♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

♪ ♪ KATIE COURIC: This poem is "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.

GREGORY ORR: Lose something every day.

Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

SHERYL SANDBERG: Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.

None of these will bring disaster.

YANG LAN: 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.

RICHARD SUMMERS: 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.

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER: 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.

ELISA NEW: Elizabeth Bishop is now cherished as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.

Her poem "One Art" is regarded as her masterpiece and a modern classic.

To explore the poem, I gathered six extraordinary readers.

I'm so happy to be sitting here with Katie Couric, who has kindly agreed to discuss Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" with me.

It's a poem clearly about loss, but loss on several levels.

And it touches me because I am a completely disorganized mess and I lose things constantly.

And because I have dealt with... uh, tragic loss in my life.

You can't master loss.

There's no one I know who's been through tragic loss that thinks they could control it.

In my own experience, I certainly couldn't.

Mastery means finding a way, finding a way to feel pain without it threatening you or overwhelming you.

These instructions about how to navigate the world, how to navigate your grief-- those are things you talk about, you think about, you wonder about, you practice, when you're older.

What we're looking at with Bishop is a true poet-- that is to say there's enormous amount of chaos and confusion inside them.

In that way, they resemble human beings.

But what poets do is, they turn that confusion and experience and crisis, they turn it into language.

And it's language, as poetry, that you can organize and order.

What is it to call losing an art?

It seems she wants to abstract a very deep and powerful emotion to some skill.

But actually, it's not a skill to be learned.

It's something you experience and will be part of you.

NEW: Although Bishop's published output was small and she was famously reticent, the house where she spent her early years is open to visitors.

Vassar College holds not only her drafts and letters, but a rich trove of Bishop's own paintings and sketches, glimpses into the life she translated into her one art.

♪ ♪ YANG: 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.

Part of what I like about the poem is, it has a certain chipper tone, which is so at odds with what she's talking about.

I would say she's very cavalier in this poem.

- Mm-hmm.

And I think that juxtaposes with, you know, the most intense and profound feelings that you can have as a human being.

ORR: First, she does a generalization about things as if things actually had a will of their own and their wish was to be lost, you know.

"So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost."

Things in the world are conspiring against us.

She's also adding a tone of joking.

Uh, a lightheartedness.

I'm choosing it, I'm getting good at it, it's not just a terrible burden, but it's an art, and I'm gonna write about it.

And...

I'm gonna show off about it a little bit.

♪ ♪ "Lose something every day.

"Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master."

The poem is called "One Art."

- It suggests that there are others.

Other ways to compartmentalize and create distance.

We have real distorted ways of dealing with pain and loss.

We run from it.

We anesthetize ourselves to it.

We find all these different ways to coexist with it.

I have this song, um...

The first line is, "Grief sits quietly in the passenger seat."

(playing slowly) It's a song about coexisting with grief and loss.

♪ Grief rides quietly on the passenger side ♪ ♪ Unwanted company on a long, long drive ♪ My husband died when he was 42 years old of colon cancer.

And so I think I gravitate towards poems that deal with grief and loss because they're helpful and consoling to me.

SANDBERG: I could have never predicted that I would have lost my husband, Dave.

Suddenly, at age 47?

Sometimes, when I hear a song that he liked or see someone in a jacket he had, or see someone that has his shape or looks like him from a distance... And sometimes for no reason at all, and I don't even know what triggered it.

And so I don't think you can master loss.

- I think you've just pointed to something in the poem, which is the way that little things can be suffused with loss.

So, your keys could be... not a big deal, it could be the hugest deal.

"The hour badly spent," I mean, I actually... And not talked about this, I haven't even probably dared to think about this that much, but, like... You know, if I could replay the last hour I had with Dave-- I fell asleep.

We're playing a game, I was tired, I fell asleep.

That I would have liked to stay awake.

So, the loss of that hour not well spent... (voice breaking): It's much bigger.

♪ ♪ NEW: Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop's losses began at just a few months old, when her father died.

Bereft, her mother took her to live with Elizabeth's maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia.

But by the time Bishop was five, her mother had become mentally ill and was confined to a psychiatric hospital.

A few years later, Bishop was taken to live with paternal relatives in Worcester, where she was unhappy and frequently ill.

The loss of Nova Scotia gives the poet a richly metaphoric vocabulary for feelings of homelessness and estrangement.

Throughout her career, including in the titles she gives to poems and whole volumes, Bishop uses the language of geography, coasts, islands, spinning globes, to visualize and contain emotions too large to name.

♪ ♪ CARPENTER: "Then practice losing farther, losing faster: "places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.

None of these will bring disaster."

It does sort of feel like it... is revving up to something.

You can feel it.

It-- it moves you forward.

You're waiting for, for the next line because of the rhythm inherent in the words that she's chosen.

