Sunday, 4 a.m.

Sunday, 4 a.m. An endless and floodeddreamland, lying low,cross- and wheel-studdedlike a tick-tack-toe. At the right, ancillary,“Mary” ‘s close and blue.Which Mary? Aunt Mary?Tall Mary Stearns I knew? The old kitchen knife box,full of rusty nails,is at the left. A high vox humana somewhere wails: The gray horse needs shoeing!It’s always the same!What are you [...]

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Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

I’m not trying to do anything specific in my poetry — only to please myself.Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) Below are excerpts from an interview with Elizabeth Bishop by Alexandra Johnson, published in the Christian Science Monitor (23 March 1978, 20-21) and later in the book Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, edited by George Monteiro and published in [...]

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Exchanging Hats: The Paintings of Elizabeth Bishop

The painter does not paint in order to fill the canvas with colours, any more than a poet writes to fill a page with words. — René Magritte There are things in each of us as humans so fragile they exist nowhere except in ourselves. These watercolors by Bishop seem like fragile pieces of the [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1956

The Weed I dreamed that dead, and meditating, I lay upon a grave, or bed, (at least, some cold and close-built bower). In the cold heart, its final thought stood frozen, drawn immense and clear, stiff and idle as I was there; and we remained unchanged together for a year, a minute, an hour. Suddenly [...]

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Poem of the day, Jan. 4 2010

Poem About the size of an old – style dollar bill, American or Canadian, mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays —this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?) has never earned any money in its life. Useless and free, it has spent seventy years as a minor family relic handed along [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1947

Skunk Hour For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores [...]

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Poem of the day, Oct. 12 2009

The Moose for Grace Bulmer Bowers From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay [...]

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Poem of the day, Aug. 21 2009

Birdcall —for Elizabeth Bishop Tuwee, calls a bird near the house, Tuwee, cries another, downhill in the woods. No wind, early September, beeches and pines, Sumac aflame, tuwee, tuwee, a question and a faint But definite response, tuwee, tuwee, as if engaged In a conversation expected to continue all afternoon, Where is?—I’m here?—an upward inflection [...]

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The Fish

In this video clip from Helen Vendler’s Voices and Visions series, you can hear Marianne Moore reading her poem, “The Fish.” Both Moore and her protege Elizabeth Bishop wrote poems entitled “The Fish.” Below is correspondence between them on Bishop’s fish poem. The Fish by Marianne Moore (published 1921) wade through black jade. Of the [...]

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Poem of the day, July 10 2009

Breakfast Song My love, my saving grace, your eyes are awfully blue. I kiss your funny face, your coffee-flavored mouth. Last night I slept with you. Today I love you so how can I bear to go (as soon I must, I know) to bed with ugly death in that cold, filthy place, to sleep [...]

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