Elizabeth Bishop, Seer
By David M. Katz
The following is an edited version of my introductory remarks for a seminar on Elizabeth Bishop that I led on May 22-24, 2024 at the Poetry by the Sea Conference in Madison, Conn. The extraordinary group of poets who participated were Ned Balbo, Patricia Behrens, Shaune Bornholdt, Mia Grogan, Elizabeth Lara, Joyce Wilson, and David Yezzi.
I'd like to begin with a quotation that might be familiar to some of us. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask,” Joseph Conrad once wrote.
“It is, before all, to make you see.” Whether that was Elizabeth Bishop's primary purpose as a poet, it was her primary gift. In Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, he writes that poets "charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader's imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this."
While Pound's dictum may be an oversimplification of the elements of poetic art, I believe it can be useful in helping us focus on a given poet's particular gifts. Thus we can say that while Bishop's poetry displays a superb and unique ear for meter and rhyme and a clarity of syntax reminiscent of Hemingway’s, those faculties tend to be in support of as great a visual gift as exists in our poetry. As we read and discuss Bishop’s work, we might want to think about exactly how she makes her poems so appealing to the eye and the other senses, and through them, to the mind.
How do sound and tone and sentence structure combine with the images of her work? Most importantly, how can we as poets bring what we learn from Bishop’s methods into our own poems?
“no detail too small” —Elizabeth Bishop, “Sandpiper”
I began reading Bishop on a summer vacation on a Long Island beach across the sound from here in the mid-1980s, about a decade after the publication of Geography III, a landmark collection of later 20th century poetry. I am still gripped by the sense of place she evokes in the “The End of March,” the penultimate poem of that book. Near the beginning of the poem she writes:
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The speaker proceeds to describe a walk back and forth across this chilly landscape. In Pound’s terms, this is language charged with visual meaning, words that place us right there, right now, in the present, in a place we can see in both specificity and totality. Uncannily, Bishop creates an effect of expansiveness through an opposing image of contraction—that is, low tide.
She achieves this through the use of passive verbs: everything is “withdrawn as far as possible, / indrawn,” creating a panoramic visual vacuum. The ocean is “shrunken,” implying that a moment ago it had been vast. Nothing is static; everything is in motion, like the waves. The movement draws us in, and we become inhabitants of the scene. We walk along that beach with Bishop and her companions.
The sense of wide vistas that Bishop often creates is built by means of the deliberate accretion of tiny details. In “Sandpiper,” an earlier beach poem, Bishop describes the frenetic seabird as “a student of Blake,” presumably referring to its ability “To see a World in a Grain of Sand”—the first line of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.”
For her, as for the sandpiper, there is, as she says, “no detail too small.” She ends the poem with a dazzling tour de force of microscopic geological observation: “The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.”
Such acute attention to complex mixtures of color should come as no surprise in a poet who declared, in her 1981 Paris Review interview, that “I like painting probably better than I like poetry.” One tell-tale sign of Bishop’s painterliness is a propensity to dwell closely on the expressive qualities of fabric, as Ingres does in his depiction of the pale-blue folds in the silk dress in his famous portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville.
In at least three of her poems, Bishop likens water to fabric. “At low tide like this how sheer the water is,” “The Bight” translucently begins. (Italics are mine.) From a perch on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, the speaker observes that “The silken water is weaving and weaving,/disappearing under the mist equally in all directions[.]” Finally, in “Song for the Rainy Season,” we see the waste products of weaving adhering to water as
…the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.
The intensity of Bishop’s visual gifts is on full display in two ekphrastic poems from early and late phases of her career: “Large Bad Picture” and “Poem.” Both poems concern paintings a speaker has discovered among family relics. Both paintings depict scenes set in Nova Scotia and are produced by, one assumes, the same great-uncle. The badness of the large picture, a seascape, seems to be connected to its ungainly size, in which “a fleet of small black ships” are “motionless,/their spars like burnt match-sticks,” inert and ashen against a panoramic sky. The scene recalls the ominous stasis of the vessel in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—"As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The overall effect of the observed painting is unsatisfyingly enigmatic. “It would be hard to say what brought them there,” the speaker says, “commerce or contemplation.”
In “Poem,” by contrast, the size of “this little painting” is what makes it extraordinary. It’s about “the size of an old-style dollar bill,” which would make it about 7.5 inches by 3 inches in the period being discussed. Peering into the tiny scene and its miniature details, as fascinating as dollhouse furniture, draws the speaker further and further into the life of the painting. Suddenly, we are there with her: “Heavens!” she exclaims. “I recognize the place, I know it!”
This visual seizure of a place is one of Bishop’s most characteristic moves. She begins “Arrival at Santos,” the first poem in her previous book, Questions of Travel, with a panoramic survey that anticipates a journey of discovery: “Here is a coast; here is a harbor; / here after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery.” Comparing the Brazil poems that constitute the first part of the book to a groundbreaking collection by Bishop’s great friend Robert Lowell, the critic David Kalstone wrote that the Brazil poems “are Life Studies in a new transparent key, the bright C Major of discovery in the present tense.”
Most tellingly, the first two lines of “Arrival at Santos” contain the word “here,” launching Bishop’s perhaps most dazzling encounters with the sense of place. Although modern and contemporary poets have long been cautioned against personifying nature, the speaker’s first view of the Brazilian landscape is daringly packed with human emotion. She describes the “self-pitying mountains / sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery.” She moves on to warehouses, “some of them painted a feeble pink” and then to “some tall, uncertain palms.” (Italics are mine.)
Next comes a powerful rhetorical swerve and a change to direct second-person address, the poet talking to readers as though we are tourists, and of course addressing herself:
Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you//
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a different life
Although often less pronounced than it is in “Arrival at Santos,” this back-and-forth between the vividly visual and the emotional, the philosophical, the meditative, it’s strongly characteristic of all her work. The unique nature of that dialogue between sense and sensibility reflects her dogged persistence in getting to the bottom of an argument. She probes deeply into the images of “the tremendous fish,” the moose halted in the road, the dentist’s waiting room, and slowly her descriptions give way to that glimpse of truth Conrad was searching for. “We leave Santos at once;” she writes at the end of the poem. “[We] are driving to the interior.”