February 2023 - Workshop Shit!
For the prompt this month, we looked at Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art, which celebrates in intimate detail how the speaker has become at peace with what they call “The Art of Losing.” Using Bishop’s villanelle as a launching point, poets were encouraged to think about different arts, and how those arts expressed themselves. To this end, we created a word-bank riffing on Bishop’s idea of “The Art of Losing,” whereby we would start the word-bank with a set of verbs (in the “-ing” form), and build images from there. After some brainstorming, poets engaged in a 15-minute free-write, drawing from the word-bank we’d created together to set-down some original responses. The range of prompt responses showcases an eclectic mix of styles and themes, and represents the comfort with which each poet was able to adapt a somewhat flexible prompt to suit their own strengths. Like Elizabeth Bishop, some poets chose to focus on one art form, such as The Art of Waiting, or The Art of Leaving, while others mused on various art forms.
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
The Rules:
Playing off of Elizabeth Bishop’s idea of “The Art of Losing”, as described in her poem One Art, think of different activities that can be considered an art form. In other words, think about The Art of ___ing.
Using a table like the one below, begin listing different verbs in their “-ing” form to fill-in the blank.
From there, match each verb with a noun and an adjective.
To add a bit of zest, come up with an image more complex than just a verb, noun, or adjective that fits with the original verb. While brainstorming on the night of the workshop, we ended up with two images for every adjective, as seen in the table below. You’re free to limit it to just one, or expand to however many you like.
Spend 15 minutes freewriting on the idea of The Art of ___ing. You’re free to include as few or as many of the elements from your own table as you like. There is no line limit, and there are no guidelines or restrictions on form or style.
Peter’s Response
The art of waiting is an underrated craft. We live in a society fueled by instant gratification, self-worth assessed by virtual likes and clicks, demands for videos or your adventures never happened, and mass appeal notarized by now or never. But there's a delicious fluidity in the longing, a rooted subtlety in use of time in between destinations, the true power of patience; now a dying virtue. People think that trees are dead and useless in the winter, frozen husks of their former selves. Instead of seeing them as lives just biding their time in order to create a thousand different futures when they're branching out to the world. When everyone celebrates their rebirth like the Sakura Matsuri. Life is like love, flames can burn out as fast as they ignite. So what's the rush? Like Hollywood, always keep them coming back for more, by having everyone enjoy the wait.
Douglas’ Response
THE ART OF WAITING
After Elizabeth Bishop
The art of waiting isn’t hard to master, if you sit, centered on your roots, attentive to the sense of proprioception, where you know intuitively the location of your bones and feet, your fingers and your sacrum.
Trees have this intuition ingrained in the tendrils of their slow climb, in the adventitious, fibrous radicles that suck the soil deep in darkness.
This is where waiting becomes simple, the obvious answer to anxiety, the most advantageous response to an insane environment.
The branching development of new assignations reaching toward a sky so randomly pockmarked with blue is not what needs to be anticipated.
Waiting can only become an art, only be easily mastered when those pink petals burst open along the edge of the great river in the comforting warmth of new spring when the corridors of power suddenly empty, and every face, whether patriarchal or self-absorbed, corrupt or shiny-eyed turns up to the sunlight and sighs.
Andrew’s Response
The art of waiting is impatient waste:
That sun is lost, which sinks too slow alone
Amidst trees’ gossip and high mushrooms’ tastes,
And leaves that fidget with bored, windy groans.
The art of leaving is the spirit’s tale:
Where vibrant, stoney walls once stood – proud, tall –
Pale ghosts now flee … receding ruins wail
Behind them, shrouding dust, flesh, bones, and all.
The art of living’s standing up again,
One cough past yesterday’s last, gasping breath:
Perhaps more myth than man; perhaps less rain
Than fog; perhaps more laugh than death.
A thousand different futures lurk ahead.
They change. That change is choosing’s art. That’s said.
Rikhav’s Response - The Art of
There is a simple joy in the art of choosing. Children in their adolescent wonder distill the world into singular points, often binary in nature, a daily, sometimes hourly study in the journey of the human mind. To them, the world is an open outstretched palm, filled with options and opportunities that they may not truly understand, but still reach for all the same.
There is a certain release in the art of leaving, walls crumbling in the background, ruins receding behind you with each passing step. These stony structures are no immortal edifices, for over time they, too, weather, worn with age and reason, cracked with the thorny vines of experience, broken bones of innocence under dusty clouded skies.
There is a selfless act in the art of waiting, patience, a lesson often in need of relearning, lost in the whirlwind of hurting that we all get swept up in from time to time. In the bustling day to day of life, we often lose sight of time, in the process of trying to save it we forget how to spend it, unlike the cherry trees during Sakura Matsuri, each flower a thousand different futures in the making.
There is an endless waltz in the art of living, a delicate path through mushroom riddled wilderness myriad fractalled mycelium reaching deeper than the highest tree branches ever could. With each step, we are wound around each other, a tapestry of interconnectedness, a carefully crafted chorale, that echoes throughout our lives, with each breath.
There is a bottomless well in the art of loving, a contradictory constraint of freedom, that hampers and yet harbors hope, juxtaposed by heart wrenching suffering that allows us to grow, and to slow, to count every second and make every second count, because with time, we come to know, unlike our prepubescent selves, that there is wisdom in heartbreak, and with each stroke of a pen in a diary late at night, we free ourselves of a piece of what holds us back.