Week 1, Sign Inventory

"One Art" Elizabeth Bishop

1. "Losing" and "Filled" in lines 1-2 suggest that loss can fill things. The suggestion seems to relate losing to a tangible object that acts and creates responses from other objects. 

2. The three tenses in the 1st stanza: "losing", "lost" and "loss" insinuate more than one way of losing. There exists multiple ways into the art of losing something. The word "art" parallels multiple ways into creating and writing.

3. The speaker doles out advice and instruction in this poem. The pedagogical approach forces the reader to act as student.

4. The juxtaposition of the important with the mundane. For example, " lost door keys" and "the hour badly spent" suggests that losing isn't a specialized talent--anyone can do it.

5. The connection between the mundane and the important. For example, "lost door keys" and "the hour badly spent" read as the same thing. Looking for lost door keys turns into an hour lost.How can something small lead to something encompassing.

6. What if we replaced lose with write?  "Write something every day". How is losing and writing similar?  What do you lose when you write?  Control? 

7. Repetition (last and last, losing and losing, disaster, master). The art of repetition plays out in this poem insisting that the reader not forget, to not lose the words. The repetition makes the words easy to remember.

8. Punctuation in the last stanza stops the sing-song repetitious reading of this poem. First, the dash cuts this stanza away from the others. The parenthesis separates the things the speaker hasn't lost because she remembers them ("the joking voice, a gesture"). 

9. I think of Shelley and "Ozymandias". Once written down, words are not lost. Poetry directly confronts "the art of losing". 

10.  (Write it!) This poem concerns itself with the art of writing. Again, here the pedagogical voice of the poem switches to an encouraging mentor's voice.