Poetry rX: "The Sandpiper," Elizabeth Bishop
the poem as telescope/ time machine
In graduate school, I fell in love with Elizabeth Bishop. Her willingness to perform self-restraint on the page really plucked a tender harpsichord in me. Over a decade later, I keep teaching “The Sandpiper.” The poem was published in The New Yorker in 1962, but I think it can do us a world of good today, too:
How does a poem evolve? What changes in a poem as you change? How is a poem, like a telescope, a time machine?
Years ago, when I lived inside “The Sandpiper” for a spell, I was charmed by Bishop’s sly mockery of a poet obsessing over details so finically that he misses what we might call the Big Picture. That first stanza helped me find humor in my dogged attempt to find the universal in the mundane; my desire to lift up the grimy bars of Tempe, AZ into high lyricism; my interpretation of Blake’s insistence to “see a world in a grain of sand” as a call to revise a single dead line a hundred times.
If humor is a gateway to love, being able to laugh at oneself is a sign that one’s headed toward loving oneself, right?
If anything kept me from taking off on that path, it was an unhealthy obsession with figuring out what might be en vogue in the contemporary poetry world. Ugh, grad school. Grad students, how are you doing out there?
Back then, I thought the fat/hiss description was weird and cool. It reminded me of my grandmother and made me accidentally visualize her belly rolls. It was just surreal enough, I thought, to get some nods at a poetry reading. Now, when I get to the second stanza, I’m shaken right out of that charm I talk about above. “The beach hisses like fat” is short and guttural, and it turns the landscape into a slaughter-able body. A characteristically Bishop way of saying— hey, you (me), stop it. Pay better attention. But does she? Does she stop and look up?
No. Well, I’ve just said “she,” but if it’s a warning being issued, it’s a warning issued by the poet to the bird, right? If you’re reading the poem, then you’re likely trying to look where Bishop says the sandpiper is looking. Does that mean that the reader is the bird, on some avatar-y level? Can Bishop be the sandpiper, too? I think so, in the way that the lyric makes possible: The poet/speaker follows the bird so closely that the two nearly collapse into one another. I love that the Sandpiper is a “he,” too, because it puts a little tension in this Sandpiper/EBishop unity.
So where were we. First, I was laughing at myself and my stilted poet demeanor, and then the fat was hissing in the pan like foam on a beach. To my left, where I’m decidedly not looking as I make my 2025 family breakfast, is a “sheet” (of paper? of ice?, the line break wants me to consider) of “interrupting water.” The interrupting water is precious to me: The idea that something so inanimate as water might interrupt me, might help me move in a more thoughtful direction, is comforting, somehow. Bishop was always giving inanimate** things agency:
“a sheet of/ interrupting water comes and goes/”
— I can’t help but think of Michaelangelo, being the woman that I am— and then the sheet “goes/ and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.”
Here, by line seven, I’m not sure I’m the bird anymore, because Bishop has played with the camera angle. By line eight, she asks us to see the bird from the perspective of a photographer (such as the human who shot that photo above). By line nine, we move on again, looking at the bird looking at his own toes, which is oddly intimate. If we’re re-reading the poem, then we know that we are going to get to go further, and to see between his toes, soon, and we anticipate that zooming in. Or, I do, anyway: I am waiting to see from the bird’s own eyes.
Susan Rich, writing about this poem in South Africa back in 1998, beautifully articulates my obsession with “The Sandpiper:”
“It is the poem’s concern with observation and vision, how it plays with perspective and scale, the details and broad brush strokes of the world at large which I find… intriguing and satisfying…It is as if Bishop is observing the world through a set of distinct yet interlocking lenses where each magnification allows for a new observation: literally a way of re-visioning the external world and therefore constructing new ways of thinking.”
I love this description of the poem, almost as if it enacts its own kind of scientific method. New ways of thinking.
I believe that, at our best, we try to get around our limited perceptive faculties. We try to see the world from another’s POV; we force ourselves to imagine suffering we haven’t personally experienced; we make charitable donations. And when we’re really well rested, we try to consider questions like, What is reality? How do we know what we know? But it’s hard for us to do these kinds of things for an extended period of time. We, or our psychology, lock(s) our consciousness up in a cycle of, as Kaminsky writes, go the dentist, get the basil, think through what has to happen next. “Poor bird, he is obsessed!” What a pitiful (full of pity) line.
