Out in the Street with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Pinsky

In 1961, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of American Cities placed the urban street at the center of “an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and design” (Jacobs 6). This laboratory, however, was under attack from urban planners like Lewis Mumford and Le Corbusier, who would attempt to replace Jacobs’s public street with the cookie-cutter monotony of the master-planned community. Five years later, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” portrayed Brazil’s disorderly streets as captivating scenes of public life, one viewed from a tourist’s privileged position looking down on it through the poem’s titular window. Robert Pinsky would render a street from his New Jersey childhood in much less sentimental terms in his poem “The Street” twenty years later, wherein an unnamed man in “pyjamas” on “The Street” finds public humiliation, outed as a cuckold on the Rockwell Avenue of Pinsky’s childhood. With their descriptions of exotic streetscapes, both Bishop and Pinsky’s poems reinforce the point that public streets can serve as nodes for healthy communities as Jane Jacobs argued, but they also argue that streets thus conceived are under threat from car-centered development and Foucault’s skepticism of surveillance.