Julie R. Enszer | "Love should be put into action!"

Elizabeth Bishop's emotional, erotic, and sexual life was focused on women. She had both long-term relationships with female partners and brief love affairs with women. Her sexual orientation was well known among friends and professional colleagues. It would be a misnomer to call Bishop "closeted" either during her life or in retrospective biographic appraisals, although she certainly negotiated the "closet," throughout her life. It also would be inaccurate to say that Bishop was "out" as a lesbian, or as a lesbian poet. While the contemporary construction of the "closet" and location of being "in" or "out" of it emerged, primarily post-Stonewall in 1969, Bishop eschewed associating with the growing feminist and lesbian communities, particularly in the worlds of poetry. For instance, she declined to have a poem included in the independently published anthology, Amazon Poetry, the first published collection in which all poems were "written by women who define themselves as lesbians" (Larkin and Bulkin, prefatory note.) Bishop's life and her poetry are a complex hybrid of movement toward openness and recognition of her lesbian sexuality and movement of elision and erasure of lesbian sexuality.

Although Bishop refused to position herself in relationship to the emerging feminist and lesbian contexts of the 1970s, Bishop is still a pivotal figure for both the feminist and lesbian poetry movements that emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Bishop's significance comes not from public or private association with them but rather from her work. Bishop's poetry imagistically prefigures and defines territory for lesbian sexuality in the American lyric—territory which would be further explored by later lesbian poets. From Bishop come poetic gestures that are repeated and renegotiated by lesbian poets of subsequent generations. Ultimately, Bishop's work can be read as foundational to the lesbian-feminist poetry of the 1970s; she provides language, images, and diction that create and continue to build the lesbian poetic of the twentieth century.

At the same time, Bishop's work encodes and closets lesbian sexuality. In her poems, Bishop is not a bold, erotic foremother to lesbian poets. For that, the historical gaze must be cast farther back to Gertrude Stein or Mina Loy. Most often Bishop's published poems obscure the erotic and sexual, putting them on the page only with reticence and understatement. Though within this reticence and understatement is clear lesbian eroticism and sexuality. This is the paradox of Elizabeth Bishop. Her poetry both reaches toward defining a textual erotic of lesbianism, and it defines a textual practice of the aesthetic closet. The excavation of this paradox is critical to understanding Bishop and situating her in relation to the lesbian poetics of the twentieth century. A close examination of Bishop's work through the lens of lesbian sexuality and eroticism provides a way to understand how both the aesthetic closet and lesbian poetics are operating in her work. Understanding Bishop's strategies of writing lesbian sexuality, explored openly on one hand and encoded obliquely on the other, provides a basis for then considering the strategies of subsequent lesbian poets, who both mimic and reject Bishop's sensibility.

The closet is a metaphor used by the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community to describe the experience of hiding something about one's self, in this case, sexual orientation or gender identity, and then revealing it to people, or "coming out of the closet." The closet is a central concept for queer theory and queer scholarship. In The Epistemology of the Closet, published in 1990, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick defines the terms of engagement regarding the closet for queer theory. Sedgwick uses the metaphor of the closet as a system to read and understand western history and literature, declaring that without a "critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definitions," Western culture is, "not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance" (Sedgwick, p. 1.) While Sedgwick focuses almost exclusively on gay men and gay male authors (Melville, Proust, James, and Wilde), similar observations could be made in regard to American women poets (Stein, H.D., Bishop, and Rich) and their significance to the poetic tradition, with the caveat that for women poets the internecine relationship between sexism and homophobia make it even more difficult to ascertain the source of the damage.

Sedgwick further defines the closet as a metaphor for "the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition" (Sedgwick, p. 3.) This has potent applications in poetry; poetry concerns itself both with what is stated and what is unstated, with what is spoken and what is silent, and with what exists on the page and what is suggested by the page. In one way, poetry, by its very nature, works within a "closeting" system. The movement of information, in and out of the poem itself, is a central part of the artistic systems of creation. Poetry on the other hand lives in the world outside of the narrative drives of prose; it resists the syntactical confinements of spoken or scanned language. Poetry seeks to use both the explicit and the allusional as it seeks to say what is deeply and often implicitly understood. Poetry lives not in the formal entertaining rooms of our real or metaphoric homes—that is the space of prose and, particularly, non-fiction. Here we sit on the recliner; we read newspapers and history; we greet guests and bring friends and family into our inner sanctum. Poetry lives in the nooks and crannies—the hallways, the cupboards, the closets. It insists on knowing what happened in the lives of its people in the most private and intimate spaces without the artifice of what is publicly presented. Poetry is at its best when the emotional landscape of the poet is accessible to the reader; that is to say, poetry is at its best when little is dwelling in "the closet." All of this make the exploration of the closet potent and vital for consideration of the work of lesbian poets.

