Pink Dogs

Just over a week ago my partner Kathryn Gray and I (the two halves of Bad Lilies) performed a short set at an event in Bloomsbury. It was called Bishop vs. Lowell: A Literary Rumble. We were talking about, yes, Elizabeth Bishop (my corner) and Robert Lowell (Kathryn’s corner). I think it’s fair to say these two poets are formative loves for both of us…well, both of them for me and perhaps Lowell first for Kathryn (then Bishop later…I’m the early adopter of the relationship). We talked about their great literary friendship; we read their poems; we played some music that proved important to both of them. It was a fun night and the audience was lovely and encouraging afterwards. I enjoyed doing some research for the evening but the concept was all Kathryn’s.

A year ago I wrote this piece about Bishop for the Los Angeles Review of Books and it provided the kernel for my argument in her favour. I don’t want to elaborate too much on that, not least as Kathryn and I are thinking of expanding our set to a longer event, but I started by riffing off the extraordinary rise of Bishop’s reputation and linking it to a motif in her poems. To quote — and refer to that LARB piece — I said the following:

Considering the trajectory of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry since her death makes me think of a recurring motif in her verse: that of illumination and elevation. Consider ‘Late Air’ and the “Phoenixes/burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb”, or the “frail, illegal fire balloons’ which climb “the mountain height" in ‘The Armadillo’. Or perhaps most appositely, given the stature with which Bishop and her work is now regarded, think of the fireflies in ‘A Cold Spring’, who “begin to rise”:

            up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
−−exactly like the bubbles in champagne.

It’s a measure of the rise and rise of Bishop’s reputation that I found myself reviewing her entry into Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series. Hopefully you know those little primers. You might wonder who the other poets featured in the series are. Well, when I wrote the review last year there were only five poets with dedicated volumes other than Bishop and they were…Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, Homer, Ovid, and William Shakespeare.

Quite the company! The LARB review of the OUP Very Short Introduction includes some personal reflection on Bishop’s importance to me that I didn’t include at the event but which remains a major reason I ‘bonded’ with her…and the first occasion, to my knowledge, anyone has written in detail about the links between Bishop’s poetry and one of her very particular health conditions. I am talking specifically about the severity of her early childhood eczema…which persisted throughout her life and which, arguably, played its part in her alcoholism and other problems she faced. It is key, as I explain, to understanding the dualism between body and mind in her verse…and indeed, if you have read this far, you should really read that review I keep mentioning…

I say in my essay-review that Bishop found writing descriptively of animals allowed her to mediate her physical alienation, most directly in ‘Pink Dog’. For reasons of space I didn’t elaborate on that particular poem. ‘Pink Dog’ appears to be the last poem that Bishop finished, in 1979, although she likely started writing it in Brazil in the early 1960s. While ‘Pink Dog’ is primarily a poem exploring the urban poverty of Rio de Janeiro, there is an element of self-portrait to the stray animal, a “poor bitch”, “a case of scabies”, which “Naked and pink, without a single hair”, causes passersby to “draw back and stare.” Bishop’s identification with the stray’s skin condition and others’ reaction to it is clear. As a biographer of Bishop, Thomas Travisano, has written, ‘Pink Dog’ captures a “simultaneous and parallel existence of loveliness and squalor, of gaiety and tragedy, of acceptance and irony.” It is particularly powerful to consider the way this poem refuses the motif of illumination and elevation found in other poems — those phoenixes, fire balloons, and fireflies I referred to above in relation to her posthumous reputation. Bishop considers the degradation of a city where beggars are “thrown in tidal rivers”, writing:

            Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites
            go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights
            out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.

A bleaker scene would be hard to find in Bishop’s poetry, and she considers what might happen to the dog in similar circumstances, addressing it directly to say, “In your condition you would not be able/even to float.” There are no lights, and there is no floating (either on water, or up and away) in the world of ‘Pink Dog’ – and yet the poem ends on a positive note by somehow bringing the promise of escape down to earth instead, as Bishop urges the dog to make the best of things and “Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!”

This all speaks, of course, to why I think Bishop is a very great poet indeed. ‘Pink Dog’ holds to a Shakespearian idea of the human condition. She has Hamlet in mind: “What a piece of work is a man”, and most importantly the preceeding lines, that suspend us in such unbearable tension between what is “majestical” and “foul”: “This most/excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave/o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted/with golden fire — why, it appeareth nothing to/me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”

Bishop knew that tension intimately, the “awful but cheerful” as she puts it in her poem ‘The Bight’. Nevertheless, in ‘Pink Dog’, and thanks to the only footnote provided by Elizabeth Bishop to any of her published poems, we learn the name for a Carnival costume is a “fantasia.”