Where I'm from, everybody had a flower garden,
and I'm not talking about landscaping—
those variegated grasses poking up between
the yellow daylilies that bloom more than once.
Even the rusted-out trailer down in the green bottoms
had snowball bushes that outlived the floods.
Even the bootlegger's wife grew roses up the porch pillar
still flecked with a little paint, and in the spring
her purple irises rickracked the rutted gravel drive.
Even the grannies changed out of their housedresses
to thin the sprouts of zinnias so come summer
they'd bloom into muumuus of scarlet and coral
down by the road.

Now driving that road that used to take me home,
I think how maybe it's still true.
Everybody says down here it's nothing
but burnt-out shake and bakes and skinny girls
looking for a vein, but everywhere I look
there's mallows and glads, begonias in rubber tire
planters painted to match, cannies red
as the powder my mother would pat high
on her cheekbones when she wanted to be noticed
for more than her cobblers and beans.
Everywhere there's some sort of beautiful
somebody worked hard at, no matter
how many times they were told
nobody from here even tries.
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Postcard from Elizabeth Bishop to Louise Bradley, 1934
Letters: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Art Form or Something’

Langdon Hammer explores the central place letters occupy in the Bishop's work. "Letters allowed her to speculate, muse, joke, hesitate, qualify, and change her mind, all in the course of a letter, or sometimes in the course of a sentence....Letters allowed her to mix subjects in meandering association, or with less connection than that, shaped only by the flow of thought and the chance nature of experience."

via NYR DAILY
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What Sparks Poetry:
John Cotter on Bill Knott’s "(Sergey) (Yesenin) Speaking (Isadora) (Duncan)"

"I realized eventually the intensity of my hero worship was too unwieldy, though only about six or seven months after my friends did. I also knew I’d never find my own voice if I kept imitating Bill’s. I pushed off toward other mentors—no one I interacted with personally, just voices in books—but it was never the same. Poetry was too lonely without Bill in my head." 
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