Nova Scotia Connections: The Elmonte House

The Elmonte House in Great Village was built in 1899 to replace the Londonderry Hotel, which was destroyed by fire on 5 December 1898. The Londonderry Hotel had stood on the same site since 1861. Indeed, there had been public houses and inns in the Great Village area since 1807. The convergence of roads in Great Village made it a stopping place for many travellers.

The Elmonte, built and operated by Mr. and Mr. Ralph Smith, was a gracious establishment, three stories high, with large airy, elegantly furnished rooms. Its dining room rivalled the best hotels in Truro and Halifax. One of the hotel’s unique features was the “Sample Room,” a long, low building where travelling salesmen brought their wares to display. Merchants from miles around stopped in to view these wares and place orders. The Elmonte also burned, in 1932 – and with it went a long tradition of hoteliers in Great Village. This tradition was revived when the Blaikie House Bed and Breakfast was established.

In mid-September 1917, Elizabeth Bishop’s wealthy paternal grandparents, John and Sarah Bishop, arrived in Great Village intent on taking their granddaughter back to Worcester, MA. Being the standard to which they were accustomed, the Bishops resided at the Elmonte for several weeks before departing with Elizabeth in October.

Elizabeth Bishop never directly mentions the Elmonte House in her published writing, but, because she was an inveterate traveller her entire life, she spent a good deal of time in hotels in many locations. Often when in New York City, she stayed in residential hotels. In her fable-like story “In Prison,” which explores the idea that we all inhabit some kind of prison and that the key to a productive life is to find the right kind of prison to inhabit, the narrator notes, “The hotel existence I now lead might be compared in many respects to prison life, I believe: there are the corridors, the cellular rooms, the large, unrelated group of people with different purposes in being there that animate every one of them; but it still displays great differences.” (Collected Prose, 182)

The narrator’s catalogue of the kinds of “decorations” that adorn hotel rooms (“unattractive wallpaper,” “Turkey carpets,” “brass fire extinguishers,” and so on) might have been inspired by the New York City hotels she frequented in the 1930s, when she wrote this story. For example, one of Bishop’s extant visual images is a drawing of her room at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City, done on hotel stationary, with its elegant stamp, around which Bishop has drawn the picture (so that the ornate stamp looks like an ornament on the dresser). The picture is dominate by a large upholstered chair and a floor lamp. The close perspective of the drawing gives a sense of confinement, such as the narrator seeks in “In Prison,” in those “cellular rooms.”

However, one can’t help but wonder if the Elmonte House was an essential prototype for the idea of “hotel” in Bishop’s iconography, especially given that a major part of its clientele were those travelling salesmen, who brought all manner of wares from the four corners of the world to merchants and customers in Great Village. Bishop encountered a similar hotel in Ouro Prêto, Pouso do Chico Rey owned by her friend Lilli Correia de Araújo. It was from a window in this hotel that Bishop watched and overheard passers-by stop at a fountain: “The seven ages of man are talkative / and soiled and thirsty.” (Complete Poems 154). The thirst at the Elmonte would have been quenched with water, too, as Great Village was a strong temperance town!

One other aspect about the Elmonte which would have intrigued Bishop was that it burned. Many buildings burned in Great Village over the decades (which was not that unusual in Nova Scotia): the first Presbyterian church, one of the early filling stations, various barns, and various hotels, including the Elmonte. Fire is another central image in Bishop – it arcs a trajectory across her entire life from the Great Salem Fire in 1914 and the fires following the Halifax Harbour Explosion in 1917, to the fires caused by fire balloons during Carnaval in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. Bishop was not in Nova Scotia the year the Elmonte burned, but she would have heard about it from her Aunt Grace, who was living there at the time.

Most of us pay little heed to hotels, but for Bishop, with her “no detail too small” obsession, even places of transience – or especially places of transience – always caught her attention. And when those places of transience had existed for years, or eons (the Elmonte, Murray Hill, Chico Rey and its fountain), all the more intriguing to her restless eye “looking, looking, looking” for some place of permanence.

****

Ed. note: I have added links for the Blaikie House and the Murray Hill above. I assume the latter link is to the same building Bishop knew, though these days it is what is called a "boutique hotel." Lilli's Pouso do Chico Rey is no longer operating, but there is a hotel called Pouso do Chico Rei in Ouro Preto, and I link to it, simply to give a sense of that glorious city, which I had the privilege of visiting in 1999. The little inn in which I stayed during that trip, which was just down the road from Bishop's own house, Casa Mariana, was delightful, but unfortunately I have forgotten its name.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XXIV: The Art of Losing, by Heather Jessup

I’m sure that in my undergraduate American Poetry class we read Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in that red-covered anthology. I’m sure I read “One Art” before I moved to Montréal; but, like so many things that we encounter at a younger age that are good for us — asparagus, afternoon naps, silence, bike-rides — I had to return to “One Art” again, when I was a bit older, to figure out its inherent beauty and wisdom.

I arrived in Montréal from Vancouver during the hottest ember of August. The moon hung so low and bright in the sky it might have touched the tip of the cross on Mont Royal. I had carefully packed up all of my worldly possessions: the beginnings of a novel manuscript; an encouraging letter from a writer I admired; a Las Vegas T-shirt that my friend’s mom had worn in the ‘70s with real glass rhinestones; all of my journals. I parked the car in front of a friend’s apartment on Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The soundtrack in the tape deck had been perfect. Songs about departures and summer wheat and skies with stars. I had left behind a broken heart in Vancouver. This new life was going to be good

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop tells us. And I guess that’s why I didn’t really understand “One Art” before. I hadn’t really lost anything. Sure, in my own life I had made it to the first stanza: I had lost door keys, a badly-spent hour; I had even lost “places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel,” and Bishop was right, it hadn’t brought disaster. But I don’t think I actually read this poem, really read it, until my first week at Concordia University in Montréal, where I was starting my master’s degree, in a life-changing class called Poetry’s Arguments.

After stopping in to say hello at that friend’s house the first night I arrived in Montréal, we went to peer down at the street signs to see whether or not I was allowed to park the car where it was (those who have parked on Montréal streets know how confusing this can be). When we stood on the balcony looking down we saw a man, a broken car window, and the entire contents of the car being carried into an alley. We ran down the spiralling stairs and into the street, but all of it was gone by the time we reached the pavement. Everything I had saved and prepared to begin life across the country had been taken. My novel manuscript, that encouraging letter, the sparkly Las Vegas T-shirt, all of my journals.

Unlike in stanza three of “One Art”, I had not lost “my mother’s watch” nor my “next-to-last, of three loved houses,” but I had lost quite a bit: part of my heart in Vancouver, and now everything I owned, right there beneath that big silver moon on Boulevard de Maisonneuve.

A few weeks later I sat in Poetry’s Arguments. I heard Bishop’s “One Art” for what felt like the first time, finally really listening to that last stanza: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master” she repeats again, faltering in her rhythm, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” There are seventeen drafts of “One Art” in the Vasser College Archive. Seventeen drafts! I have written in my class notes. (Which, at this stage as a writer, now seems entirely possible). I also have written in those notes, the form of the villanelle is a poetic constraint that allows Bishop to bring a sense of major sorrow into reality. Not only was Bishop able to constrain her own sorrows in this poem, she was also, somehow, able to soften mine.

Like so many of the encounters posted on this Elizabeth Bishop centenary site, Bishop’s poetry came into my life through literature classes and the recommendation of remarkable teachers. (What would we all do without those remarkable teachers?). But Bishop’s words stay with you, like the repeated refrain of the Villanelle, turning life over and over like a worried stone.

When I had the immense fortune to stay at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, and to lie on the patchwork quilts in Elizabeth Bishop’s tiny turquoise childhood room, my novel (the one started, stolen, and resurrected) was sitting in stacks of paper on the kitchen table below. I had a cup of tea in my hand. I was reading another collection of poetry, Brian Bartlett’s The Watchmaker’s Table, and I came across the poem “On listening to a first-year student read Bishop’s ‘One Art’”. Bartlett’s poem ends: “Does she know it’s a gift, this euphony?/ “One Art” held in the breath of Stephanie.” I imagined all of the students who will have the losses of “One Art” befall them (after all, we will all have these “disasters”) and how the worried refrain of Bishop’s villanelle might, years later, sustain them.

***

Heather Jessup’s first novel, The Lightning Field, is forthcoming with Gaspereau Press in the fall of 2011. She is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Toronto.

[ed. note: Heather promised us a "First Encounter" post some time ago, and it arrived the other day. It is one of those lovely synchronicities that her meditation on "One Art" crosses paths with John's meditation on the same poem. This convergence was entirely unplanned. In the not too distant future, we will be posting information about an open call photographic exhibit being organized for EB100 by photographer Roxanne Smith and ViewPoint Gallery in Halifax, N.S. -- it will be asking photographers to meditate on "One Art" as well.]

Sunday Wonder Question: Two Arts -- Bishop and Frost? -- with a small excursus on Cristina Peri-Rossi...

