary journal Nuova
corrente, and at Bishop’s apparently scant interest in Italian literature, the paper will
consider the two book-length selections of Bishop’s poetry published at the end of the last
century, both edited and translated by practicing female poets (who, perhaps not
coincidentally, also translated selections from Emily Dickinson): Margherita Guidacci and
Bianca Tarozzi. It will then move on to a consideration of the acquisition of Bishop by the
prestigious (not to say imperialistic) publishing house Adelphi, which in 2005 produced a
new, broader selection of her poems (strangely enough, the collective work of three
different male translators) and, in 2014, a selection from the Bishop-Lowell
correspondence, whose title, Scrivere lettere è sempre pericoloso [Writing Letters Is
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Always Dangerous] – so unlike the original title, Words in Air – is telling of the bent, or
“intention”, of the Italian book. Adelphi’s launching of “its own” Elizabeth Bishop had been,
perhaps unintentionally, paved, a few years before, by the great Italian success of two
American novels where Bishop figures, if not quite as a “character”, as a presence and
presiding genius: Cathleen Shine’s The Love Letter (1995) and Peter Cameron’s The City
of Your Final Destination (2002) (whose Italian title, The Golden Evening, is borrowed from
the lines from Bishop’s “Santarém”, which serve as epigraph to the novel). The paper will
close with some remarks on the ways in which Bishop “travels” in these (and perhaps
other) novels.
Bio: Francesco Rognoni (Pavia 1960) is full professor of English and American Literature
at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. An editor of the Florentine literary
journal Paragone, he has published extensively on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,
both in Italian and in English. He is currently editing (with Kelvin Everest, Michael
Rossington and Jack Donovan) the fifth and final volume of The Poems of Shelley in the
Longman Annotated English Poets.
Panel 3: Biographies of Bishop
Jonathan Ellis (University of Sheffield, UK) “In Wexford now”: Colm Tóibín’s Elizabeth
Bishop
Thomas Travisano (Hartwick College, USA) Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of
Elizabeth Bishop
Panel 4A: Ideas of Freedom
Hugh Foley (Exeter College, Oxford University, UK)
“Never wide and never free”: Elizabeth Bishop’s minor Romantic lyrics and
American Empire
Bishop famously described herself as a ‘minor female Wordsworth’, in a letter to Robert
Lowell, and critics such as Bonnie Costello have pointed out the ways in which Bishop’s
poetics function as a revision of the Romantic tradition, impugning its patriarchal or
imperialist perspective in, for example, the gendering and ‘mastery’ of nature. Examining
Bishop’s use of what M.H Abrams called ‘the greater Romantic Lyric’, the poet’s meditation
on a landscape and their relation to it, I hope to make a link between Bishop’s handling of
this tradition and of her specific and complicated relationship to the culture of America at
mid-century. I believe there is scope for a reading of her poems as in a more complicated
dialogue with both the politics and possibilities of the ‘greater Romantic lyric’.
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By exploring Bishop’s use of Transcendentalist resonances in her poetry of natural
landscapes, I hope to show Bishop interacting with the sense that arguments about the
self-take on a specifically national character in American discourse. Building on Camille
Roman and Steven Gould Axelrod’s insights that Bishop’s poetry stages a critique of
American militarism and imperialism, I hope to show that Bishop’s challenging of
perspectival dominance relates to her unease, particularly as a lesbian writer, and also as
a Canadian one, in relating to the patriarchal, dominant power of the United States.
However, what I also wish to suggest is the ways that Bishop’s subversions of the ‘greater
Romantic lyric’ are invested in in its continued viability, and invested in the ways that
individual identity can escape, or at least co-exist with, complicity in power structures.
Reading the poems ‘A Cold Spring’—written by Bishop about a rural retreat from
Washington D.C—and ‘Questions of Travel’, my paper will explore the pathos of Bishop’s
handling of this tradition in the light of its political entanglements, and suggest that
Bishop’s self-conscious ‘minority’ enhances her need and her ability to remake this
tradition in her own image rather than attack it.
Bio: Hugh Foley is a DPhil Candidate at Exeter College, Oxford. His thesis explores the
relationship between landscape description and criticisms of American Imperialism in postwar American poetry.
Heather Treseler (Worcester State University, USA)
Bishop’s Triptych of Washington, D.C.
From her residence in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop recast her experiences as Consultant to the
Library of Congress in two new poems, “From Trollope’s Journal” and “Visits to St.
Elizabeths.” Considering this pair alongside “View of the Capitol from the Library of
Congress,” the single poem Bishop completed during her troubled year in Washington,
D.C., this paper offers a reinterpretation of Bishop’s critique of Cold War politics that adds
to the substantial and nuanced work of Steven Axelrod, Jonathan Ellis, and Camille
Roman, among others. It explores Bishop’s depiction of Cold War surveillance, critique of
jingoist rhetoric, and use of queer subtexts, resituating this triptych of poems within the
poet’s sustained meditation on the energies of poesis and imperial imagination: a focus
evident in her writing from the 1930s and ‘40s that shifts palpably in her middle decades.
Bio: Heather Treseler’s poems and essays have appeared in three books and in Harvard
Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. She is an
assistant professor of English at Worcester State University, and she was named the
“Emerging Poet” at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in 2014.
John McAuliffe (Manchester University, UK)
Elizabeth Bishop and what it means to be free
This paper will how ideas about freedom emerge in Bishop’s work. It will look at the poem
‘Questions of Travel', written at a time when Bishop was peripherally involved with the
Brazilian political elite and discuss that poem in relation to how she writes about freedom
15 years later, when she has moved to the US, and writes about the subject more
abstractly in ‘Sonnet’ and ‘Poem’. The paper will discuss how those poems relate to
contemporary debates about freedom and identity in Brazil and the US respectively, while
also talking about their parallel interest in thinking about aesthetic forms and freedom.
Bio: John McAuliffe was born in Ireland 1973. He grew up in Kerry and studied English in
Galway. He won the RTE Poet of the Future Award in 2000 and published his first
collection, A Better Life (Gallery), in 2002, which received a bursary from the Irish Arts
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Council and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. His second book Next Door was
published in 2007. His new book Of All Places was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation for Autumn 2011.
Panel 4B: Contact Points
Jess Cotton (UCL, UK)
“That endless wall of fog”: Elizabeth Bishop, Rimbaud and the Translation of Loss
The importance of the French connection in Elizabeth Bishop’s work has attracted
significant critical attention, particularly in relation to the publication of her first collection,
North and South (1946). This idea of ‘Frenchness’ has primarily be considered in relation
to her exposure in the 1930s to the French surrealists and, more specifically, to the work of
Max Ernst and Max Jacob. In my study, I want to shift the focus of influence away from the
surrealists to concentrate more specifically on Bishop’s relationship to Rimbaud, in spite of
(or I will suggest because) of her lost translations of his work.
In the first part of my paper, I will consider Bishop’s decision to translate Rimbaud in late
1935 in Douarnenez, a fishing village on the coast of Brittany. More particularly, I will
endeavour to situate the particular context of her writing and reading of Rimbaud in
relation to its setting, in as much as, for Bishop, it represented a Nova Scotian landscape
at a remove. As such, I will look primarily at what ‘Frenchness’ meant to Bishop at the
time, and then suggest where traces of Rimbaud can be found in her first collection and
how they resurface later on.
In the second part of the paper, considering her dispute with Lowell over his
(mis)translations of Rimbaud in Imitations (1961), I will suggest to what extent for Bishop,
translation is figured as loss. The tentativeness with which she approaches translation is, I
will argue, deeply connected to her fear, evident in so much of her poetry, of appropriating
or misrepresenting a culture. In so doing, I will consider in what ways she negotiates
foreignness in her translations, what faithfulness to a language means to her, and to what
extend her translation technique is analogous to her conception of writing.
Bio: I am an AHRC-funded PhD student in the English department at UCL. My thesis
examines the representation of childhood in post-war American poetry. I have also written
on poetry for publications including Prospect, Harper’s and The White Review.
Angus Cleghorn (Seneca College, Toronto, Canada)
Bad boy for good: Baudelaire in Stevens and Bishop
Baudelaire’s legacy in Symbolist, Modern and Prose poetry is well known. His impact on
Stevens and Bishop is unique and separate from these usual influences. In each case
Baudelaire’s affect on the writer and work differs, but has liberating effect. For Stevens, as
one of many French influences, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal is innovatively immersed in
‘mal’ and thereby enables Stevens to work through human tragedy in the Second World
War. The title “Esthetique du Mal” is clearly a tribute to Fleurs du Mal, and Baudelaire’s
explorations of vice led the way for Stevens to respond to the pressure of the
contemporaneous war, not just fascism in 1944, but the war as an historical illustration of
human malaise traced back through the Enlightenment, Medieval and Christian inceptions.
As with Baudelaire, Stevens delves into malady; unlike Baudelaire’s sense of doomed
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damnation, however, Stevens’ apocalyptic imagination envisions purification in the secular
pleasures of this green earth.
For Bishop, Baudelaire is the bad boy she turns to in her Florida years through World War
II in order to work through her disappointments with Edgar Allan Poe: his imprisoning
despair and limiting poetics are found, by Bishop in her Key West notebooks, to be
inconsistent with his mad passions – and these Baudelaire works through with exemplary
relish – enabling Bishop to write “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box” and other “Bone Key”
poems in her intoxicating years of lesbian fulfillment in Florida. Baudelaire’s submersion in
hedonism (which she also admired in Stevens) helps Bishop overcome the restraints of
the traditional north Atlantic coast cultures that persist from her upbringing in Nova Scotia
and Massachusetts, and continue with her mentor, Marianne Moore. Baudelaire for
Stevens and Bishop is fiery purgation.
Bio: Angus Cleghorn is Professor of English & Liberal Studies at Seneca College in
Toronto. His first book, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric (Palgrave
2000), has been followed by two co-edited volumes, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century:
Reading the New Editions (Virginia UP, 2012) and The Cambridge Companion to
Elizabeth Bishop (2014).
Marvin Campbell (University of Virginia, USA)
Elizabeth Bishop and Audre Lorde: “Driving into the Interior” of a Global South
Atlantic in Florida
My paper investigates how, from the peninsular island of Key West, Elizabeth
Bishop launched transnational crossings into Haiti, Mexico, Aruba, and most famously,
Brazil across moments from “North and South,” “Questions of Travel,” and “Geography III”
alongside a concomitant geographical arc undertaken by Audre Lorde from the peninsula
proper to Oaxaca and the Virgin Islands. Bishop sought to “do more” than predecessors
like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Hart Crane, with this portal closer to Havana than
Miami, as she reminded her students at Harvard, making investments in gender, race,
nation, and class grounded in a set of particular circumstances and subjectivities; forging a
twentieth century literary community through correspondence with, translation of,
Hispanophone and Lusophone poets, and building a nineteenth century poetic genealogy
where the Americas might meet French poetics on more equal terms, Poe rival to
Baudelaire. Whereas Audre Lorde brought Bishop’s more circumspect, if not genteel,
explorations into sexual, racial, and gender identity to the fore of this liminal crossing
across national borders and boundaries, hybridizing her own better documented
investments in Yoruban myth and religion with a hemispheric consciousness and placing a
Black feminist ethos more sharply still departing from the Anglo-American modernist
legacy in the Keys in favor of an Afro-Caribbean American lineage in Langston Hughes,
Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. In addition to moving Bishop beyond the welldocumented feminist agon with Adrienne Rich by refracting it through Rich’s fellow traveler
in Lorde, such a remapping through Key West reveals a Bishop and Lorde, each selfdescribed outsiders, at the center of a literary formation where the Anglo and AfricanAmerican poetics of the twentieth century converge and clash in the contact zone, to
employ Mary Louise Pratt's critical concept, that Key West and its larger framework of a
Global South Atlantic provides.
Bio: Marvin Campbell is an ABD doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia.
He currently works on 20th century American poetry, African-American poetry and prose,
and global modernism, in a project that reframes modernist and contemporary American
poetics through the lens of a Key West where shared investments in difference on the part
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of poets Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Audre
Lorde inform the spatial imaginary of a Global South Atlantic. He will defend his
dissertation in the spring of 2015.
Panel 5: Brazil/Brasil
Neil Besner (University of Winnipeg, Canada)
Flores Raras e Banalíssimas/Rare and Commonplace Flowers: Brazil, Bishop, and
Biography
Carmen Oliveira’s Brazilian biography of Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, Flores
Raras e Banalíssimas: A história de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop first
appeared in Portuguese in 1995 (with several subsequent reprintings, the most recent in
2013); its translation into English, Rare and Commonplace Flowers: the story of Elizabeth
Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, was published in 2002 (first reprinted in paperback
2003). The biography’s (generally positive) reception in Portuguese and in English has
differed; reviewers of the English translation have been more likely to query the apparent
intrusion of fictional techniques in a biography. The Brazilian feature film with English
subtitles, “Reaching for the Moon” (2013; in Portuguese, “Flores Raras”), largely based
upon the English translation, has likewise drawn mixed responses in the English-speaking
world. Bishop scholars have been disappointed in the film’s lack of accuracy in depicting
Bishop’s relationships with Mary Morse, Lota, and Robert Lowell, and more generally, with
the film’s distortions of the history of Bishop’s twenty years in Brazil, while the Brazilian
reception of the film has been overwhelmingly positive. I would like to inquire into the
divergent expectations that Brazilian and North American readers and scholars (as well as
writers) of biography have brought to this text and its translation, as well as – differently, to
be sure -- to the film. This inquiry opens out into a wider consideration of the conflicted
reception, historical and contemporary, of Bishop and her poetry in Brazil, where Bishop’s
position as a foreigner, a woman, and an artist – and, vitally, of her long and conflicted
relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares – have been read quite distinctively and
differently from the assessments in the English-speaking world of Bishop’s Brazilian years.
Bio: Fluent in Portuguese, Neil Besner translated Carmen Oliveira’s biography of Bishop
from Portuguese into English in 2002 (Rutgers UP). Over the last twenty years he has
published many essays and reviews on Bishop’s poems in Canadian and Brazilian
scholarly journals and newsletters, and delivered papers on Bishop at scholarly
conferences in Canada, the U.S., and Brazil. He has taught her poetry in Canada and
Brazil.
Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins (Univerisade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brasil)
Elizabeth Bishop: Eros in brushstrokes of light and shade
A poet who knew the power of reticence, Bishop leaves us only a few depictions in
poetryof her story with Lota de Macedo Soares. The poem “The Shampoo” enacting a
ritual of initiation is curiously a ritual of passage from A Cold Spring to Questions of Travel.
The identity of the inspiring muse so carefully veiled as “dear friend” in the poem is
surprisingly revealed in the dedication of Questions of Travel. The epigraph containing the
last two lines of a “courtly love sonnet” by Camões, as Lloyd Schwartz notes, is Bishop’s
“most public statement of affection and her open acknowledgment of Lota as the muse of
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this book.” Considering notions of love and eroticism by Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz, I
will discuss Bishop’s poetry and other writings related to this muse. The dilemma of veiling
and revealing results in unique portraits of chiaroscuro, until it finds its ultimate expression
in the myth of Friday, in “Crusoe in England.”
Bio: Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins is a Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina,
and holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts / Amherst. She has published
Antologia de Poesia Norte-Americana Contemporânea, Duas Artes: Carlos Drummond de
Andrade e Elizabeth Bishop, and essays and translations in the area of poetry.
Elizabeth Neely (Texas Wesleyan University, USA)
Losing and Finding Bishop in Brasil
When Bishop died in 1979, she was an almost forgotten literary presence in the country
that had been her adopted home for roughly twenty years. Only a few of her poems had
been translated in small journals in Brasil during her lifetime, and the newspaper articles
that once heralded her work and receipt of the Pulitzer vanished. This silence remained for
over a decade after her death. Yet 2013 marked the debut of Flores Raras, a feature film
by national filmmaker Bruno Barreto, in which her character shared the stage with that of
Lota de Macedo Soares in a film rendition of the book by Carmen Oliveira (Flores Raras e
Banalíssimas published in 1995). Waiting strategically in bookstores was translator Paulo
Henrique Britto’s third and most substantial translation of Bishop’s poems, Poemas
Escolhidos de Elizabeth Bishop.
What has Bishop’s reception in Brasil undergone between these two points? The journey
includes the political and societal factors that influenced the publication delay of Bishop’s
poetry in Brasil, and, in place of the poems, the persistence of Bishop as a presence in the
Brasilian imagination that conflicts with her North American image. Yet this imaginative
presence has fueled popular work on Bishop earlier in Brasil than in the U.S. The journey
also includes the crucial perspectives that Brasilian Bishop scholars bring to her Brasil
poetry, many of which North American critics have still to acknowledge. My own research
in Brasil includes first-time translations of newspaper articles on Bishop (historical and
contemporary), and of critical reviews of translations of Bishop’s poetry by Brasilian
scholars, along with interviews with Bishopólatras, scholars and fans of Bishop. These
illustrate the gradual but marked reintroduction of Bishop’s work in Brasil in both scholarly
and popular communities.
Bio: Elizabeth Neely, an English professor at Texas Wesleyan University, has lived in
Brasil three times, most recently in 2013 on a Fulbright grant researching Bishop. She has
published scholarly articles on Bishop’s Brasil poetry. Her book project, Elizabeth Bishop:
Journey into Brasil, chronicles Bishop’s acculturation throughout her Brasil-based poetry.
Regina Przybycien (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Bishop’s Brazil/Brasil’s Bishop 25 years ago and today
Bishop’s “Brazilian” poems, restrained and purged of personal feelings and judgments,
nonetheless reveal her views of Brazilian nature and culture. Furthermore, there is a shift
from the detached voice of an outsider who registers particularities of a place in the first
poems to a contained but emotionally charged voice in late poems like “Pink dog” and
“Santarém”. Her copious letters register her personal conflicts related to her life in Brazil,
but also document a turbulent period of Brazilian history. As the first Brazilian scholar to
research Elizabeth Bishop’s work, I propose to compare my view of Bishop’s poems and
letters as expressed in my PhD dissertation twenty-five years ago to my perception of
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these items today. Among the polemic subjects that Bishop addresses in her
correspondence are her views of Brazilian politics, her judgment of Brazilian artists, and
her apparent carelessness about the Portuguese language. I will address some of these
issues.
Bio: Regina Przybycien is currently professor of Brazilian literature at Jagiellonian
University, Cracow, Poland. Her study of Bishop Feijão preto e diamantes – O Brasil na
obra de Elizabeth Bishop (Black beans and diamonds – Brazil in Elizabeth Bishop’s work)
is due to be published in January 2015. She also published numerous articles about
Bishop in periodicals in Brazil and elsewhere. Regina P. is a translator of Polish poetry.
She published Poemas, her translations of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry.
Panel 6A: Forms of (Auto)Biography
Vidyan Ravinthiran (Durham University, UK)
“Manuelzinho” and Me
Is this poem’s epigraph a kind of apology? ‘Brazil. A friend of the writer is speaking.’ That
would be Bishop’s aristocratic partner Lota Soares: there’s a ‘whiff of noblesse oblige’,
says Frank Bidart, to how this voice scorns its impoverished ‘half squatter, half tenant (no
rent)’. Some ‘American and Brazilian readers’, writes Barbara Page, find the poem
insensitive to ‘to Manuelzinho’s painful social and economic condition’. Bishop responded
to negative reviews by saying that her own Brazilian friends liked the poem very much, and
told her: “it’s exactly like that.”
Two thoughts: first, this reminds me of Bishop telling us, in ‘A Cold Spring’ – a poem
dedicated to Jane Dewey, and spoken in her own voice – that fireflies rise ‘exactly like the
bubbles in champagne’. A social and aesthetic observation. Second, when I imagine those
(presumably upper-class, writes Page) Brazilians defending Bishop’s poem, I remember
my own Sri Lankan parents defending racist anecdotes and texts (I’m thinking of the Peter
Sellers film, The Party) by saying those people, our people, really are exactly like that.
(And, like Bishop, doesn’t the bigot always have a conveniently citable friend of the
relevant sex, nationality, race, sexual orientation, who finds their joke funny?)
‘Manuelzinho’ is one of the poetic masterpieces of the twentieth century. But to understand
this we must see that when Page acknowledges the poem as ‘a great achievement of tone
and color’ – prior to listing its critics – she activates a mistaken division between ‘tone’ and
(social, political) content. In this paper I look closely at how the word ‘me’ is used in this
poem to structure, ironise and complicate its dramatic monologue; and I also consider
what ‘Manuelzinho’ has meant to ‘me’, as a British / South-Asian poet who should perhaps
recoil from its supposedly patrician voice.
Bio: I am a Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University; previously, I was the
Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Elizabeth
Bishop’s Prosaic is forthcoming in 2015; I’ve published peer-reviewed articles in Essays in
Criticism, The Review of English Studies and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
among other journals. I’ve also written over thirty pieces of literary journalism, many for
The Times Literary Supplement, and am co-editor of Prac Crit, the online magazine of
poetry and poetics.
My poems have appeared in a range of periodicals which include the TLS, The Sunday
Times, The Financial Times, PN Review and Poetry Review; they’ve been anthologised
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several times, published as a pamphlet, and my first volume, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe,
2014) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Laura Helyer (University of Southampton, Chichester, UK)
Imagining the Life of Gertrude Bulmer Bishop: Travels Between Verse and Prose
I am currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Southampton/
Chichester (due to submit Jan. 2015). My project is comprised of a novel set in Nova
Scotia in the early twentieth-century which aims to extend current scholarship on Elizabeth
Bishop through experimentation with the hybrid form of the biographical novel. This has
allowed me to further my interests in the possibilities and limitations of ‘interior biography’/
‘faction’, and to engage with current methodologies utilised by biographers and novelists,
including the validity of ethical considerations concerning the fictionalised ‘appropriation of
others’ lives and privacy’ (Byatt, 2009). Whilst keen to be as factually accurate as
possible, I was also attracted to the creative possibilities of imagining ‘an inner world
beyond the normal reach of biography’, as John Mullan understands the genre of
‘biographical fiction’ as capable of achieving.
The accompanying critical thesis includes a chapter focused on Bishop’s prose,
particularly in relation to the prose poem. My own background is in poetry rather than
fiction and this is my first novel. I have therefore found it very useful to try to define and
reflect on the transitional space between prose and verse, as well as analysing examples
of hybrid/ mixed genre works. I have also considered the artistic practice and strategies of
other writers in addition to Bishop who have moved between poetry, prose and fiction.
Through my ongoing research (including a research trip/ creative residency in Nova
Scotia), I have gained a greater knowledge of the history and literature of Halifax and the
Maritimes, and how this informed Bishop’s work. I would therefore like to present a hybrid
paper comprising of a critical discussion of rhythm and time in Bishop’s prose and a
reading of an extract from my own novel.
Bio: I have an MLitt. in Creative Writing (poetry, with Distinction) from the University of St.
Andrews where I also completed three years of part-time doctoral study in literature,
specializing in the area of lyric poetry, letter writing and ecopoetics. This included research
on Elizabeth Bishop which I have since developed into a creative writing doctoral project. I
am currently based in Glasgow.
Panel 6B: Another Sense of Self
Marcel Inhoff (University of Bonn, Germany)
Elizabeth Bishop's sacred exteriors
From the onset of Bishop criticism it has been noted repeatedly that Elizabeth Bishop is a
descriptive writer with an eye trained by Marianne Moore, Darwin and other sources. Later,
insightful discussions of Bishop's sense of self and the way it is expressed in her poetry
have been added to the conversation. Much less frequently discussed, apart from two
exemplary studies, is Bishop's use of religious sources for her poetry. In my paper, I will
show how Bishop's use of religious autobiography, and religious poetry has been
instrumental in creating a narrative of the self that makes use of external stimuli, while at
the same time not submerging them. Using Questions of Travel, as well as Bishop's book15
length translation (especially the foreword) of Helena Morley, I will show how Bishop's
poetry uses the form of poetry and the (less strict) form of autobiographical narrative to
create a poetry of description that is illuminated by the autobiographical impulses of a poet
who publicly eschewed confessionalism. I will show how Bishop's method can be traced
back to the poets and theologians she was reading all her life, from St. Augustine to Henri
Amiel and Simone Weil, from Edward Taylor and Wordsworth to Hopkins. And finally, I will
suggest that while her friend Lowell was the one lauded and recognized for his influence
on confessional poetry, that the influence of less publicly autobiographical poets like
Bishop (and Delmore Schwartz) is underestimated in seeing how the Middle Generation
seeded a significant amount of American poetry to come.
Bio: Marcel Inhoff is a poet and scholar, currently finishing a PhD at the University of
Bonn, Germany on the role of religion in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and
John Berryman.
Arsevi Seyran (Stony Brook University, USA)
Negative Capability in “Filling Station”: Who Loves Us All?
“Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop is formed of raw description and rhetorical questions,
seemingly aiming to capture no emotion. But its depiction of “black translucency” does just
that, generating a sense of intrigue as well as tenderness. The poem evokes a less
intense version of the drive we have to turn our heads and look when we pass an accident
on the highway. Truth, in this Bishop poem, is not beauty but unseemliness—
unseemliness is truth. Yet, though the poem is not beautiful, it elicits an uncanny pathos
from the reader.
As T. S. Eliot puts it, “poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from
personality.” John Keats, too, had written: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in
existence; because he has no Identity.” This paper will portray Bishop’s poem in light of
the arc from Keats to Eliot as the two emphasize the absence of a poet’s self in his/her act
of composition. “Filling Station” merges Bishop’s role as a traveler with her negative
capability as a poet, allowing the piece both the distance and emotional vigor of
photography. Through this merging, Bishop attains gusto, which is explained by William
Hazlitt as “the power or passion defining any object”—its intensity. Therefore, in this poem,
featured in section two of Questions of Travel (“Elsewhere”) “truth of character” is captured
by virtue of Bishop’s “escape from personality,” giving the reader a seamless experience: a
vision and a feeling that bear the trademark of Bishop’s poetics.
“Filling Station” is the work of a chameleon poet whose role as an anonymous traveler
facilitates her negative capability, the result of which is the “passion,” the unexpected
pathos, that is evoked in her reader.
Bio: (Zeynep) Arsevi Seyran is a second year PhD student in English at Stony Brook
University. She currently teaches “Introduction to Poetry” at SBU and holds an MFA in
poetry from the University of Oregon, 2011. She is the (modest) author of Quarter Past
Terminal, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in Kentucky, 2013.
