Exchanging Hats

"Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
--oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist.

in spite of our embarrasssment.
Costume and custom are  complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keepin putting on the yachtsmen's caps
with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors haning o'er the ear,
so that the golden anchors drag
--the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.

Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian's feather bonnet
--perversities may aggravate.

the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?

Unfunny uncle, you who wore it,
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora.

Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned down brim."
  - from Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, New York, Library of America: 2008.

A poem first published in The New Republic on February 13, 1956, Exchanging Hats was never included by its author Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)  in any of her poetry collections.  Although circumspect about her personal life, Bishop hints here at the unconventionality and humor that she possessed.  At the time it was written, a gender-bending poem was far more daring  than it seems now.  The year turned out to be a good one for Bishop, who won the Pulitzer Prize in April.  Because her father died when she was an infant and her mother suffered from mental illness, Bishop grew up with grandparents in Nova Scotia.  In 1956, she was living in the Brazilian tropics, a far cry from the chilly Northeast.

Like Bishop, the Surrealist Max Ernst had considered the .suggestive possibilities of hats in several works, beginning with The Hat Makes The Man in 1920.  A Freudian would probably point to the tubular shapes or the enclosing of the head as cues of deep significance.  But there is nothing wrong with a little anarchic silliness either, and that's what I think of when I think of exchanging hats.

 Images:
1. Max Ernst - La Seve Monte, 1929, Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Max Ernst - Les Hivernats de la Grande Jatte, 1929, Pompidou Center, Paris.