Bishop's worldly jaunts still transporting readers

By Lorrie Goldensohn
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Why? one might ask, looking at the plain surface of her language, or at her homey, straightforward subjects — a map, a toy or a marching band.

But in all her writing, Bishop’s sly wit, and the understated elegance of her treatment of objects and people, blend smoothly with exoticism — as landscapes Nova Scotian and New England, Brazilian and Floridian, reflect her restless life and mixed origins.

Because Elizabeth Bishop’s American father died shortly after her birth in 1911, Bishop’s Canadian mother returned with her only child to the parental farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia. After her mother’s final retreat to a mental hospital in Halifax, Bishop’s paternal grandparents swooped down on 6-year-old Elizabeth, to take her to their huge and formidable house in Worcester, Mass.

Dragged to America

In Bishop’s own words from “The Country Mouse,” she “had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even the inverted R’s of my mother’s family.”

This split — between the Canadian and the American, the well-to-do and the economically backward, between northern and southern landscapes and hemispheres — holds as an intriguing contrast in all of Bishop’s life and work.

Migrating from the family of one near relation to the other, Elizabeth Bishop, asthmatic, and prone to allergies, eventually wound up at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, where she thrived.

In the report of one professor, she was “evidently doomed to be a poet.” During her undergraduate years, Bishop served as a yearbook editor, hatched a new school magazine with classmates over a foul red wine at a local speakeasy, and began to publish the poems that would earn, among other major awards, a Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Group traveled the world

Vassar, from which she graduated in 1934, brought Elizabeth Bishop the friends with whom she later traveled to France, England, Ireland and Morocco. Fanny Borden, the college librarian, pointed the way to poet Marianne Moore, then living in New York City; Moore helped, but determined Elizabeth to find both subject and audience for her early poetry. During the 1930s and ’40s, Bishop perched between New York and Key West.

But eventually, Elizabeth Bishop met the Brazilian, Lota de Macedo Soares, in Manhattan; drawn by Lota, Bishop settled in Brazil. For more than a decade, they shared an urban flat in Rio de Janeiro and a spectacular country place in the old imperial resort, Petropolis. From these and later vivid stopping points, Bishop produced the poems, both sad and funny, that open to the deeps of the ordinary, where the fantastic lives.

At the speed of a good conversation — if we like, and even without our noticing — her words take us on those tremendous journeys leading to the inward and metaphysical.

Poet and critic Lorrie Goldensohn has taught at Vassar College since 1982. Her book, ‘‘Elizabeth Bishop/The Biograph of a Poetry,’’ was published in 1992 by Columbia University Press and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.