1What makes Elizabeth Bishop a great poet, and not just another merely mimetic lyrical poetastress or belated “female Wordsworth,” is what Robert Lowell once pinpointed as “something in motion.” It is the same thing as what Bishop herself later called “baroque” poetry, defined as that “which strove for action within the poem.” For her as for Williams the objectivist, a poem is a machine with an intrinsic movement. For all her mixed feelings for Pound, for all her Audenesque poetic journalism and Mooresque diarism, her poetry is pervaded by an essentially modernist, practically Vorticist fascination for the non-representational dimension of art. Like the Imagists, she believes that “poetry should render particulars exactly,” but like them, too, she believes in “concentration”— “life and the memory of it so compressed/they’ve turned into each other; Which is which?” Her poetic signature resides in a literally aesthetic, cosmetic, often erotic enjoyment of the immediacy of the world. “There is no ‘split, ’” she says, as she declares her predilection for “the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life.” Yet her imagist surrealism is the continuation of an “American idiom” with Emersonian roots. She is no longer willing to afford Transcendentalistic idealism, but remains “an eye” who loves to explore not so much the world itself as the living, moving texture, the very tissue by which the world is perceived.

2To put a name on what she and her Strayed Crab (140) could perhaps call “compression,” or rather this adhesiveness, this connectedness, this amorous empathy for the outside world that is to be found again and again in her poems, one might find it useful to borrow a term from Lacanian vocabulary. In book VII of the Seminar, entitled L’éthique de la psychanalyse, there are some considerations about “cette extériorité intime, cette extimité” (167)—this external intimacy, this extimacy. And Bishop has some very interesting reflection on the same issue in her poem “In the Waiting Room” (159), which is a confessional poem, even though in several ways it is a false confession, which she wrote after her long friendship with Robert Lowell had induced her to write in a different way, brought about by the liberating experience of autobiographical prose. The central and literally uncanny (unheimlich) subject-matter of the poem is the disquieting (or “unlikely”) feeling that the scream of pain uttered by Aunt Consuelo in the dentist’s room next door is perceived as the poet’s own scream, in her own mouth: “What took me/completely by surprise/was that it was me: /my voice in my mouth.” (160) This inspirational kernel of “In the Waiting Room” has been dealt with by Bishop in at least two other texts. The story “In the Village,” as Lowell once suggested, could have been entitled “The Scream,” because it is so strongly centered on “A scream, the echo of a scream, [which] hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever” (Collected Prose 251). This disembodied scream, an utterance just beneath articulate speech, and without a subject, becomes the implicit signifier of the missing mother. The dentist’s waiting room episode is also told, in terms very close to those of the poem, in the story “The Country Mouse,” which appositely ends by this question: “Why was I a human being?” (33), reiterated in the poem as, for instance, “Why should I be my aunt, /or me, or anyone?” What passes off as the mere existential pang of a child of six may in fact be a very essential moment in the discovery of Bishop’s poetic vocation. The symbolic condition, that of a human being, is resented here because it is felt as reification— “I scarce dared to look/to see what it was I was.” In a personal dramatisation of the Mirror Stage, the surrounding company of adults and other objects is perceived as a collection of spare parts from fragmented bodies, in a style reminiscent of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Taken seriously, the refusal to be a human being is bound to spell disaster, but what redeems it in extremis is the telling again and again of this reluctance to perceive oneself as a Self very clearly distinct from the outside world. Bishop, in other words, remains fascinated by the porosity of the boundaries between her own perceiving body and what it perceives.

