Letters Between Friends: Bishop and Merrill

PLEASE NOTE: WE ARE AT CAPACITY FOR THIS EVENT.

James Merrill celebrated Elizabeth Bishop as a poet and as a person all his adult life. “She set standards for me,” he said, “as no other contemporary did,” and he called her poems “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime.” Their correspondence began after they first met in 1948, when Bishop was 38 and Merrill 22, and what has not been lost amounts to about 140 items, many of them not included in the volumes of their selected letters. This talk will consist primarily of excerpts from their letters and postcards to each other, with gaps filled in by short passages from Merrill’s prose, and a modicum of commentary. Often the excerpts are short quotations from long letters, to give a sense of a conversation taking place over decades, as their friendship deepened and influence began to flow in both directions.

About Jeffrey Harrison:

Jeffrey is the author of seven books of poetry, beginning with The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series in 1987, and including Feeding the Fire, winner of the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, Incomplete Knowledge, runner-up for the Poets’ Prize, Into Daylight, winner of the Dorset Prize, and Between Lakes, chosen as a 2021 Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bogliasco Foundation, among other honors. His poems have appeared multiple times in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize volumes; been translated into Bulgarian, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese; and been set to music by several composers and performed at the National Opera Center, the Boston Athenaeum, and other venues. His essay “The Story of a Box,” about Marcel Duchamp and his family (first published in The Common), was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2024. He lives in Massachusetts.

Free to attend. MUST register to attend. Limited seats.