I’ve never been sold on much of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and not for lack of trying, from sellers and buyer alike. She was a poet who lived a passionate life, transgressing boundaries of her time, struggling with addiction, childhood abuse, rootless-, restlessness and infidelity. Yet her words mask rather than reveal, rarely allow a glimpse of vulnerability.

Please don’t lecture me on the right of people to their privacy, or the value of reticence, I get it. I just describe my emotional reaction to people feeling compelled to hide something essential under the armor of protection of privacy. In any case, today is not about the poet, it’s about the thoughts that a particular poem of her’s elicited.

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.

by Elizabeth Bishop

This is probably one of, if not THE most famous poems on loss around within contemporary poetry. Strange villanelle, the faster, fluster, master, disaster racing each other through ever widening losses, until the very end of a relationship that’s severed. Whether through abandonment or death remains unspoken.

Apparently the poem went through 17 drafts, each successive one eliminating more details that could tie it to the personal experiences that purportedly gave rise to the poem itself: the suicide of Bishop’s former long-time partner Lota de Macendo Soares after the poet had left her, and the abandonment by her subsequent lover, Alice Methfessel, a woman some 30 years her junior. She eventually returned to Bishop, staying with her until Bishop’s death at age 68 in 1979. Maybe that personal distancing by removing identifiable details protected her. it certainly raised the possibility for the poem’s readers to project their own losses into the lines.

Here is what really interests me, though. The poet, in her repetition of “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and the title – One Art – suggests that all losses are on somewhat equal footing, all can be tucked away, no matter if it’s a key, a library book, a friendship or a country. Even with the loss of a person the catastrophe gets only acknowledged in parentheses, (Write it!) and as a conditional – it may look like – instead of an acknowledgement – it IS a disaster.

Of course no-one doubts for an instant that the death of a person can or should be equated with the loss of a pair of sunglasses, or that Bishop really meant that. Glasses can be replaced, the dead cannot. We have a hierarchy of the severity of our losses; they might vary in some details, but the overarching arc is probably the same for much of humanity. The poem likely expressed the desperate wish that the “one art” assumption could help to ignore the reality of true disasters, losses that will haunt us.

What then if something utterly new appears on the horizon, a loss that we have not contemplated before, that we lack rituals for, that we cannot even judge for its long-term consequences, where do we stack that in this hierarchy? And stack we want, since a relative placement could help us modulate our reactions.

And how do we learn to master those losses, when we can’t even categorize them? What do you call being isolated from human contact, as you knew it, during a pandemic? What do you name the feeling that danger lurks behind every human interaction and if in doubt, you need to distance yourself? How do you adapt to a situation where your general assumptions about health and medicine’s magical rescue kit are turned upside down? How do you predict the damage wrought on us essentially social creatures, when socialization during appropriate developmental stages (nursery school!) is not happening? How do you integrate the opportunity cost when teenagers can’t “try out” relationships at a time where hurt does not leave extensive scars? Will their loneliness push them into clinging relationships too early?

How will we be affected when the restrictions of rights or the expansion of duties create violent reactions in large parts of the population? How are we able to tolerate a sense of unpredictability regarding time frames – not knowing which loss is temporary, however long, or which is final – we will never and nowhere escape a pandemic due to constant mutations? Are we talking a few more months, years, decades? How do we sort the moral implications of property rights vs. inoculating the world populations on a large scale? Or the moral implications of some of us being able to take safety measures vs. others who cannot afford to?

I sometimes think the hardest losses to accept are those that defied expectations. Children should not die before their parents, a knee replacement should not put you into an irreversible coma, a right that you and your country fought for and cherished should not simply be ripped away from you by some empowered few.

And now we have a situation where not only our (naive) expectations that a Western, developed country should be able to escape a deadly disease, are defied. We also experience that the precautions against the threat themselves are causing harm. Covid isolation led to depression, anxiety and increased substance abuse, as well as overdose deaths. (Ref.) We are facing a complete reversal of what we thought was an overall given: a life expectancy extending easily into our seventies and eighties for most, a continuance of communal experience.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” well, I am at a loss. Translated into German: Ich bin ratlos, which means literally “without advice.” Unable to give advice, or not having received any, the phrasing doesn’t tell. Not exactly a disaster, but a rather anguished way of being.

Here is a trailer for Reaching for the Moon, a (mediocre) film made about Bishop’s time in Brazil and cheerful music from Brazil to get us into the weekend.

Images today from the 2018 series Tied to the Moon about women’s experiences shared across history.