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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.
Postcard of the town of Sóller in Majorca sent by Bishop to Frani Blough in May 1936. On the back she writes: “I’m sure this was much better than Martha’s Vineyard.” (VC 34.5; Courtesy of Vassar College)
Postcard of Newfoundland with Bishop’s correction of the angles of the cliffs sent to Frani Blough in August 1932. “This place is far beyond my fondest dreams,” she writes. (VC 34.2; Courtesy of Vassar College)
Postcard of the Piazza di Spagna sent by Bishop to Frani Blough in 1937. “Keats died at the house on the right,” she tells her friend. (VC 34.6; Courtesy of Vassar College)
Postcard of a group of tourists at Blarney Castle sent to Frani Blough in 1937 by Bishop, who turns the reverential scene of the ‘kissing of the stone’ into farce with her mocking message. (VC 34.6; Courtesy of Vassar College)
Postcard of a Florida sunrise sent by Bishop to Lloyd Frankenberg in March 1945. She sends it reluctantly, claiming it is the only one she has. (VC 29.8; Courtesy of Vassar College)
Postcard of Cos Cob, a neighborhood in the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, sent by Bishop to Lloyd Frankenberg in May 1949. (VC 29.9; Courtesy of Vassar College)
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