‘Cheerful AND Profound!’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Buster Keaton

Abstract

Inspired by Buster Keaton’s sporadic but crucial presence in Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, this paper examines her artistic ideal of comic surrealism through the lens of queer phenomenology. Keaton’s slapstick comedy serves as a nice cinematic parallel to Bishop’s understanding of ‘real wit’ as ‘usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous’. Taking the oft-cited 1964 letter and Bishop’s ‘Keaton’ (late 1950s) as points of departure, I carry out an intermedial analysis of the Keatonesque elements in Bishop’s comic surrealist poems that blur the demarcation between a brutal reality and a dream world of endless possibilities. These poems bring about a sudden flash of self-awareness of our own contingency, ultimately to reorient us towards what I call queer love. The formal, thematic associations that I draw between the two artists illuminate not only the poet’s surprisingly quirky, experimental sides, but her subtle deftness in addressing political issues around gender, sexuality, class, and race.