Getting to know Elizabeth Bishop

Gate in front of the Elizabeth Bishop House. Photo by Mark Hedden.

The Key West Literary Seminar is nearing the home stretch of our restoration of the Elizabeth Bishop House here in Key West. It’s a beautiful place and, more importantly, will honor one of Key West’s — and America’s — greatest writers.

Maybe you are not that familiar with Bishop. Despite having recently graduated with a degree in English, neither was I in 1993 when the Key West Literary Seminar focused entirely on her. It was a revelation. Here are my suggestions for getting to know more about Bishop and her work.*

“Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, Island of Her Dreams” - excerpt from “Love Unknown: The Life and Words of Elizabeth Bishop” by Thomas Travisano

Poems:

“Florida”

“The Fish”

“The Bight”**

“One Art”

“Sunday at Key West”

“Key West”

“It Is Marvelous To Wake Up Together”

Essays:

“Gregorio Valdez”

“Mercedes Hospital”

Letters:

There are many from Key West between 1938 and 1948, but this might be my favorite, from a February 5, 1940 letter to Marianne Moore:

“I have one Key West story that I must tell you. It is more like the place than anything I can think of. The other day I went to the china closet to get a little white bowl to put some flowers in and when I was rinsing it, I noticed some little black specks. I said to Mrs. Almyda, ‘I think we must have mice’ – but she took the bowl over to the light and studied it and after a while she said, ‘No, them’s lizard.’”

Paintings:

Bishop captured many Key West landmarks, including the cemetery, the Harris School, the Armory and the County Courthouse.

Books:

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters (Library of America)

One Art: Elizabeth Bishop letters (selected and edited by Robert Giroux)

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano

Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings

Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems: 1927-1979

Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose

*This list is entirely by me (Nancy Klingener) and should not be considered a representation of the Key West Literary Seminar or the Monroe County Public Library

** The last line from this poem, “All the untidy activity continues / awful but cheerful” is the epitaph on Bishop’s gravestone in Worcester, Mass.

Elizabeth Bishop’s gravestone in Worcester, Massachusetts. Photo by Nancy Klingener.

Let’s call the place the Place

Last month, the city of Key West began working on improvements to the public area bounded by Front, Greene and Whitehead streets in front of the Custom House, one of our grandest and most important public buildings (and now an excellent museum run by the Key West Art & Historical Society). Today, the Citizen ran a photo by Rob O’Neal showing the area scraped clean, the obelisk at the center wrapped up.

I’m very glad this historically important area is getting attention - especially the obelisk, which was erected by the Key West Navy Club in 1866, dedicated to Union soldiers and sailors who died here during the Civil War (almost all of them of yellow fever). More on that below.

But here’s the thing - all the city releases and press coverage and I’m afraid to think of how many official documents refer to this area as Clinton Square. But that’s not its name. It’s Clinton Place.

If you doubt me, I refer you to “Key West: The Old And The New” by Jefferson B. Browne, the 1912 book considered Key West’s first comprehensive history. On page 52, he details how different streets and sites were named, including “‘Clinton Place’ after DeWitt Clinton of New York.” Referring to the dedication of the obelisk on page 62, he refers to it as “Clinton Place, the small triangular plot at the intersection of Front, Whitehead and Greene Streets… ”

Today In Keys history column, produced by the Monroe County Public Library’s Florida Keys History Center, as it appeared in the Key West Citizen on July 25, 2024.

“Triangular” is the key word here. Besides not being its actual name, “Clinton Square” is an embarrassing error of basic kindergarten-level geometry. When the state acquired the Custom House in the early 1990s and the Art & Historical Society took on the restoration, then-Executive Director Susan Olsen pointed this out to me: It’s not a square. It’s a triangle.

This may seem like a small nitpick, but facts matter. This is true in journalism and it’s true in history. We are a place that purportedly cares a lot about our history and for good reason. For a small island with a relatively small population, a lot of interesting stuff has gone down here. Our small size and geographic isolation helped keep a lot of the historic fabric intact and now it’s a major component of our multi-billion-dollar tourism and real estate economies. It matters on many levels.

