Frames of Reference: Paterson in “In the Waiting Room”

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop built her much-beloved late poem Waiting Room on a childhood memory of reading Geographic. Her memory, however, was pointedly inaccurate: grown-up who speaks Waiting Room invented riveting photographs that child Elizabeth sees in National Geographic, / February, 1918 (Complete Poems 160). Bishop's photofiction is not news. Already 15 years ago, Brett Millier observed that many of Bishop's contemporary critics fairly cackled with glee at catching her in an inconsistency (445). (Such relish was misguided. Bishop readily admitted fictionality of her recollected both publicly and privately.(1)) Although in intervening years. Bishop's invented photographs--especially one of topless African women--have been read as coded deposits of poet's homosexuality or political worldview, (2) literary referentiality of Bishop's citation of magazine remains largely unexamined. For what other text might stand? Or: what does Bishop read under the cover / of Geographic, / February, 1918? This essay argues that Waiting Room activates two kinds of allusion. Wrapping an iconic pop-cultural reference around a high literary allusion, Bishop's treatment of ubiquitous echoes and alters Geographic picture lyric that William Carlos Williams plants early in Paterson I. I contend that occasional text of Waiting Room, Geographic, participates in collapse of chronology on which poem relies throughout. (3) As speaker's adult perspective frames telling of her childhood experience, so speaker's adult reading inflects child's reading. As speaker reads grown-up matter over her child self's shoulder, Bishop superimposes Williams's reading of in Paterson I onto her own recollection of reading Geographic. I am less concerned with proving intentionality of Bishop's allusion to Williams than with exploring viability, and consequences for interpretation, of intertextual claim. Nothing in Bishop's letters, drafts, or extrapoetic commentary will confirm that she had Williams in mind as she wrote Waiting Room. In place of such hard evidence, I juxtapose Paterson I and Waiting Room and link two poems by way of close readings and telling contingencies of Bishop's and Williams's intertwined publication histories. I contend that lack of such conventional evidence ought not preclude examination of an audible echo--certainly not when examination underwrites a new reading of one of Bishop's most important poems and unsettles acquired accounts of her poetic persona. Bishop's reputation for modesty and deference has recently undergone vital critical revision, especially around question of her political engagement. Those early overworn points of reference, though, continue to limit readings of Bishop's poetic engagement, of how this poets poet also responded critically to poetic models and precedents.(4) This essay, then, moves toward redressing that limitation by taking hint of Paterson I in Waiting Room. A final introductory point: if accustomed modes of reading Bishop or her work have forestalled consideration of her allusion to Williams in Waiting Room, then difficulty of classifying her citation only compounds problem. Parody, refutation, revision, critique: these pointed terms do not quite capture simultaneous blatancy and understatement of Bishop's allusive mode in Waiting Room. Her response to Williams is most helpfully approached as a methodological problem, as strategic misdirection. Responding to Williams, Bishop's poem capitalizes on conspicuousness of both and its pictures of half-naked women; ubiquity of magazine and notoriety of that particular genre of photograph hide her reference to Paterson I in plain sight. …