[What follows is prompted by the mention of Bishop's "To a Tree" in Michael Hood's lovely "First Encounter" last Sunday. It appeared in a slightly different form in the Newsletter of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia in the Spring, 2001 issue. -- JAB]

"Poetry is what is lost in translation," Robert Frost remarked slyly, but for someone of my generation and national origin, poetry can sometimes seem to be Frost in translation. Perhaps it seemed so, or came to seem so, to Elizabeth Bishop in 1927, when she wrote "To a Tree". Had she seen, one wonders, the July issue of the Yale Review that year, and been moved to respond to Frost's "Tree at my Window"? Or did she learn of its existence only after writing her own poem?

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
Admiring infinites'mal leaves. [1]

* * *

Tree at my window, window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. [2]

What a windfall this juxtaposition would be for the poetics of coincidence! Is the grotesquerie of 'grieves' as a pun on 'greaves', for example, to be taken as a criticism of the ambiguities of Frost's 'sash', -- just a saucy sixteen-year-old sassing an elder? Or is this one of those archetypal encounters Poetry is so fond of: two looks... Two Look at Two... two poems translating each other...

Bishop translates Frost again in one of the first letters we have [August 14, 1947] from her correspondence with Robert Lowell. She breaks off mid-sentence because she has been called away to see a calf being born in the pasture behind the house. "You come, too", that letter never quite says; instead, it ends by telling Lowell (and us, now) what Frost does not: "The calf's mother has started to moo, and the cow in the next pasture is mooing even louder, possibly in sympathy. It seems that if they take the calf away immediately, then they don't have the trouble of weaning it. It will drink out of a dish, says Mr. McLeod; he has promised to call me when they try it the first time." [3]

There are some who would say that translators are Mr. McLeods, but I think it is both kinder and more accurate to call them cows in the next pasture. The metaphor is refined by considering other cows in Bishop's poetry: the cow standing in the dugout in "Santarém", say, "quite calm, chewing her cud while being ferried, tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married," [4] keeping the Tapajós and the Amazon from intermingling in their dazzling dialectic. Or the tiny cows in the water meadow in "Poem", two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows, munching their way ever nearer to that crisp and shivering iris - is it shivering with cold, or with fear of being devoured? Frost has his bovinities as well. Any translator on the prowl for those lovely windfall poems that seem at the touch of a pen to have dropped effortlessly from the branch of one language to the stubbled field of another, -- even harder to find than, say, Capote's windfall pecans ("among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass"), [5] -- has a visceral understanding of "The Cow in Appletime".

Both Frost and Bishop, I suspect, would object to being called Wobblies, but it is the calm confidence that both display when oscillating between two enormities which is one of their chief affinities as poets -- Frost the poet of the semi-revolution, climbing black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven, till the tree will bear no more but dip its top and set him down again, the poet who comes to recognize himself, perhaps, (in "On Being Idolized") in the tottering of that new-born calf, and makes the poem containing it the introduction to his collected volumes; -- Bishop the poet of shadows taken for shallows, mammoth man-moths, the compass needle wobbling and wavering, undecided. Only when they come to death do they diverge: Frost may return if dissatisfied with what he learns from having died, while Bishop's rainbow bird, freed from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flies wherever it feels like, unimpressed by the ambiguities of the word 'bound' in Frost's line "I'm bound - away!"

Bishop gives her most detailed characterization of Frost in a letter to Randall Jarell (February 25, 1965):

[...] I think, if you will take it the way I mean it, that you are the real one and only successor to Frost. Not the bad side of Frost, or the silly side, the wisdom-of-the-ages side, etc. - but all the good. The beautiful writing, the sympathy, the touching and real detail, etc. Also your psychology is, of course, much in advance of Frost's! Not his kind of idealized "lost world" of the small farmer at all - which may look as if it leaves me with nothing much of him left, and yet it does, and if I were a more skillful critic I think I could really write quite a piece on this. You're both very sorrowful, and yet not the anguish-school that Cal seems innocently to have inspired - the self-pitiers who write sometimes quite good imitations of Cal! It is more human, less specialized, and yet deep. [6]

On the other hand, she is not above a wicked epithet: in a letter to Robert Lowell (October 30, 1958) she writes "Frost - the Bad Gray Poet." Her sharpest gibe, though, is tied again to the nature of what is lost in translation. She reassures Lowell about his potential Brazilian audiences (March 30, 1959):

One good idea I think is to have the poems you intend to quote or read mimeographed, to hand out to the audience. They are amazing linguists, of course, but poetry is hard to get the first time. Just the poems - not the lecture itself. Spender made that mistake - gave them the whole lecture to read while he read it and the audience felt quite insulted. I suppose one should just speak a bit more slowly and clearly than usual. (Frost did marvelously, of course - the Brazilians got his every joke.) [7] [My italics -- JAB]

Bishop's "One Art" is, in its own way, a poem about translation. Here is the original and two Russian versions (one could characterize the differences among Bishop, Frost, and Capote by the differences in the trips to Russia each of them made), followed by back-translations as literal as I can make them:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Простая наука

Забвенье - как проста наука эта!
Предметы исчезают - сами будто,
И их уход еще не гибель света.

Теряй всегда. Смирись со всем. Пусть где-то
Утерян ключ, истрачена минута, --
Забвенье - как проста наука эта!

Теряй быстрее, больше, и совета
Послушай: позабудь пути-маршруты
Далекие: они не драма света.

Дома последнего моего лета,
А может предпоследнего - падут. О,
Забвенье! Как проста наука эта...

Теряла города и лица: нету
Вселенных и миров; ищу их всюду,
Но и они все ж не источник света.

-- И даже ты. (Шутливостью согретый
твой жест люблю.) Тебе я лгать не буду:
Забвенье - не сложна наука эта,
Хотя и кажется: она - погибель света. [8]

A Simple Science

Oblivion - how simple this science is!
Objects disappear - as if by themselves,
And their departure is still not the end of the world.

Lose always. Become reconciled with everything. So what if somewhere
A key is lost, a minute is spent, --
Oblivion - how simple this science is!

Lose faster, more, and listen
To advice: forget ways, distant
Routes: they are not the world's drama.

The houses of my last summer,
Or perhaps the one before - fall. Oh
Oblivion! How simple this science is...

I lost cities and faces: gone
Are universes and worlds; I seek them everywhere,
But even they are nevertheless not the source of light.

--And even you. (I love your gesture,
Warmed by joking.) I won't lie to you:
Oblivion - this science isn't complicated,
Although it seems: it is the end of the world.


Одно искусство

Потерь искусство не замысловато;
такое множество вещей изнемогало
потерянными быть, что не беда увидеть их утрату.

Теряйте каждый день. В темпе токкаты
потерянных дверных ключей тот час, где время застывало;
потерь искусство не замысловато.

Потом терять беритесь больше и быстрее во стократно:
места, и имена, и то, куда предназначалось
вам отправляться. Ничто из этого не принесет утрату.

Я потеряла матери часы. И посмотри! Куда-то
последний или предпоследний дом из трех домов любимых сник;
потерь искусство не замысловато.

Я потеряла пару городов, мне милых. И когда-то
присвоенные мною царства, также две реки и материк;
скучала я по ним, но это не была фатальная утрата.

И даже потеряв тебя (шутливый голос твой и мимику,
которую люблю), все сказанное остается в силе. Ты уже привык
к тому, что потерять -- искусство не замысловато.

Хотя, заметь, потеря может быть похожей на фатальную утрату. [9]

One Art

The art of losses is not intricate.
Such a multitude of things have grown faint
in being lost, that it is no misfortune to see their loss.

Lose every day. At the tempo of a toccata
of lost door keys is the hour where time froze;
the art of losses is not intricate.

Then undertake to lose more and faster by a hundred times:
places, and names, and where it was
you were to go. Nothing of this will bring loss.

I lost Mother's watch. And look! Somewhere
the last or next to last of three loved houses vanished;
the art of losses is not intricate.

I lost a pair of cities, dear to me. And a realm
once acquired by me, also two rivers and a continent;
I missed them, but it was not a fatal loss.

And even having lost you (your joking voice and the mimicry
which I love), everything said remains in force. You are already used
to losing - the art isn't intricate.

Although, take note, a loss can look like a fatal loss.

* * *

Native speakers of English can see, I think, the cost in translation, although the precarious purchase gained can be clear only to someone who knows Russian. Whether one totters on a brink with the generalities of the first, clinging to the beauty of 'наука' ['science'] with its allusions to Osip Mandelstam's "Я изучил науку расставанья" ["I have studied the science of parting"] in his poem "Tristia", or wobbles in the direction of the greater detail of the second (sometimes too great a detail, for the translator, forced to specify the gender of the 'You' of the poem, has chosen the masculine form), gasping at the many different words Russian has to convey the nuances of what we have only the word 'loss' to express, or grasping at them like straws, one cannot but admire the balancing act.

