Цитаты из произведения Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography

"The single question Elizabeth ever asked me having to do with Yale was, 'What is deconstruction?'" When I finished my ten-minute explanation, her only comment was, "Oh dear".

Elizabeth just said, "I'm blue." She fell off the wagon (most of the time I knew her, she was on Antabuse), and I fell off the wagon. We both got blue-eyed drunk.

Elizabeth said right away that Paul Bowles had sent them a package of hashish from North Africa and they never knew quite what to do with it, so they made brownies from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. We sat down to eat brownies. The brownies were very good, as a matter of fact.

Bishop and Bowen read to each other and played cards and Scrabble as they traveled. In Manitoba, the conductor stopped them from playing Scrabble because games of chance were forbidden in this province.

There were loads of books, many of which were being drilled by termites and carpenter ants. Elizabeth asked if now and then I would apply a treatment to certain of these books. I used her worm-eaten Oxford English Dictionary, a compact two-volume set.

There was a chicken that had been run over by a car on Fourth Street in front of Nicola's [a grocery store]. Individually, we all trotted over to see this bird. There was a lot of jollity about the chicken, conjecturing where it came from. That night she wrote the poem and brought it over the next morning.

Elizabeth said that in Brazil when the newspapers came out with a sensational story, maybe a murder or something, within a matter of days there was a song written about it, and it became popular. It was a way of perhaps passing news around.

There was livestock on board: turkeys, dogs, and eleven large green turtles in the lifeboats, which the captain had filled with water. He fed them crusts of bread. Egrets and flamingos flew by or waded near the shore, and hundreds of white herons perched on trees beside the river. At one stop along the river, Bishop…

The Indians were a friendly, happy, peaceful, even sweet-smelling people. One widower proposed to Bishop, after eyeing her earrings and watch and poking her to make sure that this person in slacks was a woman.

Bishop found varieties of orchids, huge snails and butterflies, and humming birds three-quarters of an inch long whose eggs were the size of pieces of rice. There were also flowers that Bishop had known in Key West, and apple and pear trees she recognized from New England and Nova Scotia. For her birthday in February a…