The word creative drives me crazy. I don’t like to regard it as therapy.

Mr. Yousouf forgot his umbrella
Mr. Yousouf lost his umbrella
Madame Yousouf, someone stole her umbrella

Black! Black!
A driven man!
Black! Black!

“One never bathes twice in the same stream,” the philosopher Heraclitus used to say. However, the same people always turn up again! They go by, at the same time, gay or sad. You, passers-by in Ravignan Street, I have given you the names of Historical Defuncts! 

Once there was a locomotive so good that it stopped to let pedestrians pass. One day an automobile bumped over its tracks. The engineer whispered into the ear of his steed: “Shouldn’t we take it to law?” “It is young,” said the locomotive, “it doesn’t know.” It contented itself with spitting a little disdainful steam on the out-of-breath “sportsman.” 

I entered timidly: there was an ostrich that was losing its feathers, and, on a pedestal of white stucco, a bronze bird whose plumage was represented by a series of engraved shells. Mr. Abel Hermant or someone like Mr. Abel Hermant appeared as soon as the vestibule was opened.

In the early seventies, when Lowell published scornful personal letters to him without permission, Bishop wrote him a strong letter advising against it.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Homesickness” appeared in our Summer 2005 issue as part of a portfolio of her notebooks. Alice Quinn wrote of the poem, Bishop began “Homesickness” in 1948, and the handwriting suggests that this draft may date from that …

For years I have enjoyed teaching May Swenson’s subtle poem “Dear Elizabeth,” an intricate meditation on sexuality and exoticism, though I have found my classes startled when I claimed it constituted a kind of causerie between the two lesbian poets about their situation as lesbians, as poets.

I introduce Penelope Gwin,
A friend of mine through thick and thin,
Who’s travelled much in foreign parts