I'M A LOSER, BABY: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

LITCAFE🔥 #1

For our first LITCAFE🔥 I’m going to look at a poem I rarely look at by a poet I rarely read, despite both of them being famous enough to fill several bathtubs.

Let me explain the phrase “a poet I rarely read”: to clarify, I rarely read any poetry at all, for the same reason you don’t give a terrier a cappuccino. If I do partake, I am not allowed to do so within several hours of my bedtime, which inches closer to 4:30pm every day.

Of the poets I do manage to read, and survive, Elizabeth Bishop is among my favorites. She is powerful. Precise. Incisive. Convective. She makes things bloom. She is deeply tactile even through the most folded and inverted and slippery of her abstractions, and, though she appears to be extremely tidy, she’s guttingly spacious. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf.

I want to look at Bishop’s poem “One Art,” with no particular lens in mind, just reading it line by line, to help slow us all down*. To that end, I’ll break this thing into sections that correspond with the stanzas, and I’ll record it [editor’s note: I just did it, and we’re rolling with the pre-dawn, done-is-better-than-perfect M.O. here— jsut call me the one-take wonder, half-awake phlegm-ball of hope that she’ll get it in the bag before the children wake] so you can listen while you work or drive or make the actual soup I’m about to use as a metaphor in the following paragraph.

*Two of the myriad gifts literature gives us: the reason and the means by which to ratchet ourselves down, to ease ourselves off the standard rolling boil of the capitalist hellscape down to a gentle simmer, so that we don’t scorch, and all the flavors around us can mingle and come forward. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a soup you’ve just concocted on full blast is only 8.2% as tasty as the soup you forgot about and simmered overnight.

Let us bubble gently, and see what flavors we can bring into being.

*

ONE ART
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

(And here’s a link, in case opening another tab so you can peek back and forth is easier than scrolling up and down. But I will also try to give enough context for each line as I come to it that you don’t get whiplash.)

*

STANZA 1

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she begins.

Ahem. Any time a poet makes a statement, assume there is a question inside it. (Previous utterance, and all those to follow, included.)

Poets don’t come to the page to tell you what they know. They come to the page to help themselves survive while they find out what they may be capable of knowing, with the asynchronous but promised (imagined) help of your eyes.

Yes, you: writing is fundamentally an act of connection, even if sometimes only with a later version of the self, and it most often it depends upon a reader or readers outside the body and mind of the writer. You are part of Bishop’s process, part of her poem, part of her why and her how: the imagined promise of you, the unborn you as yet twinkling in the ether, you-as-hope-of-Elizabeth. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.)

So, her opening question-as-statement: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” We could take her at face value, but not for long. What we probably immediately suspect, just from the boldness of the statement alone, is some form of irony, if not outright cynicism.

There’s a kind of sadness, a sighing, to the choice of “so many,” in the phrase “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost,” as opposed to something even a tiny bit different, like just plain “many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost.” (This is often how you know you’re dealing with a poet— if you alter or omit just one word, the entire experience changes. Try it anywhere else in the poem, read it aloud, and see how things change.)

And we absolutely can’t ignore the introduction of one of my very favorites, the word “seem,” in that same phrase, “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost.” Oh my but this is a powerful trick, because it is a functional fraternal twin to an assertion like “so many things are filled with the intent,” but the “seems” version can bloom and flow in a way that the untroubled assertion can’t; it’s the uncertainty itself that gives the statement life and invites us in, aerates it.

And yet, even at the same time as letting uncertainty flow through the cracks, the word “seem” provides us with a sense that Bishop is working to be accurate. Someone who’s going to bludgeon us with her signed-and-sealed belief doesn’t slow down and zoom in enough to admit the localized, tourniqueted uncertainty of “seem.” It’s a move that helps us trust her. Though tonally complex, it is honest work she’s doing.

In line 3, “to be lost that their loss is no disaster” kind of makes or does the thing she’s talking about (another poet trick). Imagine the galloping rhythm you’d make on your thighs for a kid who was running through the living room on a stick-horse— duh-duh-DUM, duh-duh-DUM. This is the rhythm I feel for both “to be lost” and “that their loss.”

There is a rhythmic equals sign between the two phrases. “To be lost” holds the potential, and “that their loss” holds the actual, and the fact that they’re wearing the same rhythmic “outfit” helps us regard them as kinda interchangeable: in this case, what may be also will be. She’s building inevitability not only out of dictionary meanings (also called “transparent” meanings), but also out of musical meaning (also called “opaque” meanings, or, my personal favorite, the “mouth-feel” of the words. In this case, since we’re talking about the rhythm, I might even go so far as to call it the “body-feel” of the words as they unfold).