‘The Moose’ as Movie: Elizabeth Bishop as Screenwriter

Abstract

This chapter considers the practical influence of film on Elizabeth Bishop’s writing by drawing out cinematic techniques in her narrative poem, ‘The Moose’. In a series of close readings, it analyses specific splices or film-editing effects produced in the poem, before moving on to suggest that Bishop’s filmic techniques have significant implications for the titular creature’s climatic entrance. The moose’s appearance is related to beastly encounters in Krzysztof Zanussi’s Kontrakt (1980) and Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006) in order to emphasise how Bishop’s poem works against this cinematic trope, which typically marks some epiphany for the human involved. Instead, a crucial inconsistency or ‘trick shot’ used to exaggerate the moose’s height in the poem underscores the constructedness of that expectation.