Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop

"Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, 'wherever that may be,' as she put it in her poem 'Questions of Travel.' She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote 'anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.' Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. ..."

The Paris Review