Hyperallergic Looks to Home with Elizabeth Bishop

Over the weekend at Hyperallergic, Elisa Wouk Almino took a personal look into Barbara Hammer's documentary Welcome to This House, about the life and various homes inhabited by Elizabeth Bishop. Wouk Almino approaches Bishop's poetry from a sense of homelessness and longing. She writes:

I’d long struggled to define what home meant to me, until I read Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in college. I became particularly drawn to the poems she wrote while living in Brazil, where she went on vacation in 1951 and decided to remain for 15 years after falling in love with the Carioca architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Together they moved far up in the mountains of Petrópolis, in a house designed by Soares. It became known as the Samambaia house, for which — after having lived there for eight years — Bishop wrote a kind of ode and goodbye, titled “Song for the Rainy Season” (1960). In the poem, she describes the house’s surrounding habitat as simultaneously “familiar, unbidden”: familiar because it is her home, but unwelcoming because it is nonetheless strange. Brazil was certainly exotic to her — even after living there for a while, she did not become acclimated and she would never feel comfortable with her Portuguese — but this sense of alienation is present in the poems she wrote in all the places she lived, as she assumed the role of foreigner to the world.

Throughout her life Bishop struggled, as I have, to associate home with a geographical location. She spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, and as an adult she led a nomadic life, moving among various cities in the US (Poughkeepsie, New York City, Key West, and Cambridge) and Brazil (in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, and Ouro Preto). She was constantly estranged and yearning for travel, wondering, as in her poem “Questions of Travel” (1956), “Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?”

Wouk Almino then turns to Hammer's documentary which tours the various places Bishop lived in throughout her life, beginning in Nova Scotia and then traveling through Brazil:

Home, for Bishop, was not found in a place (though she desired this) but rather in how she observed her surroundings. Her wandering eye suggests a continuity in her life of travel, even if the places were as disparate as the lush landscapes of Petrópolis and the tidy borders of the Boston wharf. In a journal from the mid-1930s, she writes:

Reality […] is something like a huge circus tent, folding, adjustable, which we carry around with us and set up wherever we are. It possesses the magical property of being able to take on characteristics of whatever place we are in, in fact it can become identical with it.

Perhaps reality is just the way we see, the way we “set up.” Bishop’s reality is visualized into an imaginary tent, as if perception were her own enclosed space, her own home.

Read on at Hyperallergic for an equally insightful look at Colm Tóibín's latest book On Elizabeth Bishop. And if the article has sufficiently whetted your appetite, consider this piece by Alexandra Pechman about Bishop's time in Brazil and her relationship with Clarice Lispector.