Layer by layer, our loss becomes vaster, faster.

NEW: A quality of restrained agitation is a signature of Bishop's work.

"Controlled panic" is what she calls it in "Sandpiper," where a frantic shorebird seems to channel the speaker's own anxiety.

In other poems, Bishop clamps the panic within anxious exclamations.

Or she hints at where such anxiety drives her in "The Prodigal," who goes on alcoholic benders like Bishop herself, only to relive the shame again and again.

ORR: This poem has deep roots in the way we think.

The recurring lines mimic obsession.

What obsession is is an endless circle.

The dog chasing its tail in a circle.

You can't stop thinking about this-- it just keeps coming back again and again.

SUMMERS: With each verse, she goes back and forth, talking about disaster, master, disaster, master, disaster, master, which is really this sort of dialectic of trying to manage something.

NEW: This is a poem, as you've probably noticed, that's very tightly controlled, formally controlled.

It's a villanelle, which is a weird, hard form.

- Talking about extremely rigid linguistic order.

The form is 19 lines, composed of three-line stanzas.

A strict villanelle only has two rhymes.

First line and the third line in the first stanza are going to repeat all the way through the poem.

They're going to show up as the last line in the next, then, and they're going to alternately appear.

In the very last stanza, which is a four-line stanza, those first and third lines are gonna appear next to each other.

CARPENTER: It's just marvelous to me that it adheres to this form, and there's nothing quite as satisfying to me, when I'm writing a song, to find a structure, in a way.

It's, it's uniquely satisfying, and I don't know why that is.

But I like order out of chaos.

The secret of lyric art is the interplay of disorder and order.

Nietzsche said there are two gods who preside over the creative process.

First god is Dionysus.

He's the god of madness, ecstasy, chaos, dance-- your first draft, all over the place.

The second god, who also needs to appear, is Apollo, the Greek god of beauty, harmony, order, stability.

Now, of course, it doesn't mean that Apollo arrives and vanquishes Dionysus.

The beautiful thing about poems is that they're both present there.

NEW: The first draft of "One Art" is a far cry from the final version.

And the poem did not begin as a villanelle.

Bishop's 16 drafts show her struggling to find a more universal, less revealing language for feelings of loss.

And here, as at other times, the language of geography serves.

For instance, the word "cape."

Bishop spent happy summers as a teenager at a girls' summer camp at the tip of Cape Cod, where she may also have fallen in love for the first time.

"Cape" persists in drafts seven through ten before it is finally excised.

The "vaster" loss of a continent stands in for the loss of Bishop's lover, Lota de Soares, with whom she lived in Brazil for 15 years before Lota committed suicide.

♪ ♪ As the poem takes shape, some hurts are buried, others excavated.

SUMMERS: Maybe it was her life's work to tolerate feelings of loss.

(playing slow song) SUMMERS: Loss can become an identity.

It can become a companion.

- ♪ Grief sits silently on the edge of your bed ♪ ♪ It's closing your eyes ♪ ♪ Stroking your head ♪ COURIC: "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."

It intensifies as the poem goes on.

First, it's material possessions, and then it starts to be memories.

YANG: It's not about houses, it's about life.

It's about love.

It's about all sorts of feelings and emotions that used to be housed in those residences.

SUMMERS: This gets into the life experience of Elizabeth Bishop, who, my understanding is, had many losses, including many early losses.

CARPENTER: Someone said that this was one of the few instances where she actually even referred to her mother in her work.

That she lost her mother's watch, and how rare that was.

"Mother's watch" is something very specific and very personal, and suddenly it hits you-- maybe that's the only connection between her and her mother.

♪ ♪ SUMMERS: And also, I guess, there's the multiple meanings of it.

You know, her mother watching her.

Like, "my mother's watch" is, you know, "my mother's love."

"My mother's, sort of, being there."

It feels like, all of a sudden, she dove into something much deeper.

♪ ♪ COURIC: "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."

YANG: I feel bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper emotions.

She talks about the sense of place, where she talks about places that she has lost.

(playing rhythmically) ♪ Away from home, away from home ♪ ♪ Away from home, away from home ♪ ♪ Lord, I'm 500 miles from my home ♪ YANG: That can relate to many people whose hometown may be totally changed.

And if you go back, you cannot even find the old address.

Grandparents passing, you only have their pictures to look at.

Or people who have traveled so far away, they can never get back to their home.

CARPENTER: Being a musician for the last 30 years, I've been on the road.

I feel like I've spent my life on a big tour bus with my face pressed against the window, at every stop, looking around, going, "Could I live here?"

And it's that sense of always looking for home and not sure where it is.

♪ ♪ SANDBERG: "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."

All the way through, till the last stanza, she's talking to herself.

It's I, I, I.

