Elizabeth Bishop’s Proposal for a Cartographical Poetry

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss how geographic notions are present in the metaliguistic poetry of the North-American writer Elizabeth Bishop, building a poetic methodology defined by cartographic parameters. Therefore, three poems will be analyzed: “The Map”, “The Monument” and “The Weed”. For the proposed reading, we try to build a connection among Bishop’s writing, the idea of cartography presented by Deleuze and Guattari on A thousand plateaus, as well as the notion of spatial analyses of literary texts, as stated by Foucault in his conference “Language and Literature”. Moreover, there is a discussion about the epistemological status of descriptivism in modernity, centered around the indistinction of space/matter allegories and subjective representations, or, in a broader sense, the erasing of the separation between nature and culture. In this sense, what Bishop seems to propose is the building of affective maps, in which objectivity would be replaced by memory and the search for an experience. In order to do so, she focuses on hybrid sceneries, in which elements are contaminated and stain the rigid cuts of cartographic representations.