There is a second art, though - not the juxtaposition of "equivalents", as Bishop's and Frost's tree poems might be taken to be, but the one Bishop pursued in her first letter to Lowell. This is the art at work in Uruguayan writer-in-exile Cristina Peri Rossi's short story "El arte de la pérdida", [10] which combines "One Art" with "In the Waiting Room" and takes a quick trip beneath the trans-gendering rainbow (I shall resist the temptation to refer to it as the "Bi-Frost Bridge", and trust readers are correspondingly grateful) to examine the anxiety of the masculine. Peri Rossi, by grasping the nature of the loss of identity in "In the Waiting Room" in the gasped 'oh!', moves beyond the concerns of the word-by-word to those of the Secret that sits in the middle and knows.

Ten years ago, when I wrote this essay, only four of Bishop's poems had been translated into Russian, as far as I had been able to determine: "Armadillo", "Insomnia", "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance", and "One Art". Now there are many, many more, including at least eight different versions of "One Art". An image from the first of the four pioneering efforts, however, may serve as well as any to represent a last correspondence of the two arts, of writing poetry and translating it:

"the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts."

Why not pair them, as they steer between the kite-sticks of the Southern Cross, with Truman Capote's "...I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."? [11]


NOTES

[1] Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 192.

[2] Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), 251.

[3] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art. Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), 147.

[4] "Santarém" can be considered a kind of translation of Bishop's remarks in that first letter to Lowell: if we let the calf be the matte white wasps' nest, then Mr. McLeod is Mr. Swan...

[5] Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, (New York: Random House, 1956), 15.

[6] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art, 432. Anna Akhmatova was also put off by what she termed Frost's "farming streak", while Frost thought her "very grand and very sad".

[7] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art, 370.

[8] Translated by Boris Leivi [http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/Bishop.html]

[9] Translated by Anna Zhdanova.

[10] Cristina Peri Rossi, Una pasión prohibida, (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), 129-142. English translation: "The Art of Loss" in Cristina Peri Rossi, A Forbidden Passion, (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993), 105-114.

[11] Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, (New York: Random House, 1956), 45.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XXIII: Encountering Bishop, by Michael Hood

I believe pretty much with certainty, that the first encounter I had with Elizabeth Bishop was by way of reading selections of her poetry included in an anthology (red cover, I believe — hmmm!) edited by Al Poulin, Jr.: Contemporary American Poetry. Al had been a student, and later, a teacher at the college I attended during the 1960s, and too, the moderator of the literary magazine (The Canticle — I contributed one poem ) and drama club (The Friars Club — I had minor roles in two plays).

I next encountered Elizabeth Bishop via her poem, “To A Tree.” I included it as one of a series of poems that I made use of as part of my creative writing class for students at the secondary school level of education — Bishop needs to get into the classroom at the lower levels of public education — and too, as part of my poetry sections when teaching English as an Adjunct in one of the colleges in Worcester, Massachusetts.

My third encounter with Bishop came about in 1997 at which time I accepted an invitation by Laura Jehn Menides, currently Professor Emeritus of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), to serve as one of several assistant editors treating scholarly papers connected to the lengthy “Elizabeth Conference and Poetry Festival” held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1997. Later they were brought together in book form: “In Worcester, Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop.

While serving in an editorial capacity in reading the conference papers, then, I fell into reading a bodily amount of Bishop-written poetry and creative prose, and prose materials examining both her life and her works. As a result I found myself being drawn closer into Bishop’s life. My particular interest of concern at the time (still is) was the lack of attention given to her childhood and youth. More specifically, information and possible creative output (mature or otherwise) relating to and/or coming from a major American poet during particularly sensitive years, as in her pre-adolescent and adolescent period in Revere, Massachusetts: 1918–1925; her time in Saugus, Massachusetts: 1925–1930 (intermittingly in the late part of the 1920s); and too, her summer time at Camp Chequesett (Cape Cod) during some of these same years. Not satisfied, then, with limited information and limited creative showing during what I call her “gap years,” I followed through with a series of visits to Revere and Saugus. These visits ultimately led me to write “Elizabeth Bishop: The Revere and Saugus, Massachusetts Experience.” This paper was presented at Case Western Reserve University as part of a conference celebrating Bishop and other literary artists, and later published in The Worcester Review, Volume XX1, Numbers 1 & 2, 2000.

Tidbits of Encountering

I would note that on each visit I made to Revere I would read and re-read Bishop’s unfinished memoir narrative about her Revere experience: “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs” (located in Vassar College Special Collections holdings on Bishop). Sometimes I would carry out my readings of her narrative in front of her 55 Cambridge Street house, at other times on each side and in the back of the house, and still at other times across the street at the back and side entrances to the dwelling wherein once lived the character Barbara Hunt, Bishop’s sometimes playmate, who appears in “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs.” I even read sections of the unfinished narrative in the entrance passageway of the dwelling (located on Mountain Avenue). On my trips I never got to directly meet any Sullivans residing at that address. However, at the entrance doorway on one of my trips I did get to briefly converse with a female voice through a closed door setting. The woman said that Mr. Sullivan was not home and chose not to identify herself. The man who lived next door to the Sullivans said a Mr. Sullivan was alive but not at home, was quite ill and was currently in the hospital. Also, during my Bishop-Revere Experience, I was to discover in the local newspaper, The Revere Journal, that Bishop was listed as having made the Honor Roll while attending junior high school in Revere. This is particularly interesting since it is generally presented that she received little formal education preceding her entry into private schools at the secondary level. And too, correction of photo misidentification of the Bishop residence and the residence of Barbara Hunt in Bishop’s “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” also came about as a result of my Revere adventure. Lastly, during my last visit to Revere, I unexpectedly (talk about encounter) met with the current owners of the house wherein Bishop and Maud and George Shepherdson resided, and too, received a brief tour of the interior of the house. Neat.

My early visits to Saugus had me knocking on doors and asking questions and taking notes of residents living in the immediate area or vicinity of where Bishop and the Shepherdsons had resided: 20 Sunnyside Avenue. I also meandered around to get a feeling of the land as it presented itself in its natural state. Out of this came my imaginative reconstruction of the physical environment that surrounded Bishop during her residence on Sunnyside Avenue: wooded area, pond…. I also visited where the Cliftondale (an area in Saugus) branch library in Saugus was located in relation to the Shepherdson-Bishop residence: comfortable walking distance for Maud and the not-always healthy Bishop. I also checked town records and old newspapers: great aids. And too, I had the occasion to unexpectedly (again, talk about encounter) meet and talk with a Saugus resident who remembered George Shepherdson (“Mr. Shepherdson”) — he had a garden, she said, and shared with her family the fruits of his labors. She also noted that George Shepherdson collected rent from her parents on behalf of someone, but she could not recall the name (interesting).

And finally, I encountered Bishop in Uxbridge via Saugus! As I said earlier, during my early visits to Saugus, I knocked on many doors, some while in pursuit of specific information, and others while in pursuit of general information. At some now unremembered point in time I received, anonymously, in the mail, a Saugus High School transcript reflecting Elizabeth Bishop’s Freshman high school subjects, grades, attendance, and conduct, etc., during the course of the 1925–1926 school calendar year. The succeeding year she entered a private school. Up to this point it had been understood that her high school record for the school year 1925–1926 had been destroyed. In investigating this point I was to learn that student records need only stay in existence for a given number of years and then, at the discretion of authorities, could be destroyed, or SAVED.

*I must note that my numerous visits to Revere and Saugus Massachusetts, inclusive of countless area points outside the immediacy of 55 Cambridge Street (Revere) and 20 Sunnyside Avenue (Saugus), has allowed for my reason and imagination to compatibly work together to sharpen my analytical and creative skills with respect to my current undertaking of imaginatively filling in the “gap years” of Bishop at a creative level, and via my own mode and style. I am currently working on Bishop within this framework and suspect I will continue to do so for some time to come. My hope is to encounter Bishop creatively, time and time again, and in doing such, bring about a more fully developed range of appreciation of her.

Nova Scotia Connections: The Post Office

One of the enduring images in Elizabeth Bishop’s story “In the Village” is of the child taking the package across the bridge to the post office. The package, put together by her grandmother, was sent to Bishop’s mother in the sanatorium in Dartmouth, N.S. The address on the package was written “in purple indelible pencil, on smoothed-out wrapping paper. It will never come off.” (Collected Prose, p. 271)

Elizabeth Bishop was only five years old when these packages started going to the hospital. Such a painful introduction to the purpose of the postal service might have been cause enough for most of us to avoid it for the rest of our lives, but the opposite was the case for Bishop. She was a life-long letter writer (and sender of packages). During an era when letter writing was still the custom, she was as fine a practitioner of the epistolary art as anyone. She loved sending and receiving mail, even as the first mail she sent was the painful “care package” to her ill, hospitalized mother.

