Poem of the Week: 'One Art'

[ontology]

First order of business: OH JOY! RAPTURE! I'VE DONE IT! EUREKA! Or, to quote Peter Pan, oh the brilliance of me! *crows*

I have ended The Wise and the Lovely.

I have! I have! I really, actually, most definitely have. Note that I didn't say that I "finished" it, because I actually have the wee-est bit left to write: I skipped over Fleur's declaration and the infamous "I don't care, I don't care either; I've told you a million times..." because I hadn't Half-Blood Prince anywhere about (and haven't since--let me see: February; don't ask me why I remember that), and couldn't piece enough of it together from memory to have a decent go at it, despite the fact that I have read page six-hundred-nineteen or whatever it was (twenty-nine? twenty-six? I'm a bad fan!) about a million times already. (If you hear an odd noise, that's me in the corner repeating my "I am not a shipper" mantra.) But yes, other than that brief bit of filling, IT IS DONE. I can't believe it. Remus stopped being schamltzily sentimental, Tonks stopped crying every five sentences, and my prose stopped being dull and stodgy. Also, I have referenced three poets in one short-story-sized work (Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as a very brief mention of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, although not to his poetry), which has a deliciously geeky feeling to it. Now I need to finish hunting down the photographs I mean to use as illustrations. *squee!*

Anyway, National Poetry Month is over, which is very sad, but I have been very poetically active lately, which is rather thrilling. Onto the poetry!

This one's a villanelle, a poetic structure of which I am rather fond, if perhaps for no other reason than that I can actually recognise it on sight. (I like the rhythm of it as well.) I love the almost comic, prosaic tone it's imbued with; it reminds me of the way I often write non-fiction, with far too much dry humour as I often find the darker matters of life difficult to write about. The last verse is wrenching, however, and I love the determined insert 'write it!': a sort of authorial gritting of the teeth and bearing it, or at least beginning to try.

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 isn't hard to master
though it make look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Comments

[ressie-noldo.livejournal.com]

Yay! *squeals on your behalf* And now we get to read it, yes *happily prods, secure in the knowledge that she has nothing worth being prodded for yet*

And as for your poet-mentioning, that's another area in which you are a Very Bad Influence on me. Or something. Because in the latest R/T that may-or-may-not have an existence outside of quantum possibilities, I was sort of sparked off by Wallace Stevens's 'Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird', and then there was that Dylan Thomas-quoting fic which you have seen half of and I have yet to post the other half, and then there's this other fic with that 'Streets' poem shamelessly referenced in it, and then...well. It is ALL YOUR FAULT. *uses caps-lock of dramatic angsting*


Also, the other thing: why does this entry refuse to show up on my f-list? And why is it dated 30 April? I don't think I saw this then, and the date today is very determinedly the 3rd. In short, what is up with LJ? *boggles*

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Stop prodding me, you prodder! I was going to go to the library yesterday in order to get the dialogue I needed from HBP, but we didn't have time to go to the library, so I Googled instead and came up empty. (Well, mostly. I got the two lines of dialogue that I have COMMITTED TO MEMORY. Not because I'm obessive or anything. Really.) And my obsessive-compulsiveness forbids me to put it up until it's really finished. So there. Pfft. ^-^

I like being a Bad Influence! It's entertaining! Especially if poetry is involved. How dare you cite poetry as a bad influence of any sort? ...And blast you, 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' gave me...unhatched...plotbunnies. Er. If plotbunnies lay eggs, anyway. Unspecific plotbunnies. Because I really don't want to imagine their reproductive cycles right now.

If the entry didn't show up on your f-list, it probably didn't show up on anyone else's, which would explain the Lack of Comments. I know the not seeing of an entry has happened to me with at least one other LJ, and one friend didn't show up in anyone's friends-lists after she went private. Either that, or LJ is just conspiring against me.