Elizabeth Bishop’s Immersion in ‘The Riverman’

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Riverman’, a poem generally overlooked or dismissed by her critics, as one in which travel, both literal and figurative—in particular Bishop’s Brazilian relocation—prompts her to articulate a new poetics that distinguishes her at once from her former poetic personae and allows her to stake out her own position relative to powerful predecessors and interlocutors. Travel for Bishop means emergence from a set of enclosures, first of the childhood family, later of literary precedent. Through a shamanic figure, the riverman of the title, Bishop is radically reimagining herself and her poetry as ‘other’, in an aesthetic of magical realism, wondering what strange poetic worlds and reincarnations are habitable. The poem recalls Bishop’s location in a dismembered family, but also conceives of a poetics not determined by and located in family but instead a poetics of exoticism, otherness, displacement.