An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture

Project Dates: (15 September 2025-14 December 2027) Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the twentieth-century’s most important and influential poets. Yet few of the hundreds of postcards she sent during a lifetime of peripatetic travel, or her photographs, slides, and other art works, have been exhibited or published. Our project argues that these hitherto unseen visual works profoundly influenced Bishop’s poetry: looking at them transforms our understanding of Bishop’s art and methodological approaches to modern poetry more generally. In 2023, as part of an innovative pilot study, I co-curated the first exhibition of Bishop’s picture postcards at Vassar College, USA, with my PcL, Susan Rosenbaum. The exhibition was composed of fifty-five Bishop postcards from Vassar’s collection, with an exhibition catalogue and online version of the exhibition at Vassar. The exhibition attracted widespread media attention, featuring in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. A key aim of our project is to expand the scope of this pilot study and professionalise the distribution process via two major book publications. Bishop’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has contracted Professor Rosenbaum and I to edit a trade book of 150-200 Bishop postcards. While the pilot study centred on Bishop’s postcards at Vassar, research carried out at six additional archives (Harvard, the New York Public Library, the Rosenbach Library, Princeton, the Smithsonian, and the University of Delaware) during the grant will allow us to locate never-discussed postcards and to publish over triple the number from the pilot study in a book attractive to the general reader. Research on Bishop’s visual art undertaken at these archives will also allow us to complete a scholarly analytical edition. Our proposal for this analytical edition is currently under review for an advance contract at Harvard University Press, provisionally titled An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture. This second book will make a powerful case for approaching Bishop as an intermedial artist, and for expanding the Bishop canon to incorporate the many visual arts (postcards, photography, collage, watercolours, film and architecture) that Bishop practised. Alongside these book publications, we will work with Vassar College on organising two new exhibitions of Bishop’s postcards at sites important to Bishop’s travels: Paris, France and Sheffield, UK. Rather than simply repeat the pilot exhibition, we will use the grant to create site-specific exhibitions with postcards relevant to each place, and will organise public-facing events to attract a diverse audience. Collaborating with colleagues at the Sorbonne University, we will design an exhibition at the Sorbonne Libraries and a number of creative writing workshops, along with an international symposium on Poets and Postcards. At the University of Sheffield we will work with the Rare Books Librarian to draw attention to the importance of visual ephemera like postcards, with the goal of inviting donations to the library’s collection. Our methodological insights on modern poetry as a visual art form and on the inter-relationship of poetry and other visual forms extend beyond Bishop Studies. Our project breaks down long established disciplinary walls, speaking not just to literary critics but to practitioners and scholars. To achieve this aim, we have assembled an advisory board representing multiple disciplines, and will mentor a RIA in cutting-edge interdisciplinary research.