Bishop’s description of the post office errand is both poignant and funny. She was fascinated by the post office building itself, which “sits on the side of the road like a package once delivered by the post office” (CP, 272). The post office was a gathering place for the community, as “the mails” were the primary mode of communication into and out of the village. The post office in Great Village had telegraph capacity during Bishop’s childhood. There were also some telephones in the village in the 1910s. But mail, delivered by the Canadian Pacific Railway, was the vital link. And, unlike today, it was picked up and delivered several times a day.

The postmaster during Bishop’s childhood was Angus Johnson. Born in River John in 1852, he took over postmaster duties in 1889 and remained on the job well into the twentieth century. Bishop remembered him as “very old, and nice. He has two fingers missing on his right hand where they were caught in a threshing machine.” She was intrigued by his “navy-blue cap with a black leather visor, like a ship’s officer” (CP, 272).

She knew that he knew where the package was going (indeed, everyone in the village knew). His gentle sympathy was not lost on the small child, “Yes. Yes. Your grandmother is very faithful.”

So beloved was Angus Johnson by the whole community that in 1933 he was honoured by a large gathering at St. James United Church, where he received a gold-headed cane for his years of devoted service. He also received a poetic encomium from Mrs. Peter Hall, which might have made both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Burns smile. In part it read (and was recited on the occasion):

God’s blessing on ye Pastie man,
Ah Angus ye’er a prince o’man
To sort like you –
A bonnier lad I dinna ken.
God bless ye mon.

A happier mon I dinna see
Tho’ sometimes ye gang aft a-gley
And send our missives hither and yon
And say us nay.
But we forgive ye, bless ye’er hairt
Fra’ day to day…. (History of Great Village, 142)

Angus Johnson represented an essential human decency for Bishop. He was courteous and kind; he was the walking wounded; he was a figure of benign authority. He was master of his own little nativity: “Mr. Johnson looks out through the little window in the middle of the bank of glass-fronted boxes, like an animal looking out over its manger. But he is dignified by the thick, beveled-edged glass boxes with their solemn, upright gold-and-black-shaded numbers. Ours is 21” (CP, 272-273).

The original post office building, the one where Bishop took the packages, is no longer standing in Great Village, but the community still has a “very small” post office building just up the road from the original site. When the old post office was dismantled, the grill-work containing the “glass-fronted boxes” was transferred to the new location. You can still see who has mail and who doesn’t when you go there. You can still see box 21.

The original grill-work of the Great Village post office.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XXII: Somebody Loves Us All, by Susie DeCoste

As I wrote my MA thesis in creative writing at UNBSJ a few years ago, my supervisor recommended that I read a Maritime poet, Elizabeth Bishop. She directed me to an anthology of Atlantic poetry as a place to start: Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. For my thesis, I was writing a series of poems about a woman fiercely attached to her place who also feels drawn to new horizons in travel. I read Bishop’s Questions of Travel as the title seemed suited to my interests in the project that motivated my reading. I saw connections between my manuscript and Bishop’s traveler versus her homebody—which excited me—and I fell in love with the title poem. I noticed, of course, poems about Nova Scotia: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” and “Sandpiper,” but I took for granted that Bishop was originally from the Maritimes, and didn’t think more of it for some time.

My larger, driving questions about Bishop that continue to motivate me really began during the first year of my PhD in Ontario (I’m now nearing the end of year three). There, I found Bishop in a course on twentieth-century American literature. I was confused about her listing on the course, though. After reading her poetry in Coastlines, and thinking of her as a Maritime poet also interested in travel, I was convinced she was from Nova Scotia and that she was Canadian. The professor went through each of the course texts, providing a brief synopsis to help us in choosing our slots for seminars. When it came to Geography III, I asked: “Isn’t she a Maritime poet?” The answer was simple: “No, I don’t think so.” I immediately signed up for the seminar on Bishop, and then read Geography III very closely. I found “Poem,” and “The Moose” and my initial question remained unanswered: “Isn’t she a Maritime poet?” I presented a seminar, went on to write my term paper on poetics in Geography III, and then I developed it into a conference paper.

Now I find myself continually asking how and whether Bishop is a Nova Scotian poet. When I decided on Bishop as a dissertation topic in Canadian literature, delving into questions about Bishop’s relationship to place, I began reading more and more of Bishop’s work, becoming more and more receptive to Bishop’s writing, and more enthralled by it. But, to be clear, my interests are not merely in the particular ways Bishop is categorized.

What I value in poetry is what Bishop delivers without fail. Perhaps these values stem back to a certain creative writing assignment: “be reticent about emotion, but verbose in description.” What a difficult feat for a writer: use description that understates emotion, but at the same time allow the emotion to be present, and to arise in a reader.

I recently presented at a student and faculty research discussion group, where the presenting professor—after discovering my research interests—confessed that he could never get into Bishop. He found her too cold, and lacking in emotion. But I find her reticence, the ability to show intense emotion as if it were a caged animal, to be part of her writing’s allure. And I think it so much more skilled to restrain from the over-emotional in moments of intense pain, or joy. Each time I read “One Art,” I think what a gift it is to all readers who now have loss articulated so deftly. And, there was a period of time when “First Death in Nova Scotia” and “Filling Station” never failed to bring a tear to my eye. When I found out that “Filling Station” was about a gas station in Great Village, I found it so fitting that my favourite of her poems would be grounded in Nova Scotia.

While reading Bishop’s letters recently, I found one that she wrote to a publisher who wanted to include footnotes to help students understand her work. She wrote to him: “…I’d let students figure out—in fact I TELL them—the cans are arranged to say so-so-so, etc., so I don’t think that has to be explained. However—most of them might well not know that so-so-so was—or still is in some places—the phrase people use to calm and soothe horses.” Who’s to say she doesn’t calm us when we read the line, along with those high-strung automobiles? I don’t see how the final line of that poem could be any warmer or more caring. Here is the final stanza:

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
Esso-so-so-so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

*****
Susie DeCoste is writing a PhD dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop’s Nova Scotia poems and questions of Maritime literary regionalism. She tutors and teaches writing at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and teaches children’s literature through distance education at the University of Waterloo. Her poems have appeared in journals in Canada and Ireland.

Nova Scotia Connections: Bulmer Family Bible

The sources of any work of art are both visible and invisible, even to the artist creating it. There are those who feel that art is its own independent reality, requiring no search for sources, that trying to locate the sources of art is a reductive or diminishing process. Part of the argument goes: art must be engaged on its own intrinsic terms and any apparent or hidden underpinnings are beside the point. Yet others (including me) argue that there is no art without life and lived experience (as illusory as they might be) and that knowing the sources is an interesting way to encounter and enter a work of art. Both sides of this argument (even as simplistically as I’ve described them here) can be argued convincingly. A discrete encounter with a poem, story, novel, painting, photograph, sculpture, song, outside any knowledge of the artist and the creative process can be completely meaningful. (The “First Encounter” feature on this blog relates a number of such sudden, unexpected events). Yet, arguably, one of the defining characteristics of our species is our curiosity about how things come to be, about how they work, about what things mean beyond what is apparent.

Elizabeth Bishop described herself as a “naturally curious” person, and she was interested in a vast range of subjects and objects. Many of her poems emerge out of a direct engagement with objects, which are contemplated and puzzled over in many ways. Of course, she questions her own engagement with the world of things, the subjectivity and inadequacy of her own and of all contemplation; but in the end, these object poems – from “The Map” to “The Moose” – stand; she sent them into the world. It is not too much to suppose that the actual things which triggered the creative process, which are so intensely observed and commented on, really mattered to Elizabeth Bishop. It is not too much to suppose that in engaging the actual things that we can uncover new layers, resonances and meanings. How this happens is as individual as each reader, so it behooves anyone presuming to analyze such engagement not to be reductive or categorical. As Bishop wrote in “Santarém,” all rigid dichotomies simply dissolve in “a dazzling dialectic.”

One of Bishop’s early poems has the exceptionally long title “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” – indeed, it is her longest title (the only other that comes close is “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress.” “Over 2,000 Illustrations…” has been written about at length by many literary critics, scholars and academics. It is one of her first deep examinations of a perennial Bishop theme: travel (through both time and space).

The directly identifiable primary source for this poem still exists: the Bulmer Family Bible, given to Bishop’s maternal grandparents as a wedding present in 1871 by Mary Elizabeth Black Hutchinson Gourley, Elizabeth Hutchinson Bulmer’s mother. Its publishing information includes: New Devotional and Practical Pictoral Family Bible, Chicago: The National Publishing Co., 1870.



This bible was a central object in the Bulmer family home when Bishop was a child. As an object, it is impressive, a tome of over 1,000 pages with an elegant embossed leather cover with gold lettering quite worn away now. It is filled with etchings depicting the stories in the bible and providing historical information (for example, there is a marvellous section on the plants and animals of the Holy Land). Essentially, a one-volume encyclopedia.

I saw this intensely resonant object when I first visited Phyllis Sutherland in the early 1990s. I was thrilled beyond words when I opened the cover and turned to the title page to find all the words in the title of “Over 2,000 Illustrations…” embedded in the elaborate text and images offered on that page.