And Clinton Place is, perhaps, the best examplar of Key West’s strange and interesting history when it comes to the Civil War and how it’s memorialized. We’re in Florida, the third state to secede, and the island was home to many enslavers (including U.S. Senator-turned-Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory, whose mother’s boarding house was also in that neighborhood - but who was not, it turns out, the person for whom Mallory Square was named). Key West stayed in Union hands because an enterprising Army captain occupied still-under-construction Fort Taylor soon after secession but there were a lot of Confederate sympathizers in the local population. And in the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow, when many notable citizens were in the Klan, the United Daughters of the Confederacy put up a pavilion in Bayview Park, with full honors from the mayor and local dignitaries.

In the 1930s, the state of New York donated a memorial nearby, to honor the dozens of soldiers who were stationed here and died of aforesaid yellow fever. That pavilion has recently been renamed with the city’s official motto, One Human Family. And in 2016, the city added a statue honoring the Black Union soldiers recruited here, right in front of the pavilion.

Clinton Place in 2015. Photo by Nancy Klingener

Clinton Place might have the most interesting memorial evidence of all, though. That obelisk, memorializing the Union troops who died here is surrounded by a low fence with a plaque proudly claiming that it was “ERECTED BY J.V. HARRIS, CONFEDERATE VETERAN.”

Just as the Stephen Mallory Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is still engraved at the base of the One Human Family pavilion at Bayview Park, I hope that fence and its plaque also remain through the improvements to Clinton Place.

Just like Clinton Place’s real name, the real history of Key West’s role in the Union victory - and the backlash afterwards - is part of our island’s history and our residents and visitors deserve to know the truth.

Here are a couple more images of Clinton Place from the Florida Keys History Center’s photo archive, just because they’re cool.

Clinton Place in front of Custom House ca. 1918. The Heritage House Collection, donated by the Campbell, Poirier and Pound families. Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.

Custom House on postcard by Frank Johnson, Key West. The DeWolfe and Wood Collection. Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.

On 'On Juneteenth' - and a couple other recommended nonfiction reads

I am writing this on Juneteenth. I read On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed last year after she appeared at the 2023 Key West Literary Seminar. I loved it and wrote up a recommendation for the Shelf Help feature that the Monroe County Public Library provides to the Keys Weekly newspapers:

On Juneteenth. Annette Gordon Reed. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Black history is American history, and vice versa – and few writers make that more clear than Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard law professor who won a Pulitzer for her book The Hemingses of Monticello. More recently, as Juneteenth was recognized as a public holiday, she wrote a book explaining the origins of that celebration. In this slim volume, she also explores the history of Texas, which goes beyond the cowboys and oilmen of popular imagination. Gordon-Reed is from Texas, where her family goes way back, so the book is also something of a memoir. Gordon’s straightforward prose makes the delivery of the events she’s recounting even more powerful. There’s no doubt this lawyer-historian has her facts down, even if they are facts that have been ignored or denied through most of our history. I learned a lot from this relatively short book, about Texas and America and Annette Gordon-Reed. It’s kind of like taking a college seminar with an especially gifted and generous professor. And lucky for us, no exam at the end.

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I have, in recent years, become a big fan of the slim work of nonfiction. In my 20s and 30s, I loved diving into a giant tome and just living there for awhile. I still like that - occasionally - but perhaps getting older has made me appreciate my limited time. For whatever reason, here are a couple other nonfiction books I have really enjoyed in the last couple years that won’t eat up weeks of your life. The first two were also Shelf Help recommendations.

