One Art

[AdamSmith]

The other day I spent time with someone whom I should probably spend either more time with, or less. More verse, but in (maybe) a lighter key than last time.

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's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[Lucky]

Marilyn Hacker has a wise and beautiful response to this poem. This is from her

1990 collection, "Going Back to the River."

From Orient Point

The art of living isn’t hard to muster:

Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.

When someone makes you promises, don’t trust her

unless they’re in the here and now, and just her

willing largesse free-handed to a friend.

The art of living isn’t hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;

take brisk walks so you’re hungry at the end.

When someone makes you promises, don’t trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her

to keep until they’re kept. Till then, pretend

the art of living isn’t hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster

of pleasures. Next time, don’t go round the bend

when someone makes you promises. Don’t trust her

past where you’d trust yourself, and don’t adjust her

words to mean more to you than she’d intend.

The art of living isn’t hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven’t lost her

like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,

when someone makes you promises, don’t. Trust your

art; go on living: that’s not hard to muster.

[AdamSmith]

Ach! Thank you.

Beautiful.

I admit I fall into living as Bishop describes. How really could one hew to Hacker's good sense? (We have had this discussion before, around Himself, and will continue to do.)

[AdamSmith]

Maybe this is just a defensive deflection of Lucky's on-point rejoinder. But another exquisitely odd Bishop gem...

Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,

please come flying.

In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,

please come flying,

to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums

descending out of the mackerel sky

over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,

please come flying.

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships

are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags

rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.

Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing

countless little pellucid jellies

in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.

The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.

The waves are running in verses this fine morning.

Please come flying.

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe

trailing a sapphire highlight,

with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,

with heaven knows how many angels all riding

on the broad black brim of your hat,

please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,

a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,

please come flying.

Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan

is all awash with morals this fine morning,

so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,

above the accidents, above the malignant movies,

the taxicabs and injustices at large,

while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears

that simultaneously listen to

a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,

please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave

like courteous male bower-birds,

for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait

on the steps of the Public Library,

eager to rise and follow through the doors

up into the reading rooms,

please come flying.

We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,

or play at a game of constantly being wrong

with a priceless set of vocabularies,

or we can bravely deplore, but please

please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions

darkening and dying around you,

with grammar that suddenly turns and shines

like flocks of sandpipers flying,

please come flying.

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,

come like a daytime comet

with a long unnebulous train of words,

from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,

please come flying.

[Lucky]

Brooklyn? What about Boston? After last night's trouncing comeback by the Yankees over Boston, there's one poem they are citing in Boston today, and that, coincidentally, is the only poem I ever memorized:

Casey at the Bat

By Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Taken From the San Francisco Examiner - June 3, 1888

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;

The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,

And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest

Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;

They thought, "If only Casey could but get a whack at that â€â€

We'd put up even money now, with Casey at the bat."

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,

And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;

So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat;

For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,

And Blake, the much despised, tore the cover off the ball;

And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,

There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;

It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;

It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,

For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;

There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.

And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,

No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt.

Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.

Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,

Defiance flashed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,

And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.

Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped â€â€

"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one!" the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,

Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;

"Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted some one on the stand;

And it's likely they'd have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;

He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;

He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;

But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said "Strike two!"

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered "Fraud!"

But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.

They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,

And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer has fled from Casey's lip, the teeth are clenched in hate;

He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,

And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville â€â€ mighty Casey has struck out.

http://www.simonsays.com/assets/isbn/06898..._0689854943.jpg

[AdamSmith]

Brooklyn? What about Boston? After last night's trouncing comeback by the Yankees over Boston, there's one poem they are citing in Boston today, and that, coincidentally, is the only poem I ever memorized:

Casey at the Bat

LOL! You memorized that? Hats off.

Confession -- despite living in Boston, my having grown up amid the unholy trinity of Carolina, Duke and NC State made basketball the only pro sport that sends me.

[Lucky]

"LOL! You memorized that? Hats off."

That I could memorize that seems like such a foreign concept these days as I worry about my brain losing any memory function, but today the NYTimes had an article that restored some of my confidence:

Britney? That’s All She Rote

By JENNY LYN BADER

Published: September 16, 2007

OOPS! Britney Spears forgot the words she meant to lip-sync at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday. With this momentary brain malfunction, she joined the absent-minded ranks of “American Idol†runner-up Katharine McPhee, who dropped a line from her medley of “Hound Dog/All Shook Up†in last year’s finals, and Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, who plumb forgot what she was saying in a pageant interview that became a YouTube sensation.

WHAT’S MY LINE Memorization and recitation are old hat. Forgetful stars like Britney Spears are symbols of our times.

Performance anxiety, heavy drinking and even hair extensions have been variously blamed for these lapses. But why blame the victims? They are just products of a culture that does not enforce the development of memory skills.

It’s gotten easy to forget to teach young people how to remember. The Victorian ideal of encyclopedic knowledge has fallen away. While it used to be possible for one person to know all there was to know, with our current explosion of information, one person could never know it all. And said person isn’t even motivated to know a little bit — certainly not by heart.