One of the first ways Elizabeth Bishop began her travels, which she so intimately yet ironically recounts, ponders and questions in the poem, was directly in this object (travels begun in her imagination), by looking at and through this book. When she grew up and began to make her own decisions about where she wanted to travel, she carried with her the memory and the lessons offered in the illustrations in this bible.

In “Over 2,0000 Illustrations...,” Elizabeth Bishop acknowledges the way her “infant sight,” which studied the pictures in this book carefully, over and over again, meshed and merged with the adult who observed the world around her with a more questioning eye. She identifies the centrality of her own nativity, “a family with pets,” a collective of individuals who influenced not only in infancy, but throughout her life.

Even the most in depth analysis serves only to throw a dim light on the power of lived experience and the way it sources the creative process and art. Many people, including myself, have written about “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” but we have only approximated (never fully identified or isolated) the core energy and mystery of this and other Bishop poems. On some level the fact that the Bulmer Family Bible exists may not matter at all, but the experience of actually seeing this object, looking at it and reading it next to the poem, creates a curious and wonderful synergism. Elizabeth Bishop did the same thing and from that looking and pondering emerged art.

*****

The Bulmer Family Bible was saved and passed on by the women in the Bulmer family: Mary Hutchinson Gourley, Elizabeth Hutchinson Bulmer, Grace Bulmer Bowers, Phyllis Bowers Sutherland. It now resides in the Bulmer-Bowers-Hutchinson-Sutherland family fonds at Acadia University.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XXI: From Texas to Great Village, by Adrianne Berry

My first encounter with Bishop was in 1996. I had returned to the University of Texas at Arlington to finish up a Master’s Degree (in English) that I’d left dangling several years earlier. When it came time to start thinking about my thesis, I approached my favorite professor, Dr. Tim Morris. We discussed several ideas, and I headed off to the library with the notion that I would write my thesis on some aspect of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.

When I got to the library I ran across Becoming Canonical in American Poetry, a book Dr. Morris had recently published that focused on the work of four poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Wait a minute. Who was this Elizabeth Bishop? I was in grad school and didn’t remember ever reading anything of hers. I checked the book out and took it to Dr. Morris. He explained that Bishop had a relatively small but important body of work that more and more critics and scholars were beginning to recognize. He recommended that I look at both her poetry and her prose, but that I begin with her poem “The Moose.” He was right. I read it over and over. Poetry had never made me feel this way! I was transported to that long-ago bus, watching the changing scenery, listening to the gossip, and witnessing with the other passengers the wonder of nature that brought the bus to a halt. I didn’t have to read anything else to help me make up my mind. Bishop became my thesis subject.

Now that may have technically been my “first encounter,” but my first immersion (yes, a baptism, if you will) happened when I met Sandra Barry. While researching my thesis I ran across a paper on Bishop that Sandra had presented at Vassar. I found her paper on the Internet and somehow found Sandra’s phone number (I don’t believe she had email until shortly after this time). I wanted to talk to this Bishop scholar about the paper she’d presented and see if she could point me to more information about Elizabeth Bishop. I contacted Sandra, we began corresponding, and I discovered that Sandra delighted in sharing her knowledge about Bishop. She was a great help with my thesis, but even beyond that, we began to develop a friendship. We corresponded frequently (by then both by mail and email), and in 1998, my then 17 year old daughter and I traveled to Nova Scotia and got the “Sandra Barry Deluxe Bishop Tour.” Wow! This is where my interest in Elizabeth Bishop changed into my love of Elizabeth Bishop.

Sandra introduced me to the little girl Bishop, her kinfolk, the town, the school, the churches, the people, the bay, and the province that colored Bishop’s world and helped forge the lens through which she would view the rest of her life. I was able to complete my pilgrimage by visiting the Bishop house in Great Village, even though it was owned by Paul Tingley, a private owner, at the time. During this visit to the house in Great Village, I grasped the importance of this special place, and I gained a whole new insight into its impact on Bishop’s psyche.

I was able to return to Nova Scotia again in 2006 with my husband, Eldon, and we are planning a trip in the summer of 2011 to celebrate the EB centenary. We are also fortunate and proud to be shareholders in the EB house. However, I must say that without Sandra Barry, it is doubtful I would have ever gone from Elizabeth Bishop encounter to Elizabeth Bishop immersion. Thank you, dear Sandra.

In the years since completing my degree, I’ve taught middle and high school English, and I’ve been a high school librarian for the last seven years. One thing I can proudly say is that I have introduced Bishop’s poetry to many Texas students who might never have found her. And I’ve made sure to have copies of The Collected Prose and The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 on the shelves of the libraries I’ve managed. No doubt there are other Elizabeth Bishop first encounters out there just waiting to happen!

[See Adrianne's own blog about life in Texas: "Seeing the Good."]

FIRST ENCOUNTER XX: My First (Un)Official Encounter with Bishop and Beyond, by Camille Roman

My first meeting with Elizabeth Bishop occurred about the time of her death in the Fall of 1979. I consider it to be “unofficial” because I was not familiar with her poetry and did not understand her importance until I learned about her death. Many decades later, I discovered that Kathleen Spivack, the instructor of my poetry-writing seminar held during that fall at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, knew Bishop very well. In fact she was a close friend as well as frequent table tennis partner.

Then in the Spring of 1986 I found Bishop on the syllabus of my doctoral seminar in Postmodern American Poetry at Brown University. It was very early in Bishop studies; and Tom Travisano’s first book on Bishop had just been published. So Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s decision was a major pioneering move, which resulted in what I consider to be my “official” first encounter with Bishop’s poetry. Only much later did I learn that Bishop had spent a great deal of time at Brown with the students in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and that another major Bishop scholar, George Monteiro, had been one of the founders of this field there. Given Bishop’s enjoyment of the students, it did not surprise me to discover that Brown had given Bishop an honorary doctorate.

When I began work on my dissertation, I decided to include Bishop. Fortunately I was able to organize a dynamic committee composed of Blasing as the director with Monteiro as my second reader. Then I invited another Brown faculty member, the well-respected poetry scholar Susanne Woods to join the committee; and she graciously accepted. Finally, I added a fourth reader from outside of Brown, Patricia Yaeger, now the PMLA editor, but then at Harvard University and later at the University of Michigan. She had just published a major book in feminist studies that included Bishop.

After I accepted a tenure-track position at Washington State University on the West Coast, I began teaching Bishop immediately in my graduate seminars on mid-twentieth-century American poetry. As I considered developing Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View, my book for tenure, I returned to two poems from my seminar with Blasing: “Visits to St Elizabeth’s” by Bishop and “Daddy” by Plath. They inspired me to begin thinking about both World War II and the Cold War together. At that time I also contacted Thomas Travisano, president and founder of The Elizabeth Bishop Society, and he was very gracious. I had attended the first organizing meeting of the society at MLA and therefore knew about him from that session, which was held in the suite of Lorrie and Barry Goldensohn (Lorrie also, of course, became a major Bishop scholar). From that point forward Tom and I have conversed frequently about Bishop and other mutual projects both alone and with many other leading Bishop scholars, critics, friends, students, biographers, and supporters.

Presently I am looking out at the breathtaking skyline of Portland, Oregon, where Bishop located Nova Scotian friends during her teaching assignments at the University of Washington and her stays in San Francisco – and just before she began teaching and living in her native New England. I am completing this reflection about my initial conversations with her and thinking about her further. She remains very much a part of my life. Tom, Steven Gould Axelrod (another major Bishop scholar who also read my book on Bishop in manuscript form), and I are completing the third volume of The New Anthology of American Poetry that will include her writing.

Camille Roman is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View (Palgrave) and a board member of the Elizabeth Bishop Society. Currently, she is completing volume three of The New Anthology of American Poetry with Steven Gould Axelrod and Thomas Travisano and is co-editing a large project on Robert Frost and Ernest Hemmingway with Suzanne del Gizzo.

Nova Scotia Connections -- St. James Church

St. James Presbyterian Church, circa turn of the 20th century

Anyone who has gone to Great Village will tell you that, in addition to the enormous tides in nearby Cobequid Bay, the most immediately impressive thing about the village, as one approaches and passes through, is St. James United Church. As it did in Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood, when it was the Presbyterian church, so it continues today to loom large over the community, its 112 foot steeple, still topped by a lightning rod. The steeple and lightning rod are visible from all elevations surrounding the village, looking, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “In the Village,” “like one hand of a clock pointing straight up.”

