Book Notes is taking a brief summer break, but meanwhile, of course, the life of the library continues in all its richness. As you know from the June Book Notes, on Sunday, July 10, Professor Stuart Vyse discussed his new book “The Uses of Delusion: Why It’s Not Always Rational To Be Rational” and on Sunday, Aug. 14, Professor Jonathan Post will talk about the life and work of the 20th century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. His book, “Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction,” was published in June by Oxford University Press. In anticipation of this event and to provide background, here is the full text of the conversation I had with Jonathan Post back in February to celebrate Bishop’s birthday month. Due to space limitations only an edited version appeared at the time.

BDK: How did you happen to land on this topic?

JP: Interesting question. Behind every book, there is a little backstory, and this one says something about Bishop’s status as a poet. I had enjoyed writing the “Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems” in the same series. I like the compressed format and the idea of writing for a more general audience, plus the pricing. At $11.95 apiece, the books are a steal. When Oxford asked if I’d like to propose another title, I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop, which initially drew puzzlement from the editors. But her name had been floated and Bishop was becoming a ‘set text’ in the English curriculum, it seems. For this and more general reasons having to do with her increasing visibility, I was invited to put together a proposal, which was eventually approved.

BDK: Much of your previous work, including the Shakespeare book, has been in the earlier fields of the English Renaissance and 17th century. Was it difficult to set your sights in a more modern direction?

JP: Not really. For the last two decades, my teaching and scholarly life had been fairly evenly divided between, say, teaching Donne and the poets surrounding him, and Eliot, and those around and stemming from him. (Shakespeare and Milton remained constants throughout my teaching years.) There are also strong connections between the two historical periods, and Bishop participated in some of these. George Herbert was one of her favorite poets, as you know. In this, Bishop, like Merrill, participated in a long, literary continuum, thank heavens; so while she is wonderfully strange and unique, she is, like the best lyric poets, also available on her own immediate terms to general readers willing to think about these matters.

BDK: How did you go about writing your book?

JP: The crucial idea belonged to my wife, Susan, who also provided a lovely map for the book, based on Bishop’s travels and some of the poems associated with specific locales.

Almost all of my writing had been shaped by my experience as a teacher, and here I was in Stonington, in retirement, without a class. She suggested why not set up a reading group in Stonington, which I did, and it worked wonders. The beauty of the idea had to do also with the breadth of readership in the group since that was central to the introductory nature of the project. First-time readers of Bishop were in the same room, talking about her poems, with some very experienced, professional readers. The Borough has long been a haven for bookish and boat people alike as well as artists. The climate was a hospitable one. Bishop also possesses a few advantages helpful to the continued vitality of any reading group. She wrote very few poems; she saw about 90 in all into print. This meant that selecting the bi-weekly readings was a fairly simple matter for both the discussion leader and the group. No excuse for not being prepared. I was especially interested in the issues voiced by new readers of her poetry. The writing of the book then proceeded apace, with the usual pitfalls and problems and the occasional Eureka.

BDK: Can you say more about the surprises?

JP: Yes, leaving aside for another occasion those that occurred in the seminar. One was initially something of a pitfall. Because of Covid, access to the Vassar College Special Collections, where Bishop’s archive is located, became physically off-bounds at the time when I wanted to visit it. But since much of Bishop is in print, including much unpublished and unfinished verse, this proved to be less of a hindrance than it might have been. A happier surprise was running across several rarely seen photos of Bishop taken by Rollie McKenna. As you know, she lived in Stonington in the latter part of her life. One photo I found on the wall of a friend’s house in the Borough, of Bishop, head tilted upwards, exhaling smoke from a cigarette as if she were the Oracle of Delphi herself. I came across a second in a book of McKenna’s photos that had been overlooked by Bishop scholars, in part, I suspect, because the original photo was in the Stonington Historical Society (!) and not in the McKenna archive in Arizona, much of which is available on-line. As a photographer of literary stars—her photos of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot are often reprinted — McKenna met Bishop in Brazil in the early 1950s, where she took a number of shots now familiar to Bishop scholars. But not this particular one, which shows an attractive, relaxed, and decidedly cheerful Bishop, looking very much at home in Brazil with her partner Lota de Macheda Soares. Along with the seminar, there was now, for me, a glimmer of Bishop’s visual presence around the village, one to accompany her longtime friendship with Merrill, recorded in his letters and his elegiac “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia.”

The greatest surprise for an author is always the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something as if for the first time, which only happens in the act of writing. In my case, it included, as Jim Longenbach has said, remembering a teacher of his, the recognition that “our experience of a poem is always greater, more diverse / Than our imperfect ability to describe it.” That recognition is what makes writing literary criticism a high wire act — trying to get the right balance in the hope that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery.

BDK: Are there things that make your book unique?

JP: Whatever interests individual chapters might hold—on love, on looking, on her late travel poems, for instance—I would want to single out the book’s introductory nature. At this late stage in Bishop studies, we’re at a point not of market saturation but of increased scholarly specialization, something that often follows the discovery or recovery of an author. There are two societies named after her and now a new scholarly journal, three or four biographies, and more critical books than you can shake a fist at. But for all these good works, it’s hard to get both a sense of the general outline of her great gifts as a poet and also a detailed understanding of the poems themselves, which is why we want to read about her in the first place. My book seeks to address this lack.

On behalf of all our Book Note readers, I do thank Professor Post for taking the time to share these thoughts about the way this book came into being. One of the many remarks that stand out for me is in the question about surprises. “The greatest surprise for an author is the sense of discovery, the sense of seeing something for the first time” and then he goes on to say “the hope is that others too might be led to share in the process of discovery.”

This “general reader” can say that, yes, Jonathan Post’s book does share a sense of discovery, an entirely new and fresh insight into the life and work of this beloved poet. As in his book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, compression goes hand in hand with deep scholarship, yet written in such a way as to appeal to the general reader. Throughout the book Professor Post connects Bishop’s life to her art, with the poetry, not the biography, remaining paramount. He gives close readings of the poems that, like all her readers, I will return to again and again, promising as they do”the sense of seeing something for the first time.”

Elizabeth Bishop, one of the great American poets of the second half of the 20th century who, as we learn from this conversation, has an enduring connection to this community.

Belinda deKay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.