This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 3.jpg 2023-09-20T20:53:23+00:00 Planes, Trains and Automobiles 2 plain 2023-12-13T16:07:13+00:00 Questions of travel were at the center of Bishop’s life and writing long before she wrote a poem partly answering them, questions not just about why people move from one place to another, but why goods, mail, and even ideas are transported too. Postcards offered a unique opportunity to pose these questions as she was literally traveling. She often connected issues of transport to the challenges of delivering the mail. Almost every means and mode of transport is represented in the archive’s collection of postcards. Many of Bishop’s poems adopt these “in motion” perspectives. “The Man-Moth” appears to have been written on or at least about a subway train. “Argument” remembers “all that land / beneath the plane” (P 79). “The Moose” takes place on a bus. Leaving North America for the first time in July 1935 on a Nazi freighter called the Königstein, Bishop comments on the “flattening” effect both of the picture of the ship (“give me that schooner off to the right any time”) and the euphemistically grouped “German tourists.”    
  
  Later postcards, even those not sent at sea, frequently reflect on the dangers and indignities of travel. Even when she is not actually sick, she is often traveling to or from a doctor. In 1978, Bishop mailed a copy of a 1857 clipper card, advertising the departure of the clipper ship Witchcraft from Boston to San Francisco, to her friend Dorothee Bowie in Seattle. The clipper card included Bishop’s own address at Lewis Wharf in Boston, the modern postcard traveling in the same direction westwards to Bowie as the Witchcraft had more than a century ago. Alongside the humor of the visual joke, a flimsy postcard now outpacing the Witchcraft, the message tells a related if much sadder story about time speeding up for the author of the card too. Bishop’s main reason for writing to Bowie is to ask her to source a hair dye called “Precious Pewter” she last found in Seattle. “I’m getting whiter,” she admitted.     
  
  Getting from one place to another often becomes an explicit or implicit metaphor for negotiating emotional turmoil. The journey between moods (or juxtaposition of tones) is something Bishop worked on in private and in public (Trousdale). “I think one can be cheerful AND profound,” she declared to Anne Stevenson: “or, how to be grim without groaning” (Pr 417).  In another postcard to Bowie, one sent shortly after Lota’s death, a happy-seeming image of a car traveling through a Rio park with Sugarloaf Mountain in the background is off-set by the knowledge that the car is passing through the park that Lota designed, a park that the postcard mislabels in the caption and that Bishop corrects in a handwritten note.