Invoking the startling and electric image of the lightning rod (which is, after all, a conduit between the wildly elemental and the solid dark earth – a way to channel mysterious and dangerous power) in relation to the deep tragedy of her mother’s illness and breakdown, Elizabeth Bishop sets the tone – a singular note – of her aesthetic universe, as she transforms her mother’s scream into art: “Its [the scream’s] pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”

The Bulmer home sits diagonally across the road from the church, literally in its tall shadow. Bishop had quite a lot to say about this church and its parishioners. She remarked that she was as familiar with the structure as she was with her grandmother. She admired its Gothic architecture, regarded it as “dazzling” and “high-shouldered and secretive.” She remembered playing hide-and-seek among its non-flying buttresses and swinging on the double chains that hung between white wooden pillars that surrounded the grassy yard (the buttresses still invite hide-and-seek, but the pillars and chains are gone). She heard its bell, which had been cast in Boston, ringing for worship and as a fire alarm. That bell still startles and impresses when it is rung on Sunday mornings to call the congregation to service. She watched her Baptist grandmother sit by her kitchen window on Sunday mornings watching her Presbyterian neighbours arrive and leave, and later gently gossiping with her Baptist neighbours about them at afternoon services. When her playmate Gwendolyn Patriquin died, the eleven year old Bishop was not allowed to go to the funeral, but she secretly looked through the parlour window, watching the mourners dressed in black. Suddenly, she had a vision, tied subconsciously to her struggle to understand her mother’s own mourning and disappearance, of Gwendolyn’s tiny coffin abandoned in front of the church. This waking dream triggered a flood of grief and a “howl” that echoed her mother’s scream.

In 1962 Bishop received a copy of the recently published History of Great Village, put together by the local Women’s Institute. She was fascinated by many things in this wonderful community history and she read it cover to cover, though she was already familiar with much of it through family stories and oral tradition.

The section on “Church History in Great Village” reveals that the first Presbyterian Church in the village, built in 1845, was even more impressive than the current one: “The new church was 75 feet long, 50 feet wide and would seat 1200 people.” Its opening on 30 July 1845, drew “the largest crowd of strangers ever seen at a religious gathering in Great Village.” It received its bell, cast in Boston, in 1871.

In 1882 this grand edifice “was destroyed by fire with all its furniture, including its sweet bell, its lamps and beautiful chandelier and the Bibles and Hymn Books and Pulpit and pews.” In an unfinished poem now collected in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box, Bishop remembered that the church had been struck by lightning. Is that what caused the fire? It might explain the prominent ornate lightning rod on its replacement.

Undeterred, the congregation immediately constructed another church, slightly smaller but still grand, which opened in 1883, “The main building is 55 feet by 40 feet, with a wing on each side and gable 4 feet from the pulpit, projecting 9 feet by 20 feet.” The bell was sent back to Boston, repaired and returned.

In the 1880s, Great Village, and many communities along the shores of Cobequid Bay and Minas Basin, were shipbuilding centres. One of the remarkable features of this church, designed by the architect J.C. Dumaresq, is that the roof of the sanctuary is in the shape of the inverted hull of a sailing ship. It also has unusual painted walls.

When interest in Elizabeth Bishop began to coalesce in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, one of the first gestures the community made was to erect a plaque in her memory. In thinking about where to put such a commemoration, public access being a primary consideration, the unanimous decision was to place it on St. James United Church. The unveiling ceremony took place one sunny summer afternoon in 1994. The bronze plaque was cast at the Lunenburg Foundry, which had probably made the fittings for some of the sailing ships built in Great Village. While the gathering was not as large as those for the openings of both churches, the Bishop commemoration drew people from all over the province.

Elizabeth Bishop was fascinated by churches and church architecture her whole life. Ultimately, she bought a house of her own in Ouro Prêto, Brazil, a city with thirteen baroque churches. She said that she could see six or seven of them from her balcony. Sitting in St. James’s beautiful sanctuary on that now long ago day, listening to readings of Bishop’s work and talk about her deep connection to the village, it was easy to see why St. James so impressed the little girl. It loomed not only over her literal village, but loomed large in her imagination. In a very late poem, “Santarém,” the Brazilian city’s “church, the Cathedral, rather,” deeply impressed her. The fact that it “had / been struck by lightning” found its way into the poem, one of her most beautiful Brazilian works. And, by the way, “dazzling” also appears in this poem (“such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off / in that watery, dazzling dialectic”), something I only just this moment realized as I put St. James Church and Santarém Cathedral together in my own mind.

Memorial plaque on St. James United Church. Photo by Laurie Gunn. To see some of Laurie’s wonderful photographs of Great Village and the surrounding landscape, visit her website: www.lauriegunnphotos.com.

Bishop in London

If you are planning to be in London in July, you may have the opportunity to attend the UK premiere of a new English translation of Marta Góes' play "A Safe Harbour for Elizabeth Bishop" which will be held in the Purcell Room of the Southbank Centre on Sunday the eighteenth, at three in the afternoon. The play had a limited run in New York in 2006. For ticket information click here. For a description (with photos) of the 2006 New York production, click here.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XIX: How I Got to Know Elizabeth Bishop by Carole Langille

For years, when I lived in New York City, I wanted to visit Nova Scotia because of Bishop's poems. I knew Elizabeth Bishop had spent her early years in Nova Scotia, the province with the musical name, and it was from reading her poems that Nova Scotia took on resonance for me. In one poem, Bishop describes people getting on the bus going to Maine, talking the way people talk in Nova Scotia, boarding at Lower Economies. Where was that? Where was Great Village where mint grew by brooks and when you climbed the hill you could see the top of the elm trees and the long green marshes? I wanted to see Tantramar Marshes, the Bay of Fundy, tamarack trees, sheer water revealing crumbling ribs of marl. She might not have been talking about Nova Scotia in her poem “The Bight” but she may as well have been. I longed to visit Nova Scotia ever since I read her poems, but it wasn’t until my early thirties, when I married a man who was born in this province, that I first visited with him, and then moved here.

“You shouldn’t be living in New York City,” he said to me when we first met. He was right. As soon as we arrived in Nova Scotia, I felt as if I were returning home. And though I am no longer married to this man, I still live in Nova Scotia, the province to which he introduced me.

When my then husband and I first got off the ferry in Yarmouth on a bright Monday morning, and got on the narrow country highway he identified as the 103, I was startled that there weren’t any other cars on the road. “Is there a quarantine, some illness keeping people away?” I asked. “Where is everyone?”

“Welcome to Nova Scotia,” my husband said. Here was this beautiful place, and hardly any people. And those I did meet when I first arrived, at the bank, in the post office, were kind and eager to be help any way they could.

The fact that this province had become my home seemed to me a sign that Bishop and I had a personal connection. Our mothers were both named Gertrude, after all. Bishop had been brought up in Nova Scotia and Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had lived briefly in Worcester when I went to university there. Now I was in Nova Scotia, a couple of hours from where she spent her childhood. When I began going to Quaker Meeting in Centre, Lunenburg County, I noted that the meeting was on Bulmer road. Bulmer was Bishop’s mother’s maiden name. However tenuous the connections, I was motivated to find them.

In Nova Scotia, as I talked with an old woman whose home was near mine and whose family had lived in the area for generations, I heard, with great pleasure the "yes", spoken with an inrush of breath and subtle inflection which Bishop described so well in her poem, “The Moose:”

“Yes..." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes..."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on...

I'd never heard people speak like this before I moved to Nova Scotia nor have I seen it described anywhere other than in Bishop’s poem. It was an even bigger surprise to see what far-reaching effects this poem had.

A decade after moving to Nova Scotia, I took a trip to Scotland to tour as the writer on a children’s book mobile and to give a poetry reading in the small village of Kirkcudbright. At a party after the reading the host mentioned Elizabeth Bishop. I said I was now living in the province where Bishop had lived as a child. We talked about the inrush of breath characterized in “The Moose,” and the host took a collection of poems off his shelf and asked if I'd read the poem aloud. A Scottish poet nodded excitedly as I read the lines about the inrush of breath. Afterward she said she too heard people talk like that in certain rural areas of Scotland, although she'd never before seen it written about in verse or prose. Bishop's subtle observation, detailed in a poem, traversed continents.

I have always found that Bishop's acute attention to detail so particularizes a setting that I am immediately able to place myself within it. And because she describes experience with almost obsessive attention, I am compelled to scrutinize my own world as well. Her poems are restrained and distilled, with great concentration on rhythm and sound. Yet beneath Bishop’s disciplined control, the reader can’t help but be aware of the poet’s passion and ache, even a certain wild urgency that seethes beneath her contained lines.

I had the good fortune to hear Elizabeth Bishop read once, when I lived in New York City. I was in an M.F.A program then, studying with John Ashbery, when he told the class that Bishop would be reading at the Guggenheim Museum. My close friend Soren, who was also in the class, wasn’t able to come, so I asked another friend who lived near the museum to meet me. I remember looking around the packed room and feeling quietly ecstatic.

“All these people love poetry,” I said to my friend, who was not a poet.
“I suppose so,” she said vaguely, and a little surprised.

All through the reading, the feeling of being at a major event with one of our greatest poets persisted, even when Bishop read inaudibly, staring at the page, and I could not hear the poems. I was content just to see her, to look at the dress she wore, to observe how she stood, the way she smiled. I didn't know that she was ill at the time, or that this would be her last reading in New York City. Reading a biography many years later I discovered that this precise, meticulous poet had been an alcoholic for much of her life and in and out of hospitals during her last few years.