3Such considerations cast some light on what the phrase “Geographical Mirrors” means and implies. Brett Millier (192) remarks that the poem “At the Fishhouses” (64) emerged from notes taken by Bishop during the previous summer, which in her notebooks are preceded by the mention “GM,” explained once as “Geographical Mirror.” Two phrases at least have been retained in the final version of the poem: “clear dark glass” and “my idea of knowledge,” which have become respectively “cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” and “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be.” For, in Bishop’s poetry, there are two sorts of knowledge—there is the conceptual knowledge of the “skeletal lighthouse” in “Seascape” (40) and this other, misty, translucent knowledge. In the vocabulary of Kristeva, Bishop favours the Semiotic against the Symbolic knowledge of the world; her poems are preferably geno-textual rather than phenotextual. In the older, and perhaps less jaw-breaking vocabulary of Paul Valéry, Bishop’s favourite knowledge is “co-naissance,” more textile than textual, the bodily experiencing of an attachment to the outside world. Therefore, a “Geographical Mirror” is a landscape which the poet perceives with an empathy comparable to that which one feels when looking at oneself in a mirror. In an article on the same topic, Anne Stevenson underlined that she and Lowell sometimes thought of themselves as spiritual heirs to the Transcendentalists and supposed that perhaps Bishop meant that she and Lowell shared “a more or less pantheistic approach to nature.” (37) It seems, however, that what distinguishes Bishop from Transcendentalism is that there is nowhere in her poems anything like a serious belief in any metaphysical presence. Bishop is not an idealist. The only tenet she seems to share with Emerson is that, for her too, “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.” (“The American Scholar,” Emerson 67-69) In other words, she is an adept of Williams Carlos Williams’ “American idiom.” But the empathy, the oceanic feeling, the connectedness she feels for her geographical mirrors is a very concrete, bodily, material sensation. She happened not to be an extremely urban person, but these “Geographical Mirrors” are by no means exclusively natural scenes. One of the most remarkable instances is “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (69), another one is “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (82), where the Brooklyn Bridge remains a metaphor of the same fusional drive, in spite of the mildly satirical side-wink at Hart Crane. Also, most of the apparently natural landscapes which she responds to turn out to be pictorial representations of landscapes. The poem “The Map” (3), at the incipit of The Complete Poems, is an epitome of this.

4Remarkably, the attitude which would consist in actually crossing the looking glass, penetrating through the veil of appearances to reach some real report beyond this Geographical Mirror, which is very much like what Ruskin in Modern Painters also called the Veil of the Earth, is not Bishop’s characteristic attitude. It even seems that this apocalyptic tactic of rapture and rending tends to be stigmatised as a typically male attitude. It is, for instance, that of the speaker of “The Riverman” (105) who says “I waded into the river/and suddenly a door/in the water opened inward.” It is also the attitude of the rapist conquistadores of “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (91), another poem about “embroidered nature,” a “tapestried landscape,” who “ripped away into the hanging fabric, /each out to catch an Indian for himself” (92). But Bishop had much rather caress the veil, toy with it, cuddle up in its folds. More, to her it is not a veil, but a texture, a tegument, a surface which she has the genius to perceive as a depth. She does not wish to break or cross the mirror, but she enjoys wading in the mirror. Light, for her, has a material thickness, which she envisions as a rainbow. The rainbow is white light prismatically opened up like a fan. In a brilliant short poem entitled “Sonnet” (192), she manages a meditation on exactly this issue, in haiku style, by imagining “the broken/thermometer’s mercury/running away;/and the rainbow-bird/from the narrow bevel/of the empty mirror, /flying wherever/it feels like, gay!” This rainbow-bird points out Bishop’s favorite imaginary place: on neither side of the mirror, but inside it, in the impossible zone between the glass and the silvering. Her poetic voice may be accurately located as that of the speaker of “To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash” (205)— “I live only here, between your eyes and you, /But I live in your world. What do I do?/—Collect no interest—otherwise what I can;/Above all I am not that staring man.”

