Elizabeth Bishop's Postcards: An Exhibition Main Menu Preface: By Ronald Patkus Online Exhibition Introduction 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

Animal Tears

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Bishop’s poetry has been a rich source of material for Animal Studies critics who have written about her animals-as-people, her people-as-animals, and her challenge to such distinctions altogether (Paton, Fortuny, Malay, Furlani, MacRae, Komura). The animal postcards in particular articulate emotions like grief with astonishing frequency and vulnerability. An early postcard from Key West to Frani Blough Muser, sent on January 1st, 1937, demonstrates her enduring fascination with Florida’s bird life and, in this case, with the eating habits of the pelican. The postcard commemorates Bishop’s first impressions of Key West (“a place that had never even entered my consciousness until I got there”) and her capture of a fish “that weighed 60lbs.” The image of the pelican is accompanied by an Edward Lear-inspired limerick which makes fun of the bird’s “Bellican.” In a postcard not included in the exhibition, Bishop confesses to eating various animals over the course of her travels, “armadillo at a game restaurant in Brazil, & boar, & long ago in N.S., bear” (VC 35.10). In another animal postcard sent from the Galapagos Islands, this one depicting an iguana, sea lions and a pair of blue-footed boobies, she is less carnivorous: “The birds & animals are really tame—no fear of man—and you can talk to them (not pet them, however)” (VC 112.14). An awful lot of talking to animals goes on in Bishop’s published poetry. In “North Haven,” her elegy for Robert Lowell who died in September 1977, the return of goldfinches and sparrows bring tears to the eyes. A year earlier, just a couple of months before Lowell’s death, Bishop made a similar observation in a postcard to Loren MacIver.

Bishop treated some animal postcards as almost talismans. On January 22nd, 1975, she shared a postcard of Albrecht Dürer’s “Little Owl” with Aunt Grace, commenting on its “soothing” qualities. A decade earlier, in 1966, she sent a postcard of a baby seal to her Brazilian friend, Rosalina Leão. When Bishop went to feed them, “they all got out of bed so to speak (it was late) & craned their necks like a lot of sunflowers, and then looked disappointed—eyes full of tears—when I returned with no fish.” The baby seal may remind readers of the seal in “At the Fishhouses” who, like Bishop, “was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion” (P 63). In unpublished correspondence with her analyst, Dr Ruth Foster, Bishop confessed to associating Foster with the seal and thinking of the kiss at the end of the poem as “a sort of seal” (VC 118.33). Postcards are a form of open letter, a message without seal as it were, but in this case it feels as if a secret, unsealed message is passing between Bishop and her friend that is about more than a baby animal. The image of the seal stands in for something—Lota waiting for Bishop’s letters in Brazil, Bishop waiting for Lota’s replies in Seattle, or perhaps even Rosalina as a sympathetic go-between?---but it is impossible to know for sure. Bishop expresses emotion through the seal’s tears, a role often performed by animals in her published and unpublished writing.   
 

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