Panel 7A: Change and Transformation
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Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast)
Elizabeth Bishop’s Work of Fire
“At the Fishhouses,” published in A Cold Spring (1955), is a metaphor for how art alters
our relations to the present moment:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
Imagining what knowledge would be requires a transformation of thought and a shift in
how we perceive and experience physical reality. The ‘Cold dark deep and absolutely
clear,/the clear gray icy water’ is transfigured into the feel of burning fire, the elements
transposed in the move from a visual perception of the water to a visceral experience of it.
And what maps this metamorphosis? The individual human imagination coming into
contact with reality, perceiving one thing as another in a poem or in ‘art in the present time’
as Emerson noted in ‘The Poet’ (1844). This paper reads Bishop’s understanding of the
transfigurative nature of art in relation to Emerson’s concept of poets as the ‘children of the
fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted’ before moving on to consider this
poem in particular alongside Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and
Maurice Blanchot’s The Work of Fire (1949) to understand Bishop’s own take on the
processes of art.
Bio: Philip McGowan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Queen’s University
Belfast and has published essays on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and
Anne Sexton.
Angelica Nuzzo (City University of New York, USA)
“… every so often the world is bound to shake”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of
Travel and Life Change
This paper addresses the issue of “change”— change in life and in the landscape of life, in
nature, in relationships, but also in the writing of poetry—and its connection with the topic
of travel that emerges in Questions of Travel. The issue is first biographical, and is
connected to the poet’s moving into the “world inverted” of Brazil. At the center are the
“questions” that “Questions of Travel” seals with the reference to Pascal. Herein the
travelling that produces change in life and landscape is questioned retrospectively, after it
has happened; but then it is not so much questioned as accepted and welcomed in all its
apparent strangeness and in the bifurcation that doubles change in reality and in the
“imagination.” The book opens with a repetition that is also a poetic variation—a slight
change, as it were—in “Arrival at Santos.” Change implies continuity and discontinuity: and
these are geographical and historical, spatial and temporal as “Brazil, January 1, 1502”
testifies. Change is indeed natural and inevitable (“Sandpiper,” “Song for the Rainy
Season”). But this does not make is less frightening or ominous: it must, however, been
taken into account as a part of life. The central point is the way change is accepted and
made part of life. The lesson here, for Bishop, is twofold. It is in the way the sandpiper (her
own double) puts change into the account of life—he “takes [it] for granted”; but also in the
17
way poetry transfigures things into new forms of life: the poet is the “bird” that
“arranges/two notes at a right angle” and produces the miracle that the world cannot
otherwise fathom (“Sunday, 4am”).
Bio: I am Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (Graduate
Center/Brooklyn College). I have explored the connection of poetry and philosophy in Kant
(Kant and the Unity of Reason), Hegel (Memory, History, Justice in Hegel), and Heidegger
(in an essay on “What are Poets For?”).
Katrina Mayson (University of Sheffield)
Elizabeth Bishop: A “bad case of the Threes”; one, two and (an)other
Critics often portray Bishop as a poet of duality, someone whose life and writings can be
defined by two poles of comparison, such as North America and Brazil, or insider and
outsider. This sense of one, and then another, is legitimately grounded in her writings; it
was Bishop who titled her first book of poetry North & South and subdivided Questions of
Travel into ‘Brazil’ and ‘Elsewhere’. However, my suggestion is that Bishop is really a poet
of the ‘threes’; that more often than not in her poetry there is a third figure or trope that
acts ‘as the third rail’ (The Man-Moth), essential to the structure and meaning of the
poetry. I examine how the number three shadows Questions of Travel, first questioning
the meaning of the dedicatory quote from Camões to Lota de Macedo Soares, a prequel of
sorts to Bishop’s later proposition that ‘you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one
of them.’ (‘In the Waiting Room’). I argue that the figure of the third, like the triangle of
objects left at the poet’s feet by the gardener in ‘Manuelizinho’, is key to Bishop’s ability
move beyond being merely a descriptive poet. A tripartite structure gives balance and
momentum to her poetry, such as when in ‘The Armadillo’ the flames of the falling fire
balloon are countered by the pair of owls that fly up out of their nest; are there echoes
here of the figure of the Holy Trinity? Lastly, I look at Bishop’s frequent use and adaptation
of the triplet form throughout her career and ask whether it is significant that she does
specifically feature it in Questions of Travel.
Bio: I am a second year PhD student at The University of Sheffield, writing on Elizabeth
Bishop’s poetics of observation with a specific focus on her use of objects as the
connectors between her various influences, ranging from art through to travel and
translation.
Panel 7B: Home and/as “Elsewhere”
Miyuki Amano (Prefectural University of Hiroshima)
Understanding why “In the Village” is at the very heart of Elizabeth Bishop’s
Questions of Travel
Elizabeth Bishop placed “In the Village,” the Nova Scotia story based on her childhood
experiences, at the very heart of Questions of Travel, but her decision about this
placement has been ignored by almost every subsequent editor of Bishop’s poetry, as
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Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis point out in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth
Bishop (2014). I will approach this question by examining it in a wider context, i.e., its
relationship with the other poems included in Questions of Travel.
The most significant theme of “In the Village” is a girl’s complicated and ambivalent
feelings toward her mother (intimate, but at the same time, distant) in a large family. Her
mother is suffering from a mental disorder, and is being taken care of by her grandmother
and aunts, so the girl is not allowed to come to her mother freely nor can she express her
affection for her. She watches her from a distance, and can only express her mixed
feelings toward her mother as similar to the feelings she has for a cow. She expresses the
sorrow of losing her mother by referring to the address of the sanitarium in her
grandmother’s handwriting on the package sent to her mother every week.
Both the girl’s and the present poet’s feelings and life are expressed elaborately through
the repeated use of certain colors, as well as a unique soundscape. These techniques
also serve to convey the rhythm of village life.
These themes and techniques which form the core of all the poems, appear with variations
in other poems, as well. Therefore, these elements play off each other, and enlarge the
possibility of a new interpretation of the poems: for example, the meaning of the questions
given in “Questions of Travel” and the death of Arthur in “First Death in Nova Scotia.”
Bio: Miyuki Amano is a professor at Prefectural University of Hiroshima. Her research has
been mainly in the area of 18th and 19th century British writers, and her recent research
interest is in the travel writings of British and American writers including William
Wordsworth, George Eliot, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Bishop.
Brian Bartlett (St. Mary’s University, Canada)
Bishop at the Movies
Scattered through Bishop’s letters to various friends are comments about films; these
passages provide intriguing glimpses of her life, her sensibility, her judgments and tastes.
Her passing, unsystematic commentaries on films range from inviting Marianne Moore in
1935 to a nature documentary called Baboons (a fitting choice for two women drawn to
“curious creatures”) -- to her critique Black Orpheus as “more French than Brazilian” and
guilty of falsifying samba -- to her amusing admission in 1972 that she was holding off
seeing Clockwork Orange “because it sounded much too violent to me” (yet “Maybe I’ll see
it, rapes & all”). She pointedly criticized Moulin Rouge, Quo Vadis, and the Russian film
adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Some of her letters also express admiration and
enthusiasm for The Battleship Potemkin, the 1935 Romeo and Juliet, and the 1961 La
Princesse de Cleves.
My presentation would begin by surveying such considerations of film, and by speculating
about reasons for Bishop’s disdain and admiration. 2/3rds of my presentation would likely
be dedicated to Bishop’s striking praise of Kurosowa’s masterpiece Rashomon and
Quebec film-maker Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (“extremely sad, but really
wonderful”). I would identify parallels between Jutra’s depiction of a young boy in a
Catholic mining town in the 1940s and Bishop’s writing of a young girl in a Protestant town
in Nova Scotia three decades earlier. Both Bishop and Jutra include a child’s early
encounters with death (Antoine is an undertaker), an alcoholic uncle, a general store,
churches, British influences, and brutal winter weather. I would present correlations
between Mon Oncle Antoine and such Bishop works as the poems “First Death in Nova
Scotia,” “Sestina,” and “Manners,” along with her prose pieces “In the Village,” “Primer
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School,” and “Memories of Uncle Neddy.” My presentation would speculate how Bishop’s
live and work helped encourage her keen receptivity to Jutra’s film.
Bio: Brian Bartlett of Halifax, Nova Scotia is the author of many collections of poems,
including -The Watchmaker’s Table- and -Wanting the Day: Selected Poems-, as well as a
book of prose, -Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar-. For a decade he was editor of
-The Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia Newsletter-.
Mark Bauer (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
The Elsewhere of Memory: Bishop’s Poems of Childhood in Questions of Travel
In Questions of Travel’s title poem, Bishop’s speaker asks from the midst of her Brazilian
journey, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here,” thereby introducing the
volume’s conflict between “here” and “home” (CP 93). These deictics, however, are not
synonymous with the terms that organize Questions of Travel’s subsections—“Brazil” and
“Elsewhere”—neither of which suggests the rootedness of “home.” That the volume should
rely on these more objective categories is surprising given that one of the elsewheres is
the Nova Scotia of Bishop’s childhood, which in other circumstances might fall under the
heading of “home.” Indeed, these Nova Scotia poems, including “Manners,” “First Death in
Nova Scotia,” and “Sestina,” mark the first time Bishop revisits the terrain of her childhood
in a collection of poetry, and it is striking that these efforts should appear in a volume that
is so rhetorically concerned with travel. Rather than a return to the speakers’ origins (to
“home”), filing these poems under “Elsewhere” suggests that these poems of childhood
merely show another version of “thinking of here,” of imaginative travel. As a result,
memory itself is figured as an elsewhere, making one’s own past as foreign as it is familiar.
