24 pages • 48 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopExchanging Hats
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop (1956)
The imagery of family and clothing makes another appearance in Bishop’s 1956 poem “Sestina.” Toward the poem’s end, the child draws her grandmother’s tears as buttons on a man’s shirt. Like in “Exchanging Hats,” Bishop emphasizes familial relationships. The sestina form cycles through the same six end words, which shift in each stanza. Through the sestina form, Bishop shows how the grandmother and child have become caught re-living yet ignoring their shared, unnamed tragedy.
“Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown” by Saeed Jones (2014)
More explicitly written through a queer lens, “Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown” has the cross-dressing man as its speaker rather than its subject. Saeed Jones, a modern gay writer, also makes his protagonist a young man instead of a full-grown adult. The speaker expresses his budding sexual and romantic desire through the dress. However, the tension of danger the speaker faces as a gay black man for transgressing gender norms still exists in the poem. Jones shows the flip side of Bishop’s “unfunny uncles” putting on hats for a lark.
“Birthday Suits” by J. Jennifer Espinoza (2019)
Contemporary poet J. Jennifer Espinoza also explores gender roles and strained family bonds through clothing in “Birthday Suits.” In her poem, Espinoza uses clothing to highlight the disconnect between her identity as a trans woman and her father’s image of her. Espinoza comments about the subtle ways cis people police trans people’s identities and pressure them to conform to a gender that is not their own. Like Bishop, Espinoza illustrates how clothing helps signify and define gender.
Further Literary Resources
“Some Realms I Owned: Elizabeth Bishop in Manhattan” by Laura C. Mallonee (2013)
As Brazilian American writer Laura C. Mallonee visits Elizabeth Bishop’s residences across New York City, she discusses Bishop’s life and relationships, especially Bishop’s romance with Brazilian architect Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares. Mallonee states that nostalgia, place, and loneliness intertwine throughout Bishop’s poems. She backs up her assertion with excerpts from “The Ruined Cottage,” “One Art,” “Crusoe in England,” and “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” Additionally, the article neatly lays out an overview of Bishop’s biography and legacy.
“The Life And Poetic Legacy Of Elizabeth Bishop” by Caitlin O'Keefe and Deborah Becker (2017)
Public radio correspondent Deborah Becker interviews Bishop biographer Megan Marshall about Bishop’s place in literary history. Marshall lauds Bishop’s success at reinvigorating and modernizing older fixed forms, such as the sestina and villanelle, in a period dominated by men and free verse poetry.
“The Eye of the Outsider” by Adrienne Rich (1984)
Famed lesbian-feminist poet Adrienne Rich charts her evolving perception of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems in this 1984 review of Bishop’s The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. To Rich, Bishop’s later poems better represented her triumph and view of the world as an outsider. Rich contextualizes Bishop’s “outsiderness” through Bishop’s status as an orphan, a lesbian, and an immigrant. Rich argues that more scholarship should focus on “the way she [Bishop] locates herself in the world.” She advocates for Bishop as more than just “one of the few and ‘exceptional’ women admitted to the male canon,” but as a key figure in the “female and lesbian tradition.”
Listen to Poem
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill (1926-1995) reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Exchanging Hats” during his 1993 Key West Literary Seminar program. He begins reciting the poem at 1:08.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
