All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was an adventurer, her travel life began to escalate along with her publishing in her mid-thirties. During this time, the world was her home, her means of beginning to understand herself and quite literally the world. Worcester, Massachusetts is where Bishop was born in 1911 and grew up (she also ventured in Nova Scotia). Before she was five Bishop had no mother or father. Her life was full of ups and downs in her personal and public life.

Bishop was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for second poetry collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (1955). Her popularity began to peak close to her passing. In 1979 she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was dynamic, not only a poet, but also a painter. Eavan Boland considers her the, “most disruptive and mysterious of modern poets.”

Our poem focus is “One Art,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1976. This is one of Bishop’s final piece of works.

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.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)