Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Rebecca Wolff’s "Broads Abroad: Elizabeth Bishop & Jane Bowles" is a sharp, fragmented meditation on expatriate existence, artistic identity, and the contradictions within the literary personas of Elizabeth Bishop and Jane Bowles. The poem constructs a portrait of these two figures through a language that is at once acerbic, elliptical, and deeply aware of the gendered and cultural dynamics that shaped their lives and reputations. Bishop and Bowles, both expatriate writers who navigated the tensions between artistic discipline and personal dislocation, are presented as figures at once knowing and naïve, self-possessed and vulnerable, cultivated and undone by their own detachment.

The opening lines establish an ironic, performative stance: “Approaching the subject in a gamine, in a fey way. Elfin, nicely sloshed / with the reticence of the foreign.” The use of “gamine” and “fey” suggests a lightness, a waif-like charm, yet this is immediately complicated by “nicely sloshed,” implying a state of elegant dissipation. The phrase “reticence of the foreign” captures the paradox of expatriation—being an outsider comes with both distance and power, a removed position that can be wielded strategically. The reference to knowing “some of the same faggots in New York” bluntly situates these women within a queer literary and artistic milieu, but the casual, almost throwaway phrasing also suggests a world where connections are ephemeral, where association is less about intimacy and more about navigation.

The poem then shifts to a dissection of relationships: “She had one square husband: fey, gamin, not without the shallow, tyrannical self-consciousness that might produce an existentialist classic.” This ambiguous “she” could refer to either Bishop or Bowles, both of whom were queer women who had relationships with men that were, in different ways, unconventional. Bowles was married to composer and writer Paul Bowles, while Bishop had a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares but maintained male literary friendships that carried their own complexities. The “square husband” is both an outsider and a participant in the world of the expatriate artist, his artistic ambitions imbued with an “existentialist” self-importance that seems simultaneously admired and dismissed.

“Men in the role of dead papa.” This stark line distills a broader psychological theme: the patriarchal ghosts that haunt even independent women, the male presence that persists as both authority and absence. The next lines—“The basic subject that of experience in question, they took it overseas to rest”—suggest that expatriation itself was a strategy for dealing with this existential weight. Yet rest is illusory, as the women are described as “phobic, unable to breathe or swallow scenes presented to the offended sense of delinquence.” The diction here—“phobic,” “offended,” “delinquence”—suggests that the act of being abroad is not purely liberating; rather, it exacerbates a certain alienation, an inability to fully assimilate or detach.

“Not tickled by the locals but enslaved.” This brutal reversal of the romanticized notion of expatriation is one of the poem’s sharpest critiques. The typical narrative of artistic escape—where the foreign landscape provides inspiration, novelty, and liberation—is here undercut by the suggestion that these women were not merely enchanted but trapped by their surroundings. The phrase “Mops on top, they make good lives, you see, because the lives they lived typify a rotten core” extends this critique. The reference to “Mops on top” might suggest an external tidiness, a cultivated appearance of order, but the underlying assertion is that these “good lives” are built on something unsustainable, something “rotten” at its foundation.

The poem then shifts into a more satirical mode: “Presented as fermented, a hapless party-girl deduction based on artsy-fartsy from the word ‘go.’” Here, the speaker skewers the ways in which these women—serious artists—might have been perceived, their lives reduced to bohemian caricature. “Something gravitated naively toward the ones they loved.” This vague, passive construction implies that love, for these women, was less a choice than a gravitational pull, an inevitability that did not always serve them well.

“In exile you just keep drinking and thinking about birds and flowers.” This line captures Bishop’s own poetic obsessions—her careful attention to the natural world, her restrained lyricism—but in a way that feels almost dismissive, as if artistic contemplation is merely a coping mechanism. The phrase “the little monkeys with their big hands inhabit you” follows, introducing an eerie, almost surreal image. This could reference Bishop’s time in Brazil or Bowles’ experiences in Morocco, but it also suggests a kind of internal haunting, a foreign presence that takes root within the self.

“Un moue for the record.” The French phrase—meaning a slight pout, a gesture of distaste—suggests both a performance and a refusal. This is followed by “Detail informing your countrymen of the importance of your contribution,” which reads as a critique of the need to justify one’s work to a distant, often indifferent audience. The expatriate artist is always in a double bind—detached from their homeland, yet still subject to its judgments.

The final lines turn increasingly sardonic: “Agog in the arms of a native woman your hair flops madly, radiant with henna.” This image plays with the stereotype of the Western artist abroad, caught up in romanticized entanglements. “Deck-chair Madonna in a practiced way, never in a family way” juxtaposes the image of relaxation and spectacle with a pointed rejection of conventional domesticity. The phrase “musking over jailbait” is provocative, insinuating a predatory element, a scent of scandal. The final lines—“just as good as you knew how to be, dried up nicely now and fuming with detection”—leave the reader with a sense of exhaustion, of having played the game as well as possible but still being subject to scrutiny and judgment.

"Broads Abroad: Elizabeth Bishop & Jane Bowles" is an incisive, layered critique of the myths surrounding expatriate women writers, exposing the tensions between artistic ambition, gendered perception, and the realities of dislocation. Through its fragmented syntax and sharp tonal shifts, the poem challenges romanticized notions of artistic escape, instead presenting Bishop and Bowles as figures caught between self-awareness and self-destruction, between mastery of their craft and the inevitable distortions imposed upon them by history.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...