This paper will examine the intersections of travel memoir and autobiography in Questions
of Travel further in order to highlight the volume’s attempts to cast the putative “home” of
one’s own past as “Elsewhere.”
Bio: Mark Bauer is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. His
dissertation examines Bishop’s childhood poems as part of a larger discussion of poetic
autobiography after World War II in America and the British Isles.
Panel 8: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Melissa Zeiger (Dartmouth College, USA)
“The Riverman,” Stranded Mermaids and Cold Water: Elizabeth Bishop Takes a
Swim
In this paper I shall read Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Riverman” as a poem in which Brazilian
relocation prompts her to articulate a new ars poetica that distinguishes her at once from
her former poetic personae and from such powerful interlocutors as Marianne Moore and
Robert Lowell. I will argue that travel for Bishop means emergence from a set of
enclosures, first of the childhood family, later from literary teachers and colleagues.
Through a shamanic figure, Bishop is radically reimagining herself and her poetry as
“other,” in an aesthetic of magical realism, wondering what strange poetic worlds and
reincarnations are habitable.
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Lowell called this poem “the best fairy story in verse I know,” adding that “it brings back an
old dream of yours, you said you felt you were a mermaid scraping barnacles [to eat] off a
wharf-pile.” She had described “finding” a starving and gasping mermaid, not being one.)
He had based a poem on this story not too long before: “Water,” which ends:
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
In associating the mermaid nightmare with “The Riverman, Lowell acknowledges the
importance for Bishop of exploring poetic alien realms, but not her ability to survive and be
nourished by them. His own persona in “Water” cannot: he sees himself here as staying
within the frame of houses “stuck to the rock.” Gnawing at old encrustations—earlier ways
of writing?—isn’t quite enough for Bishop. In Bishop’s poem, the water is cold, but not too
cold.
Bio: Melissa Zeiger is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, where she
teaches in the Departments of English, Women’s and Gender Studies, Jewish Studies,
and Comparative Literature. She specializes in courses on modern poetry, women’s
writing and immigrant writing. She is the author of Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality,
and the Changing Shapes of Elegy, and is currently writing a book on the poetics and
politics of gardens. Her essay, “Less than Perfect: Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular
Romance,” was recently published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.
Ruth Hawthorn (Independent Scholar)
Revisiting “North Haven”
Melissa Zeiger, in her analysis of “North Haven” — one of Elizabeth Bishop’s only elegies
for a fellow poet — stresses what she sees as the differences between Bishop and
Lowell’s poetics. She places Lowell’s ‘self-memorializing and self-aggrandizing impulse’ in
opposition to Bishop’s ‘perspective from afar’, her ‘composure and clear-sightedness’.
Similarly, Thomas Travisano argues that in this poem, Bishop is gently taking Lowell to
task: ‘because [for Bishop] a poem’s existence was independent of the self, once the
poem had been perfected it need not be changed to reflect a changing self. It was for his
tendency to “revise, revise, revise” that Bishop chided Lowell in her elegy’. These are
persuasive and valuable distinctions between the two poets and this paper seeks to
supplement rather than critique these readings through an alternative analysis that
emphasises the poetic affinities Bishop shared with Lowell. Looking at the poem in relation
to Lowell’s own elegies for his peers, I will suggest that Bishop pays tribute to her friend by
assuming his poetic habits, even indulging, momentarily, in the romanticism for which she
fondly rebuked him in their correspondence.
Bio: I completed my doctoral research on 20th Century American Elegy at the University
of Glasgow in 2012, where I taught for 3 years. Since then, I have worked as a lecturer
and researcher at University of British Columbia (Canada) and University of New England
(Australia), focusing on contemporary literature
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Panel 9A: Correspondences: Bishop’s Letters and Prose
Sophie Baldock (University of Sheffield)
Word Travels: Journeys from Letters to Poems in Questions of Travel (1965)
The aim of this paper is to investigate Elizabeth Bishop’s use of letters as source material
for her poetry. I will explore ways in which Bishop’s correspondence functions as a
workbook for the development of ideas that appeared later in published poems. In doing
so, I will focus on the way that words and images themselves travel between people,
places and the genres of letter and poem. For example, Bishop’s letters written in Brazil in
the 1950s contain images, such as descriptions of mountains and waterfalls and the “Lent”
trees, which seem to re-appear and carry over to her published poems in Questions of
Travel (1965).
My paper, in discussing the relationship between letters and poetry, will also assess recent
criticism that has focused on Bishop’s correspondence, and which seeks to elevate the
status of letters from an inferior sub-genre to an art form in their own right. I will explore
further the complexities that such observations reveal about the transformations that take
place between letters and poetry. I will address particularly the paradox that, though
Bishop’s poems make frequent reference to letters and mail-related ephemera, she
published very few verse-letters. This raises questions about the similarities, and also
differences, between the genres of letter and poem. What gets lost over the course of the
journey from letter to poem? What does and does not travel well? Why did Bishop feel
reservations about using correspondence as material for poetry, and what are the
implications of writing to a single correspondent as opposed to an audience of readers?
Bio: Sophie Baldock is a PhD student in English literature at the University of Sheffield.
Her thesis investigates post-war American poets’ use of literary letters and
experimentation with the genre of the letter.
Siobhan Phillips (Dickinson College, USA)
Bishop and the Politics of the Personal (Letter)
The decade 1955-1965 includes Bishop’s most intense involvement in national and
international politics. In part because of nonfiction writing assignments, she learned of her
adopted country with precision and depth. In part through her relationship with Lota de
Macedo Soares, she was allowed detailed knowledge of a revolution and its aftermath. But
this was also the period of Bishop’s most intense international letter-writing. Her
relationships with American friends and colleagues strengthened with the depth and
breadth of her correspondence. What does it mean to consider these two developments—
politics and letters—in conjunction? Bishop’s writing shows an innate tendency of the
personal letter as a genre: to form a space that is not public life but that is, paradoxically,
essential to it. This presentation demonstrates as much by setting the “haranguing and
explaining” in Bishop’s 1962 letters to her personal acquaintances next to the “strong
protest” of her 1962 letter to the editor of The New Republic (a letter that has not yet been
republished). This comparison not only stipulates further the letter form, and reveals
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further Bishop’s attentiveness to her political situation—as well as her self-conception as
an expatriate writer within it. Bishop’s political/personal letters also challenge current
theorizations of world literature that take their political agenda from a division of center and
periphery that letters steadily refuse.
Bio: Siobhan Phillips is an assistant professor at Dickinson College and the author of The
Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (Columbia, 2010).
Her essays and poems have appeared in PMLA, Boston Review, Twentieth-Century
Literature, Yale Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. She is writing a book about
personal letters.
Michael O’Neill (Durham University)
“Thinking with One’s Feelings”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Literary Criticism
The talk will focus on Bishop's comments about poetry in her letters and what the Library
of America edition of her work classifies as 'Literary Statements and Reviews' as well as
implicitly metapoetic moments in her poetry. Her dislike of 'making poetry monstrous or
boring' though 'pretentious' analysis ('It All Depends') does not prevent her from seeing
that 'Writing poetry is an unnatural act' (see essay with the same title), albeit one that
seeks a natural effect. The criteria she develops in this essay -- Accuracy, Spontaneity,
Mystery -- allow her to admire a very wide range of poets as her choice of touchstones (a
technique at once Arnoldian and Jarrellesque) reveals: from Herbert to Auden and Lowell.
The talk will discuss the acuteness of her insights, local and broader, into poetry. She is
capable of giving the essence of a poet in a sentence or phrase -- Hopkins's 'selfinstigated growth of feeling', for instance, or Shelley as a 'bright, steadfast flame that by
disillusionment and tragedy was strengthened and given deeper colors', a critical gift that
is accompanied by wry, witty self-awareness and a capacity to surprise, evident in her
letter of March 1963 to Anne Stevenson. This talk will also briefly explore how her ways of
discussing poetry have influenced her reception.
Bio: Michael O’Neill is a poet and Professor of English at Durham University. His research
has concentrated on questions of literary achievement and of poetic influence, dialogue,
and legacy. His third collection of poetry, Gangs of Shadow, was published by Arc in 2014.