5This poetry is conspicuously non-conceptual and non-empirical but radically sensual. Writing is for Bishop a matter of contact through the senses. If she was not so strongly visual, one would be tempted to declare her a tactile poet. In fact, her optics is emminently aware of the material nature of light, and seeing is for her the establishing of a deep physical contact and interpenetration with the, literally, envisioned objects, which are more often sceneries in which she relishes. To borrow from Emile Verhaeren an adjective he once famously applied to modern towns, there is something tentacular about Bishop’s poetry. Writing a poem is, for her, a matter of establishing a relationship, a physical link, with some external object of her desire. In her poetry as in the ancient Greek language, and some others, to perceive is construed in the middle voice—both active and passive, or somewhere between the two—to perceive is always also to be perceived. And thus, for instance, in “Quai d’Orléans” (28), that imagist poem where the wake of a barge is “a giant oak leaf of grey lights,” when the poet’s voice duplicates itself into what she tells and what “I want to tell you,” we realise that perceived images are also what the Self is made of— “If what we see could forget us half as easily, ‘I want to tell you, /’‘as it does itself—but for life we’ll not be rid/of the leaves’ fossils.’” And much later on, still, in “The Moose” (169), a big female herbivorous mammal is looked at and smelled from a bus that she reciprocally looks over and sniffs at, the poet is nested among grand-motherly fellow-citizens, in a bus that drives about under cover of the New Brunswick woods, in the fog and the red sunset light that bathes the whole land and sea (“Yes, sir, /all the way to Boston.”) This imaginary settling, this cuddling up within the very glass of the geographical mirror is dwelled upon and developed by a series of images, like that of dew drops that “settle/in the white hens’ feathers, /in gray glazed cabbages,” or “bumblebees [that] creep/inside the foxgloves,” and, among several others, that of “the sweet peas [that] cling/to their wet white string/on the whitewashed fences;” (170). What we have here, deep in the extimate flesh of a lovingly described motherly landscape, is the tenuous image of an umbilical cord. Further on in Geography III, this ultimate metaphorical expression of a desire for extimacy will recur much more obviously, in the poem “The End of March” (179). Here the poet follows “a track of big dog-prints (so big/they were more like lion-prints),” and also “lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, /looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, /over and over.” And she reaches what she calls “my proto-dream-house, /my crypto-dream-house,” which is the prototype of her “three loved houses,” mentioned in “One Art” (178): her houses of Key West, Petropolis and Ouro Prêto. This house of her dreams is just as much of a uterine image as the cabbages, white hens’ feathers, or foxgloves of “The Moose”: it is “a sort of artichoke of a house,” with “at the back another wire/ [that]/limply leashes the whole affair/to something off behind the dunes.” Interestingly, however, this constantly wished-for state of in-utero bliss is acknowledged as being “perfect! But impossible.”

