Chance Meetings Session 7: Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop’s "North & South"

The Authors Guild Foundation presents Chance Meetings, a new online literary seminar inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (NYRB Classics 2024). 

Following the book’s spirit and shape, the monthly sessions feature talks on beloved classics of American literature by contemporary writers with a personal connection to the works they are discussing. 

On November 13, join critic, biographer, and Yale University's Niel Gray, Jr., Professor of English Langdon Hammer for a discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South—“the first book of poetry Elizabeth Bishop wrote and the first book by Bishop that I read,” writes Hammer. “Fifty years later, I’m still reading and teaching and writing about it, permanently seduced by its strangeness and how it makes the world look when I pick my eyes up from the page. During the eleven years Bishop spent writing the poems in the book, Marianne Moore was her mentor. Rachel Cohen devotes a chapter to the two of them. We’ll look closely at their complex and peculiar relationship.”

For the eighth and final session of the Chance Meetings seminar series on December 11, Rachel Cohen leads a concluding discussion, extending the lines of each seminar forward with an eye toward emergent art forms after the first World War.

This event takes place virtually via Zoom. Tickets are required for attendance.