Sunday, August 22, 2010

Elizabeth Bishop, Isolation, and the Real World

It has been productive to begin reading Bishop's short stories because they help emphasize aspects of her poetry. Specifically, stories like "The Sea & Its Shore" and "In Prison" stress the importance of isolation that is slightly less apparent in the poetry. There's a strong resonance between "The Sea & Its Shore" and the late poem "The End of March."

I find this connection between early and late work important because it seems the critical perspective, initiated by Thomas Travisano in his "Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development," looks at so much of the middle and late work as a blossoming in which the "real world" makes an appearance. But I am struck by the similarities, the consistency of Bishop's vision. From Travisano's perspective, the early work is evidence of Bishop's interest in and fascination with enclosure. Bishop constructs self-imposed prisons in which characters are isolated and the world is only considered as an abstract thing. This abstraction is a form of escape. Travisano argues that Bishop's development leads her out of these enclosures in order to integrated the world. Aspects of her travels and real life are slowly integrated into her poetry and she more fully engages with the world.

I'm not so convinced. The late poem "The End of March" tells of a walk along a beach and the speaker's desire to "get as far as my proto-dream-house, / my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box / set up on pilings, shingled green." This "box" resembles the house in which the protagonist of "The Sea & Its Shore" lives. In both cases, the structure seems to offer only shelter, striping away all excesses and providing only an escape from the elements. In other words, it separates one from the world without recreating its own world. (There's probably a comment on American consumerism here, too, but I don't know where to take that yet). In both texts, the protagonist reads (or hopes to read) things that don't contain an avenue toward meaning; in the story they are scraps of paper and in the poem they are "boring books, / old, long, long books." The texts do not coordinate the facts of the world; there is no hope that one can discover some ultimate meaning from them.

The sense of enclosure that Travisano identifies in the early work is still present in the later work, and I believe appears throughout. The material of the world is definitely more present in some of the later poems, but the intent to block it all out or diffuse its variety still appears to be an important force in her work.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Theodore Roethke and Archetypes

Every now and again you find a poem that seems anachronistic or a very early precursor to a movement that takes shape later. Theodore Roethke's "Night Crow" is a good example: it seems so much like a Deep Image poem that it could be caught lurking in the Robert Bly section of the library:

When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree,
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Roethke's poem examines a moment in which perception, cognition, and the attribution of meaning are all tangled up. The event itself, the crow lifting into flight, sparks a process in the imagination that seems to escape the conscious mind and burrow into the dark recesses of the unconscious: "A shape in the mind rose up." The poem relies on the associations of crows with doom and darkness. The vagueness of "a shape" fits with the collective unconscious in which crows are creatures of darkness. The ambiguity of movement is also operating on a very sophisticated level: the "tremendous bird" flies further away, and yet seems to be entering into the brain. Moving away and yet moving in. That situation describes the unconscious, which is somehow fundamental in terms of our drives, and yet it is the repressed, further away from the ego or our conscious selves. The speaker's experience allows sudden access to the unconscious rather than providing a careful and reflective consideration. This might be the sudden appearance of the Shadow, alien and yet familiar. The poem establishes threads of connection and spaces of distance at the same time, suggesting our complicated relation to the constructed self.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Elizabeth Bishop and the Weed of Desire

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Weed" is a great poem to read using Structuralist and New Critical methods. She builds two related and productive binary oppositions, one between death and life and the other between stillness and movement. The poem begins with that very Dickinsonian opening: "I dreamed that dead, and meditating, / I lay upon a grave, or bed." Later, the poem contrasts this deathly stillness with life and movement: "Suddenly there was a motion, / as startling, there, to every sense / as an explosion." The poem investigates what one does with this spurt of life after resigning one's self to death.

But it is important to recognize that the form this intercession takes is a weed, an unwanted growth. The speaker seems to favor the idleness of death to the life represented by the weed. In a Freudian sense, the weed seems to represent the drives, which are felt to be a substantial threat to the ego. The stable and "grave" ego is unsettled by the growing weed. The weed grows in the heart, which "began to change / (not beat) and then it split apart / and from it broke a flood of water." The weed is almost swept away by the flood that it creates. The speaker feels an innate (though chilly) fear of the weed and its potential destructiveness:

"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."

The speaker subtly understands her complicity with the weed's actions ("with my own thoughts?"), but recognizes how it works to disintegrate the heart. Rather than seeing unconscious desires as a "true" sort of heart, Bishop suggests that the ego's emotions are the Self's emotions; rather than being a secret heart, the weed is antithetical to the heart.

The perspective in this poem is in keeping with Bishop's tendency to emphasize and ensure the distance between the subject and his desire. Even in the breach, when the unconscious emerges in all its power, the poem is a tale of disintegration. The poem is paradoxically a creation myth and a narrative of psychological decay. While breaking free from stillness, the brittle heart is assured destruction.