Elizabeth Bishop has agreed to guest-edit an upcoming volume in The Best American Poetry series.
"I've wanted to get her to do this since the series began," David Lehman, BAP's general editor, stated in a press release. "She is a shy person, who never liked the public stage, and the prospect of having to appear at a launch reading before a live audience had always been the ultimate deal-breaker. But when assured she would be spared this indignity, the final barrier was overcome, and we welcome Elizabeth into the fold."
Bishop's work has posthumously been published in three volumes of The Best American Poetry. James Merrill, who arranged communication between Lehman and Bishop via the Ouija app on the dark net, prevailed upon Miss Bishop to respond to the many text messages Lehman sent to her when he learned that a committee of heavenly scribes including Merrill, Louise Bogan, Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Howard Moss had agreed that while the goal of the BAP series is commendable, there has been a notable lack of poems written in set forms.
"The well-wrought urn of yore / is now thought an awful bore," Dorothy Parker has commented. (Neither John Donne nor Cleanth Brooks could be reached for comment.) Should the deceased be eligible for inclusion in Bishop's volume? Parker thinks so. "Langston Hughes / is writing great blues," she reports in her semiannual "Celestial Report."
It is widely expected that Bishop, author of "One Art" and "A Miracle for Breakfast," will be on the lookout for beautifully written villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, and the like. "I'm very fond of John Ashbery," Elizabeth wrote in a recent communication, "and I'm happy to report he is writing poems at the clip of five a week, usually during the late afternoon after 'just walking around' Paris and sitting down to his first martini of the day."
Lehman promised to reveal more details soon and he is working on an interview with Merrill, who was newly elected to the angelic secretariat.
-- Howard Nemerov
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