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In an interview with Elizabeth Spires about a year before her death, Elizabeth Bishopspokewithunprecedentedopennessaboutherexperienceofpsychoanalysis , letter writing, and the composition of poems. When Spires asked Bishop if she ever had a poem come to her as donnée, Bishop claimed that she had written her summa of elegies, “One Art,” with remarkable ease; it was, she stated, “like writing a letter” (“Art of Poetry, XXVII” 118). Bishop’s alliance of her villanelle with the narrative praxis of letter writing reflects the definitive turn that her poetry took in the late 1940s. It was in the latter part of this troubling and alcoholic decade that Bishop found a means of transmuting the pain of maternal loss and early deprivation into a poetics that avoided the pitfalls of too much “personality” or “impersonality ,” a division heightened by the New Critics’ denunciation of women poets’ so-called“baroque,”oremotional,tendenciesinthepostwarera(Brunner74–75). The epistolary poem, and the conceit of privacy invoked by the letter’s form, provided Bishop with a means of skirting this gendered binary and a way of achieving the psychological lyricism that constitutes her poetic legacy. This essay reads several previously unpublished letter poems from one of Bishop’s “Key West” notebooks (VC 75.3b): “I see you far away, unhappy” and two poems from a series entitled “Dear Dr.—.” These epistolary poems indicate the significance of Bishop’s relationship with her psychoanalyst, Ruth Foster; her sustained interest in Klein, Freud, and psychological models of psychic life; and, most importantly, Bishop’s use of the letter to foreground the lyric’s capacity for intimate, intersubjective address. Tellingly, these notebook letter-poems contain images and narrative features that reappear in two of Bishop’s most well-known poems, “One Art” and “At the Fishhouses,” suggesting the importance of the lyric letter in Bishop’s evolving “narrative postmodernism”: a distinctly relational aesthetic that appears in the epistolary poems of A Cold Spring (1955) and in the “alluvial dialect” of her mature voice (Travisano, Midcentury 182; Gray 57). Dreaming in Color Bishop’s Notebook Letter-Poems Heather Treseler DREAMING IN COLOR 89 The tropes of epistolarity in A Cold Spring (1955) and in the autobiographical story “In the Village” (1953) have often been read within the context of Bishop’s expatriate residence in Brazil, during which time she came to understand letter writing as an extension of her poetic labors or, as she wrote to Kit and Ilse Baker in 1953, “like working without really doing it” (OA 273).1 Critics have also intuitively linked the seemingly playful epistolarity in A Cold Spring with the gravely casual, self-interrogatory narratives in the free verse poems of Bishop’s last decade.2 Langdon Hammer, for example, argues that poems such as “The End of March” and “Poem” evince the poet’s sustained fascination with the “rhetorical gestures” and tonality of letters (164, 177). Hammer conjectures that the letter-poem enabled Bishop to develop a “trope of thirdness”: a Winnicottian dimension in which the anonymous reader is the privileged participant in the reciprocal play of correspondents (164). Bishop’s notebook letter-poems also accord with Joanne Feit Diehl’s observation that much of Bishop’s oeuvre seems informed by a desire to “make reparation to the abandoning mother”—to give a poetic gift that will simultaneously “replenish” the author, the proverbial “wounded surgeon” of the lyric voice (Diehl 8, 108; Eliot, Complete Poems 127). In Bishop’s two explicit, gift-like, and “subversively celebratory” letter-poems, “Letter to N. Y.” (dedicated to Louise Crane) and “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,”itis thenarrowed addressofaspecified recipientthat,ironically,enhances the reader’s sense of the letter-poems’ tacit communiqués (Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land 211; PPL 61, 63–64). Bishop’s unpublished notebook letter-poems, however, in voicing the psychoanalytic material of dreams, screen memories, and the garrulous ghosts of regret, appear to grant the reader full warrant to the literary artifact’s revelation of selfhood. In these lyric letters, the poet’s polyphony of voices, Freudian symbology, and Kleinian exploration of the mother-daughter dyad further establish Bishop’s position as a precocious “postmodernist” among her midcentury peers (Longenbach, Modern Poetry 22; Travisano, “Bishop Phenomenon ” 229). In these letter-poems’ play of multiple authoring selves and destinataires ,intheirespecial(butnecessarilytrespassed)confiance,Bishopemphasizes theconstitutive“triangulation”ofthelyricpoeminwhichathird,unnamedreader is required to complete the circuit of its intersubjectivity, its rendering of individuation into a rhetorically social form (Miller 140; Altman 186; Stewart 13). Given these letter-poems’ similarity to...

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