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• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 11.jpg 2023-09-21T21:40:05+00:00 Postcard Histories 2 plain 2023-12-13T16:09:54+00:00 The popularity of the picture postcard was well established by the time Bishop began sending them in the late 1920s (4). The “golden age” of the picture postcard, from the 1890s up to World War One, coincided with mass tourism, a new class of consumers, and new reproduction technologies, with between 200 and 300 billion postcards produced and mailed (Rogan 1-3). During this era, the picture postcard underwent a series of changes, chiefly connected to the placement and importance of the image (5). 
  
  Over the course of her career, Bishop reflected regularly and wittily on postcard conventions and her own postcard practices. Handwritten early postcards in which she dutifully and neatly filled in the verso side are best represented by the postcards she sent from Europe to Frani Blough Muser, Margaret Miller, and Rhoda Sheehan. She was keenly attuned to the distinction between the postcard and the letter, even as she commonly merged these forms. Her habit of mailing multiple picture postcards in an envelope as if they were part of a letter or at least on the way to becoming one started early in her writing life, ditto her love of captioning or otherwise writing upon the image side. Bishop’s residence in Brazil coincided with a more irreverent approach to using postcard space. From the mid-1950s, the verso side often combined handwriting and typewritten script. It might be written or typed horizontally or vertically or both. 
  
  The exhibition includes evidence of her postcard collecting, including postcards from her own family. An image of Great Village from the perspective of the Bishop house doubles as a Christmas card from Bishop’s uncle, Arthur “Art” Bulmer, to his sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson. In 1972 Bishop recycled a card titled “To my dear Aunt” that had originally been sent from Windsor, Ontario. In a short letter accompanying the postcard Bishop tells her “dear” aunt, Aunt Grace, that she “found [it] in the junk-shop—mailed in 1914, in Canada, too!” Before this, she mentions “a long piece” she needs to get finished to read at Harvard in June. The “long piece” was “The Moose,” a poem dedicated to “Grace Bulmer Bowers,” a poem that recalls her own childhood journey, like the postcard, from Canada to New England, and the sound of “Grandparents’ voices,” “recognizable, somewhere, / back in the bus” (P 191). Bishop and Grace’s correspondence in the early 1970s is mediated by an older generation’s epistolary “voice” from Canada, much as we overhear snatches of conversation of older travellers on the bus in “The Moose.” The repurposed “To my dear Aunt” postcard can be seen as a private gift that prepares the way for the more public gesture of dedicating a poem to her.
  
  Some of Bishop’s regular correspondents, including her Aunt Grace, didn’t like postcards at all, but she persisted on sending them, confessing that “it is very hard to write a letter as we drive or sight see all day & stay at a different place each night” (VC 26.6). In a long vertical postcard of Rio she sent to UT and Joe Summers in 1963, probably one of her lengthiest postcard messages, she apologized for not writing a “real letter.” Bishop felt a postcard’s relationship to reality was distinct to that of a letter, its open nature precluding the kind of personal disclosures we find more frequently in her published correspondence. Yet the images often conveyed non-verbal feeling and meaning, inviting a different kind of reading, one that is visual as well as verbal.
  
  Although Bishop delighted in postcards, she often expressed guilt about not writing a lengthier missive. Towards the end of Bishop’s life, when she settled in Boston, she apologized for limiting herself to postcards “as I do only too often these academic years” (VC 35.8). It was at this point that she definitively switched to bringing a “traveling typewriter” with her, citing “rheumatism,” “illegibility,” and “time”: “I don’t really burble on nearly as much when I write with a pen” (VC 31.5).
  
  4. The earliest known postcard by Bishop was sent to her mother’s sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, from Camp Chequessett, MA, in July 1928 (Barry 56).  
  5. Most significantly, in the late nineteenth-century, the back of the card contained the picture with a small space for a caption-like message, while the front was reserved for the address and stamp; by the early twentieth century, the picture was moved to the card front, with space for the stamp, address, and a message on back (Staff 66-67, Rogan, Willoughby 47, 67).