This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 6.jpg 2023-09-21T15:54:26+00:00 The Sea and Its Shore 4 plain 2023-12-13T16:08:16+00:00 It would have been easy to devote the entire exhibition to postcards set by the shoreline. In addition to living near the ocean, Bishop did her best to share these sea views with her family and friends via postcards. Her messages on the other side of the seashore view often reference completely different places entirely however, almost as if the shoreline was a place for reflecting on past or future journeys, very rarely present-day impressions. Littoral zones fascinated Bishop throughout her career, signifying any kind of edgeland that couldn’t be accurately represented on a map. 
  
  In a stunning postcard of a man and a child flying kites on Copacabana Beach in Rio, Bishop composes a prose poem to her friends Loren MacIver and Lloyd Frankenburg, focusing not on Rio where she was spending most of her time while Lota was constructing Flamengo Park, but on memories of Paris in the 1930s and future dreams of traveling to Egypt and seeing the Nile. “Oh for the wings of a kite to fly to Paris on,” the postcard text begins, making clear where her heart, if not her physical body, resides. 
  
  An important seashore postcard was sent from San Francisco to Brazil on March 10th, 1968. Bishop was living at the time with her new partner, Roxanne Cumming, but one would never know this from reading the message. Lota had died, just six months earlier, in New York. Bishop had not been able to keep Lota alive—a haunting fragment speaks of “no coffee can wake you” (EAP 149), but perhaps, the postcard suggests, she did not need to forget her. The postcard depicts a sculpture of Napoleon made of driftwood, one of around 50 found object sculptures that were erected on the Emeryville Mudflats in California in the 1960s and 70s. The Emeryville beach artists were influenced, like Bishop, by Kurt Schwitters. The Napoleon sculpture may also have reminded Bishop of her own poem, “The Monument,” in particular its role as a burial site for an artist-prince. The postcard was addressed to her Brazilian friend, Magú Costa Ribeiro. The first paragraph discusses her earnest attempts to keep her Portuguese alive by listening to records. She worries about flooding in Minas Gerais and Ouro Preto. Finally, she asks for a photograph of Lota, before confessing to missing her “horribly […] not the Lota of the past few years, but the old, well one I was so happy with. I know life will never be so nice again.”