My exploration of the closet in Elizabeth Bishop's work is predicated on two intertwined assumptions. First, Bishop wrote poems in which she did not reveal her lesbian sexuality and erotic desires for the purpose of making her work more acceptable to editors and readers. Second, Bishop wanted to and sometimes did write openly about her lesbian sexuality. The nexus between these two impulses is the focus of my inquiry.

In poetry, "closeted-ness" is a speech act of silence. The closet gains meaning though textual placement, such as the inclusion or exclusion of poems in a collection; arrangements of poems in a book; diction; arrangement of the poem on the page; syntax; and other poetic strategies. Speech and silence in poems—the elements of closet construction—also come from extra-textual sources, such as letters, essays, speeches, and biographical information. Extra-textual discourse surrounds poetry. Often it constructs or destroys the silence—the closetedness—on the page. For lesbian poets, the closet within poetry is the space where lesbianism exists but is silence. Silencing may happen by the poet, by critics, and by editors. The exclusion of lesbianism may be textual or extra-textual. Regardless of how the erasure happens, the exclusion results in an aesthetic closet.

Aesthetics are the principles and justifications for judgments, such as "beautiful," "ugly," and "sublime," to establish critical judgments about works of art; aesthetics are one of the bases on which poetry is judged. The aesthetic closet, unlike the closet articulated by Sedgwick, or what I might call the homosexual closet, is closeting using aesthetic devices. In poetry, aesthetic devices are all of the poetic tools of language. Aesthetic devices are used by editors to create the aesthetic closet, including the omission of a poet's sexual orientation or indicators thereof in biographical information, preferences for work that universalize rather than minoritize, the selection of work that is considered "representative" of what are the prevailing and often imagined audience norms, the selection of work that satisfies other literary stakeholders, and the exclusion of work with particular sexual or erotic content—often on the grounds that there is better, or more beautiful, work. Critics use aesthetic devices to construct the aesthetic closet, including determining what work receives critical attention, how erotic content is addressed, and what work is promoted and standardized. Thus, in the aesthetic closet, as in the homosexual closet, the location or position of the poet with regard to the closet is dependent not only on her own agency but also on the system in which she is operating. A dynamic construction and reconstruction of the closet occurs and is relevant not only for the individual, but also the broader society and culture. Aesthetic strategies, utilized by lesbian poets to closet their work, often are greeted with support and accolades by fellow poets, poetry critics, and general audiences. This reinforces and reifies the aesthetic closet. The aesthetic closet emerges therefore not only through the actions of poets, but also editors, publishers, and critics. The result is lesbian erotics and sexuality are erased, elided, or denied.
In the case of Elizabeth Bishop, her poetic reticence, both a strategy of literary understatement and a mark of the aesthetic closet, has become a standard applicable to other poets, including non-lesbians. Mapping how Elizabeth Bishop constructed and engaged the aesthetic closet, including when and where she entered it, peeked out, and tried to exit it, provides a basis for examining how other poets have utilized the aesthetic closet.

The aesthetic closet of Bishop has been characterized by reticence, obliqueness, and a withholding, not only of sexuality, the erotic, and Bishop's same-sex desires, but also of human connection more generally, is one of the aesthetic standard by which poetry today is judged. The consequence of this is poetry is deemed "good" and "worthy" when, like Bishop's work, it elides lesbian sexuality and eroticism from entering. There are, however, alternate readings of Bishop, in which lesbian sexuality and eroticism are made visible and where Bishop is situated within a broader continuum of lesbian poetics.