Panel 9B: Bishop and Animals (2)
Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield, UK)
“Almost criminal”: Nature Before the Law in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry
On receiving Elizabeth Bishop’s 1937 prose poem, ‘The Hanging of the Mouse’, Moore
wrote to Bishop that ‘your competence is almost criminal’. Although Bishop of course sent
many poems to Moore during this period, it is certainly possible that she had Moore
especially in mind: in ‘Efforts of Affection’ Bishop dwells at some length on how she was
first introduced to Moore’s work by the Vassar college librarian, Miss Fanny Borden, the
niece of the infamous Lizzie Borden. Monteiro has explored connections between the early
Bishop and Kafka’s stories via ‘The Man-Moth’ and ‘The Hanging of the Mouse’, but while
Kafka criticism has discussed the legal and judicial discourses that structure his fictions,
similar detailed attention has not been paid to fictions of justice in Bishop’s poetry. I will
attempt to explore relationships between nature and the law in Bishop’s work, taking as a
starting point this link with Kafka, added to Rosenbaum’s argument that ‘Bishop resists a
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spiritual resolution to man’s alienation from the natural world and does not depict a nature
that “radiates” moral law (Rosenbaum, 2014, 66)’. Rosenbaum reflects on how Bishop
modifies a male romantic and transcendental tradition that used nature as a norm and
source of moral law, turning instead to connections between nature and surrealism. I
intend to take this a stage further by considering romantic and surrealist interests in crime
and criminality in relation to portrayals of nature in Bishop’s work.
Key texts for my paper will be the scenes of execution in ‘The Hanging of the Mouse’ and
a much later poem from Questions of Travel, ‘The Burglar of Babylon’. In this later, balladic
poem, nature/nurture arguments for criminality are tested against the burglar, Micuçú’s,
flight through an urban landscape haunted with animal bodies and voices (including goats,
kites, babies, buzzards and mongrels): its also worth noting that the burglar’s name refers
to a deadly snake. Ultimately, I will explore the human/animal binary in Bishop’s work
through reference to such deviant figures and the discipline applied to them.
Bio: Katherine Ebury is lecturer in modern literature at the University of Sheffield. Her
book on Modernism and Cosmology, about early twentieth century literary responses to
Einstein, appeared with Palgrave in 2014. Her new project will examine twentieth century
representations of capital punishment.
Lhorine François (University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France)
Retrieving elusive otherness through Elizabeth Bishop's animal poems
This paper will endeavour to investigate how Elizabeth Bishop uses animals in her poems
as devices which lead her readers, through a process of defamiliarisation, to explore
notions such as the lack of coherence in our existences or the dichotomy between self and
otherness. These animals are most of the time placed in situations where the emergence
of the strange within the familiar invites the reader to reflect on the nature of the self. They
also shed light on the difficulty to account for otherness, as well as the entrapment of the
subject within its self. If most famous poems such as “The Moose” or “The Fish”
immediately come to mind, this presentation will rather focus on some of her publications
that have more scarcely been commented upon. Starting with prose poems such as “The
Hanging of the Mouse” or “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics,” we will consider how strategies
based on echoes or paratactic structures inscribe emptiness and loss in the text, and at
the same time underline the necessity for multiplicity in creative, literary experience. It will
also be observed that other poems such as “Pink Dog,” denounce the stifling of otherness.
In some other instances, detours via otherness, as in “Trouvée,” bring the reader back to
the single quality of the self, its inevitable isolation. Close analyses of those texts will probe
into Bishop's capacity to encapsulate loss and elusive strangeness into her writing, so that
she enables us, readers, to retrieve what is evanescent fifty years, and probably more,
after her passing.
Bio: A senior lecturer at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne (France), Lhorine François
is the author of a dissertation in American Literature on “The shapings of the lyrical subject
in Elizabeth Bishop's writings.” She also published other articles about Bishop and about
the translation of American and Caribbean poetry into French.
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Sarah Kennedy (Downing College, Cambridge University)
“Swerving as I swerve”: Empathy and Displacement in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Rainy
Season; Sub-Tropics”
This paper focusses on the three prose-poems collected under the title ‘Rainy Season;
Sub-Tropics’ that Bishop composed in 1967, after a two-year break in writing. It sets the
narratives performed by three of nature’s ‘radical misfits’—Giant Toad, Strayed Crab, and
Giant Snail—within a spatialised account of Bishop’s Brazilian poetry. Fixed by Robert
Lowell’s inscription of her as the ‘famous eye’, Bishop is often imaged as a writer whose
scrutinising gaze travels with an Empedoclean directness and lucidity across the
shadowplay of its distant surroundings. Where the poetry approaches an immediacy of
affect, the emotion is displaced, mapped onto other, more safely phenomenal territories of
experience. Thomas Travisano has rightly characterised Bishop’s ‘art of displacement’ as
‘one of her most pervasive and persistent artistic strategies.’ How is it, then, that Bishop’s
Brazilian poems are able to clutch at what Eric Ormsby calls ‘the quick slippery density’ of
living things? This paper argues that the progress of Bishop’s affective mapping can be
construed as a ‘swerve’, such as that traced in the motions of man and fish in ‘The
Riverman’. To ‘swerve’ is to deviate, to transgress, and to stray. The motion encompasses
the strategic (deliberate deviation) and the responsive (deflection). It is a fundamental
feature of Bishop’s poetic: in the words of the Strayed Crab, ‘I believe in the oblique, the
indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself’). The paper undertakes a close
reading of the missed connections, glancing blows and altered trajectories of the denizens
of the Rainy Season poems, exploring concepts of transitivity and intra-species empathy in
the poems’ ecological framing. As the Australian poet Mark Tredinnick has observed, ‘The
world works best when it misses / Its mark’.
Bio: Dr Sarah Kennedy is a Research Fellow in English at Downing College, Cambridge,
specialising in modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry. Her research interests
include metaphor, landscape, and literary selves. She recently contributed a chapter ‘Ash
Wednesday and the Ariel Poems’ to The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (CUP, 2015)
Panel 10A: Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts
Bridget Vincent (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Picturing shame: Elizabeth Bishop’s ekphrastic doubt
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the ethical complexities attending
Elizabeth Bishop’s preoccupation with perception. Bishop’s reflections on travel, similarly,
have prompted substantial debate. A new way in to these intersecting lines of inquiry can
be found, this paper proposes, in Bishop’s ekphrastic writing. Attending to ekphrastic
poems in this context is revelatory because ekphrastic form carries, both in its ancient
theoretical origins and its twentieth-century reinventions, a raft of aesthetic and ethical
problems highly relevant to Bishop’s writing.
Ekphrasis, by necessity, dramatises the ethics of looking and describing: the ekphrastic
encounter with visual art often prompt writers to reflect on the capacities and limits of
verbal art. As has been widely observed, for many twentieth-century poets, ekphrasis
provides an occasion for self-critique and for a meditation on the inadequacies of verbal
resources. Further, the particular representational preoccupations that emerge from
Bishop’s own ekphrases — such as her unease at using descriptors from the visual arts in
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her evocations of landscape (noted in detail by Messenger, for instance) — resonate with
a key problem in the history of ekphrasis. Specifically, ekphrastic writing denotes the
depiction of visual art in verbal art, but it can also involve the depiction of nonartistic
entities (people, landscapes, interiors, machines) as art objects in their own right — with all
the potential for dehumanisation and aestheticisation such a transformation entails. The
presentation of the real as art object informs Bishop’s anxieties in important ways, and
given the prominent role played by broader discourses of shame and self-questioning in
current Bishop scholarship, the perspectives generated by a study of ekphrastic doubt are
especially timely.
Bio: Bridget Vincent recently completed a PhD in English Literature at Cambridge
University and is currently a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
Melbourne. In 2014/15 she is undertaking further research at Cambridge University funded
by an Endeavour Research Fellowship. Research interests include: modern and
contemporary poetry; ethical criticism; interartistic aesthetics and ekphrasis; 20thC Irish
literature and politics; and the history of the lyric. Her work appears in MLR, Philosophy
and Literature, and Diogenes.
Susan Rosenbaum (University of Georgia, USA)
The Case of the Fallen S: Vertigo, the Avant-Garde, and Bishop’s Questions of
Travel
In “Arrival at Santos,” the poem which begins Questions of Travel, the tourist-narrator and
her elderly fellow passenger Miss Breen descend from their ship into a “tender” that will
take them to port. Bishop uses enjambment over the constraints of stanza and line to
enact their perilous climb down a ladder backward; the narrator comments “Please, boy,
do be more careful with that boat hook! / Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen’s / skirt!
There!” The movement of the poem down the page mimics that of the women’s descent,
with the line break in the phrase “Miss Breen’s / Skirt” analogous to the hook that catches,
and thus delays, the descent of the skirt, which arrives on the following line. This
enjambment prepares us for the much stranger one that follows, in a description of Miss
Breen: “Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall / s, New York. There. We are
settled.” In this case, Bishop hasn’t enjambed part of a phrase, but the final letter of the
word “falls,” resulting in an amputated “s,” an s which has “fallen” or perhaps slid to the
next line. Read on its own, the line “s, new York. There. We are settled” is non-sensical; to
make the “s” mean semantically it must be re-attached to the preceding word and line. On
the other hand, the amputated “s” alludes to the poems of the futurist avant-garde, to
Isidore Isou’s lettrist experiments in the 1940s, and to the concrete poems of Brazilians
Augusto and Harold de Campos, offering a glimpse of Bishop’s subtle adaptation of avantgarde experiments.