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller:

Taxonomy is classification – in biology, it’s ordering the natural world into species, genus, family, etc. It’s a way of making sense of the vast chaos around us – and sometimes in us. DNA has shaken up the established taxonomies of some animals (so a falcon is actually more of a parrot than a hawk????) but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists were going with what they could see in front of them. David Starr Jordan was an early exemplar of the field, collecting almost 20 percent of the known species of fish at the time. Yet his rigorous work did not spare him from chaos in his own life – including some he inflicted on others. Lulu Miller’s book starts out as a biography of Jordan but becomes much more – a memoir, a meditation on finding your purpose in life while coping with the chaos all around us – and a little dash of true crime that’s an eye-opener on her original subject.

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby:

Charles Dickens was a white guy who lived in 19th century England and was famous for writing novels. Prince was a Black guy who lived in 20th and 21st century America and was famous for making music. On the face of it, they would appear to have little in common. Yet novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby has written a lovely extended essay about how both were incredible examples of creativity and productivity. They did have a few things in common – both were raised in poverty, with family trauma shaping their lives and art. Both produced their greatest works as relatively young men. And sadly, both died at 58. This book isn’t just compare-and-contrast; it’s an insightful profile of each man as an artist, with a dash of personal reflection from Hornby thrown in.

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum:

I didn’t write a Shelf Help recommendation for this book (yet) - though we do have it at the Monroe County Public Library. I picked it up because of the title and its size - it’s 224 pages, but it’s a physically small book, less than 5x8 inches. The title sold me because, like a lot of people, I have spent the last few years wondering what the hell is happening and more importantly why? Applebaum does a good job answering these questions, with a heavy emphasis on Eastern Europe, which she knows best. And her conclusions aren’t quite as depressing as the title might lead you to believe.

Literary Seminar 2024 - Florida the State We're In

My opening remarks for Friday, January 12, at the Key West Literary Seminar:

The lectern and stage this year feature the KWLS logo - Audubon’s frigatebird. Photo by Nick Doll.

Good morning - I’m Nancy Klingener and I have the great honor to be the president of the board of the Key West Literary Seminar - and the program chair for this year’s event. Thank you for joining us after last night’s terrific keynote from Jeff Vandermeer - and for traveling to this far end of the state. I’d also like to thank my fellow board members and especially the program committee who helped shape this event - Michael Blades, Meg Cabot, Michael Nelson, Diane Shelby, Emily Weekley - and of course our Executive Director Arlo Haskell.

As I wrote in my program essay, I have been pitching this as a topic for as long as I’ve been on the board, close to 20 years. But I am glad it’s taken this long - not only because many of these writers would not have been here back then - because they were probably in grade school at the time - But also because in the intervening years I have gained so much more perspective and information about this state where so many of us live, and love - and fight for, even when it is literally trying to kill us.

I was born, raised and educated in New England but I was at least aware that writers lived in, and came from Florida. I was assigned to read The Yearling in junior high because apparently entering adolescence isn’t hard enough without having to read a bunch of books where the animals die. I was fortunate enough to be assigned Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school in the 1980s. That high school was pretty progressive, though I did have a Hemingway-worshipping English teacher who told me he’d visited Key West once but didn’t like it because of all the gays. In college, I read Condominium by John D. MacDonald and I started hearing about this Carl Hiaasen guy, especially when I took classes with a newly arrived professor named Madeleine Blais, who had won a Pulitzer for feature writing at the Miami Herald, in part for her profile of Tennessee Williams in Key West.

I got to Florida with an internship, then a job with the Miami Herald in 1989. Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry were among the stars at the paper but my role models were the people who had made it from the lowly Neighbors section up to the big paper a couple years before me - people like Tananarive Due, who were from Miami and who were unbelievably kind and generous to a clueless young woman who had spent her entire life in rural new england. When she quit the paper a couple years later to follow her calling and write fiction, I was even more impressed.

It sounds a little counter intuitive but I have come to believe that Florida is a place that we - and the rest of the country - should take seriously. I know that’s not our brand. But in some weird ways, we are simultaneously forerunners and on the forefront of the history of this country, especially if you’re talking about settlement by Europeans - and those they brought here.