“Poor darling,” my friend Soren said when she learned this. She too loved Bishop.

After I graduated and long before I came to Nova Scotia, I was living in the suburbs of New York City when I learned that Elizabeth Bishop had died. She’d been alone in her home in Boston when she had a brain aneurysm. I cried when I heard the news. Ever since I’d started reading her work I’d always entertained the hope of studying with her. Now I would never even get to talk with her.

I find her poems full of tenderness. In her work the particular is transformed into the universal. Such narrow focus enlarges the world. Certainly it enlarges mine. Her poems make me want to be more generous, more accurate, more alert. Not only does her work inspire me, when I read her poems I feel deep kinship and love for her. Perhaps because, in poem after poem, her precise observation is itself an act of love.

[Carole Langille is the author of three books of poetry and a collection of short stories. Poems from her collection Late in a Slow Time have been set to music by the composer Chan Ka Nin and will be on Duo Concertante's next cd.]

Two Versions of a Setting of Bishop's "I am in Need of Music"

This performance of David L. Brunner's setting of "I am in Need of Music" by the Vista Murrieta High School Chamber Choir (Murrieta, California) has just appeared on YouTube:

It has led me in turn to the following performance, with full orchestration, by the 2009 TMEA Texas All-State Mixed Choir:



From there one may go on to find many other versions... How blessed we are to live in a time when so many beautiful musical performances are so readily available!

Nova Scotia Connections -- "In the Village" in The New Yorker

There are still a few people in Nova Scotia who knew Elizabeth Bishop, principal among them is her first cousin, Phyllis Sutherland. Being fifteen years younger than Bishop, Phyllis’s own first memory of her cousin is seeing a teenager doing cartwheels in the driveway of Elmcroft (the Bowers’s family home), something which deeply impressed the little girl. The bulk of Phyllis’s memories connect to a time much later in their lives, when Bishop began visiting Nova Scotia in the 1970s, after having lived for over fifteen years in Brazil (though in the interim, hundreds of letters passed between them and Phyllis’s mother, Grace Bulmer Bowers).

The members of MacLachlan family of Great Village also had strong memories of Elizabeth Bishop, and several members of that family were resident in the village until quite recently. Donald and Alberta MacLachlan were close friends with William and Elizabeth Bulmer, Bishop’s paternal grandparents. One of their oldest daughters, Margaret Motley, was a good friend of Gertrude, Bishop’s mother. Muir MacLachlan, one of the younger sons, was Bishop’s exact contemporary and her classmate in Grade Primary in the Great Village School. Muir and his wife Helen later took over his father’s general store in Great Village and Bishop remembered visiting him there in the 1940s and 1970s. A younger daughter, Donalda, born a couple of years after Bishop, has her own very early memory of seeing little Elizabeth take the cow to pasture, passing by the MacLachlan family home.

Muir features in Bishop’s late memoir “Primer Class,” about going to school in Great Village in 1916-1917. Donald and Alberta feature in “In the Village,” Bishop’s masterpiece of memory about the year of her mother’s breakdown. In that piece the MacLachlans are referred to as “MacLean.” Bishop always had a reason for changing or modifying a name (often more than one reason). In this instance, my theory is the change was made because she never mastered the spelling of MacLachlan (I have come across several variants of it in her letters). Like Bulmer (Boomer, Bulmore, Bullmer, etc.), MacLachlan did legitimately have several spellings, but I think Bishop opted for the simpler “MacLean” as being safe and close enough.

“In the Village” first appeared in The New Yorker in the 19 December 1953 issue. With its rigour about “facts” – its (im)famous fact checking department – I find it interesting that “MacLean” made it through. Perhaps when the complete Elizabeth Bishop/New Yorker correspondence comes out next year (edited by Joelle Biele), there might be some indication whether “MacLean” was ever questioned.

When I first started researching and writing about Elizabeth Bishop, I had the great pleasure and privilege of meeting Margaret Motley, Muir MacLachlan and Donalda Nelson. I remember on one occasion sitting in the wonderful old MacLachlan family home talking with them about Bishop, the Bulmers, their own parents and what Great Village was like during their childhood.

It was a deep loss to Great Village when Margaret and Muir died. I continued to visit Donalda, who lived across the road from her family home, in the lovely old house which had once belonged to the Great Village postmaster Angus Johnson. Recently, Donalda moved to nearby Truro.

I have many wonderful memories of drinking tea with Donalda in her cosy kitchen, talking about music, art, history and Great Village. During one of those visits she told me about one time when Margaret was living in New York City and she opened up an issue of The New Yorker and saw “In the Village.” Recognizing its provenance immediately, she mailed a copy of the issue to her parents. It may very well have been the first way anyone in Great Village saw this story. Bishop was living in Brazil at the time, and while she unfailingly sent signed copies of her books to Aunt Grace and Phyllis, she rarely managed to send the magazines or journals in which her poems appeared.

It was the first time I had heard this story, and you can imagine how interested I was. Donalda got up and went off into another room. A moment later she returned holding the very issue of The New Yorker that Margaret had sent! I nearly fainted. I opened it up and found “In the Village,” and laughed when I saw the cartoon on the opening page, it has a parrot nattering at a television. As I leafed through this treasure, Donalda gently asked, “Would you like to have it?” I nearly fainted again! “Yes,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, “thank you so much.”

What intrigues me about this story is the trajectory: Elizabeth Bishop sits in her Brazilian studio in early 1953 writing “In the Village,” the story about her childhood in Great Village in 1916-1917. She sends it to New York City where it is published in December that year. Margaret Motley of Great Village is living in New York City and opens The New Yorker (perhaps she bought it off the newsstand or perhaps she was a subscriber) and reads the story. She knows it must go back to Great Village. When it arrives it is likely the first moment when Bishop’s vivid memories are tangibly returned to her childhood home. The MacLachlans and Donalda save the issue, treasure it, and decades later, it reappears and is passed on to me. What are the odds? Whatever the odds are, I am most grateful to Donalda for her stewardship not only of this resonate object, but also of her family’s memories of and connections to Elizabeth Bishop.

Cover of the 19 December 1953 The New Yorker.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XVIII: A poem by Phoebe Roper

Rooster
(inspired by Elizabeth Bishop)


At dawn, raucous
and vain
you awake us again
and again -
your song, your sake, your say:
“Wake up! I’m here!”

You hurl words into our sleep
our day
and keep
flaunting that blood crest, throbbing;
arched chest and royal tail
unfurled
you who, each dawn, create the world.

But I admit you did wake up Peter -
terrified into recognition
of his betrayal
unto death
Death, that with His contrition, saved;
forgave and forgave.

Was this a phoenix birth
this rude, rash awakening
of intractable earth
this sudden dark dawn
of shame
no angel song below
just that outrageous
cock crow?


Phoebe Roper, Halifax, N.S.

FIRST ENCOUNTER XVII: Journeys, by Helen Cannon

Before I write of my first meaningful encounter with Elizabeth Bishop, let me tell of my less-than-meaningful exposure with Bishop’s oeuvres and the facts about her life. I’m a woman in her 70’s, having come up in my university literature studies in the 1960’s, when DWPM (Dead White Protestant Males) ruled and reigned. If we studied the token woman writer here and there, it certainly wasn’t Elizabeth Bishop. In fact, if the notion of Canadian literature was acknowledged at all, it was viewed askance as almost an oxymoron.

So, eventually in my literary studies, partly in defiance of that oversight of Canadian women’s letters, I chose to write my Master’s thesis on two Canadian Margarets—Atwood and Laurence. And when I then began teaching at Utah State University, my niche was the writing of prose, not poetry, and when I was allowed to teach literature classes, it was contemporary women’s prose writing that was my focus.

Another salient matter relating to my scant acquaintance with Bishop’s works might seem to be a left-field matter. Why would the fact that my husband and I have been avid subscribers to and comprehensive readers of The New Yorker magazine for going on 50 years now, and that when I taught Creative Non-Fiction (another unfortunate rubric—who wants to write in a “non” genre?) I used The New Yorker as text, be of relevance here? Anyone who knows the course of Bishop’s writings has to know that this magazine was her primary venue—for both her poetry and her prose writings. So I came to her writing, not through my undergraduate literature classes, but fortuitously and serendipitously, as I happened upon her lovely, provocative works in those illustrious pages. As these prose and poetry items appeared, I came to acknowledge this major talent, but I can’t really single one out—neither prose nor poetry—as being my pivotal “First Encounter.”