Alicia Ostriker observes that Elizabeth Bishop is an erotic poet whose poems "reach toward tenderness, connection, communication, touch" (Ostriker, p. 42.) Ostriker argues however, that the neediness is "armored and veiled" and lifts "only at moments in the late poems" (Ostriker, p. 42.) I agree with Ostriker and appreciate her work to reclaim the sexuality in Bishop's work; other critics including Costello, Harrison, and Wheeler also have made important contributions to thinking about sexuality in Bishop's work. Unlike Ostriker, however, I actually locate Bishop's impulses more in her earlier work, particularly A Cold Spring, and find her actually less veiled than she generally is presented critically.

A Cold Spring was published in 1955. A Cold Spring contains sixteen poems. In almost half of the poems, Bishop reveals some aspect of her erotic desires. For the careful, or amenable, reader, Bishop's revelation of her desires can be read clearly as lesbian because they are encoded in ways that lesbian desire was encoded at this time. For the purposes of this talk, I will only discuss two poems from the collection, "At the Fishhouses" and "Insomnia."

Bishop's well-loved poem, "At the Fishhouses" is the fifth poem in A Cold Spring. What is striking about this poem is the way that the concluding imagery prefigures much of what will become an image bank for lesbian-feminist poetry in the 1970s and early 1980s during the second wave of feminism. The final six lines of the poem are:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

With these lines, Bishop expands the scope and the intention of "At the Fishhouses" from the detailed memory of her childhood to a more philosophical rumination on knowledge. She makes this transition with water images. Bishop describes the water as "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free" words moving from physical descriptors of water to an emotional reference, "free," which also is the only word in the series that Bishop merits an adjective. This description of the water is initially mysterious, and then it moves to freedom. In the third line of this concluding section, Bishop introduces the notion of knowledge; she associates it with carnality through the enjambment of "mouth" at the end of the line. In the next line, the reader discovers that the mouth is not the one on the human head, but the mouth of the world. By connecting the body with freedom first from the earlier reference and then with the world, Bishop is beginning to gender the subject and to connect knowledge with creation. Bishop inserts both the body and freedom into a feminized space. In the fourth line of this segment, Bishop refers to "rocky breasts." The co-junction of "mouth" as the end word of the third line and "breast" as the end word of the fourth line genders the body as female in a way that is both free and imaginative. These two lines make the conclusion of this poem are erotically charged with not just female but lesbian sexuality. The images that Bishop uses in her conclusion align the female body with nature and also with knowledge. The final two lines of the poem assert that knowledge is historical and like water—"utterly free." The historical dialect separating man as culture, or knowledge, and woman as nature is being reworked by Bishop with her wry and understated manner. The consciousness of the poem, and the images with which it works—female bodies, lesbian erotics and nature—, is replicated and pressed further by lesbian poets twenty years later during the lesbian-feminist poetry movement.

The eighth poem of A Cold Spring, "Insomnia," is to me one of the great lesbian love poems of the 20th century. And it is one of Bishop's most intimate poems in this collection. "Insomnia" is included in its entirety on your handout. The stark revelation at its conclusion, "and you love me," marks it as a love poem, although in what was becoming Bishop's signature, the moment of human intimacy is withheld until the very end and only prefigured earlier obliquely. "Insomnia," in addition to being one of Bishop's most intimate poems, is one of her poems that most articulates a mid-century lesbian poetics.

The first person "speaker" of the poem combined with the second person "beloved" is a familiar structure of the love poem in western literature. Throughout much of canonized literary history, the speaker is an assumed male and the beloved assumed female. Lesbian poets have the unique opportunity to use the linguistic structure of the "I" and "you" to elide the absence of gender difference between lesbian lovers. The dual-gendered possibilities of the first and second person in English allow the lesbian writer to hide gender sameness and be closeted in love poems. At the same time, this manner of creating an aesthetic closet—through elision—presents more emotional integrity than the alternative: consciously changing the gender of a beloved one, which also undermines the emotional veracity of the poem as I've explored elsewhere.

Bishop's actions in representing lesbian sexuality on the page also have to be considered in the context of working in a male-dominated, heterosexuality-assumptive tradition. Bishop works against the assumptive gender of male poet. She disrupts the cultural and literary paradigm of the male actor and female object. Bishop's embrace of the first person and second person paradigm for the love poem serves to obscure gender sameness and lesbian desire, but in Bishop's poem, "Insomnia," the gender formulations do not simply rely on obscuring gender linguistically. "Insomnia" is more complex.

