The Art of Losing

Ezra Pound famously wrote that poetry should be as well written as prose (though he might have qualified, as well written as good prose). Elizabeth Bishop’s poems are certainly that, but they tend to be prosaic in a less positive sense. It’s better written, more clear prose than most novels can boast, and the poems, for example “In the Waiting Room,” which narrates the speaker’s discovery/creation of her own identity as a discrete individual, are frequently very interesting and engaging in their topics. However, they too often lack that essential element of song, of words for music perhaps (in Yeats’ phrase), or words as music.

This is not true, however, of one of her most famous poems, the villanelle “One Art.” This is appropriate, given the musical nature of the form, which was originally a peasant song, though not originally in the form that we now know, with its strictly patterned repetitions. (The word “villanelle,” via a French detour, derives from the Italian word villano, “peasant”). In a footnote to a piece in his Literary Essays on the English Decadent poet Lionel Johnson (a fine writer largely forgotten today), Pound wrote of the villanelle as embodying obsession, the repeated lines bearing that which haunts and torments the speaker. “The villanelle…can at its best achieve the closest intensity, I mean when…the refrains are an emotional fact which the intellect, in the various gyrations of the poem, tries in vain and in vain to escape” (369). That is one way in which the villanelle can work, though not the only way. The repeating content of the villanelle gets stuck in the speaker’s head; he or she can’t get away from it. But at the same time, the villanelle contains (in both senses of the word) the obsession that is so often its subject, subjecting feeling to form. As poet and critic J.D. McClatchy writes of “One Art,” “The villanelle—that strictest and most intractable of verse forms—can barely control the grief, yet helps the poet keep her balance.”

“One Art” deals with loss as an activity, almost an occupation, and the poem both engages in that activity (so many things are lost over the course of the poem) and explores it as an activity (what does it mean to lose all these things?), an exploration facilitated by both the repetition and the variation on the repetition in the poem. It’s not a traditional villanelle, in that the lines containing the word “disaster” are not repeated exactly, but shift their shape over the course of the poem, as the speaker’s understanding of and relation to disaster shifts. The poem can be read as an extended metaphor: “one art” is both the art of losing and the art of writing poems (critic Mutlu Blasing notes that “the [poem’s] title tells us that the art of writing and the art of losing are one”). Here that art is the art of mastering loss, but also the art of surrendering to loss. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is, after all, ironic, since what is “mastered” is how to lose things—mastering the art of losing is, in effect, to become so good at loss that one loses everything. Life becomes equivalent to loss, though never quite equal to it. So many things seem to want to be lost that no individual loss need be a disaster. And yet it is, because there’s that word, over and over. One starts with small things, and then moves on to bigger challenges, things harder to lose (places, names, houses, cities, two rivers, a continent) but more painful for the immensity of their loss. The lost objects grow larger and larger, as if to flaunt how lightly the speaker takes even the seemingly greatest loss. And then one returns to the seemingly small, one irreplaceable thing, which is the largest, most painful loss of all: “you.” Beside this loss, all the other losses are insignificant. The speaker won’t have lied (and note the echoes of “I shan’t have died” in “I shan’t have lied”) in saying that the art of losing isn’t hard to master, for look, she’s lost the most important thing in the world, one simple pronoun, “the joking voice, a gesture/I love.” “Write it!” is both an instruction about the proper way to master loss and a command to the one who has been mastered by loss. The voice has stumbled, can’t go on, as evidenced by the stammer on “like.” “Write it!” demands that she go on, that she speak the word “disaster,” admit that this loss was indeed a disaster. At this point the poise the voice has maintained (nothing has been a disaster) breaks down; the rhetorical gesture enacts the visceral pain that the poem’s smooth surfaces heretofore have kept at bay. The voice can hardly say the word “disaster,” yet she must finally admit it, both say it (write it) and admit the immensity of the loss into her consciousness. After all these denials (denials haunted by the repetition of the word), it is disaster after all.



One Art

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.