If there was one New Yorker piece that discursively taught me about Elizabeth Bishop in ways my formal education had not, it was Dana Gioia’s “Studying with Miss Bishop,” (September 15, 1986). I identified very much with that lovely essay, since teaching was of utmost importance to me then, and as Gioia described Miss Bishop as a teacher, I could fully align my teaching philosophy with hers, even though she was a recognized and established poet teaching at Harvard, and I was a nobody teaching at a university in the hinterlands of the West. Both of us stubbornly chose to be out-of-step with the current pedagogy. Both of us found a good dictionary the best teaching aid to recommend to our students—better than all the deconstructionist and postmodernist analysis that was newly in vogue. I can still quote from Gioia’s praiseful essay, word for word, and I still hold to Bishop’s against-the-grain pedagogy as it was described by one of her admiring students: “…One did not interpret poetry; one experienced it. …One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary. There was no subtext, only the text.” Gioia had begun his tribute by telling of how “While Northrop Frye, who was visiting Harvard that year to deliver the Norton Lectures, drew audiences of nearly a thousand for his class on myth and literature, Miss Bishop, I was to learn, rarely attracted more than a dozen unenthusiastic undergraduates. Her manner was at odds with the academic glamour of Harvard, her conversation was not designed to impress…”

So my first encounters are random and diffuse and hard to pinpoint—that is until something happened in the most tangible of ways to bring about what now seems to me like the most remarkable of miracles. Let me explain.

My then colleague, Anne Shifrer, a poet and teacher of poetry at our university, understood and appreciated the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop in ways I was just beginning to discover. Anne had traveled to Nova Scotia in the interest of furthering her studies of Bishop’s works—had visited the Bulmer home and the gas station and other Bishop landmarks. Earlier, at a Bishop conference at Vassar, Anne had made a firm and fond connection with the independent scholar and poet, Sandra Barry. Out of that meeting grew a remarkable literary correspondence—a true correspondence course on Canadian letters in general and Bishop studies in particular. Those letters from Sandra to Anne were so informative and fine that we decided they would make a core resource for a class we were scheduled to teach—better than any text on Canadian literature that we could identify. So with Sandra’s permission, those letters became required reading for our course, along with primary materials—representative poems and prose works, as Bishop herself advised. Furthermore, Anne’s love for Bishop’s poetry was entirely contagious. I was already becoming a convert, but the momentum and imagination that Anne inspired made something wonderful come to pass.

Anne and I had proposed to our department’s curriculum committee that we create and team-teach a class on contemporary Canadian women’s literature. I would teach the prose, and Anne would teach the poetry. So here we were, a couple of ingénues trying to introduce to students works that we had just barely discovered ourselves. But Anne had sufficient intrepidity in her vision, daring, and imagination that when she saw a Canadian embassy notice offering grants for study in Canada, she boldly suggested that we apply. Together then, we wrote a proposal to that embassy, and, unlikely as it had seemed to me, somehow we won the grant to study Canadian Women’s literature in situ—something I wouldn’t even have dared dream had it not been for Anne. In addition to our Canadian Embassy travel grant and matching monies from our university and from our own English Department, we also had been awarded a $1000 grant from the Women’s Studies Program for course enhancement. So, that summer of 1997, we readied ourselves for three weeks of study in Eastern Canada in ways no graduate study program anywhere could provide, and in ways I could never repay. Here, at last I found my first true encounter with the works of Elizabeth Bishop by way of first-hand time with one of the very best Bishop scholars, traveling with her in the country that Bishop loved and wrote of—even from Brazil and other far-flung places. This was Bishop’s heart’s home, no matter how far afield she traveled. The seminal importance of actually being there—in Bishop country—is hard to fully convey. James Merrill captures some of that necessity in his poem, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia Elizabeth: Bishop 1911-1979,” as it appeared in the October 23, 1989 New Yorker magazine:

Your village touched us by not knowing how.
Even as we outdrove its clear stormlight
A shower of self-belittling brilliants fell.
Miles later, hours away, here rooms are full
Of things you would have known: pump organ, hymnal,
Small-as-life desks, old farm tools, charter, deed,
Schoolbooks…

—All circa 1915, like the manners
Of the fair, soft-spoken girl who shows us through.
Although till now she hasn’t heard of you
She knows things you would have known by heart
And we, by knowing you by heart, foreknew. …

Closer to both art and what we are
Than the gush of nothings one outpours to people
On the correspondence side of bay and steeple,
Whose dazzling whites we’ll never see again,
Or failed to see in the first place. Still, as the last
Suds glide, slow protozoa, down the pane
We’re off—Excuse our dust! With warm regards,—
Gathering phrases for tomorrow’s cards.

Not until I myself stood in the upstairs garret where the little Elizabeth heard her mother’s scream did I fully understand just how perfectly “In the Village” captured that place and those feelings. “She stood in the large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side, papered in wide white and dim gold stripes…” We stood there and the lines were made manifest… “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!” Other lines can never again be merely abstract descriptions: “September rain falls on the house/ In the failing light, the old grandmother/ sits in the kitchen with the child/ beside the Little Marvel Stove,/ reading the jokes from the almanac/ laughing and talking to hide her tears…”

Sandra took us to that very house—a house little changed since Elizabeth had lived there as a child. At the time of our visit, the home was owned and lived in by Paul Tingley, a man who respected the provenance and history of his home and its village and who, most of all, caught something of Sandra’s vision and so was willing, because of Sandra, to allow her to bring inquiring folks into his home.

Our witnessing wasn’t limited to Great Village. We traveled the "Moose Route" and met Bishop’s cousin Phyllis (Sutherland). At Acadia University, we saw and even touched some of the fonds. I can still almost feel the fragile thinness of the pages of the Bulmer family bible on display there—“Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’…”

Those ands still suggest the endlessly generative nature of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, so that a “first encounter” cannot stop with first, but leads inevitably to what follows. “First” can never stand alone…

***

Helen Cannon is a retired English literature professor, who taught at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Nova Scotia Connections -- Tradition and Modernity

Horse-drawn wagon in Great Village, circa turn of the 20th century

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” with its epigraph “For a Child of 1918,” speaks about her close bond with her maternal grandfather, William Bulmer, and about the how his traditional way of life was being affected by the changing modern world, represented in the poem by automobile.

William Bulmer, a tanner, currier and shoemaker, continued to ride his horse-drawn wagon right up until he died in 1930, that is, he remained faithful to old ways of artisanship and the home-made. While he undoubtedly drove in automobiles, he never owned one. Elizabeth Bishop’s vivid memories of her beloved “Pa” (as she called him) centre on his quiet, gentle and patient practices of craft and oral tradition.

In the poem, grandfather and granddaughter trundle through Great Village on his wagon greeting everyone they meet with a courteous hello and good day – even shouting to the people inside noisy automobiles which speed by in clouds of dust. Being on the wagon means that they were part of the community, there was no separation from others, unlike those contained inside automobiles, a technology that advanced civilization but that also divides us from each other.

Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood in Great Village occurred during World War I. I have already written about how the war intersected in strange and profound ways with Bishop’s maternal family (see Nova Scotia Connections: The War Was On, parts 1 and 2). This “Great War” marked a cataclysmic shift in the world, on all levels of existence, which can be defined and characterized in many ways (countless books have been written doing so). One of the ways to characterize this time was as a tension-filled dialectic between Tradition and Modernity.

Even in Great Village, in rural Nova Scotia, this dynamic played out in many ways and the young Elizabeth Bishop observed and absorbed some of the dialogue/debate between these two cultural and existential forces. Decades later she acknowledged the impact of World War I on her own life and poetic practice, describing herself to Anne Stevenson as a “late, late post-World War I generation poet.” I have argued elsewhere that Elizabeth Bishop had her own life-long dialogue between tradition and modernity, which I believe was set during her formative years in Great Village, a dialogue which helped shape the kind of poet she became.

In “Manners,” Bishop presents this dialogue in a quiet, gentle and patient manner. She does not tell us what she is doing, she simply shows us in the juxtaposition of Pa Bulmer’s wagon and the speeding automobiles. Just as William Bulmer stayed true to his old-fashioned way of life, Bishop’s maternal uncle, Arthur Bulmer, a tinsmith, embraced the new order. He was one of the first people in Great Village to get a Model-T Ford, along with the fellow who delivered the mail and the village doctor. In a memoir of her uncle, “Memories of Uncle Neddy,” Bishop observed: “Uncle Neddy got his Ford somehow, and the younger daughter [Hazel], fifteen or so, with long curls just like Mary Pickford’s, drove it hell-for-leather, expertly.”

As the spectacle of an unprecedented war loomed over the world in the 1910s, each person, each family, each community, engaged and came to terms with personal and cultural change as best they could. Elizabeth Bishop always respected traditional ways and sought to connect with and understand them regardless of where she was in the world. She engaged and came to terms with the modern, uncertain world and its pervasive technological change – not always with equanimity, sometimes with resignation, but always with curiosity. Sometimes the seemingly innocuous or trivial has an abiding affect on our lives and so it was with wagons and automobiles, realities of daily life and metaphors for philosophical positions. Elizabeth Bishop’s special brilliance is the way she held dualities like this one in fluid connection, how, as she wrote in “Santarém,” such ideas always, for her, “dissolved, straight off” in a “watery, dazzling dialectic.”

Dr. T.R. Johnson and his automobile, circa 1910s