Bishop ends with "and you love me." In this conclusion, the poet, or speaker, is not the actor but the object, the acted upon. The poet, the "I," but in the predicate as me, is loved, as opposed to actively loving. The actor of this poem is the "you." This would fit with gender assumptions if the reader assumed that the female poet, Bishop, was in love with a man, but Bishop neither leaves space for this assumption nor seeks to exploit it. "Insomnia" is about the beloved object of Bishop's female gaze in a "world inverted." In this "world inverted," Bishop explains, "left is always right" and "the shadows are really the body." These two images explain to the reader that what is to come in the poem is not what is expected. The next line, the first appearance of the first person locates the couple to be revealed in the concluding line within the "world inverted." Bishop writes, "where we stay awake all night" and then continues in the next line that "the heavens are shallow as the sea/is now deep." Bishop imagisticly unites the beloved couple with both the heavens, or things that are godly, as well as the sea, another location of power, especially feminine power, which Bishop establishes in the second stanza with the "body of water" as the location of the moon's power.

Bishop works with three notions of "inverted" within the poem. First is the mirror, which reverses things. Second is the well, which is where the world is inverted. The third notion of "invert" is allusive. The "invert" was a common trope for describing homosexuality, and lesbianism, during the 1950s. The "invert" as a term for lesbian comes from the publication of Sexual Inversion in 1897 by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds; the book was under renewed discussion in the 1940s and 1950s and scrutiny with Alfred Kinsey's publication of Sexual Behavior of the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female in 1953. Bishop takes the idea of an "invert" and makes the world inverted as a way to encode, for the willing, or knowledgeable, readers, her lesbian sexuality in the final declaration of the poem. "Insomnia" is, in fact, in the context in which Bishop was writing and publishing not a poem that operates within the aesthetic closet, but rather "Insomnia" is a bold statement of Bishop's lesbianism, or as she might have called it, inversion.

"Insomnia" like "At the Fishhouses" prefigures with its imagery what later happens in lesbian-feminist writing in the 1970s. With the moon imagery in "Insomnia," Bishop both feminizes the moon and gives it active ”" even aggressive ”" agency. Bishop writes of the moon, "she'd tell it to go to hell,/and she'd find a body of water,/or a mirror, on which to dwell." [Emphasis is Bishop's.] This combination of female characterization, counterpointed by female power, particularly within the natural world, is a common configuration in poetry of Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, and others in the lesbian-feminist poetry movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In "Insomnia," while Bishop uses the first person and second person pronouns and this choice degenders the beloved couple, the selection of the first person and second personal also situates the poem in the tradition of heroic love poems and Bishop's lesbian assertion in the poem challenges the heterosexual paradigm. In this way, "Insomnia" is a Bishop poem that simultaneously writes the aesthetic closet by not revealing the lovers as of the same sex and it simultaneously reaches for a lesbian poetic by expressing lesbian, or "invert" desire and eroticism.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis' construct of the "feminism of production," which Bishop certainly did not position herself inside, and the "feminism of reception" as different elements of feminist poetry is significant when considering Bishop. At the same time A Cold Spring was published, the organization, Daughters of Bilitis, an early lesbian community group, was formed. Its name comes from a book of beloved poetry about lesbian desire by Pierre Louÿs (Gallo, p. 2.) Lesbians as a community of readers were beginning to emerge. If Bishop's book A Cold Spring had been received not only by her peers and mentors in a positive fashion, but also by a visible community of lesbian readers, Bishop's response in her future work might have been different. Without reception that was affirmative of her lesbian poetics, Bishop retreated into the aesthetic closet.

In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser writes, "At this juncture, I wish to defend the wordless—the mute act, which proves itself without speech, which declares and insinuates in silence, and is stamped on memory. Even in concern for poetry, we realize the life of the unspoken" (p. 122.) Much of the magic of poetry is, as Rukeyser suggests, in the unspoken and it is right to honor, even praise it, as Rukeyser does, but she concedes, "In the arts of speech, however—in poetry and song and the dramatic arts—while silence may be even the climax, it is language and the relations of language with which we deal" (p. 123.) Language and the relations of language are of even greater importance than silence. It is for these reasons that the aesthetic closet must be interrogated vigorously. The aesthetic closet is a central dimension of Bishop's work and a dynamic informing multiple decisions that she made as a poet, both in her work and in the production, distribution, and reception of her work.

