Poetic Justice

When I first read "One Art" (Bishop's letter collection) years ago, I noticed it only included one letter E.B. wrote to her Brazilian lover Lota. How was that possible? Bishop was a prolific letter writer (it was her life line to friends) and her "selected" letter collection was already a 600 page tome. How could it only contain one letter from the fifteen-year (often considered the happiest period of E.B.'s life) relationship? Then I discovered from the footnote that E.B.'s letters to Lota were all burned by Lota's families after Lota commit suicide in New York. (The one survived because it was put into a book as a bookmark.) 

Now, after almost 20 years, Bishop is in the Pantheon of Library America. Numerous books, biographies, and papers had been written about her. Even her unpublished poems had been dug out of libraries and assembled into a new (though controversial) book. (We even have a feature length movie about her love affair!) No stones in her life hadn't been turned and no closets unopened. Bishop would be totally horrified to discover how her life had been exposed. Surprisingly, no "new" letters to Lota had been uncovered, not a single one. Without her letters, her love story stays forever a mystery; we can take a peek from her love poem such as "The Shampoo", but we will never know the rest. In some way, it seems to be the poetic justice this very private poet needs. It also makes reading the only surviving letter in "One Art", right before E.B.'s other letters to report Lota's death, a poignant experience one can hardly describe.