I now have two jobs: the job I am about to lose and finding my next job.
I have a full slate of students for this, my last semester: three classes with 20 students in each, at least for now. For my two writing classes, I have 40 drafts to mark and offer feedback on each week.
There is always a jolt returning after the break. But this is different. Never, in my 20-plus years of teaching, have I been more loosey-goosey, more IDGAF, more laissez faire about my classes. It’s not so much about not caring as it is that I am overwhelmed by having more immediate tasks with resumes and networking and job interviews.
I’ll mark on a batch of drafts in a fraction of time I usually did in the past, then hop on a Zoom with a committee of six people who ask about how I multi-task under several deadlines, or recall a time where I encountered a task with which I was not familiar. Nothing like topping off a day of getting asked about your strengths and weaknesses with a batch of speedgrading students’ strengths and weaknesses.
I am listening to a student’s recording of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” and am about to grade it. I am not the world’s biggest Elizabeth Bishop fan, but there is a core group of poems I hold near and dear. “One Art” is one of them.
“One Art” is widely regarded as one of the greatest poems in the English language. It’s also a very strange poem in its grammar and twists and turns of language.
Another reason is that it’s the shortest poem with the highest difficulty rating. For one subset of students, it’s their chance to get that most elusive thing: the perfect 100 score.
The performance I’m grading is part of my third class this semester, where I listen to and grade 40 recordings of poetry performances each week.
When I was hired by my college back in 2005, my hiring slot was creative nonfiction, with a secondary specialty in poetry. Even though I got my graduate degree in poetry and wrote poems, I was more than happy to not teach poetry workshops and leave it to other faculty. I wanted to teach what I was writing, which at that time was artsy fartsy prose pieces.
By then I had burnt out on the poetry business, po-biz drama, and, well, poets themselves. But I still loved poetry.
To get my poetry on, there was this class we required of future teachers called “The Oral Interpretation of Literature,” and each semester I re-named it “Poetry in Performance.” I taught Poetry in Performance every year for 18 years.
Students in Poetry in Performance develop and perform their own work, too, and those are the poems they perform for their public performances. In past years, students performed at community centers and coffee houses. They’ve performed on the 10 bus on Western Avenue, in the smoking gazebos on the outskirts of campus, outside the Starbucks in the student center, and on the sidewalks of Lark Street. But mostly, we performed at local open mics.
You may agree with me here when I say that poets are not unlike kindergarteners in temperament and demeanor. Reading new poems in front of other poets at an Albany open mic, if you ask me, it’s the ideal kind of training to prepare future elementary school teachers.
Performing poetry to strangers is public speaking on steroids.
The student, Grace, begins her performance. So far, her voice, articulation, and intonation are perfect.
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.
Some students trip up at the line break of “intent / to be lost.” My theory is that it’s t-sound of “intent” that does it. To go from “intent” to “to” isn’t easy, at least for my weak New Jersey palate.
But Grace not only navigates it, she makes two crisp t-sounds and emphasizes “lost” with some zest.
I’m rooting for Grace. So far, so good.
I mostly assign living poets for students to perform, poets I know or poets who came to town for the reading series I ran. There’s one assignment, 20th Century American Poets, where they get to recite some dead poets, famous from the past 100 years.
And that’s where “One Art” comes in.
Students are so obsessed with getting the perfect grade that they will attempt to climb Mt. “One Art” to accomplish this. Many trip over the lines running into the next lines (aka enjambment). Others may stumble over the commas, or pauses, or the villanelle rhyming scheme. There are just so many places where a student performing it might trip up.
Some students pick “One Art” because they like it. Most students pick it because it’s one of the few poems with a difficulty rating of 20. Students want to get that fucking perfect score, and Elizabeth Bishop isn’t going to stop them.
In karaoke terms, “One Art” is the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” of poem choices.
In my 18 years teaching Poetry in Performance, at least one student has picked “One Art.” I’d guess I’ve heard more than 75 performances over the years, probably more. I never get tired of hearing them, even the ones where some go wrong.