The Spanish claimed Florida in 1513 - decades before the English made their first, doomed attempt at colonizing Virginia and almost a century before they got a foothold in Jamestown. And they brought enslaved people here long before 1619 - obviously not a distinction to be proud of, but one that we must recognize and acknowledge as part of this state and country’s history.

Another first - according to the Florida Museum of Natural History, some 800 Spanish sailors, soldiers and settlers held a Mass of Thanksgiving and then put on a feast with local Indigenous people near the Matanzas River - more than 50 years before that meal in Massachusetts that gets all the attention.  

So Florida, in the relative terms of American history, is ancient. But it’s also constantly reborn and renewed. In the last year, almost a thousand people a day moved to the state. From Silicon Valley and the midwest. From the Caribbean and the former Soviet republics. The new arrivals are here looking for safety, or opportunity - or let’s face it, a state with no income tax. If they stick around long enough they can join the chorus of people complaining about how much better it used to be when they got here, whether that was generations or a couple years ago. Which in some ways - fair. Some changes are hard to watch and they’re not for the better. But new people also bring new ideas, enterprises, perspectives. And that helps maintain one of Florida’s most important qualities as far as I’m concerned - it is very rarely boring. Which really makes it the perfect literary subject.

So Florida, I would say, is on the edge. Literally, we’re on the edge of the water, if not under it. Yet. Incidentally - there’s a tidal gauge just over there on that big pier we call the outer mole - they’ve been taking tidal measurements in Key West Harbor since 1913. I checked with our local weather service bureau the other day and in that time the sea level has risen one foot four inches. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot this weekend about Florida’s future on the environmental front.

Socially, we’re also on the edge - the state has been surprisingly forward thinking at times with measures like a very broad public records law, and rules about what public officials are at least SUPPOSED to do in the sunshine. Florida has also at times been shockingly reactionary and brutal with massacres like the ones Gilbert King has documented. And atrocities like the Dozier school that Tananarive has reimagined in a way only she could, as the daughter of Florida freedom fighters and the grand niece of a young man who died at Dozier.

While we were putting together this Seminar, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about Florida. I’ve decided it’s kind of like family: I love it in a deep, abiding way that I can’t shake even if I wanted to. It drives me crazy. I enjoy ridiculing it but bristle just a bit when outsiders use us as a punching bag. And thank you, Dave Barry, for occasionally punching back in the most entertaining of ways. One thing I never doubted, probably from the moment I walked into Books & Books and attended my first Miami Book Fair in 1989, or my first Key West Literary Seminar a couple years later, is that Florida is a literary place.

The writers at this seminar show the depth and diversity of Florida’s literary talent. And that’s just those who are here with us this weekend.

 In my job at the local public library I put together the email newsletter and for the January edition, I included a book list of Florida fiction.* Any place where the chroniclers include Zora Neale Hurston, Elmore Leonard, Lauren Groff and Tananarive Due is a place I want to know more about.

Even though I’ve lived here for almost 35 years, I suspect by the end of this weekend I will have learned so much about this state we’re in - and that my to be read list will get even longer.

*This list includes one book per writer and only has books from the Monroe County Public Library collection, so - not comprehensive!

Reporting away again in Margaritaville

Meagan Bryon of Hoboken, N.J., added a shaker of salt to the memorial at Jimmy Buffett’s Shrimp Boat Sound studio in the Key West Bight on Saturday. Photo by Rob O’Neal.

Ten years ago, on Sept. 2, 2013, I unexpectedly found myself on All Things Considered, reporting on Diana Nyad’s successful swim across the Florida Straits, from Cuba to Key West.

Two days ago, on Sept. 2, 2023, I unexpectedly found myself in the New York Times, reporting on how Key West was coping with the loss of Jimmy Buffett.