Permit me to play for a minute and pretend that I am really Elizabeth Bishop’s sandpiper. Why do you pity me?
How do I know the ocean is draining backwards and downwards, even if I don’t stop to hear the roaring alongside me? Sometimes, I do stop and stare. But I look down, and what I see: “the dragging grains.” The way Bishop has worked out the syntax, I am given the sense that the grains themselves, the “minute” things, are pulling the vastness of the ocean constantly away.
As the ocean goes, my jewels are uncovered. I have not myself made anything new or startling possible, I’ve simply taken advantage of What Is there, on the beach, in the poem. To be specific, I see, among millions of grains that are sepia in tone, a pop of “rose and amethyst,” a glittery unveiling which brings me back, via rhmye, to “obsessed.” And ultimately, up and back, to hiss.
I don’t think the answer to the riddle of this poem is so easy as just go on living your life, and sometimes you will find beauty in the quagmire. That possible answer is complicated by the echo of “hiss,” which insists: right when we reach the moment of awe we were looking for, at the very end of a beautiful lyric, right then is when we must remember how the search for beauty (or sustenance or desire) itself can keep us from seeing truthfully. Let me try again. The searching, probing consciousness we depend on also limits us, even (or especially) during transcendent experience.
Two years ago, I saw a fling*** of sandpipers in San Francisco while my four-year-old ran a-mock on the beach. The birds were so… funny! They were so funny, and the way they moved around together— like, one would get a panic, or figure out that they’d run out of food in that stretch of beach or something, and one would go, and then the others would figure it out, like— holy shit! We gotta go now! The fling is off!
I looked it up, and apparently, the sandpipers are species of bird that exist in the in-between of land and water, and they collectively “retreat from waves because their feeding methods only work in damp ground.” My amateur observation was more or less correct: “Sandpipers are like fast-moving vacuum cleaners, collectively wiping an area clean of anything that looks edible in their patch of sand, mud, or water” before together moving on (Robinson).
Witnessing their collective fluttering brought me into the present moment of perception, a place I have a hard time finding, and I did feel wonderfully alive, waiting to see when they’d move again. I can remember that feeling vividly now, even, from the distance of two years, though I couldn’t tell you what I myself had to eat that day. The feeling is my something, something, something; it’s what I will keep looking for, forever. Even though I know, of course, it always finds me. Going out and looking for it is precisely what makes it harder to find.
I did think of Bishop’s poem, that day (Hey, those are Sandpipers!Just like in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem!). But not for long. Because, check them out:
They’re so cute, right? No wonder Pixar found a muse in them. Bishop depicts her Sandpiper tenderly, too. But one has to admit that a fast-moving vacuum cleaner, one that wipes an area clean of anything that looks edible, is an apt metaphor for a group of us. This is why the poem feels, to me, very 2025. I feel at least a little like one of those beautiful fools, running running running, shifting this way and that, looking for something good to chew on, and choosing, most of the time, to ignore the incoming waves, waiting for someone else to say “NOW! YOU GOTTA MOVE NOW, DAMN IT!” Definitely, more than a little… pity-full.
Learn from “The Sandpiper” what you will, and share those lessons with me, please.
*You can easily pick up Questions of Travel (of “Filling Station” fame) or her collected Poems from your library. Both include “The Sandpiper.”
**Actually, as a biophysicist recently reminded me, water is not a vat of not-aliveness, but that’s a topic for another day.
***From Tasha Robinson’s Verge article describing the inspiration of Pixar’s short film, Piper: “According to various questionably reliable internet sources, like WhatBird.com and MyVocabulary.com, a group of sandpipers is called a "bind," a "contradiction," a "fling," a "hill," or a "time-step." Most of these terms are ridiculous, given the way sandpipers tend to tear around like little raver marching bands, rather than piling up into hills or getting tangled up into binds. They generally don't even contradict each other. But "time-step" is a nice term for the way they zip across the beach together.”
This post is dedicated to
, for always following me into the mist.