Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Description by Zachariah Pickard (review)

In the introduction to his insightful study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, Zachariah Pickard builds his case using one of her important pieces of prose, a letter that praises the careful method of Charles Darwin:

But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking … What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

According to Brett C. Millier, Bishop wrote this letter to Anne Stevenson on January 8, 1964. Pickard’s examination of Bishop’s description necessarily focuses on her powers of observation as a poet, what he later calls her ‘incessant close reading of the world.’ But he does so only as a means of probing her ‘larger goals … always latent, always hiding just behind the physical world.’ One is reminded of P.K. Page’s ‘ … rarely glimpsed bright face / behind the apparency of things’ in ‘The Filled Pen.’ Challenging the unpersuasive attempts of late twentieth-century commentators to argue that Bishop is a postmodern poet, Pickard seems to be saying that Bishop’s description has something to do with a poetics of transcendence.

In ‘Surrealism,’ one of his most illuminating chapters, Pickard ‘explore[s] Bishop’s notion of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, the senses and the imagination.’ His main assertion is that, ultimately, Bishop rejects the surrealists, even if she showed an interest in them early on. One of Pickard’s lines of reasoning is that the Darwin letter has been read ‘outside the context in which it appears.’ Pickard argues convincingly that ‘The Darwin Letter is really an attempt to reclaim aesthetic territory – the uncanny, the unexpected – that the surrealists have effectively co-opted, and that we, as critics, have all too readily allowed them to dominate.’ This chapter makes a substantial contribution to Bishop studies, partly because it departs so sharply from other scholarly examinations of Bishop’s work. Zachariah Pickard is a gifted writer – open, erudite, usefully allusive – and therefore his disagreements with others are productive. As a lucid conversation with other scholars, his book is a model of its kind.

As he concludes his book, Pickard offers another innovation in a book full of them when he states that ekphrasis ‘is the antithesis of Bishop’s own poetics of description.’ Ekphrasis, he suggests, is a useless trope if one is to understand how Bishop observes the ‘minute particulars.’ Along the way, Pickard presents a reading of one of the best-known works of ekphrasis in the canon: Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts.’ But ekphrasis won’t do for Bishop: ‘For a poet dedicated to careful, disinterested scrutiny of whatever life gives, it is cheating to scrutinize a Breughel since it is, as it were, prescrutinized.’ He argues that Bishop’s ‘“Large Bad Picture” and “Poem [About the size of an old-style dollar bill]” … eschew all of the conventional advantages of ekphrasis.’ But what about ‘The pink Seurat bathers’ in Bishop’s poem ‘Pleasure Seas’? An ekphrastic poem if ever there was. If I have a minor complaint, it is this: the meticulous care with which the evidence is selected in this book may occasionally prompt fleeting doubts in the reader about the staying power of the thesis.