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

Bishop’s Favorite Postcards

7
Bjarne Rogan observes that the “postcard craze went hand in hand with the rise of a new consumer culture, a more affluent society, and a new middle class” (1), with women taking the lead in postcard collecting (Schor 12). Collectors saved postcards in albums, joined collecting clubs, and subscribed to industry magazines (Staff 64-66, Willoughby 16, 131). Bishop was an avid collector as well as sender of picture postcards, keeping track of new postcard series in the places she lived, and browsing through junk shops for antique postcards. Bishop saved her Great Village postcards in an album, and kept a number of postcards she had bought or received. She also had favorite postcards which she mailed numerous times, including a Florida Key Lime pie recipe card; a postcard of Boston baked beans superimposed over the Boston harbor; a photocard of Dona Olimpia, a local celebrity in Ouro Preto, Brazil; and a postcard map of North Haven, Maine. Bishop indicated other favorites in her postcard messages, stating of a Brazilian church near Ouro Preto that “This is my very favorite church in the whole world—like a lop-sided little Chinese package outside, & inside absolutely gorgeous,” and pronouncing the postcard of Paul Klee’s “A Young Girl's Adventure” “my next-to favorite card.” 

Bishop also liked cards that depicted writers’ and artists’ homes. She sent cards depicting the homes of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, George Sands and Frédéric Chopin, and John Howard Payne (who wrote the song “Home Sweet Home”). A 1937 postcard of Rome to Frani Blough Muser seems to center on the Spanish Steps, but Bishop’s message indicates her real focus: “Keats died in the house at the right.”  

In addition to the animal cards and sea and shore cards displayed in this exhibit, Bishop loved what she called “local p-cards” (VC 28.4), especially those featuring local celebrities like Dona Olimpia, or indigenous populations in representative dress. “In a town full of eccentrics,” she commented of Dona Olimpia, “she stands out as the most photogenic.” Bishop hoped to give her “my last good hat,” but wondered if she would ever get the opportunity. Bishop is amused by Dona Olimpia’s fame and pities her poverty, but her empathy is often marked by her racial and class privilege (Parmar), a complex stance mirrored in poems including “Manuelzinho” (Ravinthiran). “Local” postcards depicting indigenous populations have generated important scholarship on the Western, colonial gaze (Alloula, DeRoo, Geary and Webb), and Bishop’s local postcards invite comparison to poems such as “Brazil, January 1, 1502” and “The Burglar of Babylon” that reflect on this gaze.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Online Exhibition vclibrary

This page references: