Cybernetic Warfare: The Cold War Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop

Cybernetic Warfare: The Cold War Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop

Written during the Cold War, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop illuminates a cultural moment when cybernetic imagery or cybernetic modes of thinking infiltrated social and political discourse and rhetoric. Bishop’s notion of poetry as portraying “a mind thinking” echoes the technological insights of “cybernetics” that sought to specify the ways in which human minds and machines operate. Cybernetic frameworks attune us to Bishop’s Cold War poetics and her artistic strategies for communication in an increasingly technology-driven world. The thematic and structural elements of Bishop’s work find a poetic means by which to reactivate the socio-cultural dynamics of cybernetics science in the form of aesthetic assimilation of and resistance to power and control. As a result, the complex social, cultural, and technological realities are made to interact with and shape each other within the artistic composition of Bishop’s poems. This paper demonstrates how Bishop’s poems embody the self-reflective paradox of cybernetics (both formative and transformative, and also both mechanical and self-organizing), which was deeply embedded within the socio-cultural dynamics of the Cold War period.