Chapter 28 - Queerness

Summary

Contra assumptions regarding Bishop’s privileging of perspicacity as interlinked subject and method, this essay reflects on the persistence within her poems of a haptic incessancy pursued as though for the pleasure of its own sake. The affinity between Bishop’s formulation of peninsulas taking up the water that surrounds them “like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods” and the appearance in a late essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of an identical gesture, what Sedgwick invokes as the weaver’s handshake, opens onto a consideration in both writers of an exacting inexactness resistant, for Sedgwick, to paranoid reading’s opposite tendency toward a clarity too often – in both queer theory and queer readings of Bishop’s work – treated as self-evident. Returning to Bishop’s under-examined engagement with Poe illuminates her own frequent challenging of epistemology’s queer promise, inviting our appreciation for a poetic wavering capable of withstanding even our best-intentioned corrections.