Elizabeth Bishop: A Poetics of Space

Writing in a historical context in which private space was alternately sacralized by social discourse and publicized by such poets as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop explodes the binaries of strangeness and domesticitiy by grafting public issues onto private experiences and constructing ambiguously public and private (textual) spaces. Foucault calls “heterotopias” such countersites that challenge the distinction between private and public space. Beyond actually inhabiting a variety of such heteroptopias throughout her life, Bishop frequently wrote about spaces of deviance or crisis such as the poorhouse, the prison, the dentist’s office, and the mental hospital. She also described a variety of strange or precarious houses capable of inverting the qualities of the stable and safe domestic bulwark essential to Cold-War era containment ideology. For instance, Bishop situates the action of “Pink Dog” at a Mardi-Gras festival, ie, during a time when the Carnivalesque reversal of ordinary social hierarchies provides an oppositional space of equality, disguise, heterogeneity, and pleasure, allowing for the poem’s abjected subjects to escape their isolation and invert their normal routines. While numerous Bishop poems describe various transitional or alternative spaces, poetry itself is Bishop’s heterotropia par excellence—or rather, given the primarily textual and figurative nature of the alternative world thus defined, a heterotropia. Among such heterotropic places without a place, we find Bishop’s “The Monument,” an odd mix of nature and artifice that may be seen as occupying the same border zone as Winnicot’s transitional object. Also emblematic of Bishop’s heterotropic desire is once again “Pink Dog,” whose rhythmic and rhyme patterns reveal the poet’s dual love of boundaries and of crossing boundaries, while the entire poem’s carnivalesque setting becomes the stage for a mise en abyme of troping itself, inviting the reader to an endless meditation on the relations between imaginative and literal space. Both carnival and poetry eventually emerge as heterotropic spaces which offer a vital alternative to deadly public and private spaces by undermining the notion of a stable subject, nation, or representational system.