The Case of the Falling S: Elizabeth Bishop, Visual Poetry and the International Avant-Garde

Abstract

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of the letter S from the word falls (‘Glen Fall / s, New York’), as an experiment in visual poetry shaped by the work of the international avant-garde. The breaking of a word between consonants is unusual for Bishop, but it was not at all unusual for her avant-garde precursors and peers. Scholars have explored Bishop’s relation to the visual arts as a painter of watercolors, as a lifelong student of modernist painting, sculpture, and architecture, and as a writer who derived poetic strategies from the visual arts and wrote many ekphrastic poems. However, we have paid less attention to the importance of the visual design and spatial layout of Bishop’s poems in the context of avant-garde experiments with visual poetry.