Poem by Elizabeth Bishop   I believe it was Robert Lowell who said of Elizabeth Bishop that she “spent a lifetime trying to impersonate an ordinary woman.”  Perhaps he meant it as an observation of her personality, but it is also an apt observation of her poetry, of her poetic technique.  And it is what I love about Bishop’s poems: the casual, conversational tone, the frequent questions and hesitations, the way we’re gradually drawn into the sense that we are seeing—not just seeing, really, but entering—a mind at work, and then the turn, or turns: into reflection, and then into revelation, revelation that surprises and moves. All of Bishop’s poems don’t follow this exact pattern, of course, but think of many of the best…