News at Eleven: Writing to her in 1974 from England,

and a third marriage, [Robert] Lowell remembered Elizabeth [Bishop] at that first meeting as "rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of design and anecdote as now," only to be corrected, a couple of weeks later: "Never, never was I tall . . . and I never had long brown hair either . . . so please don't put me in a beautiful poem tall with long brown hair!" For her part, Bishop recalled "the sad state of his shoes" and that "he needed a hair cut". The eye for detail and the endurance of the affection go together, and it may be telling that Lowell, rather than Bishop, eventually allows himself to misremember things. "I can't tell a lie even for art, apparently," Bishop wrote to him in 1962; "it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts."

from The Guardian: 'I seem to spend my life missing you'

~~~~~~~~~~~