Halfway through Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, Howard Moss confesses: “The truth is that I have, somehow, forgotten how to write letters. All I can think of saying is what I had for lunch, or what kind of day it is.” Fortunately, Moss makes a distinction between letters and written communication, between vivid self-expression and quotidian details. His mea culpa stands alongside the book’s title as a warning to readers that there are very few letters in this dense, new collection, which was released alongside Poems and Prose to mark Bishop’s centenary.
Instead, there are queries. Queries that do not “give us a rare glimpse into [Bishop’s] artistic development,” but rather the provisions in her contract. It’s true that the collection offers a lens onto The New Yorker’s house style and its influence on Bishop’s poems, but readers of The New Yorker should be able to guess what that entails.
Charles Pearce says it best when he refuses Bishop’s “The Slot Machine” because “it doesn’t seem quite precise enough (I believe that is the right word).” Any reader’s guess as to whether this is intentionally humorous is as good as mine. Pearce continues to describe the poem as “a bit too long,” and ends the letter “Sincerely, Charles A. Pearce.” There are many other instances of meta-precise language in the collection, but this is by far the best—and it appears on page eight.
The best lines from The New
