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  3. Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive

Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive

Bethany Hicok
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  • Overview

  • Contents

In a life full of chaos and travel, Elizabeth Bishop managed to preserve and even partially catalog, a large collection—more than 3,500 pages of drafts of poems and prose, notebooks, memorabilia, artwork, hundreds of letters to major poets and writers, and thousands of books—now housed at Vassar College. Informed by archival theory and practice, as well as a deep appreciation of Bishop’s poetics, the collection charts new territory for teaching and reading American poetry at the intersection of the institutional archive, literary study, the liberal arts college, and the digital humanities. The fifteen essays in this collection use this archive as a subject, and, for the first time, argue for the critical importance of working with and describing original documents in order to understand the relationship between this most archival of poets and her own archive. This collection features a unique set of interdisciplinary scholars, archivists, translators, and poets, who approach the archive collaboratively and from multiple perspectives. The contributions explore remarkable new acquisitions, such as Bishop’s letters to her psychoanalyst, one of the most detailed psychosexual memoirs of any twentieth century poet and the exuberant correspondence with her final partner, Alice Methfessel, an important series of queer love letters of the 20th century. Lever Press’s digital environment allows the contributors to present some of the visual experience of the archive, such as Bishop’s extraordinary “multi-medial” and “multimodal” notebooks, in order to reveal aspects of the poet’s complex composition process.
  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Member Institution Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part I The Queer Archive
    • Chapter One. “Too Shy to Stop”
    • Chapter Two. Elizabeth Bishop’s Sanity
    • Chapter Three. Elizabeth Bishop’s Perspectives on Marriage
    • Chapter Four. “Keeping Up a Silent Conversation”
    • Chapter Five. Dear Elizabeth, Dear May
    • Chapter Six. Odd Job
  • Part II Travels: Scale, Location, Architecture, Archive
    • Chapter Seven. Elizabeth Bishop and Race in the Archive
    • Chapter Eight. “I miss all that bright, detailed flatness”
    • Chapter Nine. “All the untidy activity”
    • Chapter Ten. The Burglar of the Tower of Babel
    • Chapter Eleven. Elizabeth Bishop’s Geopoetics
  • Part III The Work in Progress
    • Chapter Twelve. The Archival Aviary: Elizabeth Bishop and Drama
    • Chapter Thirteen. Archival Animals
    • Chapter Fourteen. “Huge Crowd Pleased by New Models”
    • Chapter Fifteen. The Matter of Elizabeth Bishop’s Professionalism
  • Works Cited
  • List of Contributors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
The complete proposal and manuscript of this work were subjected to a partly closed ("single-blind") review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.
Citable Link
Published: 2020
Publisher: Lever Press
Copyright: 2020
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-64315-011-6 (paper)
  • 978-1-64315-012-3 (open access)
Subject
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / LGBT

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A notebook page from Bishop's transcriptions of blues lyrics of the 1930s and 40s where she copied lines from Blind Boy Fuller's 1936 "Evil Hearted Woman." Bishop places several question marks in this rendering, betraying a halting confidence about words and phrases.

Notebook Page with "Evil Hearted Woman"

From Chapter 7

Bishop copied “Evil Hearted Woman” by Blind Boy Fuller into her notebook. (VC 74.12.1; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Page one depicts two black servants, a mother and son, unsuccessfully attempting to clean pots and pans for the household.

Sapolio Ad, Image 1

From Chapter 7

Page one of the advertising leaflet for Sapolio soap, an extensively advertised brand popular in the 1930s, where the visual grammar of blackness/dirt and whiteness/cleanliness unfolds over the panels. The image overlaps with page three of the booklet. (VC121.19; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Page two shows the "Modern Household Fairy" arriving with a bar of Sapolio Soap for the white woman of the house. Page three shows the two black servants joyously and now successfully cleaning the pots and pans. The black maid can now see herself in the clean mirror as she gazes into it.

Sapolio Ad, Images 2-3

From Chapter 7

Pages two and three of the Sapolio soap advertising leaflet. (VC121.19; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Page four shows the white "master of the house" gazing in distress upon his white classical statue of a woman covered in dirt. Page five shows the "lady of the house" with her son and a grubby mantelpiece and table, which she is unable to clean. The child is about to drink some poisonous liquid.

Sapolio Ad, Images 4-5

From Chapter 7

Pages four and five of the Sapolio soap advertising leaflet. (VC121.19; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Page six shows that the master's classical white statue of a woman is all clean and sparkling bright thanks to Sapolio soap as is the room where the lady of the house and her son reside on page seven of the booklet.

Sapolio Ad, Images 6-7

From Chapter 7

Pages six and seven of the Sapolio soap advertising leaflet. (VC121.19; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Page eight shows a different white father and son from the earlier images. Here the man has overturned the ink jar and spilled ink everywhere. And his son also seems to be covered with ink.

Sapolio Ad, Image 8

From Chapter 7

Page eight of the Sapolio soap advertising leaflet. (VC121.19; Courtesy of Vassar College)

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