Blogging from JJ's

Many of my students are writing analyses for the first time. It's been difficult to convince them that I'm giving them the tools for analysis but that they don't have to use all of the tools. One student's writing on a Bertrand Russell essay about Conrad and feels she needs to bring in the historical relationships among Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Britain. In 1250 words. I told her that I'll accept papers up to 10 pages, but no more.

To shift somewhat:

The following poem reminds me a lot of the previous post's Berryman poem, in that Bishop uses form to constrain deep, aching emotion. You've probably read it, but it's such a lovely villanelle. 

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.

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 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.

--

Please note that this poem is copyrighted, and I've stolen it. I have mixed feelings on whether a company (like Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC) should get to own a poem.

A typically constrained poet, Bishop breaks her own conventions with this poem: using two exclamation marks, the parenthetical outburst, the stuttering last line. Yet, she still manages to contain an otherwise destroying grief, the death of her lover, Macedo Soares. Although she affects a light tone until the last stanza, the poem as a whole always drives me close to tears. The chosen details ("the joking voice, a gesture/I love") are countered by the oddly formal "shan't." In the final line, she must command herself to complete the poem. She pushes the disaster of Soares's suicide away with the conditional "may" and the couching of grief as simile ("like"), but it doesn't work. She feels, and makes the reader feel, the intensity. The discipline it shows—she wrote 17 drafts—amazes me, but I think I understand the impulse of containment. To do otherwise risks spinning out of control: out of art, mastery, and eventually language. What in another poem might be a command to another (e.g., "Accept the fluster") emerges as commands to herself, as the parenthetical, italicized statement reveals. She is essentially talking to herself and to her dead Macedo, as one addresses a headstone, speaking for her own benefit into the void. She's trying to comfort herself, even through the disowned lie in the final stanza. 

"One Art" is perhaps the most affecting elegy I've encountered.