Personal Preference and Aesthetic Judgment

In one of my previous posts I wrote that I would like to like all good poems, but I don’t. A commenter asked the very pertinent question of how one can recognize that a poem is good and still not like it. The answer hinges on the distinction between personal preference and aesthetic judgment.

As Wallace Stevens writes in “Adagia,” “Poetry is not personal.” But obviously our responses to it are, especially our initial responses. Ideally, one should be able to separate one’s personal response to a poem from a more objective consideration of its merits and shortcomings as an aesthetic object and an aesthetic experience. But that doesn’t mean that the personal response disappears. It only means that one doesn’t use a merely personal response as the basis of an aesthetic judgment. One’s personal response to a piece of literature is the starting point, but it cannot be the end point.

Kant wrote that aesthetic judgment requires the renunciation of interest (in the sense of investment, desire, the wish that the object do something for one, that it satisfy one) in favor of a disinterested perspective (disinterest is of course not the same as lack of interest) which sees the object for what it is, not for what one wants from it or even for its effect on one. As Adorno writes, "the traditional attitude was one not of enjoyment, but of admiration--admiration for what those works are in themselves, regardless of their relation to the viewer" (Aesthetic Theory).

There are many poems I can recognize as excellent examples of their kind without being engaged or attracted on a personal level to that kind of poetry, or to that particular poem. For example, I have very little interest in narrative poetry. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize Frost’s “Home Burial” as a powerful example of the genre. Similarly, I recognize Milton’s Paradise Lost as an amazing verbal and intellectual achievement, while finding the poem both repellent and dull on a personal level. Most of Elizabeth Bishop's work strikes me as well-written prose masquerading as poetry, but I admire her descriptive skills and her carefully calibrated deployment of significant detail. As in one’s dealings with people, it’s possible to respect and even to admire without liking.

Conversely, there are poems to which I have a positive personal response, poems that I like, that I also recognize are not particularly well-achieved aesthetic objects, are not particularly good as poems. I have a personal interest in poems about gay nightclubs and gay cruising, because I have a connection to that material: as my students say, I “relate” to it. But I can also recognize that, while many such poems engage me on the level of subject matter, they are not necessarily good poems because they’re about something in which I have a personal investment. Some are; some aren’t. Mark Doty writes very well on the topic (“The Vault,” which takes place in the sex club of the same name, is wonderful), as did the late Ed Cox (see his lovely little poem “Cruising”), and D.A. Powell writes splendidly, extravagantly about the world of gay clubs and gay cruising, especially in his extraordinary first book, Tea. Aaron Shurin is an ecstatic, quasi-sacramental poet of gay sex; “City of Men” is a contemporary masterpiece.

Nor, of course, is a poem a bad poem because I don’t respond to, or even actively dislike, its subject matter or its style.

I have learned a lot as a writer and as a reader from good poems I didn’t like, and also from bad poems that I didn’t like. (From bad poems that I’ve liked, I’ve learned to be very careful about what I allow to influence my work and my reading habits.) I think it’s very important that one read things that one doesn’t like, both because one never knows what a work can teach both about what one could do and about what one may not want to do, and because something one dislikes at first may became something one loves. As also in our interactions with people, it’s always best to err on the side of generosity and to be ready to offer a second chance.

Again, aesthetic value and personal preference are not the same thing, or even the same kind of thing. Aesthetic value is a quality of the artistic object. Personal preference is a matter of individual response to the artistic object, of an individual’s relation to and experience of that object. Obviously one has to have the relationship with the object in order to experience its qualities, but one’s experience of the object is not equivalent to the object, just as our thoughts about the world are not equivalent to the world. (Wallace Stevens writes, again in his "Adagia," that it's important to try "To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.") Consciousness pushes against the world, and the world pushes back. As Frank Bidart writes, “If it resists me, I know it’s real.” Poems are real things, and as Stevens writes, they resist the intelligence almost successfully. In that sense, they help defend us from ourselves.