Textual and Corporeal Convergence

Abstract

Each of the women who comprise Poetics of the Body deals with a lived-in, physical body, and each woman’s experience with her body proves unique to her. Elizabeth Bishop’s bodily reality often involved illness and addiction; Marilyn Chin’s body, by her own admission, remains a constant reminder of her “otherness,” and, at times, Marilyn Hacker, like Bishop, confronts the body’s betrayal through disease. Edna St. Vincent Millay, also, like Bishop, experienced her body through the mediation of illness and addiction. Unlike the other poets, however, Millay deliberately, consciously, and effectively used her body to promote her poetry and herself as poet, and the body that Millay put on display is an overtly, hyperfeminized one.¹ Just as each of these women experiences her body differently from the other, each poet “handles” the body differently in her poetry. Millay and Hacker write openly about the body and its attendant needs and desires; Bishop writes a poetics of the body that positions it in spaces of liminality—somewhere between celebration and abjection. Chin’s poetic bodies manifest as constant reminders of the body’s location in space and time. Despite these differences, the body is significant, intentionally and unintentionally, in the work of Millay, Bishop, Chin, and Hacker.