Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop

UNPUBLISHED POSTCARD SENT BY ELIZABETH BISHOP, FROM SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY, VASSAR COLLEGE. COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY THE ALICE H. METHFESSEL TRUST. PRINTED BY PERMISSION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX ON BEHALF OF THE ELIZABETH BISHOP ESTATE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, “wherever that may be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Travel.” She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.”

Read more: The Paris Review