Elizabeth Bishop suffered from occasional attacks of vertigo, but in her poetry vertiginous experiences and all forms of loss of visual perspective disembody the conversational speaking voice that suggests personal intimacy between “Elizabeth” and the reader. Vertigo represents a collapse of identity and an emptying out, even as it simultaneously wheels through a superfluity of identities. In her famous poem “In the Waiting Room,” when Bishop as a girl realizes that “I am an Elizabeth,” she finds herself in free fall, grasping at all the ways in which identity is constructed. The poem invites and has received feminist, queer, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and all kinds of political readings. Identity is over determined. 

The focus of this course will be on Bishop’s lesbian identities and the ways she remained both in and out of the closet, but it will examine sexual identity as expressed in the sublime. It is in Bishop’s exploration of the sublime and she finds the loss of perspective that causes panic or anxiety that exposes endless uncertainties of identity. Some time will be spent on ideologies of private and public, and how these express themselves in the personal poet and the American “official” poet.

Primary Works:

Bishop, Elizabeth.  Elizabeth Bishop: Poems and Prose

Parts of:

Butler, Judith.  Gender Troubles

Freud, Sigmund.  On Sexuality

Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality

Kristeva, Julia.  Revolution in Poetic Language

Stewart, Susan on Longing