"I lost," "I lost."

The first time I believe I see the word "you" is that very last stanza.

And I think she lost someone.

I don't think it's her joking voice.

I don't believe it's her gesture.

And I think it turn, takes a very dramatic turn in that last part.

"Losing you."

That "you" is a specific, intimate other.

This, to me, is the heart of the poem, is, you're trying to get to what really, really hurts.

What really makes you the ultimate irredeemably vulnerable human being, which is to lose the beloved.

NEW: "Even losing you."

Who?

Her lost mother?

Her grandparents in Great Village?

Lota, her Brazilian lover?

At the time the 65-year-old Bishop was writing "One Art," she feared that a new relationship with a younger woman, Alice Methfessel, would be lost, as well.

In drafts five, ten, and 11 of the poem, the "you" has eyes colored blue-- aster blue.

While in the final draft, the "you" is non-specific, perhaps to include the many "yous" the poet has lost, or to keep secret feelings too tender to share.

You could write a book about Elizabeth Bishop's parenthetical asides, and we see it here.

"(The joking voice, a gesture I love)."

YANG: She or he must have been very joyful to be with, and also with, a "gesture I love," you don't know what gesture.

Even as this parentheses is disclosing something, the only thing we really know about this... YANG: Yeah, yeah.

NEW: ...lover who's been lost, it's also retaining the privacy.

It's a little secret that we, we know.

SUMMERS: "I shan't have lied."

Who accused her of lying?

Why is she protesting that she didn't lie?

And I think it's because it's sort of more like, the truth will out, finally.

ORR: What we're talking about here is same-sex attraction.

So, the reticence is socially and culturally justifiable at that time, and, at the same time, that reticence and that urge to disclose, it's what makes the poem alive.

♪ ♪ What's beautiful about this poem is that by the end of the poem, there's more chaos than there was in the beginning.

And yet, the form itself is so strong that she can go right into chaos.

She can, she can open her heart.

NEW: What is it to call losing an art?

SANDBERG: Loss happens to all of us differently.

Art is something that no two people do the same way.

If it's a science, it happens the same way every time.

But if it's art, it's different.

Anyone who has the paintbrush does it their own way-- anyone who has the pen.

♪ ♪ COURIC: I think the most significant line in this whole poem is what's in parentheses in the very last line, "(Write it!)."

I think Elizabeth Bishop is putting "(Write it!)"

in parentheses and italicizing "Write" because I think she's trying to convince the reader and herself.

YANG: It's kind of reinforced instruction that you have to master this skill, so write it down.

Like, there's an exclamation point there.

NEW: Yeah.

- You know, don't dodge that.

Write it.

The experience of writing is somehow healing and transformative for her.

Once she's written, she feels different than the way she felt before.

If you write something down, then you have this piece of paper with that commitment on it.

And paper and pen, they codify all sorts of things, right?

Whether it's a marriage license or a birth certificate or a death certificate.

One of the things we discover as lyric poets is that we may be really suffering and confused and screwed up in our lives, but if we can turn it into words, we can remake it.

(playing slow song) ORR: Just the process itself and the product can help sustain us.

CARPENTER: When you write something, as a songwriter, you make sense of things.

It's a method for comforting, understanding myself better.

(continues song) ORR: My feeling is that what lyric poetry is is, it's something culture invented in order to help us survive.

It said, "Look, here you are, moving through your life.

"Then you're happy and you're sad.

"You don't know what's gonna happen next, things that you loved are gone."

And, and we need order-- we need some kind of order.

NEW: Though her life was frequently chaotic, Elizabeth Bishop used form to find order.

Perhaps one reason her strict villanelle, "One Art," so resonates with readers is what it tells us about the human need for form, for ritual, and for the art that organizes our most painful feelings.

I'm a Presbyterian.

- Mm-hmm.

- And we sing, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost" with the same tune every Sunday.

And there's something so evocative about being able to, to return to some kind of structure and form, and more than that, it's a familiarity.

CARPENTER: ♪ It hands you your overcoat ♪ ♪ And opens the door ♪ ♪ You are learning the world again ♪ ♪ Just as before ♪ You have to believe there are steps you can take.

You get out of bed, you brush your teeth, put one foot in front of the other.

CARPENTER: ♪ But the first time was childhood ♪ ♪ And now you are grown ♪ ♪ Broken wide open ♪ ♪ Cut to the bone ♪ (song continues) YANG: It sounds like practice, but that word "master" also implies that you have to experience it again and again.

(song continues) ORR: This is the voice of a solitary named Elizabeth Bishop, who finally faces her own aloneness, and who also demands of herself, "Write it!"

This is the voice of the solitary speaking to herself.

But it also speaks to us.

(song ends) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

For additional information and streaming content, please visit us at poetryinamerica.org.