Elizabeth Bishop in New York

This tour was postponed from its original date, Sunday, 10/29/17. Poet Elizabeth Bishop spent many years ghosting in and out of New York City. Her travels led her from Europe, to Brazil, to Key West, Florida, and Boston, but time and again she landed back in the city that both enthralled and intimidated her. For her fans, New York is a living reminder of her life and work. In Greenwich Village, Bishop befriended a small circle of writers and academics, among them Louise Crane, Mary McCarthy, Donald Stanford, and later, the renowned poet Marianne Moore, who gave her the confidence to believe in her own work and develop it. It was in and around Greenwich Village that Bishop honed a style full of both lyrical power and sensual acuity that is still widely read and loved today. On Charles Street in 1934 Bishop made her first NYC home in a tiny poet-in-a-garret apartment with a budget that anecdotally allowed for the purchase of one piece of furniture per month. On King Street Bishop kept her longest address in the city and while here published her first volume of poetry, North and South, which was deluged with critical praise and later won her the Pulitzer prize. She also contributed short stories to The New Yorker in this years. Typical of her vexed relationship with the city, she left this home for a physchiatric hospital during the same year she was US Poet Laureate. In a two-story home on Perry Street in 1942 she first met her long term romantic partner, Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, whom she would follow to Brazil for many years and it was here that the two were staying when Lota committed suicide, in 1967. Join Laurence Frommer on an exploration of this great poet's often tempestuous affair with a city that was so formative to her talent. Cost: $30 / $20 Members.