MOM 2006 journal for pdf.pmd - University of Michigan-Flint

AN INTRODUCTION IN THREE PARTS:
EXAMINING THE FIRST THREE POEMS IN ELIZABETH BISHOP’S
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL
Megan Charley
Faculty Sponsor: Gladys Cardiff
Department of English, Oakland University
Elizabeth Bishop’s book of poetry, Questions of Travel is often noted for its careful
sequencing. As Thomas Travisano claims, the poems form “a narrative of an observer’s growing
cultural insight and even identification with what she observed” (Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic
Development 135). That is to say, the early poems in the sequence dramatize the most cursory,
tentative, and broad assessments of the speaker’s surroundings; and the later poems are just the
opposite: detailed, observant, insightful glimpses into the core of life in Brazil. The placement of
the first three poems, “Arrival at Santos,” “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” and “Questions of Travel,”
has also gained attention, for the way they compliment each other. Indeed, most critics consider
them a trilogy; Travisano describes them as “a three-poem series that asks (and answers) related
questions of travel” (135). Yet, the trilogy’s subject matter is quite different from the other
poems in the book.
This difference in subject matter may be the greatest reason critics read them as a trilogy.
Individually, the subject matter of these three poems is different, but they share something none
of the following poems have: an emphasis on the speaker. The works that follow express
“growing cultural insight” of the observed, striving to illuminate the place and the people
residing there. But this initial trilogy is most concerned with dramatizing the observer’s
experience of setting. The reader gains an understanding of how the poet views travel and all the
moral dilemmas which arise when one writes about a new place. I propose these “related
questions of travel” and their answers are placed at the beginning of the book so we can reserve
those answers for the poems which follow.
As such, it is my argument that this trilogy serves not as the first poems in a sequence of
“growing cultural insight,” but as an introduction to that sequence. This heuristic introduction
establishes Bishop’s various views and theories on travel writing; they include what constitutes
adequate knowledge of a subject, which subjects are most worth writing about, and the danger an
author / traveler places on her subject.
Interior Knowledge
The first poem, “Arrival at Santos,” elicits the idea of the interior in its final sentence: “We
leave Santos at once; / we are driving to the interior” (39-40). It is this line which leads critics
such as Angus Cleghorn to claim: “Questions of Travel (1955) is a volume that begins with
tentative entrance into Brazil, and moves intermittently and variously into the interior.” But
what, to Bishop, constitutes the interior?
Meeting of Minds 2006 46