Still Explosions of True Desire: Exploring Artifice and the Shadow in Elizabeth Bishop and Jean Valentine

Abstract

This thesis posits an inherent connection between paradoxes of scale, negative capability, and queerness as expressed through poetic form, taking Elizabeth Bishop’s attention to physical objects and geographical landscapes as a primary example. My research takes up what I see to be the other end of the spectrum, which is also a point of connection: the relative slipperiness of Jean Valentine’s dreamlike poems of address, particularly her elegy for Bishop: “Snow Landscape in a Glass Globe.” I look to both poets for structures that allow emotional directness through syntactically and imagistically indirect means, though the differences in each poet’s formal concerns create a central tension in my poetics. I am interested in queerness as the liberating result of negative capability, and the constraints of paradox as a formal embodiment of transformation, which is necessary once one has recognized their place outside of heteronormativity and taken steps to transcend it. Insofar as poetic form is an embodied expression, paradoxes and other strangenesses that emerge are in service of saving the speaker of these poems, and their beloveds, from being flattened into an assumed gender or relational role. Form allows the poem itself to keep some of its secrets, and keeps the art alive.