For our first LITCAFEđ„ Iâm 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 âa poet I rarely readâ: to clarify, I rarely read any poetry at all, for the same reason you donât 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, sheâs guttingly spacious. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf.
I want to look at Bishopâs poem âOne Art,â with no particular lens in mind, just reading it line by line, to help slow us all down*. To that end, Iâll break this thing into sections that correspond with the stanzas, and Iâll record it [editorâs note: I just did it, and weâre rolling with the pre-dawn, done-is-better-than-perfect M.O. hereâ jsut call me the one-take wonder, half-awake phlegm-ball of hope that sheâll get it in the bag before the children wake] so you can listen while you work or drive or make the actual soup Iâm 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 donât scorch, and all the flavors around us can mingle and come forward. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a soup youâve 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 isnât 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 isnât 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 motherâs watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isnât hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasnât a disaster.
âEven losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shanât have lied. Itâs evident
the art of losingâs not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
(And hereâs 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 donât get whiplash.)
*
STANZA 1
âThe art of losing isnât hard to master,â 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 donât 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 Bishopâs 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: âThe art of losing isnât hard to master.â 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.
Thereâs a kind of sadness, a sighing, to the choice of âso many,â in the phrase âso many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost,â as opposed to something even a tiny bit different, like just plain âmany things seem filled with the intent / to be lost.â (This is often how you know youâre dealing with a poetâ 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 canât ignore the introduction of one of my very favorites, the word âseem,â in that same phrase, âso many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost.â Oh my but this is a powerful trick, because it is a functional fraternal twin to an assertion like âso many things are filled with the intent,â but the âseemsâ version can bloom and flow in a way that the untroubled assertion canât; itâs 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 âseemâ provides us with a sense that Bishop is working to be accurate. Someone whoâs going to bludgeon us with her signed-and-sealed belief doesnât slow down and zoom in enough to admit the localized, tourniqueted uncertainty of âseem.â Itâs a move that helps us trust her. Though tonally complex, it is honest work sheâs doing.
In line 3, âto be lost that their loss is no disasterâ kind of makes or does the thing sheâs talking about (another poet trick). Imagine the galloping rhythm youâd make on your thighs for a kid who was running through the living room on a stick-horseâ duh-duh-DUM, duh-duh-DUM. This is the rhythm I feel for both âto be lostâ and âthat their loss.â
There is a rhythmic equals sign between the two phrases. âTo be lostâ holds the potential, and âthat their lossâ holds the actual, and the fact that theyâre wearing the same rhythmic âoutfitâ helps us regard them as kinda interchangeable: in this case, what may be also will be. Sheâs building inevitability not only out of dictionary meanings (also called âtransparentâ meanings), but also out of musical meaning (also called âopaqueâ meanings, or, my personal favorite, the âmouth-feelâ of the words. In this case, since weâre talking about the rhythm, I might even go so far as to call it the âbody-feelâ of the words as they unfold).