nothing avant garde, please

From Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau’s Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography:

in two cortisone-induced sleepless nights she finished “In the Village” . . . The New Yorker [in 1952] purchased the story for twelve hundred dollars, even though the editors felt it was an experimental piece for them because of its suggested rather than explicit story line. They wrote to Bishop about what appeared to them as non sequitors in her story, and she quipped that she did not “believe they could follow their noses.”