Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Summer 9-5-2013 The orF eign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop's Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Kelly Barrett rB own Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Brown, Kelly Barrett, "The orF eign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop's Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change" (2013). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1121. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1121 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Program in Comparative Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Steven Meyer, Chair Mary Jo Bang Robert Henke Ignacio Infante Vivian Pollak Vincent Sherry The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop’s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change by Kelly Barrett Brown A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2013 St. Louis, Missouri Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii List of Abbreviations iv Epigraghs vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Teasing Belief: The Bishop’s Religious Wit 30 I. “Our audience eyes”: Rapacious Gazes 46 II. “The motion church”: In the Off-Balance 56 III. “God’s Spreading Fingerprint”; or, Not Looking Particularly Holy 72 Chapter 2 Tongue-Timed: The Contrapuntal Note 90 I. Under Your Eyes: 2/3 Time 106 II. Counterpointing Voices 118 III. “Seven Days Monologue” and the Original Explosionists 124 Chapter 3 The Creations of Sound: Bishop’s Hear-Say Sea 151 I. Ears for the Poet (the Reader) “All Eye” 151 II. Transitional Challenges: Paddle your own Canoe 160 III. The Hear-Say Sea 171 IV. Pleasure Seas and the Shoals of Distraction 201 Chapter 4 Religious Contingencies 210 I. First Morning: “In the Village” 224 II. Nascent “I”s and Some Other Voices 241 III. Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair 256 Conclusion Gestures of Assent & the Chances of Change 277 Appendix 302 Works Cited 307 ii Acknowledgments It may not be customary to thank one’s subject of study, but it stuns me, on occasion, that after over a decade of companionship with the poems of Elizabeth Bishop they continue to surprise with new lights and shifting waters, funny puzzles, joys and indescribable sensations. Living long inland, they keep the coast close, its ocean breath to tickle the ear, sudden waves, a spray of spray. In such joyous immersion are dangers. Many, many thanks to Steven Meyer who has helped guide this project toward a flourishing soil. His close attentions to rhythms of thinking in poetic experiments, remarkable work on Gertrude Stein, and regular provocations to sharper and broader thinking about Bishop have been instrumental in this project’s success. Many thanks also to Vivian Pollak for her stimulating seminar on American Woman Poets in which my admiration and affection for Elizabeth Bishop’s work was fully consolidated. The many conversations about her there, and after, have been invaluable—and hope they continue. Naomi Lebowitz has been a source of joyful inspiration from my first graduate seminar to today, in her contagious passion for literature, her wit, and generally jubilant presence. I am also extremely thankful for her comments on early drafts of the first chapters. I owe debts of gratitude also to several who even in casual conversation have provided new angles on Bishop’s work, particularly William Gass, Charles Altieri and Lloyd Schwartz. The Vassar College Library of Archives and Special Collections kindly provided access to the Elizabeth Bishop Papers in the Fall of 2010 and 2011, and I owe particular thanks to Dean Rogers for helping me locate the needed material. The Department of Special Collections at Washington University has been similarly generous in offering access to their collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters. Thanks in particular to Joel Minor and Sarah Schnuriger. And for her always encouraging words and concern, warm, warm thanks to Kathy Schneider. Unflagging in their votes of confidence and encouragement to pursue my passions and curiosities at every turn, my parents have been the best. Their love, humor and support have ever been a blessing. I most certainly would not have finished this project, most of all, without the steady sustenance and love of the love of my life, Michele, my foreign ear. For the meals and massages, the listening in and knowing when to check a sentence (or notion) a little too rococo , for picking up the slack on all sides while I’ve surfed the sounds of words, for the very grit and flourishing of her alongside and through all of this, I am grateful and humbled and humored. iii Abbreviations C Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop . ed. George Monteiro. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1996. CP The Complete Poems 1927-1979 . Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. CPr The Collected Prose . Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. EAP Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. FW Finnegans Wake. James Joyce. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. LM Life and the Memory of It . Brett Millier. Berkeley: University of California P, 1995. NA The Necessary Angel : Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951. NY Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker, ed. Joelle Biele. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. OA One Art: Letters / Elizabeth Bishop , ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. OP Opus Posthumous . Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books. OED Oxford English Dictionary Online PP Principles of Psychology . William James, ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. PPL Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters . Elizabeth Bishop, eds. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. New York: The Library of America, 2008. REB Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: an Oral Biography, eds. Gary Fountain, Peter Brazeau. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994). V The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature. William James. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1961. VSC Vassar Library Special Collections. iv SCP The Collected Poems. Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. WU Washington University Special Collections. WWJ The Writings of William James . William James, ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago U of Chicago P, 1977. v …the bomb in it in a delicate way . Robert Lowell on Bishop’s “The Armadillo” Come closer. You can see and hear the writing paper lines of light and the voices of my radio singing flamencos in between the lottery numbers. -Elizabeth Bishop, “Jerónimo’s House” I am thinking of joining the Anarchists, only I can’t seem to locate headquarters where I can find out exactly what their platform is. –Elizabeth Bishop to Frani Blough vi The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop’s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated for the utter absence of rhetoric stretched beyond the human scale, and the observations and descriptions of her remarkably vivid poems felt to be “devotional, anti-romantic ‘spiritual exercises’” that, “rather than elevating the ego” serve to discipline it, as Thomas Travisano considers, “devoting it to the stuff of external appearance, which permits self-forgetfulness and surprise.” 1 This is certainly right, and importantly draws out that quality, surprise, which she felt to be the one “indispensable” quality she sought in her poems, and enjoyed in those of others (C 104). Quirky and on the move, her images are one source of surprise, gaiety even, as Jeredith Merrin sees, how “everything is always turning into something else. 2 My modest proposal is that her words are no less mobile, that they’re quietly geared to queer in transitional chances, and that in fact, in the (f)act of feeling them do so we more closely approach and participate in her experimental, experiential aesthetic. It may be a tough sell as regards a poet we’ve come to believe “All Eye,” as David Kalstone crowned her, invoking that most noble, Platonically privileged of senses. At length, however, we’ll discover hers to be a project precisely split in competing registers, and expanding in the waking feel of that split, waves of peripheral, “proliferal” sensations and thetic extravagance. 3 The affective taste, or physiological, “sensational tang, ” as William James calls it in his chapter on sensations in his Principles of Psychology , are “first things in the way of consciousness,” differing from “‘ thoughts’ (in the narrower sense of the word) in the fact that nerve-currents coming in from the periphery are involved in their production,” and “only when 1 Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988), 104-5. 2 Merrin, “Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change,” in Geography of Gender , ed. Marilyn Lombardi (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993), 153. 3 Kalstone, “All Eye.” Partisan Review 38.2 (1970), 127. 1 new currents are entering” does it have “the sensational tang .” 4 That tang is the difference for Bishop, as it is for James, between cold knowledge and the heat of having an experience, but also, for Bishop, between simply “seeing things”—which we’ll discover she felt a bit too closely allied with memory and identity—and meeting and making them. She dis-stills it quite in “The Weed” where a speaker morbidly ensconced with a timeless “final thought” finds Suddenly there was a motion, as startling, there, to every sense as an explosion.