When it comes to Elizabeth Bishop, I'm pretty much a flaming dork fanatic—there's no graceful way to say it. I have two of her poems hanging in my apartment—one is framed, the other torn out of a magazine and Scotch taped. Once for Christmas, a friend gave me a handmade glass ornament decorated with a Bishop quote. I wrote my college thesis on Bishop (it was called "Necessary Digressions," I'll spare you the subtitle) and I have a tendency to reference the "The Man-Moth" whenever I am out and the moon is full. I got a little misty when I read the opening sentences of David Orr's recent review of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments in the New York Times Book Review:

Clearly.

Bishop's style—ferociously detailed, restrained and subtle, undeniably intimate—is what makes her the greatest. Though few pledge the cultish devotion she inspires in me, I know there are others out there. Secretly, I suspect that many of us are alumnae of women's colleges with English degrees and at least one typewriter and/or piece of vintage luggage. Like Orr, I like to think that each of us fans lives in a world singular and personal but defined, in a sense created, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Like her, I prefer to keep things close. She wrote in a letter to Robert Lowell: "In general, I deplore the 'confessional.'" This stance, her famous privacy, complicates the publication of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn—there has been some controversy over whether it should have been published at all—though by the same standard anyone should feel guilty reading Bishop's (wonderful) letters. I doubt she ever imagined anyone other than the recipients reading them. Bishop also wrote some very personal prose pieces, though, again, they were collected and published posthumously. I picture her horrified, feeling quite exposed, out there in the afterlife.

But all the ephemera sends me back into the poems themselves. Every now and then I take my Bishop books off the shelf, get in bed with clean, high-thread-count sheets, and see where my reading takes me. I get caught up in an image, try to figure out where it came from and how it corresponds to her life, and in no time I am cross-referencing poems, letters, related poems, footnotes, biographies, sometimes even Bishop's watercolors.

The footnote to one of my favorite poems, "The Man-Moth," indicates its inspiration: "Newspaper misprint for 'mammoth.'" This just tickles me. From this passing typographical mistake comes a story of the tender, nervous human-insect who "thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,/proving the sky quite useless for protection." An accident can lead to the most charming image. (My favorite typo, in a headline from the New York Times, now hangs in my bathroom: "Thongs Join Anti-Israel March in Germany.") In "The Fish," Bishop begins: "I caught a tremendous fish." She sees "frightening gills/fresh and crisp with blood," "big bones and little bones," and "the pink swim-bladder/like a big peony," and looks "until everything/was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" I remember the exact moment when I saw the same gills and bones and rainbow, though I was looking at sunlight hitting a rusty coffee can filled with old screws in my parents' garage. I look at things with an eye made obsessive and aggressive by Bishop.

Bishop was a notorious perfectionist, known for having spent years writing poems, changing single words and phrases. In "For Elizabeth Bishop 4," Robert Lowell wrote: "Do/you still hang your words in air, ten years/unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps/or empties for the unimaginable phrase—/unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?" Because of Bishop, when I read I am always thinking about everything buried underneath, the words edited out, the letters left fattened and imbued with emotion.

Here's the quote on my Elizabeth Bishop custom Christmas ornament: "Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)"

Alice Quinn talks about Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box on Thurs April 27 at Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, 7:30 pm, $5–$8.