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Elizabeth Bishop

January 3, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
“The Bight”

In 2011, WCPA ran a year long Centenary Celebration for Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).

Monday, January 3, 2011

Looking at Elizabeth Bishop
First Monday Poetry Series
First Unitarian Church, Worcester

Bob Cronin kicks off Worcester’s year-long Elizabeth Bishop Centenary Celebration with a brief overview of Bishop’s work and a presentation of several Bishop poems for discussion. Bob is editor of The Worcester Review Elizabeth Bishop Centenary Issue. (Fall 2011.)

Tuesday, February 8 , 2011

Birthday Reading
Hope Cemetery
Worcester, Massachusetts

In all, just four of us braved the cold afternoon at Hope Cemetery on February 8, and we never made it anywhere near the Bishop headstone. We were ready with shovels and snowshoes but the Worcester winter trumped our shovels with a blistering wind. (And we were worried it would be too dark to read!) We managed a spirited reading of “The Bight” and called it a day.

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Participatory Reading of “The Country Mouse”
Street Beat
1 Ekman Street, Worcester

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Beth Sweeney Reads Elizabeth Bishop
Barnes & Noble Poetry Series
Lincoln Square, Worcester

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Visionary Women
Amy Belding Brown
Tuckerman Hall, Worcester

WCPA collaborated with Master Singers of Worcester and the Worcester Women’s History Project in a Tuckerman Hall program of choral music based on the writings of famous New England women, including Elizabeth Bishop. Following a pre-concert lecture,
author Amy Belding Brown read the texts performed
during the concert.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

A Mirror on Which to Dwell: Elliot Carter’s Musical Settings of Elizabeth Bishop Poems
ECCE, East Coast Contemporary Ensemble
with Lloyd Scwhartz

TitltonHall, Clark University.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Mapping Elizabeth Bishop
A talk and slide show by Laura Menides & Carle Johnson on Bishop’s life and works,
with readings by Joyce Heon.

Shrewsbury Public Library

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Elizabeth Bishop Suite

Chamber music (solo piano & voice) performance by composer JB Menides, with vocals by Victoria Nors: musical settings of six EB poems–The Wit, In the Waiting Room, Letter to NY, The Argument, One Art, & Anaphora.

First Congregational Church, Shrewsbury

May 26-29, 2011

American Literature Association
Elizabeth Bishop Society Meetings
and Panel Discussions

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Worcester Celebration of Poets

Hanover Theatre, Worcester, MA

Charles Simic, US Poet Laureate 2007-2008
and
Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate 1997-2000
read Elizabeth Bishop poetry and their own work as part of the day-long Worcester Celebration of Poets.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Lloyd Schwartz
poet, critic and editor of Elizabeth Bishop Poems, Prose and Letters

Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Kennicutt Hall

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Ron Strauss, MD:
“Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry
and Graduate Medical Education”

UMass Medical School
Lamar Soutter Library Rare Book Room

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Hope Cemetery
Worcester, Massachusetts

Laura Menides and Carle Johnson visit Hope Cemetery, Worcester, on the anniversary of Elizabeth Bishop’s death, October 6.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Ron Strauss, MD:
“Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell”

Fitchburgh State University

Other Elizabeth Bishop Thoughts and Events

Inscribing the Stone: Notes from Worcester’s Hope Cemetary

by Angela Dorenkamp

When I first visited Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts, to search out Elizabeth Bishop’s grave, snow covered the ground. At the cemetery office, I was given the exact location of the gravesite and learned that Bishop’s ashes had been buried on the reverse side of a monument bearing her parents’ names: William T. Bishop and Gertrude B. Bishop. On Beach Street, curving among Hope Cemetery’s gently-sloping, snow-covered lawns, I found the gravestone – a substantial piece of rectangular-cut, beveled granite. Bishop’s parents’ names and dates were carved on the side fronting the road. Anxiously, I scurried to the far side to see whether the line from “The Bight,” – “Awful but cheerful” – which Bishop had reportedly requested for her epitaph, was actually there. To my surprise, the stone was altogether blank. Perhaps, I reasoned, someone had placed an inscribed stone flat to the ground on Elizabeth’s side, but I could not test this theory because the snow was too thick and hard. When spring came, there was no flat stone.

When Laura J. Menides (WPI) and I presented a program about Bishop at the Worcester Historical Museum integrating biography, poetry, and slides, we had a slide of the family plot in Hope Cemetery and mentioned the fact that the grave was not marked and that we wanted to try to get that done. The cemetery office told us we needed permission from Alice Muthfessel, executrix of the Bishop estate, in order to have Bishop’s name cut in the stone under which she is buried. Eventually we wrote to Ms. Methfessel, as did Elizabeth Ross Naudin, a first cousin of Bishop’s who lives in Florida, and a few of the people who attended our presentations. Soon, Laura Menides, Carle Johnson (Worcester County Poetry Association), and I were busy planning The Elizabeth Bishop Conference & Poetry Festival, which will be held in Worcester Massachusetts, on October 9-12, 1997. We wanted to include a tour of places in Worcester related to Bishop’s life here, including her gravesite, of course. So I sent Ms. Methfessel a copy of the permission form required by the cemetery. When I spoke with her on the phone, she was gracious and anxious to have the matter resolved. In fact, she said, she had been under the impressions that the estate’s lawyers had taken care of the inscription some time ago. Once we had the permission – and the assurance that the estate would cover the cost of the engraving – I arranged for the work to be done. The lettering matched that of Bishop’s parents’ exactly. The letters, for instance, were hand-cut rather than sand blasted. The inscription, sent to us by Alice Methfessel, reads as follows:

Elizabeth Bishop
1911 – 1979
“All the untidy activity continues
Awful but cheerful.”

On a beautiful fall day – Sunday, October 6, 1996 – which happened to be the 17th anniversary of Elizabeth Bishop’s death, Laura Menides, Carle Johnson, and I made a pilgrimage to her grave. There we noted the newly cut inscription and read “The Bight” aloud. Bouyed by the nip in the air, we felt the lightness of euphoria. Thanks are due to Alice Methfessel; to Laura Menides and Carle Johnson; to Aldo Gatti, the stonecutter; to the cemetery staff; to Elizabeth Ross Naudin; to all those who supported and helped bring to closure, this small, but important. enterprise.

Laura Menides, Angela Dorenkamp, and Carle Johnson at the Elizabeth Bishop gravesite, Hope Cemetery, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1996. A Hope Cemetery reading has become a WCPA biannual event, typically followed by dinner and additional readings and discussion.

Saturday, May 10, 2008 – 12 Crane/Riverrun

The 12 Crane arts complex (Southbridge) hosted WCPA and Lloyd Schwartz, editor of the new Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, for a reading & book signing. Local poets joined the program, reading favorite Elizabeth Bishop poetry and prose.

 

Filed Under: Literary Tour

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