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• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 1.jpg 2023-09-20T20:43:17+00:00 X marks the spot 5 plain 2023-12-13T16:03:11+00:00 The exhibition begins, where Bishop’s habit of collecting and writing postcards begins, in Great Village, Nova Scotia, the small town on the Bay of Fundy where she spent the formative years of her childhood. The first postcard in the exhibition is a view of Cumberland Road, Great Village. “I drove the cow to pasture up this road,” Bishop records on the other side. The message is as much an aide-memoire for herself as anybody else, a reminder, too, of the importance of postcards to the Bulmer family. In “In the Village,” the short story that bridges the “Brazil” and “Elsewhere” sections of her third book, Questions of Travel (1965), Bishop reflects on her family’s collection of postcards and the disjunction between the beloved postcard world of colored ink, crumbling glitter and artificially outlined buildings and the “gray postcards of the village store [that] are so unilluminating that they scarcely count” (Pr 65). Postcards were worth keeping not because they were strictly accurate, but because they offered a view of the world “as it should be” (Pr 65), or, one might add, as it once was.
  
  Bishop wrote, “I wish you were here” (VC 29.4), just the once, but frequently grumbled, “Not like this picture” (VC 31.7). The first case of postcards, subtitled “X marks the spot,” draws attention to the precise place where Bishop is in the world—from Newfoundland to North Haven, via Key West, Washington, Rio, and Seattle—and to the odd sense that she is not fully in any of these places, at least not emotionally (see Appendix 1 for a full list of the places Bishop sent postcards from). A perfect example of this is the postcard she sent to Loren MacIver from the University Inn, Seattle, on January 8th, 1966. Bishop was in Seattle to take up her first teaching post at the University of Washington. She was also taking a break (if not yet breaking up) from her long-term partner in Brazil, Lota de Macedo Soares. A postcard sent from a hotel, especially a university hotel, does not sound very homely. Bishop emphasizes the point by comically annotating the image of the heated pool (“snow falling into it”). Her message hopefully suggests this might become a “home away from home—temporarily, at least,” before admitting that she doesn’t feel at home at all: “It makes me feel very very New Englandish, or Latin Americanish.” She is homesick, but not sure which home to prefer, New England or Latin America, North or South.
  
  The postcard paradoxically records what is not there just as much as what is. In an unpublished essay, Bishop compared her maternal grandmother’s glass eye to “the problem of writing poetry […] the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real: the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye” (EAP 212). The postcard fits this definition just as well as a poem. Postcards were not so much documentary artifacts for Bishop, but marking points in time and space, palimpsests of different literal and metaphorical points of view. The point in selecting a postcard was not to find a replica of what one could ordinarily see—“After all, one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color” (Pr 65)—but to encourage the recipient to look again and test out their first impressions.
  
  The general rule of a Bishop postcard is: If an image shows one place, she is likely to be day-dreaming and certainly writing about somewhere else. The “X“ on the front of the postcard marks the temporary position of the poet’s physical body in time and space, but it doesn’t give us the full coordinates. We have to read the message to understand “why” she is there.