Witnessing the Witness
What Poetry Can Do: Reading Bishop and Tranströmer through Simic and Levis
If you’ve taken my Lyric Essay class, you may have already read this essay. It’s about poetry and the slipperiness of the psyche and about the kind of witnessing that poems and personal stories make possible. I’m teaching Lyric Essay again starting on Monday 1/16, and there are a few more spots left. The course will be open for registration all this week. I am also beginning another round of online generative writing workshops at the end of this month.
Thank you to my readers and students and fellow writers for being in community with me. I’m offering the essay below as a thank you to my paid subscribers, and we can have a conversation (about the essay or writing in general) in the comments, if you like!
Witnessing the Witness:
Psychic “Slippage” in Elizabeth Bishop and Tomas Tranströmer
by Joanna Penn Cooper
Section I: Still There, Floating
When someone asked me recently when I first knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, I flashed on a satisfying memory, an image of myself at about eight years old in an empty apartment that we had just moved out of. I was on my stomach on a wood floor in a white, bare room, writing on notebook paper with a pencil. I had become inspired to write a story while my parents finished cleaning, and I didn’t want to leave until the story was done. All the rooms were empty around me, and time was moving but not moving. There was a feeling of the world being around me, but also of existing in my own space, a psychic space that seemed to project out into the room, so that I felt both smaller and larger than usual. The feeling was extremely satisfying.
Section II: Who Is It?
In 1971—several years before the scene described above—Elizabeth Bishop published “In the Waiting Room,” a poem about childhood psychic dislocation, and one of many poems by Bishop that explores a sort of slippage of consciousness.[1] This poem is one of my favorite works of literature (and the favorite of many people, I’m sure). It resonates with me in an intense and strangely personal way, with its description of the full waiting room, the objects in it, the contrast between the growing winter darkness outside and the life carrying on at the dentist’s office. Here is the poem’s opening:
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
The quiet matter-of-factness of the tone here works with the later description of disassociation to perform what it describes: a strange slippage that can occur within or between the mundane moments of childhood, the way they can be interrupted by the parting of an existential curtain, by a sudden realizations that the individual is capable of perceptions separate from or beyond conventional Western ideas about reality, space, time.
It is difficult to talk about why the poem affects me as it does, though. We can note the simplicity of the diction, the shortness of the lines, the straightforward way in which a strange, almost indescribable event is described, starting at this point in the poem:
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic
February, 1918.
In choosing to tell this story, to capture in relatively straightforward language an experience that would remain largely unrelatable in day-to-day discourse, Bishop makes it her project to guard the significance of the inner world, to put words to the moments of the inner life which usually have no words. The power of the poem is in its quiet witnessing of the very idea of a psychic “witness” who notes and records and files away such moments, adding texture to the psyche.
Bishop locates the psychic event in a very specific room and then creates a trajectory in which the speaker loses her hold on where/when/who she is in the physical world before appearing “back in it.” When she loses hold, she is in some space larger than both her own mind and the particulars of her time and place, “sliding/ beneath a big black wave,/ another, and another.” What exactly is Bishop describing when she writes these lines toward the end of the poem?: “Why should I be my aunt,/ or me, or anyone?/ What similarities--/ boots, hands, the family voice/ I felt in my throat, or even/ the National Geographic/ and those awful hanging breasts--/ held us all together/ or made us all just one?/ How—I didn’t know any/ word for it—how ‘unlikely’ . . . ”
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