Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop
Due to my ongoing interest in any and all times Bishopian…
This excerpt is from a review by Moira Richards at Rattle of Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic by Alicia Suskin Ostriker:
In another essay, about the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds, “I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds,” Ostriker takes that feminist approach to the way the poetry of those two women is often misread, misunderstood–perhaps “pigeon-holed” is a better word–by patriarchal readings. She looks at marginalisation and argues and illustrates her points with lines of poetry in a way which is both inviting and accessible for a lay reader like me. Perhaps the cornerstone of this essay is her point that:
Bishop mostly evades, Olds mostly asserts erotic connection – but for both, the erotic is a power preceding and defining the self; for both, it exists at the liminal border between language and the unsayable; for both, it abuts on a realm we may call spiritual. Technically, however cool the voice of Bishop, however seemingly overheated the voice of Olds, the metaphors of both poets enact the erotic.
Eh, ok, but I’d say that more often than not Bishop’s moves are toward sensuality, not eroticism. Poor Bishop though–for decades, readers and critics assumed she’d been effectively neutered, and then the post Adrienne Rich feminists all seem to have “discovered” in her work something powerfully sexual. I think the real story is somewhere in between these two poles: Bishop was a sensual being and wrote like one, but she was conscious too of decorum and wrote like that as well—tastefully, quietly, with attention always to what shouldn’t be said. Not because she was incapable of saying it (she was much more out in her life than I’d imagined) but because the writing was, for her, far less interesting when one’s innermost emotional truths were not casually spit upon the page.
I also think that Bishop was more conscious than most about not revealing too much about the living. While Lowell went around slandering everyone who’d ever loved him, Bishop cringed. I think Sharon Olds’s parents, for example, would have had to have been horrified by what she said about each, and I can’t imagine Bishop allowing that kind of hurtful stuff to take root in her work; when Bishop told Lowell not to publish the “poems” he’d derived from Hardwick’s letters, she said “art isn’t worth that much.”
If I recall correctly, Vassar is a repository for all things Bishop.
Enjoyed perspective offered by “Virgin’s” comments.
Richards’s review offers enough to motivate me to get a copy of the essays.