And the Proud Shall Be Laid Low

I'm starting to look more intently at writing programs and in all the websites, open house videos, statements of purpose, faculty biographies, course requirements... I found something I wasn't looking for. I believe they call it humility.


I've always felt both better than other people. (I've usually felt inferior as well, but this is a confession not group therapy.) A better writer, better intellectual, better thinking sentient being. Despite being smacked down time and again, there's some hard nugget of pride at the center of myself that can't be cracked, chipped or melted down for ammunition.


But there's a nervousness, a fear I'm starting to feel that says maybe I'm not that good, that bright, that talented to make it all break my way. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is promised. The only success is the work.


One of the first times I felt such a state was reading this poem, one of the most acclaimed and famous in twentieth-century literature. And justifiably so. The stateliness, desperation, mystery, repetition, the language both lovely and frightening...


Elizabeth Bishop's complete poems takes up less than 300 pages. That's right, "The Da Vinci Code" is more than 50% longer than everything she ever published, including juvenilia and translations. But she packed so much into it, revising her poems over decades. I don't know if I wrote anything ten years ago worth looking at, much less revising. 


The first time I read this I couldn't believe someone had actually sat down, put pen to paper and written it. Maybe I'm the only one to feel this celestial voice speaking to me as if on a deserted island, but there are a few times where you feel spoken to directly. "One Art" is one of those burning-bush type signs.

One Art

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.