But it's not really a disaster...

So, I automatically liked Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." For two reason, first it reminded me of my favorite Sleater-Kinney song "Good Things". Second I can relate to this poem. I feel like a lot of the poems and stories we have read this semester were important to read because they are historical or historically important. However, nothing beats reading poem and getting it, because it expresses feelings you have felt. And I'm really into feelings.

After reading Bishop's poem and deciding that I wanted to blog about it I logged onto Ebsco to see what other people were saying about "One Art." The first article I read titled, "Bishop's ONE ART" by Jonathan Sircy shed some light on how Bishop uses irony in this poem. So post-modernist, right?

In the fist stanza of the poem Bishop writes, "The art of loosing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster." This alone isn't ironic but when taken into account with the rest of the poem, this beginning thought that loosing things is easy, so many things just seem intent on being lost, it isn't earth shattering. Things leave, things go, and when they do you just pick yourself up by the boot straps and move on. After all it is no disaster.

The next two verses of the poem as Sircy suggest almost seem like a manual on how to loose things. Bishop writes, "Loose something everyday" (Step one), "Accept the fluster" (Step two), "Practice loosing farther, loosing faster" (Step three). See! It's easy to loose things, surely no disaster.

In these two verses as well, the tone of the poem shifted for me. The first two verses are almost cute. You just sort of read along thinking yeah loosing stuff isn't a disaster, especially when it is just some keys or an hour of your time. Those seem more like small inconveniences as opposed to disasters. Then in the third verse and with the introduction of "step three" the poem takes on a serious tone. That line, "Practice loosing farther, loosing faster" kind of breaks my heart in a good way. Especially when she adds, "places, and names and where it was you meant to travel." That's heavy. And sure loosing those things isn't a disaster like a tornado or an earthquake, but it still hurts. After listing off those things she once again states that "None of these will bring disaster."

At this point in the poem she switches over to first person. She begins to recount the things she has lost grouping her "mother's watch" and "three loved houses" as things that went. Of course the houses are not lost but like the "cities," "rivers," and "continent" of lines 13-15, she no longer owns claim over them. I have lived in a couple different cities, and I do feel like I have lost them. The street where you old work is, is no longer your street. Your old houses, are not your any more. New people have moved in, been hired, taken your spot and you lost it. You can go back and visit, you could even move to the same city again, but you can never have that time back. It is intact lost, and all that remains is memory.

Although she misses these places, loosing them was not a disaster.

In the last verse, Bishop is no longer addressing places and things, she talks about a person's memory. She seems to try to make light of the loss she feels towards this person by remembering a "joking voice" or beloved "gesture." In this verse she also admits that the "art of losing's not too hard to master thought it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." I think the use of the "(Write it!) makes this poem take on an even heavier feeling. People are the hardest thing to loose, and if she has been trying to associate small loss with big loss to downplay the importance of the big loss, perhaps realizing that a big loss is a disaster somehow makes all those smaller things disasters too.

I can't help but feel like the irony in this poem is sort of like forcing yourself to believe something as true. Like you so desperately don't want to care, don't want to hurt, don't want to miss and by just shrugging it off as something that happens, just like loosing your favorite t-shirt or hat, you can minimize just how disastrous it is. By lumping big loss with little loss it all becomes interchangeable.

Perhaps Bishop is being a little bit of a trickster as well. Trying to pretend like loss doesn't hurt, it is all small and easy to master. At the end of poem I think her true feelings are reveled, as it seems like it gets harder to write as she realizes intense feelings created by the collectiveness of everything every loss.

Disastrous is a big word, with lots of negative connotation, but it could just simply be when everything falls apart or ends. When you move, your previous life is gone. That is sort of scary. That could technically be disastrous, but I think the art of loosing is easy to master. The art of dealing with the loss is a whole nother story.

Really fast, is nother even a word? I say it all the time, but don't think I have ever typed it. Weird.

Now this poem kind of reminds me of this Vivian Girls song. I'm going to go head and make this comparison, because I feel like in this Vivian Girls song they are trying to convince themselves that they feel a certain way through loss. "I Believe in Nothing" and "One Art" both seem to take semi-casual approaches to the very heart breaking reality of loss.