Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place (review)

Margaret Dickie sets out in this ambitious, engaging book to trace the development of the “lesbian public lyric voice” as evidenced in the work of Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich and to present a theory of lesbian poetics based on social and literary marginalization. Because no culturally and aesthetically legitimized means for putting lesbian desire into language was available, Dickie argues, Stein, Bishop, and Rich each had to experiment with language to “encode” lesbian desires. In so doing, they created a formal and thematic lesbian tradition based on the dynamics of secrecy and revelation, “coming out and going back” (199): they “push[ed] language and form to the extreme as Stein experimented with nonreferentiality, Bishop with elaborate artifice, and Rich with common language” (3). Dickie admits that Rich might seem out of place in such a lineage, since she is known as an “out” poet, but Dickie convincingly argues that Rich’s work, while it takes increasingly public stances, still figures lesbian identity as “an existence that everywhere was trapped in lies” (6). In all three poets, Dickie finds an overlapping concern with love, war, and place. Unfortunately, the uniqueness and force of such a linking—the basis that would make these themes central for a lesbian tradition, especially when they seem so common to poetry as a whole—is never fully established, although Dickie’s comparative approach does elicit some fascinating thematic interconnections and differences among the three writers.

Dickie’s readings of Stein and Bishop seem more suggestive than definitive. For Stein, this may be all a critic can do, since her work is so resistant to interpretation, but there are moments in Dickie’s readings of both poets where she glosses over the intricacies of particular poems or moves too quickly through what seem to be enormously suggestive moments in order to make her larger point. It seems that Dickie is intuitively right, but often the argument is not yet fully articulated. For example, it is often unclear how secrecy or silence automatically connotes a lesbian erotics, or how Stein’s celebration of the nation and patriotism or Bishop’s poetics of exile is connected specifically to their lesbianism. (I think they are intimately connected, but Dickie does little to establish firmly these links.) On the other hand, her reading of Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” is groundbreaking. Instead of seeing it as simply a liberating example of lesbian desire’s “coming out” into language, Dickie emphasizes how the sequence as a whole represents the ambivalence and pain of the closet, the ways in which silence and secrecy haunt (and often undermine) lesbian relationships.

Dickie’s work constitutes a major intervention into a lesbian poetic criticism that, for the most part, has remained too dependent on essentialist theories of “feminine” writing. Its shortcomings are perhaps inherent in any effort to establish a new tradition. Indeed, the book’s greatest strength may be the way in which Dickie’s suggestive readings inspire other critics to continue and extend her efforts.