One of Bishop's earliest poems, "Chemin de Fer" , is about a "dirty hermit" who in the concluding quatrain screams, "Love should be put into action!" I imagine Bishop imagining herself as that "dirty hermit" when she as a young poet wrote that line. I also imagine her thick in the emotions of her early loves for other women working out how she would put her own love for other women into action. The poem ends with this couplet, "Across the pond an echo/tried and tried to confirm it." One of the ways that Bishop put her love into action was through writing. In doing so, a complex and dynamic aesthetic closet emerges in Bishop's work. Her aesthetic closet, which created silence and elision of her lesbian sexuality and erotic life, was also a space from which she reached out to write about lesbian desire and erotics. In her writing throughout her life, Bishop tries to heed the scream of the "dirty hermit" to put her love—her lesbian love for other women—into action on the page. A central part of Bishop's aesthetic closet, beyond the ways in which she was silent, is how she reached out, how she put love into action and listened, carefully, intently, for the echo to confirm it.

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

Bishop, Elizabeth. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Blackmer, Corinne E. "Writing Poetry like a 'Woman'" in American Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 1. (Spring, 1996), pp. 130-153.

Bulkin, Elly & Joan Larkin. Amazon Poetry: An Anthology. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, 1975.

Clausen, Jan. A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism. Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1982.

Costello, Bonnie. "Elizabeth Bishop's Personal Impersonal." American Literary History, 2003, p. 334-366.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Gallo, Marcia M. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 2006.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Jarraway, David R. ""O Canada": The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop." PMLA, vol. 113, no. 2 (Mar., 1998), pp. 243-257.

Ostricker, Alicia. Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1978.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry with a New Foreword by Jane Cooper. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.

Stevenson, Anne. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. London, UK: Bellew Publishing Company Limited, 1998.

Swenson, May. Iconographs. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970.

Swenson, May. The Complete Love Poems with a Foreword by Maxine Kumin. New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2003.

Wheeler, Lesley. The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

"Love should be put into action!"
On The Aesthetic Closet in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry
Lifting Belly High: Women's Poetry Since 1900
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
September 11, 12, & 13, 2008
Presentation by Julie R. Enszer
ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Bishop's emotional, erotic, and sexual life was focused on women. She had both long-term relationships with female partners and brief love affairs with women. Her sexual orientation was well known among friends and professional colleagues. It would be a misnomer to call Bishop "closeted," although she certainly negotiated the "closet," as all lesbians do, throughout her life; it also would be inaccurate to say that Bishop was "out" as a lesbian poet. Bishop's life and her poetry is a complex hybrid of movement toward openness and recognition of her lesbian sexuality as well as movement of elision and erasure of lesbian sexuality.
Although Bishop refused to position herself in the emerging feminist and lesbian contexts of the 1970s, Bishop is a pivotal figure for both the feminist and lesbian poetry movements that emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Bishop's poetry imagistically prefigures and defines territory for lesbian sexuality in the American lyric. From Bishop come poetic gestures that are repeated and renegotiated by lesbian poets of subsequent generations. Ultimately, Bishop provides language, images, and diction that create and continue to build the lesbian poetic of the twentieth century.
At the same time, Bishop's work encodes and closets lesbian sexuality. In her poems, Bishop is not a bold, erotic foremother to lesbian poets. Most often Bishop's published poems obscure the erotic and sexual, putting them on the page only with reticence and understatement. Though within is clear lesbian eroticism and sexuality. This is the paradox of Elizabeth Bishop. Her poetry both reaches toward defining a textual erotic of lesbianism, and it also defines a textual practice of the aesthetic closet. The excavation of this paradox is critical to understanding Bishop and situating her in relation to the lesbian poetics of the twentieth century.

INSOMNIA

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
so wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always rights,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Copies of this paper are available online at:
http://julierenszer.blogspot.com/2008/09/Lifting-Belly-Conference.html

And at ThoughtMesh.net

Contact Information:
Julie R. Enszer
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University Park, MD 20782
JulieREnszer@gmail.com
www.JulieREnszer.com
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"Love should be put into action!"

On The Aesthetic Closet in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

By Julie R. Enszer