In this paper I will explore the fallen “s” as a window on to Bishop as a writer indebted to
the international avant-garde, and will consider the new vantages this context offers on the
intriguing enjambments of “Arrival at Santos” and the importance of linguistic, literal, and
figurative falls to Questions of Travel more generally. I propose that Bishop’s experiments
with a poetics of vertigo would prove to be deeply resonant with, and influential to, the midcentury avant-garde. In the main then, this paper brings Bishop into conversations about
the modernist avant-garde, from which she is conventionally excluded, with an eye to
denaturalizing some of the truisms about the kinds of movement explored in Questions of
Travel.
Bio: Dr Susan Rosenbaum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia.
She is the author of Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and
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the Crisis in Reading (2007) and she is currently finishing a book titled Imaginary
Museums: Surrealism, American Poetry, and the Visual Arts, 1920-1970. Portions of the
book have been published or are forthcoming in Genre, New York School Collaborations,
and a special issue of Dada/Surrealism on exhibitions and display.
Lin Su (Essex University, UK)
Becoming a Gourmet Cook: Elizabeth Bishop, Leonora Carrington and the Act of
Cooking
The alchemizing of the everyday and the domestic with the occult and the sacred is what
unites Elizabeth Bishop, the poet who drew on visual arts to formulate her aesthetics, and
Leonora Carrington, the Surrealist painter and writer. This paper argues that these
seemingly irreconcilable interests coalesce, in both cases, in the act of cooking as a
metaphor and a form of aesthetics for the transubstantiation of their arts.
Bishop and Carrington both see the domestic sphere as a place of creativity. The variety of
food references in Bishop’s poetry bears testimony to the poet’s fondness of the culinary
art. To give but a few examples: “crumb” is one of the repeated end-word in the early
Eucharist sestina “A Miracle for Breakfast”; “Going to the Bakery” contains a detailed
catalogue of baking ingredients; Bishop even jokingly but legitimately compares Fannie
Farmer, the author of Boston Cooking-school Cook Book, to Levi-Strauss in her poem for
Frank Bidart. Leonora Carrington’s use of cooking for hermetic and alchemic creativity
pursuits has been recorded by scholars (Aberth, Kaplan), but much remains to be done in
terms of relating Carrington’s paintings (The House Opposite and Grandmother
Moorhead's Aromatic Kitchen) and her fiction (“The Sisters”) to other female artists that
may or may have not had direct connection to Carrington, but who shared her vision of the
kitchen as a site of alchemical transformation and (metaphorically) the intellectual hub.
This paper will correlate Bishop’s and Carrington’s inter-art representations of food
preparation and cooking as an indispensable part of the female inventiveness, with an aim
to both illuminate an understudied side of Bishop and to put on the scholarly map a
specific strand of interests that the female writers of the time engaged. The texts and
contexts that I aim to engage include Bishop’s reading of Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Boston
Cooking-School Cook Book, the recipes Carrington created for her famous surrealist
feasts, Bishop’s poetry and Carrington’s artistic production.
Bio: Lin Su is a PhD student in the Department of Literature, Theatre and Film Studies,
University of Essex. Her PhD project, fully funded by China Scholarship Council,
problematizes the representations of place in Modernist poetry, with a specific focus on
H.D., T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop.
Panel 10B: Disruptive Journeys: Place, Space, and Translation
Chris Wilson Simpkins (University of South Africa, SA)
Inside/Outside: Bishop's Use of Place Against Capitalism
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Speaking of herself as a young woman, Elizabeth Bishop said, "[p]olitically I considered
myself a socialist, but I disliked 'socially conscious' writing." However, as many critics have
argued, Bishop found ways to give her poems what might be called a "social
unconscious"--that is, habits and ways of work implicitly challenging to American corporate
liberalism of the twentieth-century. My paper compares "Arrival in Santos" to
"Santarém," arguing that between the two poems, Bishop developed an implicitly
disruptive method for countering Pascal's 'man sitting quietly in a room alone':
an insistence on a Deweyan subjectivity that exists only in the immediate emotional
experience and expression of place. Built within relationship and upon feeling, this
ephemeral subjectivity disrupts capitalism's requirement for a self capable of autonomy,
quantification, evaluation, and history. By making her subjects dependent on 'having a
place,' Bishop discovers modernity's most elusive location: a place to stand outside
capitalism.
Bio: Chris Wilson Simpkins has an MFA in Creative Writing and is completing a DLitt in
English. She is interested in American women's poetry of the twentieth century, gender,
identity, and literary history. Previous publications include “Gender Transformation:
‘Process’ as a Crossover Discourse in 1950s Poetics” in Interdisciplinary Humanities
(29.2).
Maria Gens (University of Porto, Portugal)
Bishop’s Brazil: A story of love and discontent
My paper aims to illustrate how Bishop’s oeuvre portrays her expatriate’s experience
during her residence in Brazil, by showing a literary landscape that encompasses her
affection and disaffection towards her host country.
To illustrate this point, I draw on Bishop’s letters written to her American friends and
explain how the poet’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Brazil shows a split “I”/ eye towards the
other. I also draw on some of Bishop’s poetry in which she depicts Brazil and Brazilians.
In effect, the representation of the other, particularly the oppressed and dispossessed, is
described through the lens of the keen observer, who illustrates how deprivation,
marginality or criminality resist to conform to the status quo, and can be read as forms of
resistance to the social body.
Hence, by not depicting Brazil and Brazilians in the light of the clichés in which Bishop was
brought up and that still prevail today, I will prove that in some of Bishop’s poems about
Brazil, the poet turns her gaze on the poor and illiterate, whilst denouncing the evils of
Brazilian society.
Thus, in both Bishop’s letters and in the poems that I have selected, Bishop’s Brazil is
simultaneously the space of consent and dissent which, due to its ambivalent
representation, helps the poet build her own identity in a space where she paradoxically
feels both at home and elsewhere. Furthermore, feeling simultaneously at home and
elsewhere in the case of Bishop’s long sojourn in Brazil can be proven by a social
atmosphere that cherished her but where she rarely used the other’s language given her
poor speech in Portuguese, despite her good knowledge of both Brazilian and Portuguese
literature.
Bio: Maria Gens is currently studying Comparative Literature at the University of Porto.
She has an MPhil in Modern English Language from Glasgow University. Her research
interests lie in Comparative Literature with a particular interest in American poets like
Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath as well as twentieth-century Portuguese poetry.
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Mariana Machová (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic)
Travelling in Translation
Translation and travelling have a lot in common: moving from one context to another,
meeting and interacting with the other, facing the foreign, the difficult to understand, and
seeing the familiar from a different perspective. One of the most famous poets of travel,
Elizabeth Bishop is well capable of travelling in space and time long after her death, as the
Czech translations of her poems, which appeared ten years ago for the first time, show. I
believe that the ability of her works to cross borders and translate to other contexts is at
least partly due to the fact that border crossing, meeting the other, and translation form an
important part of her poetics. My paper will introduce the process of introducing Bishop
into the Czech cultural context via translation, sum up the reception of her works in Czech,
and it will connect my experience of translating Bishop to the discussion of the role
translation in her own writing and her poetics.
Bio: Mariana Machová is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of South Bohemia.
She studied English and Spanish at Charles University, Prague. In 2004/05 she was a
Fulbright scholar at Boston University. In her dissertation she examined the role of
translation in Elizabeth Bishop's works. She translated Bishop's poems and prose into
Czech.
Panel 11A: Architecture and Space
Jo Gill (Exeter University, UK)
‘An immense city, carefully revealed, / made delicate by over-workmanship’:
Elizabeth Bishop’s Architectural Poetics
This paper reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in terms of its engagement with the particular
architectures of the various places she encountered throughout her life. While
acknowledging that place and space – both literal and in the abstract – have been of great
significance to her work, I wish to turn our attention very specifically to the architecture of
certain landscapes (to particular buildings, styles, practices, and discourses) and to
examine what Bishop made of these at key stages of her writing career. I will argue that it
was through architecture (the architecture of New York in ‘Love Lies Sleeping,’ or of Key
West in ‘After the Rain,’ or of Brazil in ‘Brasil, 1959’) that a succession of new
environments first ‘carefully revealed’ themselves to Bishop; that it was architectural
features which reified and made visible the difference and distinctiveness of a given
culture, and that it was through her poetic representations of the architecture of each new
place that she marked out both its specific character and her own relationship to it.
By looking closely at these and other poems and by drawing on archival materials (from
the Bishop collection at Vassar College where I will be teaching and researching from Jan
to May 2015), I aim to establish how Bishop drew – and reflected – on contemporary
architectural discourse; how her understanding of architecture as material, social and
aesthetic practice changed with her experience of different geographies and cultures, and
how her personal relationships (including, but not limited to, her partnership with Lota de
Macedo Soares) helped to shape the architectural sensibility that underpins some of her
finest poems.
Bio: Jo Gill is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter. She is the author of The
Poetics of the American Suburbs (2013) and Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics (2007),
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and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. She is currently working on a
book on Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination.
