“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived,” Elizabeth Bishop, who was born on this day in 1911, once said to Robert Lowell.
The poems about Brazil that finally started appearing, in the late fifties, have raised charges of condescension toward the people Bishop treats as characters. “Manuelzhino,” for example, is a fond but exasperated complaint, in a landowner’s voice, about an inept gardener—“half squatter, half tenant ”—who genially fails at every assigned task. The speaker is fully aware of the inequities between master and servant but also fully enjoys the system’s benefits.
On the unnamed island, overhung with all the hemisphere’s leftover clouds—“a sort of cloud-dump,” in Bishop’s phrase—Robinson Crusoe had nightmares of countless other islands, and feared that, eventually, he would have to live on every one. Bishop started writing a poem about Crusoe in the mid-sixties; she took it up again three years after Lota’s death. The poem takes the form of a monologue by Crusoe, long after his rescue from the island and the death of “my dear Friday.
On campus, she cut an almost exaggeratedly modest figure. At a time when Sexton was giving readings accompanied by a rock band, Bishop was assigning her class exercises in iambic pentameter. She was fifty-nine when she arrived, and remained until she was sixty-six; her students often described her as looking like someone’s aunt or grandmother. The poems she wrote in these years were no less modest than her demeanor, and no less deceptive.
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How Many Stars Are in the Milky Way?Elizabeth Howell, Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before that, since 2012. Elizabeth's reporting includes an exclusive with Office of the Vice-President of the United States, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, 'Why Am I Taller?', is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and (soon) a Bachelor of History from Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science since 2015. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/howellspace
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