Learning how to hold water: Lessons for an emerging poet from Elizabeth Bishop

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry on individual readers. Despite their small quantity-101 poems published from the 1920s through the 1970s---Bishop's poems continue to critically affect poetic trends. For this reason, Bishop has been referred to as a phenomenon by literary scholars, including Dana Gioia, American poet and critic, and Thomas Travisano, Chair of the Department of English & Theatre Arts at Hartwick College, for the far-reaching impact of her work. By contrast, my study is a very particular one: to refocus attention to details of her poems to further understand how her work has nourished countless---and wildly disparate---voices.;As a path to explore the individual effects of her work, I examined Bishop's aesthetic understandings of key elements in a poem: speaker, subject, time and emotion. This examination consisted of looking to Bishop's personal life as well as to the aesthetics revealed in her poems, which highlight a resistance to the poetic trends of her time (confessional poetry, feminist poetry collections, the New York literary scene, and approaches to self-editing). Bishop's oppositions freed her to define poetry in her own terms, pushing her readers to actively discover what meanings a poem makes available.;From this foundation, I tracked my own responses to her work, focusing on the development of her understanding of elements of a poem and how they interplay. I immersed myself in exploring Bishop's poetry and writing process, observing how my own composition and self-editing became affected. My experience revealed a process of reverse aperture, where, instead of creating experiences in poems through which readers can enter, Bishop created poems that readers must assemble within themselves. Because readers must mentally recreate Bishop's work, the experience of reading her poems is individualized; it is a matter of the poem becoming suspended within us rather than us within the poem. Certainly other poems can echo this experience, but that Bishop's work consistently requires this internalization, and that her influence spreads across both time and trends, deserves our attention. In exploring how Bishop's work nourishes others, I can better understand how her work influences my own.