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Magical Realist Biographies: Italo Calvino

Italo CalvinoITALO CALVINO

Born:  15 October 1923

Died:   19 September 1985

Little known facts:

The first thing Calvino ever published was a drawing that appeared in a magazine published by a drawing correspondence school; he was their youngest pupil at eleven years old.

The dense forests and abundant fauna in Calvino’s early fictionderived from a small working farm on which his father pioneered the cultivation of what were then exotic fruits.

 

Much better known facts:

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923, the son of two Italian agronomists.

Calvino’s mother encouraged both Italo and his younger brother to join the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group fighting the Germans in WWII.

 

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and a writer of short stories and novels, best known for his trilogy Our Ancestors (1952–1959), his collection of short stories Cosmicomics (1965), and novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). While Invisible Cities, a collection of poems in prose, was more successful in literary circles, Italian Folktales was a public success in the U.S. where his image has been that of a writer of tales and fantasy.

Two years after Calvino’s birth, his family returned to Italy, settling in San Remo on the Ligurian Coast where his father directed an experimental floriculture station. They also had a country house in the hills, where Calvino’s father actually developed the techniques for growing grapefruit and avocados. In that environment, Italo admired Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and developed early interests in drawing and in stories—much to the dismay of the two scientists who had brought him into the world.

Italo studied in San Remo and enrolled in the agriculture department of the University of Turin to satisfy his parents. Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had occupied Liguria. At twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. He reasoned that, of all the partisan groups, the communists were the best organized, and in the spring of 1944, he joined the Garibaldi Brigades, fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945. Years later, he said politics was necessarily the first phase of his adult life and it held great importance for him because of the traumas involved in surviving the German occupation.

After the war, Calvino began writing about his wartime experiences. He published his first stories after resuming his studies and shifting his focus from agriculture to literature. During this period, he wrote his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders and had already started working for his publisher while he finished his degree.

In this postwar period Calvino joined the Italian Communist Party but soon began to feel increasingly that “the idea of constructing a true democracy in Italy using the model—or myth—of Russia became harder and harder to reconcile.”

In 1952 he produced a novella, The Cloven Viscount that appeared in a series of books by emerging writers called Tokens. Reviewers outside the Party had praise for the work, but his departure from his initial realist style garnered criticism from within the Party. He resigned from the Party in 1956 when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.

Calvino published a collection of Italian folktales in 1956 and the next year brought out The Baron in the Trees. In 1959 he published The Nonexistent Knight. These two combined with The Cloven Viscount are found today in the volume Our Ancestors. In 1965 he published Cosmicomics, and in 1979 he published his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The last works published in his lifetime were a novel Mr. Palomar (1983) and a collection of stories Difficult Loves (1984).

The range of Calvino’s literary production displayed a highly versatile capability to write as a neo-realist and to transition to post-modernist with varying degrees of movement through fabulism to fantasy. He became a well-respected post modernist, declaring that his central theme was the “conflict between the world’s choices and man’s obsession with making sense of them.”

One of his better examples anthologized in English is “The Distance of the Moon.” It is a tale that begins with a premise that a theory about the Earth and the Moon once being very close (attributable to British astronomer and geophysicist George H. Darwin) was in fact true many years ago. The fantastic component involves the people existing at the time, complete with economic motives and organization, with longings for people and things (many unattainable), and choices that had to be made by them as they recognized the Moon was easing away from the Earth. The narrator was a participant and is still trying to make sense of the choices people made at the time. Besides that set of considerations, the reader will find the source of the title of The Moon Milk Review—the predecessor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.

In a collection of his published and unpublished essays produced after his death and at the close of the century, the frame for his major body of work is partially revealed in the discussion of his admiration and his debt to Jorge Luis Borges. Calvino’s initial affinity for Borges centered on the notion that literature is a world rendered and governed by intellect that should “provide us with the equivalent of the chaotic flow of existence, in language, in the texture of the events narrated, in the exploration of the subconscious”—located exactly in the heart of the fin d’ siècle emphasis in art, literature, and science emanating from Vienna into the Western world as detailed by Kandel in The Age of Insight.

