Bishop and Psychobiography

• Bishop's experience's of loss
  1. Her father died when she was eight months old.
  2. Her mother then was institutionalized.  She died in a sanatorium in May 1934.
  3. Bob seaver committed suicide because she refused to marry him.
  4. Kita took an "'accidental' overdose" upon their reunion in Yew York in 1967.
       
     
     Brett Miller's Life and the Memory of It qut in MaCabe 253.
• MaCabe's interpretation of "One Art":
  "The poem reveals a struggle for mastery that will never be gained.  We can only make loss into therapeutic play.  One does try to master loss, but Bishop recommends that we recognize our powerlessness and play with the condition of loss: the blurring and splitting of presence and absence, being and nonbeing.
      Bishop's "art of losing" resembles what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Pinciple calls the rule of "fort-da" (gone/there), after a game his grandson constructed in his mother's absence. . . . " (27)
   
• "Sestina" --
  To understand and appreciate the poem, we need to understand
  1. How Bishop weaves the six key words (child, grandmother, stove, house, almanac, and tears) into the complicated pattern of sestina.
  2. How the six elements develop and get different meanings in the poem.
     As Ryan puts it very nicely, "[the] form of the poem prescribes a repetition and displacement of its key words that is reflective of the way grief travels from one sign or object to another, moving away from and around the original loss tha cannot be named except as 'it'" (42).  In other words, without naming or explaining the source of sadness, the poem shows how the grandmother and the child respectively deal with their losses by  finding an indirect way to express and transform their sadness.  While Lacan thinks that our desire can never be satisfied and we always need to replace the desired object with something else on a metonymic chain, what Bishop shows here is the cathartic process whereby the original sadness gets cleansed away or transformed.

     For instance, tears gets replaced by rain, steam on the tea-kettle, tea, button, moons (the passing of time) till finally it becomes something to plant (bury)out of which something more productive might come.

MaCabe, Susan.  Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss.  Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1994.  (Highly recommended)
• MaCabe's approach:
  "A psychoanalytic perspective toward loss is invoked through Freud; with Lacan, I am able to link the experience of loss with writing.  I supplement my use of the French postmodern feminists Kristeva and Cixous, who invoke the possibility of a distinctly feminine writing, with a variety of Anglo-American feminists such as Chodorow, Oxtriker, Miller, Gilligan, Butler, Flax, as they diversely approach issues associated with women's writing and feminist philosophy" (xix)
  Ryan, Michael.  Literary Theory : A Practical Introduction.  MA: Blackwell, 1999.