“More wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime . . .our greatest national treasure.” -James Merrill ‍ ‍

“I enjoy her poems more than anybody else’s.” – Robert Lowell

Alice Quinn, former editor at Alfred A Knopf and The New Yorker, Executive Director of the Poetry Society for almost two decades, editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, returns to the Talk of the Town series to discuss with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch, Bishop’s life and work through four of her revelatory, masterful poems: Sestina; Song for the Rainy Season; One Art; Sandpiper.

Bishop is one of America’s most admired, influential and important poets of the 20th Century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, revered for the precision, elegance, and simplicity of her language, her richness of observation and deep feeling, reflecting a life informed by tragedy almost from birth - her father’s death when she was eight months old; her mother’s emotional collapse when Bishop was five, her own frail health from asthma as a child, spending hours and days alone, reading, writing, playing the piano – and her sense of not belonging, “of being a guest,” her years in Worcester, Mass, and later in her teenage years at Walnut Hill boarding school; then at Vassar where she forged friendships with other brilliant writers-to-be - Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and her subsequent apprenticeship with Marianne Moore, who said of Bishop’s first book of poetry, North and South, “At last we have someone who knows, who is not didactic;” the influences of Moore, Wallace Stevens, George Herbert and others; her years living with her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia; moving to Key West; traveling to Paris, Mexico and North Africa in the 1930’s; then in 1950, visiting Brazil and settling there happily for the next decade and a half . . . her love affairs with Louise Crane, scion of the Crane paper company whose father was a former governor of Massachusetts and mother, a co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art; and with Lota de Macedo Soares, Brazilian landscape designer and architect .

“I think geography comes first in my work,” said Bishop , “and then animals. But I like people, too. I've written a few poems about people.”

Join us for this moving, revelatory Talk of the Town conversation with Alice Quinn, dedicated to the spirit, wisdom and pleasures of the work of Miss Elizabeth Bishop.

Watch the ninth event in the Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch that takes place monthly at the Salmagundi Art Club in New York City.