Elizabeth Bishop: A Conversation about Her Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the great masters of American poetry of the 20th Century. Her remarkable gifts have been described in a variety of ways, but one gift repeatedly recognized by readers is her skill at recounting the results of her capacity for observation. As Randall Jarrell remarked in response to her very first book of poems, North & South: “All her poems have written underneath, ‘I have seen it.’” Perhaps the following precise and general praise by Howard Moss successfully suggests her specialness: “What Elizabeth Bishop brings to poetry is a new imagination; because of that, she is revolutionary, not ‘experimental.’ ... Admired by critics, poets, and anyone genuinely interested in writing, her work is not easily labeled.... She is not academic, beat, cooked, raw, formal, informal, metrical, syllabic, or what have you. She is a poet pure and simple who has perfect pitch.” Four lovers of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop—Bonnie Costello, Alice Quinn, Lloyd Schwartz, and Jean Valentine—will discuss what they admire about her poems and read aloud from her work.

Participants

Bonnie Costello

Professor, Boston University

Bonnie Costello is a professor at Boston University whose scholarly work concentrates on modern and contemporary poetry, often from fresh new angles. She is the author of Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981), Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), and the general editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1997). Her more recent literary studies... read more! »

Alice Quinn

Executive Director, Poetry Society of America

Alice Quinn is the executive director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University. She was the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker for two decades and before that was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Ms. Quinn compiled a collection of Elizabeth... read more! »

Lloyd Schwartz

Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Lloyd Schwartz is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In addition to being a poet and literary critic, Mr. Schwartz is the classical music editor for The Boston Phoenix and a regular commentator on NPR’s Fresh Air. In 1994, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his... read more! »

Jean Valentine

Poet

Jean Valentine has been contributing poems to our literature for half a century. Her first book, Dream Barker and Other Poems, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1965. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 won the National Book Award in 2004, and her most recent book, Break the Glass, was a... read more! »