My Favourite Poem

 One Art

 

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. 

 

- Elizabeth Bishop (from this anthology)

In trying to remember where I discovered this poem, I think first of the Writer's Almanac. This was a short radio segment in which the American radio personality Garrison Keillor read a short poem and offered a brief overview 'on this day in history' centered on writers and literature. Keillor was accused of sexually harassing female coworkers 2017, and his shows disappeared from public radio. Further digging reveals that the Writer's Almanac featured numerous poems of Bishop's over the years, but never 'One Art', so I don't actually know where I first found it. High school, browsing one of the English classroom's Norton Anthologies, having finished my class reading? At university, somehow? I am not sure. It is a poem so much a part of me that I cannot remember when I did not know it. It has spoken to me at many different times in my life. As the UK enters its second lockdown, it seems worth revisiting once more.