ELIZABETH BISHOP | Reading

Elizabeth Bishop

Richard Wilbur, 1993 

Reposted here in abbreviated form from original posted on 03/04/2009, updated on 12/26/2016 by Arlo Haskell 

The 1993 Key West Literary Seminar was devoted entirely to Elizabeth Bishop. A series of readings-in-tribute offered her fellow poets the opportunity to discuss Bishop and her influence.

In the 18-minute KWLS recording from the event, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur reads Bishop’s “Little Exercise.” Originally published in her debut 1946 collection North and South, the poem ostensibly describes a thunderstorm “roaming the sky” over the mangrove islands, palm-lined boulevard, herons, and sleeping indigents characteristic of Key West, a place each poet called home. ...

Comments

John Tepper Marlin says:
01/14/2012 at 12:21 pm

I was sorry to see the Elizabeth Bishop house in Key West in such run-down condition.

Reply

◦ Arlo Haskell says:
01/16/2012 at 11:47 am

Something tells me Elizabeth would have liked it this way, tucked away and anonymous, as simple as the day she left it…

Reply

▪ John Tepper Marlin says:
08/06/2017 at 5:08 pm

Is it important to us whether or not the sandpiper is indifferent to becoming extinct?

Notable article in The New Yorker about Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil

                    https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elizabeth-bishops-misunderstood-brazil

Previous posts on this site about Elizabeth Bishop:

Time Travel: ELIZ BISHOP | Key West 1938-46

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2012/01/elizabeth-bishop-in-key-west.html

Jan 14, 2012

Time Travel: POETS | Eliz Bishop Homes Neglected in Key West, Brazil

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2013/01/elizabeth-bishop-homes-neglected-in-key.html

Jan 18, 2013

Time Travel: POETS | Elizabeth Bishop in Ouro Preto

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-elizabeth-bishops-trail-ouro-preto.html

Feb 16, 2014

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March 1 - Birthday of Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell at the Grolier Poetry
Bookshop, 1963. Photo by Elsa Dorfman.

This day was born in Boston in 1917 poet Robert [Traill Spence] Lowell [IV]. We share a birthday; he was born exactly a quarter-century earlier.

I met him when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and we were both at Quincy House (in my case, during the years 1959-1962). Although he had a tough-guy reputation as a young man, I found him as frank and diffident in person as he is in his poetry. He told me, as if I could do something about it, that he wanted a faculty position at Harvard. I told my senior tutor, Paul Sigmund, and maybe the message was carried somewhere else, but probably by more than one pigeon. Anyway, the message was received and he taught at Harvard from 1963 to 1970, commuting from his home in New York City.

He was from an old Boston family that produced a former President of Harvard, after whom a house at Harvard was named. His Wikipedia entry has two paragraphs about the lineage of both his parents.

He attended Harvard for only two years. While a student, he had a tough-guy dispute with his father and left home. At the suggestion of Robert Frost, to whom Lowell showed his poetry, he traveled south to the Tennessee home of poet Allen Tate. In a 1961 Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, posted on the Poetry Foundation site under Lowell's name, the young Lowell described his arrival as follows:

Mrs. Tate . . . had three guests and her own family, and was doing the cooking and writing a novel. And this young man arrived, quite ardent and eccentric. I think I suggested that maybe I'd stay with them. And they said, "We really haven't any room, you'd have to pitch a tent on the lawn." So I went to Sears Roebuck and got a tent and rigged it on their lawn. The Tates were too polite to tell me that what they'd said had been just a figure of speech. I stayed two months in my tent and ate with the Tates.

He married three distinguished women in turn, Jean Stafford, 1940-1948; Elizabeth Hardwick (1949-1972), and Lady Caroline Blackwood (1972-1977). The first two marriages ended in divorce, the third with his death.

He began his poetry career in classical poetry form, emulating John Milton, writing in the third person with tradition rhyme and meters. By 1959, however, with his collection Life Studies, he was writing free verse with personal references - what is called now confessional poetry, inspiring Lowell's one-time students Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Anne Sexton (1928-1974) and W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009). Snodgrass was an early practitioner of confessional poetry and influenced his mentor.  Sexton and Plath committed suicide, suggesting that confessional poetry can be a risky line of work.

Lowell suffered from what is today labeled bipolar disorder. He was for some time in the care of mental institutions.  His good friends and correspondents included Elizabeth Bishop. Their 30-year correspondence is published as Words in Air (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

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