I sort of see you surrounded with fine-tooth combs, sandpaper, nail files, pots of varnish, etc.--with heaps of used commas and semicolons handy, and little useless phrases taken out of their contexts and dying all over the floor," Elizabeth Bishop said upon learning a friend landed a job at The New Yorker in the early 1950s. From 1933 until her death in 1979, Bishop published the vast majority of her poems in the magazine's pages. During...