"One Art"

21 November 2025: Taught the most beautifully meta class of my life today, leading students through Bishop's "One Art." 

Do the thing. Say the words. Master the disaster. Even though it's still a disaster. 

Point to the cracks. Point to the fragility. Let them see that that's what makes it beautiful and human and real.

The joking voice. The gesture I love.

All there in that classroom, moving me along. 

Last night, when I was waiting any moment to hear that my father was gone, I couldn't imagine being in that classroom the next morning, much less to talk about that poem.

But he made it through the night. 

Who knows what comes next?

But whatever it is, the classroom...and language...and art...and teaching will be there. And he will be there, too. 

"no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him"

2 September 2023: A random tidbit from one of my "Year's Work" articles--Elizabeth Bishop talking about John Dewey: "[H]e had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had time, took an interest in everything,—no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him” (qtd. in Potts 808). Apparently they were neighbors when Dewey lived in Key West.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Dewey, connected in part to using his philosophy for part of my Masters Thesis. To think of him this way makes that spot even softer.

Pott's piece is pretty cool overall--a really neat reading of Bishop's poetry through the lens of her admiration for Buster Keaton.

Work Cited

Potts, George. “The Stoic Comedy of Elizabeth Bishop and Buster Keaton.” ELH vol. 89, no. 3, 2022, pp. 807–32.

Got one!

21 November 2021: Whenever I see a student in ENGL 204 who shows real talent for literary analysis, I tease them/encourage them to consider an English major or minor, even if I know they never will. I figure it can't hurt to be told you are good at something.

One of the reasons I love teaching ENGL 204 is that I get to help non-majors see that they have smart and interesting things to say about literature and that literature connects to their lives. Bishop's "One Art" is a poem that, if you put the work into teaching it right, works so well to prove these points. It never misses. 

Anyway, I just got an email from one of my students saying that she is now going to be an English minor. She writes, "Ok so after Friday's class, especially after discussing One Art, I've decided I really want to pick up an English minor. I know if I stop pursuing it I'm going to be really mad at myself, so I wanted to ask you for any advice you had to give to me."

Counting this as a little win today. Shout-out to the amazing Elizabeth Bishop.  

"What is left? What remains? Ephemera remain."

8 April 2021: "I have been making a case for a hermeneutics of residue that looks to understand the wake of performance. What is left? What remains? Ephemera remain. They are absent and they are present, disrupting a predictable metaphysics of presence. The actual act is only a stage in the game; it is a moment, pure and simple. There is a deductive element to performance that has everything to do with its conditions of possibility, and there is much that follows....This command to write is a command to save the ephemeral thing by committing it to memory, to word, to language. The poet instructs us to retain the last thing through a documentation of our loss, a retelling of our relationship to it" (Muñoz 71).

Still working my way through and really enjoying Cruising Utopia. This analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," one of my favorite poems, just knocked me out. 

Work Cited

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009. 

Multitudes...

11 November 2020: Trying to balance a lot in my head today. Good, bad, challenging, encouraging, devastating, local, national, personal, global...all part of today.  

Had one of the best discussions of "One Art" in my English 204 class that I've ever had. I wonder if it's because so many of us are acutely aware these days of of "the art of losing" and the lies we tell ourselves that it will all be okay.

"Little Exercise"

1 August 2019: This poem is really speaking to me today.

"Little Exercise"
By Elizabeth Bishop

for Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in "Another part of the field."

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.