Calvino explains “the Borgesian continuity between historical events, literary epics, poetic transformation of events, the power of literary motifs, and their influence on the collective imagination.” However, he points out that within this construct, we must keep in mind “it is in the rapid instant of real life, not in the fluctuating time of dreams, not in the cyclical or eternal time of myths, that one’s fate is decided.” He says the real impact of a literary piece or tradition is on the collective imagination that resides in the subconscious and the conscious mind—for an individual to draw from when looking for a code or a standard by which to make decisions.

During the summer of 1985, Calvino developed a series of notes on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in the fall of that year. However, Calvino was admitted to the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena on 6 September, where he died during the night of the 18th of a cerebral hemorrhage. His Harvard lecture notes were published posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English (as Six Memos for the Next Millennium) in 1993.

His American reputation began when Gore Vidal described all of his novels as of May 30, 1974 in The New York Review of Books. He was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a celebrated contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

A FEW OF ITALO CALVINO’S QUOTES

“Only a certain prosaic solidity can give birth to creativity: fantasy is like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you can’t make anything.” — From an Italian television interview shown after his death, quoted by Gore Vidal

“The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world and, in the end, from politics. That was fortunate. The idea of putting literature in second place, after politics, is an enormous mistake, because politics almost never achieves its ideals.”

 

A FEW QUOTES ABOUT ITALO CALVINO

“He has a scientist’s respect for data (the opposite of the surrealist or fantasist). He wants us to see not only what he sees but what we may have missed by not looking with sufficient attention.” — Gore Vidal

“Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.” — John Updike

 

ITALO CALVINO’S NOTABLE WORK

The Baron in the Trees(1957), Invisible Cities (1974), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Six Memos for the Next Millennium (posthumously)

 

ITALO CALVINO’S AWARDS

Asti Prize 1970

Feltrinelli Prize 1972

Honorary Member of the American Academy 1975

Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1976

French Légion d’honneur 1981

 

SOURCES

Italo Calvino. Difficult Loves (trans. William Weaver). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1958.

Italo Calvino. Why Read the Classics? (trans. Martin McLaughlin). New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.

Gore Vidal. “On Italo Calvino,” The New York Review of Books, November 21, 1985

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/nov/21/on-italo-calvino/

Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130 Interviewed by William Weaver, Damien Pettigrew http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino

Eric R. Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House, 2012.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.

 

 

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Magical Realist Biographies: William Faulkner

284px-Faulkner_2_1954WILLIAM (CUTHBERT) FAULKNER

 

Born: September 25, 1897

Died:   July 6, 1962

Little known facts:

William Faulkner was living briefly in New Orleans, Louisiana where he wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay in 1925—after being prompted by Sherwood Anderson to try writing fiction rather than poetry.

Faulkner actually detested the fame from his recognition to the point that his 17-year-old daughter only learned about the Nobel Prize when she was called to the principal’s office.

 

 

 

Much better known facts:

Falkner was his surname until 1924 when, according to one story, a careless typesetter made an error and a misprint appeared on the title page of his first book, a collection of poems. Apparently, the author had no concern about changing it.

Two Pulitzer Prizes were conferred for what most critics consider two of his lesser novels—A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), awarded posthumously.

William Faulkner was an American short story writer, a novelist, and a Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. He also wrote a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. His most notable works are his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi. His characters operate in a social framework that typifies the growth and subsequent decadence of the Deep South and reflect a century and a half of American history, spanning the decades from the American Civil War through the Depression.

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons. The family moved and settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi when he was a child. Though he traveled to Europe and Asia and worked for extended periods of time in Hollywood, Faulkner lived most of his life in that small town in Lafayette County.

While in high school, he began to write poetry, but he dropped out before graduating and went to work in a bank owned by one of his grandfathers. With the entry of the US into the Great War, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force after being rejected from the US Army because he was too short at five feet five inches. He completed basic training in Toronto, but the war ended before he could make his first solo flight. This never interfered with the storyteller relating years later how he had been shot down in France.

After the war, Faulkner studied literature at the University of Mississippi; he wrote poems and drew cartoons for the university’s humor magazine, The Scream. In 1920 Faulkner left Ole Miss without having finished a degree and moved to New York City where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore and lived in Greenwich Village, associating with other writers and artists. When he returned to Oxford, he began work as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi until the university fired him for reading on the job. The submissions to publishers and rejections finally came to an end. In May of 1924, Faulkner’s long-time friend Phil Stone sent a note to the Four Seas Company in Boston asking if they would publish a collection of poems by an unknown writer if the cost of publication were covered. After this first book, The Marble Faun (1924) did not gain success, he left for New Orleans specifically to meet established novelist Sherwood Anderson who took an interest in his work and encouraged him as indicated above to write fiction.

