Words and Images in Migration. Elizabeth Bishops’s “Iconotexts” and “Phototexts”

Abstract

In spite of the fact that what Pound called phanopoeia is an essential ingredient in Elizabeth Bishop’s production (see her frequent and consistent use of ekphrasis, synesthesia, alliteration), only a few scholars have analyzed in depth the successful intersections/interplay between the verbal and the visual dimensions in the organization of her creative strategies. The present essay aims at interpreting three less known outputs of Bishop’s imagination, according to a method which gives full account of her masterly intersemiotic experimentations. A short introductive section moves from Bishop’s poetic outputs, provides the necessary contextualization, and examines in depth the varieties and modalities of the relationship with her visual imagination, as well as the recurring interest in the art and technique of photography. The following section deals with what can be defined “explicit iconotexts”, analyzing Bishop’s visual production, in its intersection with her poetic subtext. A third section faces the problem of interactions between word and image, when the latter is introduced as an illustration, a commentary, or an integration of the former. In the reportage Brazil (1962), a work that can be defined a “collaborative output”, since it is the result of the cooperation of several authors working in different epistemological fields, the written text establishes a fruitful dialogue with an extremely rich apparatus of photographs. In the supple volume Exchanging Hats (a catalogue of Bishop’s watercolors exhibited in 1993), edited by William Benton, the paintings create an implicit, intriguing counterpoint to her poems, whose virtual figurative effectiveness materializes on canvas. In her posthumously published E. A. Poe and the Juke-box (A. Quinn Ed., 2006), the presence of visual and verbal sketches, handwritten and typewritten pages, along with snapshots of Bishop’s journals, allows scholars to feel immersed in the poet’s creative energy in its making.