This semester, one student, Grace, picked “One Art.” It sounds like she understands the poem.
Grace moves on to the second stanza:
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
The way she reads that first sentence is just blase and resigned enough that I can tell she knows the tone of this poem. She doesn’t stop at “fluster,” a rookie mistake.
The promise of the perfect score begins with the first row of the rubric, “Level of Difficulty,” which gets marked up before the poem is performed. Although relatively short, on a scale of 1-20, I always give “One Art” a difficulty score of 20. The tone changes, builds, and turns as it goes along. You have to understand the poem to really recite such that makes sense. I can tell right away when a student gets the overall meaning of the poem, which is loss, distance, and trying to figure out the algebra of grief and writing. Students might mispronounce “farther” or “shan’t,” sure, but it’s all about understanding the argument of the poem through tone.
The way Grace intones the refrain, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” differs from the first to sixth lines.
OK, I think to myself, Grace is fucking killing it.
When I first started teaching Poetry in Performance, “One Art” got a publicity bump when Cameron Diaz’s character read it in her 2005 movie, In Her Shoes. Diaz, playing a nurse, sits beside the bed of a patient, a kindly blind old man, who asks her to read the poem to him. I forget why she can’t read, or is trying to learn to read, but Diaz’s character reads the poem ploddingly but courageously.
So copyright-obsessed was my college’s technology department back then that I had to bring in a bootlegged video to show it in my class. The first time I showed the In Her Shoes clip I clicked Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, a documentary on the transgressive punk artist who would get in fights with audience members and other things I won’t mention here.
I very quickly realized my mistake and stopped after a few seconds.
As Grace continues, I open my grading rubric in Canvas. I adapted my rubric from Poetry Out Loud, a high school recitation competition that would have their finals in state capitals.
At some point, I was recruited to serve as a Poetry Out Loud judge. For years, I sat in the judges section beside way more famous people—a couple Pulitzer Prize winners, Bob Holman, Natalie Merchant—scoring teens performing Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”
There is one area of the Poetry Out Loud rubric I don’t use. It’s called something like “Appropriateness of Performance.” This, I was told, was to prevent theater kids from putting coal on their faces when performing William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper.”
There’s no chance that Grace is going to dress up like Elizabeth Bishop.
I have been allowing myself to cry these days. I do it for like 10, 20 seconds at a time, then stop. I know these episodes come out of anxiety, or exhaustion from the anxiety, over what I need to do. So I guess we’re talking about a fear-slash-exhaustion type of thing.
I’m not, like, depressed. I know how that feels. My crying moments these days are like sneezing. It builds up, the air moves over my head in a certain way, and I just let it out. I was doing a Peloton workout last week. Hannah, my favorite instructor, suggested we make self-affirmations as we move from downhills to “juicy climbs.”
“I want you to repeat after me: I am awesome!” she says.
I usually never participate in these things, but that morning I did, and it was all it took.
I shouted, “I am awesome!” then got up and started pedaling against the resistance. And then I sobbed, exactly five times, pedaling all the while I was doing it.
The Bishop poem is about that kind of regulation of emotion. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, after all.
So far, Grace has made it through the first three stanzas of the poem flawlessly. Her articulation is on point. The pace is on point, the comma–set-off phrases, to me, sound terrific. It’s deliberate enough to allow for pauses to shift from meaning to meaning.
She pauses at the poem’s turn, that stanza that begins with the em-dash:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.
That’s when the speaker starts to talk about her relationship, the love of her life. Grade pauses, changes her voice. There is a slight crack, even. Perfection.
And I am now nervous for her. Will she stick the landing? Will we have a perfect score “One Art”?
Before grading, I had yet another Teams interview for another questionable job. One of the interviewers—there’s always 3-6 people for these video conferences—questioned whether I had “enough relevant experience as a teacher” to meet the task of the job as a corporate trainer.
My theory is these questions are part of some sort of psyops tactic people learn at conferences. They’re meant to break you a bit and see if you freak out. It was working—I could feel my neck warm up a bit under my necktie. Was I found out to be a fraud?
