The fourth in a series of blogs about poetry

While walking to school the other day, I spied a cat crawling into a dumpster, presumably looking for a bite to eat and I was reminded of Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” It really dawned on me in that moment that Lowell was showing how perspective influences every factor of human thinking and behavior. Lowell’s skunks were ready to stand up and fight for their treasure--something that humans had cast aside as garbage. This revelation helped me to understand the shift in perspective pointed to by Bonnie Costello in her essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal.” Costello points out that critics often limit their focus to the biographical correlations between texts and their authors and fail to look beyond these details and toward the direction the author is suggesting. Of course the author must use language and some kind of identifiable circumstances in an effort to convey meaning to the reader, but Bishop was always eager to avoid making the clearly autobiographical revelations of the confessional poets. Bishop instead seeks to embody the voice of society as a whole, and to portray the individual as a fragmented being who is often in conflict with various aspects of the self. Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” is explored in this essay, not as a “map of Rich’s failed marriage and husband’s suicide,” although this may be one reading of the poem, but rather as a “journey into the unconscious” in which conventional meaning and identifications are broken down and re examined. Costello points out that this is a journey that can not be made “voyeuristically or vicariously” but must be made by the readers themselves. Although the details of Rich’s life may be of great interest to the reader, they do not help us go to the place that the poet would take us--to the loss of the ego and into the realm of the unconscious.
By seeking to step outside of the self and into the unconscious, Elizabeth Bishop establishes what Costello refers to as an “emergent perspective. In this model the author, while writing within the limits of language and identity, gives voice to the “unfulfilled aspirations” of his or her society. This model is very similar to the Buddhist idea of independent origination. Since, in Buddhist thought, there is no independent origination, the self is seen as a result of all the factors leading up to its creation. The self is a text which has been written just as a poem. The image of texts caste off in a museum in the essay is a striking image of the futility in trying to establish meaning from cast off relics. In Buddhism, as well as this model of poetry, the details of the self are something to be dis-identified with in an effort to create a space in which the reader may explore a truer or more complete self. Like Rich, and those cats in the dumpster, we must dive deep and deconstruct those concepts of I/me, he/she and emerge with a new model in which the self refuses to be written in another’s voice.