As storage space on computer chips increases, human data storage decreases. With cellphones, no one even knows phone numbers anymore. Given the rise of Web search engines, facts that used to be reliably in our brains are now at our fingertips, if we can remember our passwords.

Oration and recitation, once staples of the American school system, have largely been phased out. Rhetoric programs at universities have narrowed, merged with communications departments, or been eliminated altogether.

“We don’t have that kind of oral culture anymore,†said Prof. James Engell, author of “The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values,†who teaches a rhetoric course at Harvard. “We are in a culture that devalues our sense of memory.†Back when John Quincy Adams was teaching it, Mr. Engell said, “rhetoric was an umbrella where you got moral philosophy, the development of literary taste, intellectual prose, aesthetic appreciation, memorization and oral presentation. The ultimate object of this was what the Greeks called phronesis, or practical wisdom.â€

Prof. Catherine Robson of the University of California at Davis said there also was “an older heritage in American education where recitation was the standard pedagogical mode.â€

“Everything was memorized, not just poetry,†said Ms. Robson, author of the forthcoming “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.†“Knowing your lesson. The word recitation means repeating any lesson.†(She warns against too much nostalgia for the memory-happy past: “An illusion of community was created because tremendous numbers of people learned exactly the same texts.â€)

Poetry memorization held, even as other rote learning slipped away. But no one could prove it helped the mind develop: “That was one of the big justifications in the last years of the 19th century — it promotes memory training,†Professor Robson said. “Then there was a whole slew of psychological tests and all they could discover was that memorizing poetry helps you to memorize poetry.â€

But contemporary scientists have discovered that memorization exercises can stave off dementia, introducing a new world of “neurobics.†Memory needs a workout as much as the abs do. Researchers have even shown that reciting poetry in dactylic hexameter can help synchronize heartbeats with breathing.

Other body parts may be involved, too, as suggested by stories of transplant patients who acquire memories not their own. Mr. Engell said, “Memory has a kind of bodily presence.â€

Of course the oral tradition has been declining since antiquity. Plato describes the problem in his “Phaedrus,†where a god offers King Thamus the gift of writing as an aid to wisdom and memory; the king says no thanks — it could only weaken both. The rise of literacy and literary technology did undercut the oral tradition, leading to a communication crisis that, as Eric Havelock argued in his landmark book “The Muse Learns to Write,†would be mirrored in modernity. Recent illiteracy and newer technologies compound the problem, rendering us more memory free and fact impaired than ever.

It doesn’t help that we lack reflective time. “The idea that you would devote a good deal of time to a single thing or a single poem or a single piece of data seems like it would be a waste of time because you could be multitasking,†said Joan Gussow, a professor at Columbia Teachers College.

Even with recent attempts to revive the oral tradition like “Poetry Out Loud,†a national high school recitation competition, those who can recite long pieces by heart are considered unusual (while those who can repeat brief platitudes on cue are considered presidential material).

“When I was brought up, we had to memorize so much Shakespeare,†said the playwright A. R. Gurney. “One of the reasons I like to work in the theater is that theater not only dignifies the idea of memory but also it’s an art form that calls on the cultural memory.â€

Mr. Gurney was surprised when “Love Letters,†which he wrote as a literary piece, was considered a play and performed with scripts in hand by actors who didn’t have to memorize a word. Soon other plays produced as readings followed, like Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues†and “The Exonerated†by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, attracting distinguished performers with the promise of little rehearsal time and no commitment to memory.

“Asking actors to simply read a script — though it works out very well — I feel I’ve in some ways started a trend that is not totally helpful for the culture,†Mr. Gurney said.

But those unmemorized dramas are just part of a trend that’s been going on for ages, beginning with a blind poet who could recite whole books of verse, and ending with a blindsided pop princess who just wanted to make a comeback.

[AdamSmith]

That I could memorize that seems like such a foreign concept these days as I worry about my brain losing any memory function, but today the NYTimes had an article that restored some of my confidence:

Britney? That’s All She Rote

All too true. We don't memorize, we retrieve; instead of concentrating, we multitask. In college I had one professor, himself already a throwback, who made us memorize a 195-line Milton poem ("Lycidas"). It was revelatory. Milton's long periodic sentences make a lot more sense when you know them from one end to the other -- almost impossible without memorization! And one section that he revised heavily after the first draft was much harder to learn than the rest; that it did not flow from his mind in the same stream as the bulk of the piece became evident.

Ah, well. Now the world is like that sf short story where the government, to maintain control, implants some gizmo into everyone's head that causes a loud bell to be heard every three minutes, making it impossible for anyone to hold a thought and thus unable to rebel.

[Lucky]

"...head that causes a loud bell to be heard every three minutes, making it impossible for anyone to hold a thought and thus unable to rebel."

Every three minutes? Mine goes off every two minutes. No wonder I am so passive!

[AdamSmith]

Every three minutes? Mine goes off every two minutes. No wonder I am so passive!

You got the premium model. They could tell you were trouble.