'Like Working Without Really Doing It': Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil Letters and Poems

Summary

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Biele talks about Elizabeth Bishop's letters and poems that she wrote while she was in Brazil. Over the course of the 17 years she lived in Brazil, Bishop wrote hundreds of letters to friends and family. Struck by the strangeness of the Brazilian landscape, she sketched everything from the blossoming mountainsides to the small orchids for her correspondents in fluid, open prose that she later condensed into a line or two in her poems.

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'Like Working Without Really Doing It': Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil Letters and Poems

After years of writing poems in hotels, boarding houses, and at friends' farms, Elizabeth Bishop finally had a room of her own. It was January 1953. Bishop had been in Brazil little over a year and was settling into her newly built Samambaia home with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares. "I guess 'study' is the name," she said to her former mentor Marianne Moore that April, "but it sounds like James Russell Lowell. . . ." Though she was not writing much poetry, Bishop enjoyed spending time in her studio with its fireplace made from mica-flecked rocks Soares found and a Primus stove for tea. She would later hang a straw hammock, a gift from poet Manuel Bandeira, on the veranda. What Bishop loved most about this room and what she made the subject of many letters was the view. Her fifteen-foot work table stood under a bank of windows that slid in four panels. At this table she would sit typing while looking over the valley, the matto grass red and mist-covered in ...

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