Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
This book brings together almost all of the known interviews Elizabeth Bishop gave over a period of thirty years. Included also are a few selected pieces based on conversations with her. All together they allow her ardent and admiring readers a rewarding, close-up encounter with one of America’s great writers.
In this collection of conversations Bishop expresses her opinions about various types of poetry, describes her view of the geography of the imagination in the writing process, defends her often criticized feminist views, and discusses her role as teacher and poet.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) won many prizes for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. She was graduated from Vassar, where she knew Mary McCarthy. She taught at Harvard, New York University, and the University of Washington and was a long-time resident in Brazil.
Admirers of Elizabeth Bishop have reveled in One Art (1994), a collection of her letters, and will find much of value in this lively collection of interviews spanning twenty-five years of the poet’s very literary life. Bishop dazzled and enlightened such sophisticated interviewers as Edward Lucie-Smith, Tom Robbins, Anna Quindlen, and David McCullough at various stages in her poetic evolution. She notes that she writes most often about ‘geography’ and animals, identifies her influences—George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore—and, an ardent feminist, bristles at being labeled the ‘greatest feminine poet of the decade’ in 1970. Childhood memories surface, as do amusing stories about occupying the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1950, living in Brazil, and, of course, reading and writing poetry. There is much heart and wit in these conversations, but some of the most disarming glimpses into Bishop’s personality are found in the volume’s final piece, Dana Gioia’s vivid ‘Studying with Miss Bishop,’ a delightful description of Bishop’s unforgettable approach to teaching poetry at Harvard.
George Monteiro, professor emeritus of English and of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown University, is the author or editor of books on Elizabeth Bishop, Henry James, Henry Adams, Robert Frost, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, and Luis de Camoes, among others.
