‘The unreality of our reality’: Elizabeth Bishop’s conflicting presentations of objects in Geography III.
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In 1977, one year after the publication of Geography III, fellow modern American poet John Ashbery assessed Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry as possessing a ‘continually renewed sense of discovering the strangeness, the unreality of our reality’ (Ashbery, 10). Ashbery did not reference Geography III in his short essay, favouring Bishop’s earlier collections North & South and Questions of Travel, but Ashbery’s phrase is nonetheless applicable – and illuminating – to her final collection. This essay will explore where in Geography III Bishop demonstrates Ashbery’s ‘unreality of our reality’ by presenting multiple views of one object on the same plane, such that the reader is forced to understand the object by various, often conflicting, viewpoints. More specifically, I will be examining ‘Poem’ and ’12 O’ Clock News’ as these demonstrate the best examples of Bishop’s ‘unreality’, though it is a theme throughout the collection (Bishop, Geography III, 36-39 and 32-35). I will also briefly explore Bishop’s poetic debt to Marianne Moore, her poetic mentor with whom the younger Bishop was close until Moore’s death in 1972 (Anderson). As Bishop’s poetry is intent on examining objects from all angles and presenting its findings, I am terming this Bishop’s ‘scientific poetry’, through which Moore’s influence becomes clear
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