Elizabeth Bishop's House

poetry re-installed on White Street

Happy Sunday!

Here is Elizabeth Bishop, with her bicycle - a Key Wester on White Street, 1940’s.

Bishop’s house on White Street was inaugurated this weekend, with wine and sumptuous hors d’oeuvres on Friday, followed by an introduction by Arlo Haskill of the Key West Literary Seminar and two Bishop scholars talking about her postcards, which are now on exhibit in the house. She wrote a lot of postcards, and luckily the recipients seem to have kept most of them. It was a new insight into her writing process - poems as postcards, postcards as possible poems. (I wondered - how did she type on a postcard?)

I have walked past the Bishop house for 25 years or so, wondering what it was like inside. Outside, it was a mess. Junk in the front yard, the house drooping with neglect. The tenants would never let anybody in, and it became more and more decrepit. I hoped, rather than believed, that it could some day be rescued for poetry and poets. Then a few years ago, the owner, grandson of the woman who bought it from Bishop, showed me and my husband round. He was doing some repairs, and wondering whether to sell, or to live there himself. He put it up for sale, that summer when I was out of town, and the KWLS eventually managed to buy it, with big contributions from individual donors. It’s now splendid, beautifully restored, with landscaped yard and seating arrangement for outdoor events - as close to its 1940’s self as could be imagined, with probably much better working appliances. (I think of Bishop’s painting of a rickety wire stretching across a ceiling to dangle a single bare light bulb.)

So, poetry is now re-installed on White Street. The house was spared - by Bishop’s own wishes and the faithfulness of the next owners, and by everyone who supported the KWLS project. Yesterday felt like a mini-seminar, with a poetry reading by our current poet laureate, Emily Schulten, and a talk by Heather White on Bishop’s correspondence and friendship with Marianne Moore.

As Heather and I stood in the front room among the beautifully arranged and curated postcards display, we talked about the heart-break of seeing Key West being taken over by tourism, traffic and commerce. Yes, it’s often heart-breaking, it’s true. But Elizabeth Bishop herself left here because the town was getting too noisy and overrun. And the restoration of her house for literature certainly mitigates some of the heartbreak - and for us locals, provides us with a dose of the sort of optimism that comes from a bold project thoughtfully designed and achieved.

Thanks for reading.