Dear Elizabeth--Bishop and Lowell

            Yesterday at Stern Grove, I told Kathy and Ethel that I wished I'd talked Javier into going to Dear Elizabeth instead of to Before Midnight because Dear Elizabeth, based on the correspondence between American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell,  is connected to something really wonderful about Mom--almost as wonderful as showtunes.
          Robert Hurwitt reviewed Dear Elizabeth on May 17, after it first opened at the Berkeley Repertory’s Roda Theatre, and I talked back because of the interactive habits I have when I read the newspaper--my substitute for doing crossword puzzles, maybe.  I circle, underline, and make margin notes in response to what I read.   When I came to his comment that Bishop and Lowe “aren’t exactly household names even in literate families,”  I had to write, “Yes, they are!”  Then I realized that the reason I knew Elizabeth Bishop was that my mother found a book called Touchstones:  American Poets on a Favorite Poem in the used book store she used to go to all the time, and she suggested we read it together, which we did.  The essay that meant the most to me was one written by Julia Alvarez (author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, Yo)  on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art.”    I loved both the essay and the poem it was about, and when I went to a reading by Julia Alvarez at A Clean Well-Lighted Place (Opera Plaza on Van Ness) in the late 1990’s, I told her during the question-answer period how much I’d liked her essay on “One Art” as well as Yo, and she said, “Wow!  I’m surprised you’ve even heard of that essay,” and I thought:  Mom!

           It makes me feel really good to think about this because my mother had such a hard time at the end of her life—losing bits and pieces of her mind and of her sense of usefulness--so thinking about this moment in the 1990s when I was fully aware of how she had enriched my life really means a lot to me now—even more than it did at that moment.   Julia Alvarez did such an artful job in analyzing the poem that I hesitate to give my inadequate summary, but the poem deals with how the poet deals with loss through writing.   

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

The line that repeats four times (one slightly altered)  is “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” and the last four lines are

--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.

            In her essay, Julia Alvarez hears “won art” and says that the poet or any other artist wins art--there are no freebies—by writing and righting the losses she speaks of.  “It is her joking voice that I love, her seemingly offhand gesture of tossing off line after line.  In back of this conversational, spoken voice is all the hard work of mastery, the struggle for control. Losses mastered by practice….She…provides a model for writers of how to deal with our losses by writing about them.”

I wrote about this poem in an earlier blog, so this is just about how it re-entered my life when I saw the Robert Hurwitt review  and then again yesterday, when I told Kathy and Ethel about it.  (On the subject of correspondence on literary matters Ethel mentioned 88 Charing Cross Road, which I want to read and see again!)  I didn't let Javier know how much Dear Elizabeth meant to me, and he was tired and wanted to stay in the city (which was really more demanding because of the driving in heavy traffic, which BARTing to Berkeley wouldn't have constituted).  I wish I'd let him know or seen the two-person theatre piece on my own.   I've heard that they read "One Art."  I listened to their podcast and see that the actress playing Elizabeth Bishop wasn't familiar with what a Villanelle is.  I know because of Roger Hite.