 

In July 1925, he left New Orleans for Genoa and Paris. During his four months stay in Europe, Faulkner toured the WWI battlefields and also spent ten days hiking in England. After the hiatus, he published Soldier’s Pay (1926), a novel about the return of a soldier, who had been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I followed shortly by Mosquitoes, a satire of Bohemian life in New Orleans.

In 1929 he had his first substantially successful work, The Sound and the Fury, published which earned him some long awaited recognition as a serious writer. In that same year, he married Estelle Oldham Franklin, whom he had courted seriously but unsuccessfully as an undergraduate, after she divorced her first husband. During that year he wrote the first of fifteen novels set in his notional Mississippi. His series deals with racism, class division, and family—as both a life force and a curse—as recurring themes.

The next year he purchased a traditional pillared house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak. Many years later, after his passing and the passing of his wife, it was sold to the University of Mississippi and made into a museum.

While working the nightshift at an electrical power station, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930)—now considered one of the best English-language novels of the 20th Century.

He dedicated Sanctuary (1931) to Sherwood Anderson “for services rendered,” and, according to the author, it was “deliberately conceived to make money.”

 

In order to support Estelle and their three children, Faulkner had to work for the next twenty years in Hollywood on several screenplays, from Today We Live (1933) to Land of the Pharaohs (1955). Ironically, the conservative producers considered Faulkner’s stories too daring for film with all their rape, incest, and suicide; and in the publishing world, his Light in August (1932) was initially rejected, but is now also considered one of the best novels in the century.

While engaged in scriptwriting, Faulkner published several other novels: Pylon (1934) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—now often considered one of the best novels of the 20th Century and Faulkner’s fourth on that Modern Library list.

By 1945, Faulkner’s novels were out of print and he moved to Hollywood again to write scripts, mostly under contract to director Howard Hawks who had read Faulkner’s 1926 novel Soldier’s Pay when it first appeared.

He worked with Hawks on the films To Have and Have Not (1944), based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler’s novel. When Hemingway had turned down Howard Hawk’s offer to work with his own book, the director said, “I’ll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you can anyway.”

Faulkner had a second period of success beginning with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946). However, his physical and mental functioning started to decline, forwarded downslope by his hard drinking and coping with his wife’s drug addiction.

He published Requiem for a Nun in 1951, and A Fable in 1954. The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) continued the story of the Snopes family, which he had begun in The Hamlet (1940).

 

Faulkner was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville from February to June 1957 and held that position again in 1958. He suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction on July 6, 1962, at Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. He is buried along with his family in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford.

William Faulkner’s works have been placed within the literary traditions of modernism and the Southern Renaissance. However, he is also cited in the biographies of flagrantly successful magical realists such as Gabriel García Márquez as very significant to their careers because he dared to experiment and depart from convention in modernist work. This view was shared within the literary circle called el grupo de Barranquilla (journalists Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas, and Alfonso Fuenmayor who all became respected novelists or poets) that set about reading the work of Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf, and most importantly, Faulkner.

 

Perhaps it was Faulkner’s disappointment in the initial rejection of Flags in the Dust that drove him to become less responsive to his publishers and to take on a more experimental style. In any case, Garcia Marquez acknowledges Faulkner and Sophocles as the two most leveraged influences impacting his work. Faulkner amazed García Márquez with his ability to create from his childhood experiences a mythical past, inventing a town and a county in which to frame the actions of his characters. García Márquez found the seeds for his Macondo in Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha. It is also clear that they admired his use of internal monologue, very long sentences and other techniques considered experimental at the time.

