This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Elizabeth Bishop's Postcards: An Exhibition Main Menu Preface: By Ronald Patkus Events News Works Cited Catalogue Key West Exhibition Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards, held at Key West Literary Seminar’s Elizabeth Bishop House in Key West, Florida, from March 6, 2025 to May 3, 2025. Paris Exhibition Copyright © 2023 Vassar College Libraries

Online Exhibition

Introduction: Elizabeth Bishop's Postcards
By Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the twentieth-century’s most important and influential poets. Her poems are included in nearly every anthology of twentieth-century poetry, those poems taught across the world. In the 2008 Library of America edition of Bishop’s work, editors Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz arranged their selection of her writing via three genres: Poems, Prose, and Letters. William Benton’s book, Exchanging Hats: Paintings (1996), added a fourth art. This exhibition and accompanying catalog of Bishop’s picture postcards, selected from 570 postcards held at Vassar College, celebrates a fifth.

Although Bishop’s correspondence is considered central to her career—she famously described letters as “an art form or something” (OA 544) and taught a course on letter writing at Harvard—few of the hundreds if not thousands of postcards she sent during a lifetime of peripatetic travel have been exhibited or published. One Art: Letters (1994) contains 27 transcribed postcards, without a single image described or reproduced, while Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008) includes 37 postcards from Bishop but only supplies verbal descriptions of the postcard images. Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker (2011) contains few postcards and no images.

What do we miss by not seeing these postcards? When Bishop sent her friend Frani Blough Muser a postcard from Newfoundland and writes that she wishes, “and not just conventionally,” that Frani could “see them,” the effect of this phrase rests less in the written text than on the juxtaposition between the postcard image of the scene and the writing on the other side. “About this many degrees off,” she captions the image in handwriting with a line showing the real angle.

Although the picture postcard was central to Bishop’s travels, writing, and art, it has been almost completely overlooked in the biographies and scholarship dedicated to her life and work. Bishop didn’t employ postcards simply to keep in touch, much as this was important to her. Rather, she thought on and through picture postcards, a simultaneously verbal and visual form, as an extension of but also something distinct from the cognitive workings out we see in her notebooks or letters. The picture postcard combines image and text, seeing and reading, in what Naomi Schor has called the “perfectly reversible semiotic object” (21). Bishop explores a number of analogies for this reversible object, including doorways, windows, museum displays, movie theaters, and liminal places such as the sea and shore.

A perfect example of this is the postcard she sent to Helen Muchnic of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence. The image of an open door feels like an optical illusion. It invites us in, but we are not sure how to interpret perspective here, or even where to focus. The message on the verso side gives us Bishop’s take on what we are looking at, describing it as “One of his works that I find most impressive—also mysterious and futile since it doesn’t ever get anywhere.” Instead of explaining the image, the message actually confirms its mystery, as Bishop moves through her own memory bank via a series of steps from Florence to Ouro Preto to Key West. The image and text are in conversation with each other but no one side dominates. Something similar happens whenever we come to look closely at almost any Bishop postcard. We flick from back to front. We look in, but are denied entrance. We read down, but also look left and right. We settle down to know something, yet wonder if we know less by the postcard’s end.

Although we considered organizing the exhibition by correspondent, place, and time period, Bishop’s picture postcards explicitly challenge such definitive categories, emphasizing instead movement, in-betweenness, and the layering of time and place. These are preoccupations central to Bishop’s writing and visual art. Categories dissolve on approaching any Bishop work closely, as the end of “The Monument” warns us. An object that looks like one thing might also be “the beginning of a painting, / a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument” (P 27). The exhibition is organized around important features of Bishop’s postcard practice, illuminating a fifth art that not only integrates Bishop into the history of modern media, but also casts new light on familiar work. The picture postcard is a synecdoche of Bishop’s aesthetics more generally, an art of looks, stares and views (“and not just conventionally”).

Jonathan Ellis is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield.

Susan Rosenbaum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia.

Contents of this path: