Apropos of Memorial Day: "A Reckless Nostalgia"

The other night at B's house, I spotted the newest edition of the London Review of Books on the dining room table. The cover promised an article on the subject of Elizabeth Bishop, my favorite poet. As dinner was cooking, I leafed through the pages and began to remember what I loved so much about her writing when I first discovered it. She lived a somewhat lonely but colorful life (another kindred spirit). Bishop wasn't exactly prolific; sometimes she would work on a piece for years-putting it down for as long as it took for the imagery to finally overtake her and then crafting and re-crafting a phrase until she was certain that it could solidly stand on its own. This is a methodology often applied to the creative process and unfortunately as a practitioner I understand its agonizing effects all too well. It must be perfect or it remains unfinished in perpetuity.

Here is the poem that first drew me to her. A recently-published book reproduces a total of 16 existing drafts. It's probably her best known work, and over the years I've seen many instances where people have appropriated it to validate a variety of self-pitying claims about some of the sadder aspects of their own lives. Unlike those people, I see an incredible strength and durability in her words; a reckless nostalgia for the velocity of loss and how it propels us, the mostly unwilling, forward through time. Here it is. It's called "One Art".

Imagine my surprise when B casually revealed to me during dinner that he had attended poetry classes at UW while Miss Bishop was there as a visiting lecturer and prof in 1966. A little research reveals that she took the gig because her house in Brazil needed a new roof (see picture).