 

Faulkner’s detailed realism occasionally is punctuated with scenes and moments of very effective magical realism. One such event is found in his short story “The Old People.” The setting is very similar to the much-anthologized “The Bear” where men from several ethnicities and levels of Southern society are all engaged in ritual hunting and prankstering amongst males. During a ritual hunt involving many of the same characters in “The Old People,” there is a coming-of-age ritual for a boy being taught to hunt. The boy is concerned about what seems to him beyond the realm of the real world in his experience. When he relates this to his cousin McCaslin, he finds that his cousin had been brought through this same path by the same man. Their common experience is not easily explained—except to those reared near or in rural cultures, including Native American cultures from which the notion of using natural resources reverently and without waste springs. Specifically, a huge buck that appeared and stood unafraid before the boy and the Native American Sam Feathers soon after the boy had taken his first buck and had been marked by Sam with the blood of the smaller buck as having been worthy of taking a life and having taken that life carefully and respectfully. This kind of blurring of “realities” and the prompting of alternative perceptions is Faulkner’s brand of magic realism.

 

Faulkner was regarded as a relatively obscure writer until he received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Then nearly a half century later in 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Absalom, Absalom! is often found on these lists and is usually cited as his masterpiece over The Sound and the Fury when discussing his body of work and not a comparative list.

 

Faulkner donated part of the Nobel Prize to establish a fund to support what became the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and donated another part to establish a scholarship fund to educate African-American teachers at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

 

A FEW OF WILLIAM FAULKNER’S QUOTES

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.” (Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1959)

 

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

 

“Hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

 

A FEW QUOTES ABOUT WILLIAM FAULKNER

The New York Times cited his critics in his obituary: “Mr. Faulkner’s writings showed an obsession with murder, rape, incest, suicide, greed and general depravity that did not exist anywhere but in the author’s mind”. (July 7, 1962)

 

Nobel writer J.M. Coetzee defined Faulkner not only as “the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction,” but “a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school.” (The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005)

 

WILLIAM FAULKNER’S NOTABLE WORK

The Sound and the Fury (1929), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder In the Dust (1948), Requiem For A Nun (1951, Collected Stories (1951) National Book Award, A Fable (1954) National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962) Pulitzer Prize (posthumously.)

 

WILLIAM FAULKNER’S AWARDS

Nobel Prize in Literature (1949)

France’s Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur (1951)

National Book Award for Fiction (1951, 1955)

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1954, 1962)

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction (1962)

 

SOURCES

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/literature/espmark/index.html

Eric R. Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House, 2012.

The New York Review of Books, July 7, 1962

The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005

Horst Frenz (ed.) Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969.

Petri Liukkonen. “On William Faulkner,” from Pegasos Author’s Calendar.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1959.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.

 

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Magical Realist Biographies: Elizabeth Bishop

 

Magical Realist Biographies: Elizabeth Bishop — Poet, Short-Story Writer, Translator, and Magical Realist


BishopELIZABETH BISHOP

            Born: February 8, 1911

            Died:  October 6, 1979

 

Little known facts:

Bishop seriously considered a career in medicine, but turned to poetry with the advice of her mentor Marianne Moore, who published some of her early poems in an anthology in 1935.

Elizabeth Bishop published only 101 poems during her career.

 

Much better known facts:

Bishop’s mother suffered from mental instability after her husband’s passing and was institutionalized when Elizabeth was only five years old. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, the setting for her story “In the Village.”

Subsequently, she was sent to her paternal grandparents who were well-to-do residents of Massachusetts, concerned over limited financial and educational resources in Nova Scotia.

She was the first American and the first woman to be recognized with the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Elizabeth Bishop was a distinguished poet, an author of prose, and a translator. She was also a Library of Congress consultant in poetry, 1949-50, and an honorary consultant in American Letters, beginning in 1958. She finished her career at Harvard University as an instructor beginning in 1970, a position she left in 1977 for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She is widely known for vivid, image-like descriptions of the physical world and themes about searching for and finding a sense of belonging, and the experiences of grief and longing. These are all shown in her third book, Question of Travel, where she also provides multiple samples of what American poet and critic Wyatt Prunty referred to as “the askew,” alluding to Bishop’s “moments in which the senses fail to report reality, slide off into the mysterious, terrifying, or ecstatic,” her own flavor of magical realism.

In her prose memoir “The Country Mouse,” Bishop explains her well-meant but poorly planned and poorly executed transfer to her paternal grandparents to be saved from “a life of poverty and provincialism.” There, in the insulation of their wealth, she was isolated and lonely “with Grandma, my silent grandpa, the dinners alone.”