6This accomplished extimacy nevertheless remains a limit with which poem after poem will have asymptotically flirted, with an ever-renewed erotic pleasure. Examples are numerous, but a case in point is the image of wading, where a character is represented as partly immerged in the landscape. This is to be found in “Wading at Wellfleet” (7) and also in “The Riverman” (105), but it culminates in “Pleasure Seas” (195) where “The pink Seurat bathers are dipping themselves in and out.” It illustrates Bishop’s favorite poetic pleasure, the delight of indulging in the oceanic feeling, the toying with the dissolution of the self into some other. But also, the presence here of Seurat’s name is rather instructive, because of this painter’s technical experiments with the prismatic decomposition of white light, from which he derived his peculiar style of painting, of the so-called “pointilliste” school of neo-impressionism, which consisted in applying a great number of very small brushstrokes to the canvas, using primary colours and white, in order to recreate the visual impression of the suject, but as if from withing the light, which is the stuff any perceived shape and colour is made of. The typically misty quality of Seurat’s paintings is reminiscent of the atmosphere of Bishop’s poems, but that is because the aesthetics of these two artists are close to one another. This, of course, ought to be linked to what Anne Stevenson has called the multivalency of Bishop’s poetry, the fact that almost all her “significant lines” appear to be “ambiguously haunted” by “their mirror images, in other words, their reflections, whether distorted or revealed.” (40-1) But it is not only, or perhaps not even primarily, a matter of meaning, but rather of imagery. If Bishop’s lines do appear to mean several things at the same time, it is because she is questioning the very limits and boundaries of the concepts as such. In other words, it is doubtful that Bishop is essentially trying to mean anything. “Writing poetry, she once said, “is a way of life, not a matter of testifying but of experiencing. It is not the way one goes about interpreting the world, but the very process of sensing it.” (Elizabeth Bishop, “Poetry as a Way of Life. Regina Colônia/1970.” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro) 6 June 1970, 8.) For Bishop’s poetry is not primarily interested in meaning, but much rather in imagery. Meaning supposes a subject empirically observing an object, and this is what she keeps questioning and undermining. She does not utilise concepts, but she is rather playing at exploring their margins. Thus, in “Santarém” (185), she toys with a reversal of the myth of the Fall from Eden, and reaches a deconstruction of binary conceptual pairs: “Even if one were tempted/to literary interpretations/such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female/—such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off/in that watery, dazzling dialectic.” In “Pleasure Seas” (195) again, Seurat’s decomposition of light is summed up and as it were encapsulated, quite unconspicuously, by the word “keys,” which had already been used in “Little Exercise” (41). In this sense, a key is a dry fruit, like that of the ash and the sycamore, growing in bunches. The fruits or seeds are packed hard together, so that the key, being at the same time one, and many, is a paradoxical emblem of extimacy, where the one and the other are at the same time different and the same. It is an imaginary equivalent of the light, which is both one, and many, as can be seen when it is diffracted into the iridescence of the rainbow.

7The same paradoxical vision is conveyed by the image of the “proto-dream-house” as an “artichoke house” in “The End of March” (179), and it is revisited again in “Song for the Rainy Season” (101) where the Petrópolis House, Fazenda Samambaia, is evoked as “House, open house.” It is a rainbow house, for it is a house that dew and rain can impregnate as well as sunlight. It is a house that is both homely and unhomely, both an inside and an outside—a figure of extimacy. And much in the same way, Bishop’s Nova Scotia and Massachusetts poems have a marked tendency to present landscapes and sceneries, the boundaries and contours of which are blurred, dissolving, transgressed. In “Cape Breton” (67), for instance, “The silken water is weaving and weaving, /disappearing under the mist equally in all directions, /lifted and penetrated now and then/by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck.” This poetry is constantly and relentlessly preoccupied with verges, edges, brinks. So much so that, to borrow and divert from its common usage in the English language the fine word brinkmanship, which means risky diplomacy, one might be tempted to call Bishop’s characteristic poetic attitude brinkwomanship, for it may be that there is something specifically feminine in this mode of writing that works with margins, fringes and the tissues of surfaces. Luce Irigaray once said that women have never invented anything better than weaving (461). Bishop’s aesthetics is not apocalyptic: it is not an aesthetics of revelation, it is not oriented towards the unveiling of a truth beyond appearances. On the contrary, it is rather a “calyptic” poetics, a poetics of the veil, the kalypsos. In “Seascape” (40), once again, there is a meditation on how the reflection of light on a green leaf can be obtained in painting by a touch of matt white gouache, and it gives this detail of a mangrove “with bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings/like illumination in silver.” The illumination here is no flash of light, but rather enluminure, the embellishement of a letter in writing with colours, etc. That is not to say that Bishop’s poetry is merely decorative, which it is not, but rather that is pertains of an artful celebration of writing as such, and for the pleasure of it.

Works cited

8Bishop, Elizabeth. “Poetry as a Way of Life. Regina Colônia/1970.” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro) 6 June 1970, 8.

9Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.

10Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

11Irigaray, Luce, Speculum de l’autre femme, Paris: Minuit, 1974.

12Kristeva, Julia, La révolution du langage poétique; l’avantgarde à la fin du XIX^e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris: Seuil, 1974.

13Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse. 1959- 1960, Paris: Seuil, 1986.

14Millier, Brett. C.. Elizabeth Bishop; Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.