Poems: Lost and Found
Several postcards provide evidence of poems that are now lost or unfinished. In the former category, one might include an ekphrastic poem on Auguste Renoir’s “Odalisque” (1870), a choice of subject matter that has attracted deserved criticism over the last half-century for its orientalist perspective. In a postcard of the painting sent to Margaret Miller in November 1949, exactly three decades before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), Bishop describes wanting “to write a poem about that Algerian child.” Few art historians would mistake the woman for a child. What was Bishop intending to do with this iconic image in the poem? Interestingly, Bishop’s account of going to the gallery and by implication returning the gaze of the painting’s female subject is immediately followed by an account of being stared at herself: “I came over to take a look at her this morning—just after being visited by 20 high school girls who stared at me—and I at them.” Although we have no record of the poem, Bishop’s interest in the “Algerian girl” appears in several finished poems, not least in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” where “in the brothels of Marrakesh” the poem’s speaker observes “the little pockmarked prostitutes / balanc[ing] their tea-trays on their head” (P 58).
Many of the postcards read like prose poems. Some appear to be inspired by an unacknowledged influence: the “I do this I do that” style of Frank O’Hara. A camp postcard depicting Boston baked beans sent to her Aunt Grace on November 9th, 1974, closely resembles a New York School poem in its casual-seeming account of Election Day, featuring a visit to the dentist and a search for a stool for her “tiny kitchen.” The penultimate line—“I’d like to stay home—but must go”---echoes an actual poem Bishop did finish earlier in the year, “Breakfast Song,” and its similar tug-of-war between remaining and leaving: “Today I love you so / how can I bear to go” (P 327). In other postcards selected, one or two images stand out: the comparison of fire-boats spouting water to the antennae of moths (“wide” and “feathery) in a card to Frani Blough Muser and the description of Chinese lilies as “smaller, fuzzy, and pink” in a message to Loren MacIver (2). “You’ll excuse my poetics,” Bishop half-apologized to Muser, as if aware the postcard was in danger of becoming something else.
2. For information on the significance of pink in Bishop’s poetry, see Jo Gill, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Pink,” The Review of English Studies, Volume 72, February 2021: pp. 147–168.
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