"One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop
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.
Hong Kong–born poet Marilyn Chin, in “Hospital in Oregon,” provides a different view of loss:
Shhh, my grandmother is sleeping,
They doped her up with morphine for her last hours.
Her eyes are black and vacant like a deer’s.
She says she hears my grandfather calling.
A deerfly enters through a tear in the screen,
Must’ve escaped from those there sickly Douglas firs.
Flits from ankle to elbow, then lands on her ear.
Together, they listen to the ancient valley.
"What the Last Evening Will Be Like,” by Edward Hirsch
New York City–based Edward Hirsch engages with the quiet yet transcendent ordinariness of loss:
You're sitting at a small bay window
in an empty café by the sea.
It's nightfall, and the owner is locking up,
though you're still hunched over the radiator,
which is slowly losing warmth.
Now you're walking down to the shore
to watch the last blues fading on the waves.
You've lived in small houses, tight spaces—
the walls around you kept closing in—
but the sea and the sky were also yours.
No one else is around to drink with you
from the watery fog, shadowy depths.
You're alone with the whirling cosmos.
Goodbye, love, far away, in a warm place.
Night is endless here, silence infinite.
Interviewer: You've said that poetry is a form of necessary speech. Why necessary?
Edward Hirsch: I guess it's sort of being contrasted to a tremendous amounts of unnecessary speech, things that aren't important to be said that don't need to be said. There's a constant kind of buzz of unimportant things around us, but when someone writes a poem, it seems to me that it's because something really needs to be said. Something need to be inscribed. Something important to the person that the person want it to live, and things go by so fast. Our lives are so short. Our attention span are so short. Sometimes when someone wants to say something that they hope will have a lasting life, it seems necessary to me. And that's why I call it a necessary act of speech.
Interviewer: You've written a book called, " How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry."
Edward Hirsch: I think there's an equal urgency for reading them. First of all, there are no writers who aren't readers, and in fact, one of my ideas is that poets are not just people who want to express themselves. Poets are people who've been so moved by what they've read that they want to respond in kind.
( Yes). Emily Dickinson calls them "my kinsmen of the shelf."
(Yes). They're your compadres, even though many of them are not alive. But I had a feeling that many people thought there was something in poetry for them, but they've been put off by the way it had been taught, by its difficulties, by the sort of sense of academic difficulty around it, and they had been turned away from poetry. And I thought that I could try to write a book that would speak to both initiated and uninitiated readers and welcome everyone in kind of loving spirit,welcome everyone into the tent. Begin with individual poems. I mean,the book is called "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry." The idea is you begin with individual poems. And I began with poems that I really care about.
No comments:
Post a Comment