James McCorkle (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
Elizabeth Bishop’s Islandologies
Defined by edges, islands are always undergoing reconfiguration by what surrounds and
encompasses them. Tensed between the permeable edge and the seeming solidity of
land, islands form geographical metaphors for the problematics of identity. Bishop’s
identity is bound to Nova Scotia, all but an island, where several years of her childhood
were spent, including the formative event of witnessing her mother’s breakdown, and
where Bishop summered until entering Vassar College. Bishop’s early “The Imaginary
Iceberg” echoes Darwin’s own early island meditations on emergence and subsidence, on
the creation of landmasses from the oceanic: “The iceberg rises / and sinks again; its
glassy pinnacles / correct elliptics in the sky.” “Crusoe in England” is Bishop’s great island
poem—Crusoe is doubly exiled, first cast upon deserted isle (until Friday’s arrival), and
then upon Crusoe’s return to England (and Friday’s death). The ‘elsewhere’ of both the
volcanic isle and of Friday, all cast as memory, is suggested in the conceptual
arrangement of Questions of Travel, where “Elsewhere” consists of islanded mnemonic
structures distinct from the “Brazil” poems, geographically anchored. The littoral space—
whether seen in early poems such as “The Map” or in late poems such as “The Pink
Dog”—is also associated with what Marc Shell calls islandology (Islandology: Geography,
Rhetoric, Politics, 2014) and is most apparent in “Sandpiper” where perception and reality
are in flux: “The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear. The
tide / is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.” The crease between the collection’s
two sections suggests the littoral zone, a tidialectics, to use Kamau Brathwaite’s
neologism, or hinge between the present-ness of Bishop in Brazil and the mythography of
the past.
Bio: James McCorkle teaches in the Africana Studies Program, Hobart and William Smith
Colleges and serves as Headquarters Director, African Literature Association. He is an
editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry and the author of
two collections of poetry, Evidences and, this past year, The Subtle Bodies.
Fiona Shaw (Northumbria University, UK)
Elizabeth Bishop and the Writer’s House
A woman must have money and her own room to be free to write, Virginia Woolf declared.
Elizabeth Bishop had both throughout her adult life, and they enabled her to write poems
whose base note is, repeatedly, one of dispossession and exclusion. Bishop’s work
explores, and represents, the architecture of place – actual, physical structures (even if
imaginary) and the spaces that are made into (barely) habitable dwelling places. How
might you find ‘shelter from the hurricane’? her figures ask. And what might that shelter
look like? Hers was a lifelong hunting for, or making of, inscrutable houses; places that
were perfect, but finally impossible.
I will discuss how Bishop’s houses are both actual, and staunchly provisional structures,
often about to fall down, fall off, be invaded, flooded or stormed out. Whereas, by contrast,
the poetic structures that accommodate them are safely made and impeccably
constructed. So a battle rages in Bishop’s work between repeated, and nearly catastrophic
loss, and the made artefact of the poem which is strong, robust, indissoluble: the writer’s
home. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Sestina”, in which the vertiginous, unspoken
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grief of grandmother and child, framed in the child’s drawing of ‘inscrutable’ houses, exists
in terrifying stand-off with the steady repetitions of the sestina form.
The poem “Questions of Travel” ends with the thought (borrowed from Henry James’s
Italian Hours): ‘Should we have stayed at home / wherever that may be?’ This question,
and its rider, lie at the heart of much of Bishop’s work. However, while the notion of ‘home’
remains profoundly problematic in both poems and stories, the act of writing was, for
Bishop, a refuge; it was the house she could inhabit. And for as long as she was writing,
she might too might stand ‘beguiled’ in ‘rooms of falling rain.’
Bio: Fiona Shaw is a novelist and senior lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria
University. She completed a PhD on Elizabeth Bishop in 1991. She is the author of a
memoir, Out of Me (Penguin, 1997), and four novels, most recently A Stone’s Throw
(Serpent’s Tail, 2011).
Panel 11B: Questions (and Answers) of Travel
Claes Lindskog (Lund University, Sweden)
The Painter’s Eye and the Colonial Gaze: Ontological Boundaries in the Brazil and
Nova Scotia Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
Travel is a matter of venturing onto the turf of someone or something else, of passing
territorial borders and, nevertheless, often finding a new sense of belonging. Travel is
likewise a matter of seeing, of letting one’s consciousness enter into a dialogue with a new
set of images. Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is, of course, constantly concerned with questions
of travel, and these two aspects of travel are always in her eye. The problem in focus in
this paper is how the questions of belonging and of seeing interrelate and affect one
another.
It is common in discussions of the interrelations between art and poetry – including
Bishop’s poetry – to follow the lead of modern painting and think of the text of the poem as
a surface, commensurate with the surface of a canvas. However, rather than letting the flat
surface of the text act as a boundary to a three-dimensional world behind, Bishop often
introduces a series of boundaries – such as mirrors, canvases, and screens – that
subdivide the landscape into sections with different relations to reality. Often such
boundaries appear not just in the form of similes, but as parts of the world itself, for
example by letting the world become a ‘geographical mirror’.
This paper looks at the placement of these secondary surfaces vis-à-vis the speaker and
other human characters in two categories of poems: those set in Nova Scotia and those
set in Brazil. It argues that the difference in placement of the ontological boundaries
signals a difference in function. In both settings, the speaker experiences a sense of
unease and lack of belonging, but in the Nova Scotia poems, the ontological boundaries
help forge a sense of unity with the inhabitants, whereas in the Brazil poems, they instead
dramatize the sense of disunity.
Bio: Claes E. Lindskog is Lecturer in English at Lund University, Sweden. He received his
PhD from Lund in 2008 on a thesis on spatial metaphors of knowledge in the works of
Joseph Conrad and is currently working on a project on spatiality in Stevens, Pound,
Bishop and Plath.
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Lloyd Schwartz (University of Massachusetts, USA)
Answers to Travel: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry of Retrospect
In 1970, Elizabeth Bishop finally settled in Cambridge and Boston where she would live for
the remaining nine years of her life (and where I got to know her). Twenty years after her
first visit to Brazil, she had finally begun to let go of her attachments there, and although
she continued to travel, mainly with her partner Alice Methfessel and with her friend Frank
Bidart, the trips, though to some new places (the Galapagos Islands, Scandinavia), were
relatively brief , or at least limited. She had, in essence, come home. And it was in Boston
that she completed the poems in her last book, Geography III and a handful of other
poems, poems no longer about the questions so much of her traveling had raised but the
beginning of answers to those questions—in the completion of some poems she had
started many years before (“In the Waiting Room,” “The Moose,” “Crusoe in England,” “12
O’Clock News,” “Santarem,” “Pink Dog”) and major new poems of retrospect (“One Art,”
“Poem,” ”North Haven,” ”Sonnet”). I’d like to discuss what returning to Boston meant to
Bishop and how the poems she completed there began to answer her questions of travel.
Bio: Lloyd Schwartz has taught at Boston State College, Queens College, and Harvard
University, and is currently Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts in Boston. He is co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983) and the
Library of America Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008), and the editor of
Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (2011). His most recent book of poems is Cairo Traffic (2000). His
poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair,
The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. In 1994, he was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Ben Leubner (Montana State University, USA)
Innocents Abroad? Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill Overseas
This paper proposes to investigate the ways in which both Elizabeth Bishop and James
Merrill acknowledged their complicity in cultural erosions that they wished to see
forestalled in Brazil and Greece, respectively. My thesis is that the acknowledgement of
complicity does not render efforts to curtail and resist hypocritical (as has often been said
of Merrill and, more recently, Bishop) but is instead a first step towards curtailment and
resistance. As Robert von Hallberg has noted, what often renders the genre of the “protest
poem” so two-dimensional is the lack of any sense of complicity in what is being protested,
as if the poet was unwilling or unable to see his/her own role in the events and processes
that the poem decries. Neither Bishop nor Merrill suffered from this kind of shortcoming of
vision (“vision is perhaps too strong a word”). At the heart of many of their poems which
lament a given state of affairs is a strong sense that they are in part responsible for that
state of affairs, and this makes these poems not weaker, as a result of an embedded
hypocrisy, but stronger, as a result of an unwillingness to succumb to the delusion that
oneself could possibly be free of blame. As a further consequence of this maneuver, the
poems in which Bishop and Merrill investigate political topics are almost always personal
poems, as well, a fact that has resulted (again, especially with Merrill, more recently with
Bishop) in accusations of self-indulgence and a corresponding obliviousness of
surroundings. Here, too, nothing could be further from the truth. In order to illustrate these
contentions I’ll be drawing primarily, but not entirely, from Questions of Travel (1965) and
The Fire Screen (1969). I also hope to be able to make use of Langdon Hammer’s
forthcoming biography of Merrill (April 2015), which will no doubt shed new light on the
Bishop/Merrill relationship.
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Bio: Ben Leubner is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Montana State University. His
essays and articles have appeared in The Southwest Review, Twentieth-Century
Literature, Religion and the Arts, and Letturature d’America. His first book, Fiction in
Disguise, for which he is a co-editor, is due out in the summer of 2015.
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