{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"151: Elizabeth Bishop: "In the Waiting Room"","description":"This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s poem \u201cIn the Waiting Room.\u201d I\u2019ve featured Elizabeth Bishop previously on StoryWeb. \u201cThe Moose\u201d \u2013 set in Bishop\u2019s home province of Nova Scotia \u2013 is one of my favorite poems, as it tells so powerfully the ordinary \u2013 but extraordinary \u2013 experience we all have from time to time: an encounter with wild life, with the \u201cwild life.\u201d Set in 1918 and written in 1976, \u201cIn the Waiting Room\u201d \u2013 set in another of Bishop\u2019s childhood locales, Worcester, Massachusetts \u2013 also tells a tale of an experience that is common to everyone: coming into conscious awareness of oneself as a separate person, a being who can feel pain, alone in a large and often alienating world. What is not at all common is young Elizabeth\u2019s awareness of this moment of coming into consciousness. Is the young Elizabeth aware of this as it is happening? Or is it the older adult Elizabeth who looks back and recognizes what this moment was? Or is the young Elizabeth perhaps in a kind of conversation with her adult self who seeks to make meaning out of a \u201cstrange\u201d experience? Young Elizabeth \u2013 about to turn seven in just three days \u2013 sits in a waiting room while her Aunt Consuelo has a dentist appointment. Surrounded by \u201cgrown-up people, \/ arctics and overcoats,\u201d the young girl picks up a National Geographic (with its classic yellow border). She pores over photographs of the inside of a volcano, the explorers Osa and Martin Johnson (\u201cdressed in riding breeches, \/ laced boots, and pith helmets\u201d), and \u201c[a] dead man slung on a pole,\u201d captioned as \u201clong pig,\u201d presumably destined to be eaten by cannibals. Most startling, however, are the \u201c[b]abies with pointed heads \/ wound round and round with string\u201d and the \u201cblack, naked women with necks \/ wound round and round with wire,\u201d women with \u201chorrifying\u201d breasts. Lost in her exploration of the National Geographic, Elizabeth is startled by the sound of her aunt as she cries out with \u201can oh! of pain.\u201d As she snaps to attention back into the cold, dark, winter world of Worcester, Elizabeth has \u201cthe sensation of falling off \/ the round, turning world. \/ into cold, blue-black space.\u201d Surrounded by \u201cshadowy gray knees, \/ trousers and skirts and boots,\u201d the young girl has what can only be called an existential awakening. The adult Bishop writes: But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? The moment is disorienting and illuminating at once. Bishop continues: I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen. Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities\u2014 boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts\u2014 held us all together or made us all just one? Overwhelmed by a \u201cbig black wave,\u201d the young Elizabeth is \u201cback in it\u201d as suddenly as she had been taken out of the waiting room and given a larger view. The poem concludes: The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918. No matter how many times I read this poem, I will never cease to be amazed at how deftly Bishop depicts the common, but extraordinary, experience of coming into an awareness of self. As in \u201cThe Moose,\u201d she isolates a powerful moment in time \u2013 the type of moment too many of us overlook or experience in such a fleeting way that it is nearly forgotten. Bishop provides the freeze-frame, tells us to stop, pay attention. If you want to read more of Bishop\u2019s poetry, you\u2019ll want to take a look at The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 as well as the Library of America volume Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. In addition, One Art, a volume of Bishop\u2019s letters, is indispensable reading for those who like to get the inside skinny on writers and their lives \u2013 and you\u2019ll also love Lorrie Goldensohn\u2019s outstanding book, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. Earlier this year, a new Bishop biography was published. Megan Marshall\u2019s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast draws on a collection of letters Bishop wrote to her psychiatrist in 1947, letters previously unknown by Bishop scholars. If you\u2019re not up for reading the entire biography, you might read an excerpt from the book. Published in The New Yorker, the excerpt \u2013 \u201cElizabeth and Alice\u201d \u2013 focuses on Bishop\u2019s last love affair. The New Yorker also published an insightful article about Marshall\u2019s biography. \u201cElizabeth Bishop\u2019s Art of Losing\u201d accurately describes Bishop\u2019s closely guarded personal life as \u201charrowing.\u201d Bishop\u2019s psychiatrist told her she was lucky to have survived her childhood. That she did so speaks perhaps to Bishop\u2019s personal strength and resilience. In a poem like \u201cIn the Waiting Room,\u201d we see the commanding mind already at work, even in a young girl just about to turn seven. I highly recommend these poems about Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s youth \u2013 \u201cThe Moose\u201d and \u201cIn the Waiting Room.\u201d Though she published only about one hundred poems in her lifetime, they are powerful poems indeed and well worth reading. Visit thestoryweb.com\/waitingroom for links to all these resources and to hear Elizabeth Bishop read \u201cIn the Waiting Room.\u201d ","author_name":"StoryWeb: Storytime for Grownups","author_url":"http:\/\/storyweb.libsyn.com\/webpage","html":"