BISHOP SYMPOSIUM ATTRACKS SCHOLARS, POET’S DEVOTEES
From the Vassar student paper. They’ll probably correct it soon, but go there now and enjoy this wonderful word, which folds into itself both hate and love …
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Rats. They fixed it. A commenter called them on it.
September 29th, 2011 at 1:22AM
I’m sorry. I snitched. It’s my old school. And although we don’t have a football team or really any sports to get razzed up about or wild frat houses, we tend to look after one another and feel one another’s embarrassment. They could have liked my comment, though.
At any rate, let’s have a poem 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.
September 29th, 2011 at 11:12AM
Love and hate, yes — and also a sense of the two caught in (tracked by) crosshairs. Nice.