The art of losing

I found myself reciting Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art” over and over on Wednesday, Nov. 6, after the election results were announced. The poem has always been a comfort to me — it’s in my bones. The poem begins, “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.”

I teach writing and literature at Berklee College of Music where degree students must take liberal arts and sciences courses. The literature course I offer, “The Art of Losing,” takes its title from the first line of that poem.

I am passionate about poetry, and I want to get “One Art” and other poems into my students’ bones, also — to get them to understand the power of poetry’s rhythm and repetition in much the same way that they, as musicians, understand the power of music. I know that music students carry certain lines, rhythms, rhymes, melodies with them. They tell me all the time about the musicians they love: Adrianne Lenker, Radiohead, Ethel Cain, Chopin. I know students use the beats and measures of their favorite music to bring them comfort the way I might use a poem.

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I do not pretend to know or guess how my students — or you — are feeling about this U.S. presidential election. But I do know that many people on Wednesday woke up terrified and panicked. And many others woke up celebrating. This profound evidence of division is something some journalists, political scientists and historians see as reminiscent of the divisive time in the 1860s leading up to the Civil War. Such conflict is unsettling and disorienting and can make us feel as if our differences will keep us forever at odds.

I developed The Art of Losing course because Bishop’s “One Art” has served as a mantra for me in troubled times, and whenever I teach it, I learn something new. Also, its villanelle structure — one of the trickiest forms of poetry to write (especially to write well!) — fascinated me. Then I started looking at all the literature I had been teaching over the years, stories such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter,” Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” Anton Chekhov’s “Misery” and other villanelles, such as Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” W. H. Auden’s “If I Could Tell You,” and Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” I noticed a pattern. Almost every story or poem had at its center a conflict that revolved around loss of some sort: lost love, lost homes and countries, lost opportunities, and the most final loss of all, death. I noticed that stories and poems about loss, while they can make us sad, can also help us heal. So in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, I find myself thinking about how one person’s loss might be another’s gain, and I am searching for the healing in that.

Humans often divide the world into convenient opposites: loss and gain, good and evil, love and hate, man and woman, winners and losers, on and on. Seeing the world in opposites can bring comfort, can give us structure and categories, a way to organize our thinking. Opposites certainly simplify things. But I refuse to believe that opposites are the only truth, or that they offer any kind of healing balm.

... in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, I find myself thinking about how one person’s loss might be another’s gain, and I am searching for the healing in that.

Of course, in nature, too, there are opposites: cloudy and clear, hot and cold, rough and smooth. But there is also cooperation, regeneration, ecosystems that rely on each other to survive. Caio Maximino and Marta Soares, in their article “Cooperation in Animals, and What It Tells Us about Scientists,” explain how “ostriches and zebras team up in packs for added protection from predators. Ravens guide wolves to prey.”

Suzanne Simard is an ecologist who studies trees. She has shown how “trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain.” For instance, one tree, afflicted by insects, might send warning signals to another tree.

Oh, my. What if we saw ourselves that way? What if we saw ourselves as linked by networks that send healing or warning signals to each other? What if we are on this earth to help each other survive, to help each other be? Instead of seeing only opposing forces, we could recognize the connecting ones.

What if we are on this earth to help each other survive, to help each other be? Instead of seeing only opposing forces, we could recognize the connecting ones.

In the villanelle form, lines one and three repeat throughout the poem, and at the poem’s end, they form a couplet. A villanelle circles back on itself as it progresses. But even as the lines repeat, the thought moves forward. Music does that, too. As do humans. We repeat. We repeat lines, we repeat mistakes, we repeat patterns. But I refuse to believe we repeat without progress.

Last Wednesday, my spouse Diane, my dog Rocky, and I set out for the woods. We sat on a stone bench overlooking Swan Lake at Rockefeller Preserve near our home in New York. We watched leaves, one by one, let go of limbs and dance through the air to the water below.

We didn’t know what else to do.

I teach about loss because I believe that in all its forms, it is a connecting force. We can let loss divide us, embitter us, weaken us, or we can recognize how we all suffer its presence and still move forward.

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