Five Poems by Max Jacob

In the summer of 1935, the young Elizabeth Bishop, only recently graduated from Vassar College, set out on one of her many voyages. This was a trip to France. After a homesick crossing by ship, she spent a month in the small port of Douarnenez, on the western tip of Brittany, while waiting for her friend Louise Crane. Douarnenez was a curious choice. It was, and still is, a hardworking fishing town, not a resort. The French poet Max Jacob often spent weeks at a time there, writing and painting, though he was absent that summer. Holed up in her hotel room and curious about the origins of surrealism, Bishop read and translated Rimbaud. That fall and winter, in Paris, she deepened her reading of the French surrealist poets, and it must have been then that she discovered the work of Jacob, the mystical Jewish-Catholic poet whose experiments with the unconscious had inspired Andre Breton and his friends.

As her notebooks make clear, Bishop was drawn to surrealism but also wary