Elizabeth Bishop's queer lists

Mid-20th-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop used lists in her notes to collect and select language for her poems and to think associatively on the page, blurring the worlds of the everyday and the literary. Bishop's archival drafts, published poetry, and published prose evince a poetics o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProse studies Vol. 42; no. 2; pp. 129 - 149
Main Author Knorr, Alyse
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 04.05.2021
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
American literature
Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)
Elizabeth Bishop
LGBTQ people
list theory
lists
poetry
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Summary:Mid-20th-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop used lists in her notes to collect and select language for her poems and to think associatively on the page, blurring the worlds of the everyday and the literary. Bishop's archival drafts, published poetry, and published prose evince a poetics of list-making that provided the writer with a means of achieving highly accurate descriptions that convey a spontaneous mind in motion, turn the catalog into a surrealist camera, and queer class boundaries via a fragmentary, nonhierarchical grammar. Ultimately, this project offers a new approach to queering the archive by suggesting a politics of preservation that foregrounds the ephemeral.
ISSN:0144-0357
1743-9426
DOI:10.1080/01440357.2021.1968229