Elizabeth Bishop Birthday Party, Feb. 8, 2022

Everyone is welcomed to the Elizabeth Bishop Key West Committee’s celebration of the 111th birthday of internationally renowned poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a U.S. Poet Laureate who lived and was a homeowner in Key West.  The event will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 pm Feb. 8, 2022, at The Gardens Hotel, 526 Angela Street, Key West, thanks to the interest and generosity of owner Kate Miano.   The Mayor of Key West, Teri Johnston, will read her procla-mation of the now-annual Key West “Elizabeth Bishop Day.”   Social distancing and masks are requested, so seating is limited.  Gate opens at 5:15.  There is no charge, but donations to cover expenses are appreciated.  There will be birthday cake and a cash bar.

The event is a poetry reading:  Bishop spent much of her time in Key West from the late 1930s through 1949.  She was smitten by Key West’s climate and greenery and the quiet (then), and by the fanciful ginger-bread on Old-Town porches, as well as the town’s laid-back character and characters, Sloppy Joe’s Thursday and Saturday Rumba Nights, and the deep-sea fishing that had brought her and her partner, Louise Crane, here in the first place in 1937 and led them in 1938 to buy 624 White Street, now recently purchased and being restored by the Key West Literary Seminar for their headquarters.  Despite her subsequent loneliness, depression, asthma, writers’ block, and alcoholism, Ms. Bishop wrote some of her best-known, most appreciated poems in Key West, including “The Fish,” “Roosters,” and “The Bight” (a birthday poem for herself).   While living in Key West she slowly and agonizingly pulled together her first book of poems,  North & South,  and finally got it published to acclaim.   

 The February 8 reading includes of some of these best-known by Bishop as well as other Key West poets’ on her Key West experience and their response to her poetry.  Readers include current and past Key West Poets Laureate Kirby Congdon, Rosalind Brackenbury, and Arlo Haskell, as well as Rosanne Potter and Bill McCarthy, Kay Bierwiler, Kalo Clark, Cricket Desmarais, Sheri Lohr, Capt. Karen Luknis, Patty Patten Tiffany, Mia Shawn, Edgardo Alvarado Vazquez, Emily Schulten Weekley, Arida Wright, and others, many of them members of the Key West Poetry Guild.  The student winner of the 2021 Potter Elizabeth Bishop Prize at the College of the Florida Keys will be announced.

An intermission with birthday cake and a cash bar will allow guests to share reactions to Bishop’s work and life.  Her books and others about her will be offered for sale by Keys Island Books.

Info.:  504-228-2899; [email protected]

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