I was flattered when first contacted by the Times editor, but I initially tried to turn down the assignment. I had JUST been texting a friend about how I felt relieved not to be a journalist when I heard this news. I am not a Parrot Head - I don’t mind his music and I get the appeal but it just wasn’t the soundtrack of my youth or one of the reasons I moved to, or stayed in, Key West - as it was for so many. I will admit I have always found it more than a little ironic that someone who built an empire from the Margaritaville ethos said he left Key West because it was “too commercial.” And I just felt like now was not the moment to gripe about that.

But someone talked me into it, so I made sure my camera had a battery and a card in it, threw a notebook into a backpack and rode my bike downtown to check out the scene and talk to some people. I also called up others I knew for some added context and color. Every single person I approached was generous and open about sharing their experiences, feelings and thoughts about JB and his impact on them and on the island. The journalism gods smiled on me even more, when I saw the great Rob O’Neal had already filed the perfect photo for the story.

I was glad to include the detail about the special locals-only shows that JB added when he was here in February - fittingly, his last Key West gigs and a real service for all of those who were heartbroken when they couldn’t get into the amphitheater shows. I’m kind of sorry now that I didn’t line up for tickets and see one of those shows, but I felt then like I’d be taking a space from someone who really REALLY wanted to be there. I did see him play once, in the early ‘90s, at Margaritaville when he just popped up on stage (my friend Amy Woods, a reporter at the Key West Citizen, was a hostess there and would let us know when JB was in town and might play). I appreciated more the other acts he brought into town, especially one called Evangeline that he produced on his record label. (Note to self: see if they’re on Spotify and/or go up into the attic and dig up that CD.)

I don’t hold him single-handedly responsible for Key West becoming “too commercial.” The new, wider Overseas Highway bridges (completed in 1982) with the bigger freshwater pipeline had a lot to do with that. So did the creation in the 1980s of the Tourist Development Council, funded by taxes on tourist lodging and used mostly for promotion - a feedback loop of astounding force in a place with limited supply and high demand - leading to some of the highest room rates and year-round occupancy rates in the country.* I’d rather not join the incessant chorus of people declaring the island is ruined because it has changed from how it was when they first got to know it. I recently wrote a whole essay about that - you can read it for yourself in a couple weeks in a new anthology called Key West Sketches: Writers at Mile Zero (pub date: Sept. 19 - please buy a copy if you’re interested; proceeds benefit the restoration of the Elizabeth Bishop House).

Sometime late Saturday or early Sunday, I realized my Facebook feed filled with tributes and memories and personal reflections and the big coverage this news got nationally were a testament to not only the allure of trop rock and the idea of an easy life in a sunny place but, I think, to how badly people want to belong to a community. Whether it’s Deadheads or Beyonce, Red Sox Nation or MAGA, people are so happy when they feel like they are part of an affinity group. Loving the Keys - and, especially living here - sometimes feels like an affinity group, even if one that can be more accidental than intentional. And the Internet and social media, for better and worse, have made finding your affinity groups so much easier. People used to make fun of Trekkies, now it feels like there’s a con in every city with a space big enough to hold one.

I never interviewed Jimmy Buffett. I’m not into celebrity stuff or stories that hundreds of other people are also reporting (also part of my initial reluctance). I much prefer to tell stories that people DON’T already know. But I was glad to make sure Key West was as authentically represented as possible in national coverage. And to convey the voices of people from here about the impact of someone who will be an island icon forever.

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*I know this will never happen because it would require a change in the guiding legislation but if I were suddenly given superpowers and could change ONE THING about the Keys, it would be using a big chunk of the lodging tax money to fund a really good public transportation system here. I grew up with a free bus system that covered a lot of territory in western Massachusetts (the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority). It was funded by the local towns but also college students. In the Keys, public transit would help solve SO MANY problems. Affordability - especially for the workers who staff those hotels and restaurants and attractions. Traffic. Parking. Drunk driving. Golf carts and scooters all over the damn place. And it’s so much greener than all those cars and other vehicles taking us around. Sorry! End of rant.