“Elizabeth Bishop: The Things I'd Like to Write,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 62-70.

In the following essay, Spires recollects her experience in studying Bishop's poetry and discusses Bishop's own feelings about her work.

Elizabeth Bishop once wrote: “My three ‘favorite’ poets—not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one's ‘best friends,’ etc., are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.” If I were to name the poets who have been my “best friends” in this same sense, certainly Elizabeth Bishop would have to come first. I did actually meet her once, in Boston in 1978, when I was writing a profile of her for the Vassar Quarterly. Later I edited the six hours of tapes into an interview for The Paris Review.

I had first encountered her poetry in 1970 as a freshman at Vassar. A precise, two-generational span separated us neatly...