Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Elizabeth Bishop
What should you do for your art? What do you do?
Are the answers for both questions the same? Are the answers "safe"?
Share on FacebookInterviewer: You mentioned earlier that you're leaving for North Haven in several days. Will this be a working vacation?
Elizabeth Bishop: This summer I want to do a lot of work because I really haven't done anything for ages and there are a couple of things I'd like to finish before I die. Two or three poems and two long stories. Maybe three. I sometimes feel that I shouldn't keep going back to this place that I found just by chance through an ad in the Harvard Crimson. I should probably go to see some more art, cathedrals, and so on. But I'm so crazy about it that I keep going back. You can see the water, a great expanse of water and fields from the house. Islands are beautiful. Some of them come right up, granite, and then dark first. North Haven isn't like that exactly, but it's very beautiful. The island is sparsely inhabited and a lot of the people who have homes there are fearfully rich. Probably if it weren't for these people the island would be deserted the way a great many Maine islands are, because the village is very tiny. But the inhabitants almost all work -- they're lobstermen but they work as caretakers . . . The electricity there is rather sketchy. Two summers ago it was one hour on, one hour off. There I was with two electric typewriters and I couldn't keep working. There was a cartoon in the grocery store -- it's eighteen miles from the mainland -- a man in a hardware store saying, "I want an extension cord eighteen miles long!" Last year they did plug into the mainland -- they put in cables. But once in a while the power still goes off.
