This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 19, 2011 - "The art of losing isn't hard to master," Elizabeth Bishop insists in her masterful villanelle "One Art," but thankfully her correspondence has not been lost. The poet was a voluminous letter-writer, and scholar-poet Joelle Biele has collected and edited Bishop's correspondence with The New Yorker, which published the vast majority of her work.
At 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 23, on the Washington University campus, Biele will read excepts from "Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence," published this year. She will be joined by guests Mary Jo Bang, Lorin Cuoco, William Gass, Carl Phillips and Catherine Rankovic, who will read from Bishop's work as well as her letters.
One of our greatest American poets, Bishop was born in 1911 and graduated from Vassar College in 1934. She published her first book of poetry, "North & South," in 1946. Her next three books took the Triple Crown of American literary awards: "A Cold Spring" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, "Questions of Travel" was awarded the National Book Award in 1965, and "Geography III" won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. Her relationship with The New Yorker began in 1933 and continued until her death in 1979. During 40 years of correspondence, hundreds of letters passed between Bishop and her editors.
The book grew out of Biele's dissertation. "I wrote about Bishop's writing process and quoted from the letters quite a bit," she says. "At my defense, one of my professors said he thought the letters would make a good book."
Biele's job as editor was to collect everything relevant about the correspondence, type the letters in and proofread them over and over. At the time, her daughter was an infant and "was in her playpen or swing next to me as I worked."
The letters illustrate the editorial and revision process at work long after the initial inspiration. Bishop revised her poems almost obsessively, sometimes taking them through 40 to 50 drafts.
According to Biele, the letters show that The New Yorker was Bishop's first reader, not Robert Lowell, as had previously been thought. Both poets and fans of Bishop's poetry will also be interested to learn that Bishop "was open to her editors' suggestions and the vast majority of their changes, particularly in regards to punctuation."
Biele adds that Bishop had mixed feelings and reservations about her relationship with the magazine, only one of which being that she was gay: "Readers can see how the overwhelming if constricting support of the magazine could be both a writer's dream and worst nightmare. She was very concerned about her connection to the magazine, wondering if it led to sentimental writing and if it was causing her to resist experimentation. It certainly played a role in her choosing not to publish any love poems in which the beloved's gender is identified."
Many will be fascinated to learn that the money The New Yorker paid her mattered. "It influenced what she chose to spend her time on," says Biele. "Both 'The Riverman' and an unpublished prose-piece on Brazil were written with a paycheck in mind."
Bishop is in the unique position of being a poet from the American canon who nearly everybody wants to claim -- feminists, formalists, experimentalists and especially general readers. Poet and essayist Catherine Rankovic, who will also be reading at the event, along with other Washington University faculty, appreciates that Bishop "was witty and very much North American although she is treated by critics as if her travel made her a foreigner."
Poet and Washington University Professor Mary Jo Bang observes that "she allows strangeness to exist. That's what I most admire about her. Those moments of strangeness."
For Biel, what's special about Bishop is "how she portrays a mind thinking, the slight revisions and alterations she makes within the same poem."
For all Bishop's strangeness and capturing the thought process on the page, Biele believes that Bishop is still popular today because of her "modesty and clarity, her gentle irony and the extraordinarily visual nature of her poems. She expresses complex ideas in one- and two-syllable words; she does not want to be 'difficult' in Eliot's sense. Her humility in the face of the unknowable is probably one of the most appealing things about her work."
The Oct. 23 Bishop Centennial event is sponsored by St. Louis Poetry Center and Washington University's Special Collections Department, which also houses a 250-letter correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and poet May Swenson. The reading is scheduled from 4-6 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 214, on Washington University's Danforth Campus. A reception will follow in the Ginkgo Reading Room in the nearby Olin Library. The event is free and open to the public.
Richard Newman is author of the poetry collections "Borrowed Towns" and "Domestic Fugues." He edits River Styx and co-directs, along with Adrian Matejka, the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series.