Opening the Box

In Elizabeth Bishop's unfinished poem 'Current Dreams',

Somebody says in a scolding voice 'Don't be so stupid about an old alarm clock! Don't you know that everything is an alarm clock? Children, houses, churches, books and pictures? Yes, everything in the world is set, Set, and will go off, brrrrr, [Right to the second!']

(pp. 69-70)

This passage demonstrates much that is both clarifying and surprising about Bishop's poems, prose fragments, and notes now available in print for the first time. The assertion that 'everything is an alarm clock' seems absurd especially uttered in a 'scolding voice', but in her poetry, things do indeed 'go off' unexpectedly in ways that reveal their true nature. The question of self-revelation has claimed much of the attention to Bishop's new book – do we have the right to read these unfinished poems (many of them personal in content) which she chose to withhold? Such a concern seems inflected by our awareness of her own resistance to the confessional style, but many of her previously unpublished poems pre-date the watershed years of 1955 and 1959, when Ginsberg's 'Howl' and Lowell's Life Studies established the dominant tone for post-war American poetry. It is anachronistic to think of Bishop's early work in those now familiar terms; furthermore, the secret lives revealed here are not literally hers but rather belong to the objects she describes. Things speak and have human characteristics, while at the same time people take on the qualities of things. The symbolic freight of these objects and their unsettling way of coming to life point clearly to Bishop's affinity with surrealism. Such a connection has long been apparent from her published poems of the 1930s and 1940s, but these unfinished poems and the notebook entries that Alice Quinn has included in her annotations expose more sharply the presence of particular surrealist motifs and techniques in Bishop's work. Among them is the very gesture of pulling back the curtains of private life that we now associate with confessional poetry but which appears here as an attribute of surrealism. Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box documents the continuity of two movements: one European, modernist, and primarily visual; the other American, postmodern, and primarily poetic. Selected from over 3,500 pages of archival material, this collection of drafts and notes does more than any criticism to place Bishop in the century from which she springs as a unique figure.

'Current Dreams', based on a dream Bishop recorded in 1941, invokes surrealism in a number of ways. Since Richard Mullen's 1982 study, critics have identified her interest in dreams as her clearest link to surrealist art, though all acknowledge her divergence from it as well – she particularly repudiated the practice of automatic composition (for more on Bishop and surrealism, see a recent series of articles by Ernesto Suarez-Toste). At least thirteen of the fifty-odd poems dated before 1951 – the year of her fateful trip to Brazil – describe or refer to sleep and dreams, and others contain well-known surrealist images. The speaker of 'In a Room', for example, looks at a stain on the ceiling and describes it as a rhinoceros head (this form appears in a number of Dalí paintings). The alarm clocks in 'Current Dreams' bring to mind several famous surrealist clocks, including the one in René Magritte's Time Transfixed (1938) (sitting above a fireplace from which the front end of a steam engine protrudes), and the limp watches of Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Dream of Venus (1939). These paintings suggest a disparity between measured time and time remembered or experienced. 'Current Dreams' also seems concerned with memory, but here the ticking of the alarm clock signifies an inexorable sequence of events internally 'set' to 'go off' at some point in the future, like fate. The symbol of the clock is specially positioned at the intersection of space (the fine detail...