Her mother’s sister, Maud Bulmer Shepherdson, “rescued” Elizabeth from this in May of 1918, taking her to live with her in a South Boston tenement. Bishop suffered from health problems including eczema, asthma, and St. Vitus’s dance that prevented formal schooling until she was ready for her secondary education. In an unpublished manuscript, “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” she painted this Boston neighborhood and portrayed the individuals she found there. Her shifts in living circumstances enabled her observation of societies on multiple levels wherever she was. It was in that Boston tenement that Bishop began to write poetry, influenced by her Aunt Maud.

With the sponsorship of the paternal grandparents, Bishop was sent to the elite Walnut Hills School for Girls and then to Vassar College.While at Vassar, she collaborated with novelist Mary McCarthy and others in starting up a literary magazine, Con Spirito—a more avant-garde publication than the well-established Vassar Review—that included some of her earliest work.One of the Vassar librarians introduced Bishop to poet Marianne Moore and that friendship became a life-changing relationship. Bishop earned her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in 1934.

She became independently wealthy from an inheritance and, from 1935 to 1937, she traveled to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy, finally settling in Key West, Florida. Her first book of verse, North and South (1946), contained vivid descriptions of all the scenery taken in during her travels to date.

In 1951, she became ill on a trip to South America and was left behind by a freighter in Brazil. She began a significant new phase in her life there when she developed a relationship with architect Lota de Macedo Soares that led to more stability in her life. They made homes in Rio de Janeiro, Petrópolis, and Ouro Prêto over the next eighteen years. Her art avoids explicit details of her personal life, and emphasizes her focus and her subtlety in her impressions of the physical world in both her poetry and her visual art.

Brazil was the setting of many of the poems in A Cold Spring (1955), her second volume of poetry, as well as of those collected in Questions of Travel (1965).

She received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring and in 1970, her Complete Poems won the National Book Award.

Included in this last was “The Riverman” that offers a vivid example of her variety of magical realism. A man decides to become a shaman, a sacaca, interacting with water spirits of the Amazon River, and, though his society has formally shunned such activity, they still discretely consult their own individual sacacas. The narrator is a sacaca under instruction who develops metaphors offering us a seductive blend of modernity and primitivism—from what we might expect would be immiscible combinations. Bishop creates this aura using simple language and a matter-of-fact tone. Travisano says, in analyzing the development of Bishops art, that the sacaca’s relationship to his society is the core of the matter because “he is doing something earthy, sensuous, and illicit.”

When the National Book Award for 1970 ceremony took place, Bishop was trying to reestablish a Brazilian life after the death of her partner Soares. However, she decided that without Soares, a Brazilian life was not likely, and, in the fall of that year, Bishop began teaching at Harvard University. She taught there for the next seven years and that is where she met her partner for the rest of her life, Alice Methfessel.

During her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was seen as an obscure, but respected figure in American literature, known as a “poet’s poet.” But after the publication of her last book, Geography III (1976), Bishop was finally accepted as a major force in contemporary literature. After her passing, critics like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have considered her “one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century.”

 

A FEW OF BISHOP’S QUOTES

“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper – just running down the edges of different countries and continents, ‘looking for something.’”

“Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?”

 

A QUOTE ABOUT BISHOP

“. . . her poems are balanced like Alexander Calder mobiles, turning so subtly as to seem almost still at first, every element, every weight of meaning and song, poised flawlessly against the next.”

 

BISHOP’S NOTABLE WORK

North & South (1946), Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring (1955) —winner of the Pulitzer Prize, A Cold Spring (1956), Questions of Travel (1965), The Complete Poems (1969) —winner of the National Book Award, Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)

 

BISHOP’S AWARDS

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

United States Poet Laureate

Neustadt International Prize for Literature

National Book Award for Poetry

National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

 

SOURCES

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41588.Elizabeth_Bishop

www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elizabeth_bishop.html‎

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/7

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/elizabeth-bishop

http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/bishop/bishop.htm

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01885.html

Thomas J. Travisano. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. University of Virginia Press, 1989.

Linda Anderson. “Elizabeth Bishop: The Secret Life of a Poet” in The Art of Literary Biography.Oxford University Press, 1995; Published Online: October 2011

 

Richard Perkins is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program.  He is working on an historical novel and is revising a collection of connected stories.