Elizabeth Bishop's Closet Drama

On the evening of april 11, 1973, elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill shared a stage at New York City's 92nd Street YM-YWHA. The Y had been trying to get Bishop to read there for many years; when at last she accepted their invitation, June Fortess, the executive secretary of the Poetry Center, wrote a jubilant letter of thanks to the poet, predicting, "April 11th will surely be one of the greatest evenings in Poetry Center history" (92nd St. Y Archives, Fortess to Bishop, 1/17/73). Indeed the Poetry Center did its best to preserve the evening archivally, as an historical event, an effort which was the cause, as Bishop would explain in a letter to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, of considerable anxiety:

I was very upset by an insistent photographer who just wouldn't leave me alone. After saying she wouldn't, I could actually see her snapping away from the wings and once lost my place—also I could hear a tape recorder going. So I think I've tried to obliterate the whole thing from my mind.

(One Art 579) ¹

What Bishop didn't tell Gold and Fizdale was that she had "tried to obliterate the whole thing" not only from her mind but from the archives of the Y as well; at her request, the audio recording that had been made of the reading was erased, and the negatives produced by Mara Pilatsky (that "insistent photographer") destroyed. That Bishop would have reacted this way is not surprising—she disliked giving poetry readings (especially if they were being recorded) and hated to be photographed—but the evening in question is not merely typical. Nor was Bishop's attempt to "obliterate" the evening from any kind of archival preservation wholly successful. In her papers at Vassar, one can find, in her hand and on the back of a postcard from the Cosmopolitan Club, a list of the poems she planned to read that night. The final poem on that list is "Crusoe in England," a dramatic monologue whose newly-famous speaker is himself made anxious by "the local museum's" request to "leave everything to them." In a variety of ways, this particular poem allowed Bishop to stage (from the eminently theatrical stage of the auditorium at the Y) an intricate performance of her own identity as a recently-acknowledged cultural celebrity.

That celebrity has grown since Bishop's death in 1979. Within the academy, her rapid occupation of a position of centrality has seemed, paradoxically, a function of the various ways in which, throughout most of her life, Bishop could have been described as a marginal, minor poet. ² David Jarraway's article, "'O Canada!': The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop," is exemplary in its revaluation of Bishop's poetry, insofar as it foregrounds Bishop's homosexuality and makes of central concern that aspect of Bishop's identity that she was, in life, least willing to expose to public view. Here, as in much recent criticism, Bishop's sexual identity is seen as a singularly determining factor in her poetry. Jarraway argues that Bishop's is an importantly "lesbian subjectivity" and implies that her identity is divided between an authentic, lesbian, and "Canadian" self and a culturally enforced, closeted, and "American" self. Employing a psychoanalytic approach (Lacan by way of Žižek), Jarraway claims that while Bishop's true self is "spectral," and therefore elusive and nonreferential, and unlike the "fictional" order imposed by a dominant culture, in her work, nevertheless, "the spectral becomes foreshortened by the fictional in the structuring of poetic experience" (148). To be sure, Bishop's "poetic experience," like her ordinary lived one, was delimited and, at least in that way, partially determined by her relative silence on the topic of sexuality, but it would be misleading to suggest that Bishop had some authentic self that existed anywhere except in her mediation of private and public roles, all of which were in some sense culturally bound constructions. And it would be to miss a crucial feature of Bishop's poetry, to say nothing of her life, to...