IN THIS ISSUE: July/August 2009

Poems by Hoagland, Hirschfield, Simic, Beasley, Levine, Dlugos, Boss, Hicok, Merwin, Goldbarth and others; a portfolio of Flarf and Conceptual Writing; Revell on Creeley, Pollitt on Bishop, Koethe on the New York School; unpublished Yvor Winters letters; poetry comics by Gary Sullivan

FEATURED PROSE

Katha Pollitt
Miss Bishop Says So

I met Elizabeth Bishop in 1972, when I audited her poetry class (not “workshop,” she would have hated that term) my senior year at Harvard. She was quite unlike my other professors. She was a woman—at the time Harvard had exactly one tenured woman, and not many women in the lower ranks either—and there was nothing of the grand professeur (or grand poete) about her. She was modest and unaffected, reserved but not cool. We called her Miss Bishop. She was the only teacher I had in four years of college who invited a class to her house—a sunny, rather bare apartment on Brattle Street, I think it was, where she showed us a Joseph Cornell-ish art box she had made that she said drew on the folk art Brazilians made to memorialize dead children.