TRANSCRIPT

Hi, it’s Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. This spring, we asked you to help us curate the poems we share on the show — to submit poems that have helped you pause and reflect in this busy world. In just a few days, we received almost three hundred submissions. The Slowdown team selected five to feature this week. Here’s today’s community curator, to tell you why they want you to hear this poem. 

I'm Doug Green. I just came off a stint as, a one year stint with my spouse Becky Boling as the Co-Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota. It's a poem that, it just speaks to me in so many different ways. It's a topic about loss and losing that I think speaks to everyone. And its tone is marvelous, and yet there's a kind of deeper truth underneath it about the way that little things sometimes become magnified. And then also there really are big losses, right? I mean, everybody faces those. I think it's comforting  in a peculiar way  that when you're, when you're struggling with something, when you're struggling with losses, it helps to hear someone else's voice. I think that's why I would offer it to someone.

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Somewhere in the universe is a shipping container of Major’s lost books, umbrellas, scarves, hats, eyewear, jackets, notebooks, pens, phones, and the list goes on. Thus is the nature of my hurried existence and drifting attention. I even lose the big items. On several occasions, flight attendants ran after me and breathlessly handed over laptops retrieved from seat pockets — big smirks on their faces. 

Movie theaters are dangerous. Planes are dangerous. Car rental return lanes are also dangerous. These are unsafe zones for my possessions. Between the crowded shadows and my rush to get to the next place, many items escape my notice. 

So this year I purchased Air Tags. I tucked them in my luggage, wallet, and computer bag. The pings on my phone, though annoying, are welcomed. Good thing. This summer, I forgot a whole bag of books at a writers’ conference. Thanks to an Air Tag, I was able to tell my friend Brett its exact location. She kindly shipped it and for three days, I watched it travel across the US, Nevada, Texas, and into the South. 

In another instance, I took a seat on a plane at Heathrow then noticed my checked luggage never transferred to my connecting flight. I called and fortunately reached someone in baggage claims. They promptly located it and promised to place my lost bag on the next flight, but how strange to take off while staring at a blue dot on my phone, unsure if I would ever be reunited with my favorite pair of socks. 

This incorrigible habit of losing material items might be addressed through trackers, but no amount of technology can locate the spirit of our friends and family once they’ve departed this earth, another kind of loss. And no amount of technology, today, can assuage the heartache of losing someone we dearly love after a breakup, plus… it would be illegal to slip an Air Tag into their pocket and track their movements. 

Today’s iconic poem inflects so much psychological truth and honest emotion in the wake of a parting; the hard pain must be worked through. 

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.

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.

“One Art” from POEMS by Elizabeth Bishop copyright © 2011 The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher's Note and compilation copyright © 2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.