No, I think to myself, I got this.
For one of the few times in recent memory, I summoned what I call my Confident Straight White Guy Voice. I imitated the cadence of all the Dudes With No Self-Doubt I listen to on podcasts.
“I did some back-of-the-envelope math the other day, and calculated that I have clocked in, at minimum, 12,960 hours in the classroom. So, yes, I think I have enough teaching experience.”
Boom.
Of course, as soon as the interview was over, I feared I’d sounded too confident. When you’ve worked at one job for so long, as I have, you develop a very particular set of skills, and it sure does feel like that’s it, that’s all you can do, end of story, you’re toast. Good luck finding another job, any job. Good luck finding transferable skills, or convincing people you can do this other job, one you have never done.
Academic jobs are designed that way. I was a writer who taught writing, and decoupling that identity is going to mean defining who I am all over again. I am learning all the parallel vocabularies of the different jobs and fields and making people say to me that I’m great, over and over again. I am that needy.
At some point I realized something: this will be the last student performance of “One Art” I will hear.
I try to shut that out of my mind as we move into the penultimate stanza:
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.
About half of the students trip up on “vaster.” Some may not know what the word even means, but mostly it’s about those commas. I guess you could say I am picky, but we’re talking about one of the greatest poems of the 20th Century, and if Cameron Diaz can do it, so should a future middle school ELA teacher.
Grace owns the commas. There is a pause, a change of tone. Perfect.
My father-in-law, Steve, is an antiquarian book dealer. He’s not just any antiquarian book dealer. He’s a world-renowned antiquarian book dealer. Whenever I drop his name to people in that world, their eyes light up in recognition. Hanging out with Steve is not what I envisioned whenever I thought about hanging out with a father-in-law. We don’t talk about football; we talk about books. Or, to put a finer point on it, he talks about books, and I try to hang on.
One morning when we were visiting him, the subject of Elizabeth Bishop came up, and he returned from his office with a stack of pink postcards with typing on them. Elizabeth Bishop had written to my father-in-law to appraise her collection, her letters and drafts. The correspondence wasn’t particularly significant to her poems, but the ones I read were juicy in that Bishop was asking my father-in-law to assess the value as higher in value than what Steve was setting. She was, essentially, shaking him down.
I asked him if any Bishop scholars had ever seen these postcards. He hadn’t shown anyone since he put them away in the early 1970s.
It’s the last line I listen to most closely, to hear how the student interprets a parenthetical phrase:
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
The true test of a perfect “One Art” performance is how the words in the parentheses are performed. By the time we get to these lines, we’ve changed moods from Pollyanna to resignation and despair. Those two words in parenthesis—Write it!—I interpret to be the speaker talking to themself, a self-direction to put to the page that loss is, or looks like, disaster. The capitalized “Write,” the exclamation point, all of it might trip up your undergraduate performer.
Vassar’s library bought Elizabeth Bishop’s archive in 1981, two years after she died. I don’t think my father-in-law had anything to do with the sale, but he probably knew the people involved. The archive includes hundreds of letters from poets like Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, thousands of pages of manuscripts.
There are 17 drafts of “One Art” in the Vassar archives. The first working titles were “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” then no title for several drafts, arriving at “One Art” at draft #15.
The drafting of the poem is fascinating, and I wish I had the chance to teach it to a class, if for no reason than to point out that even Elizabeth Bishop produced clunker lines en route to writing a great poem.
Versions of “(Write it!)” evolved from “(Say it: disaster)” in draft #9 to “(Say it - yes, disaster)” in draft #10. In draft #12, she tries out a couple more versions: “(Oh, write it!); “(Oh, go on! Write it!); “(Write it).”
Bishop herself seems unsure what to do with that last line’s aside, spoken to the speaker. It’s the only point of the poem where I feel unsure how someone should perform it out loud. The only thing I know is there needs to be a decision made regarding what it means.
As I listen to Grace get to the last line, I decide that whatever choice she makes, it’s going to be right. It has to be.
I take my hands off the mouse and keyboard and place each palm on a thigh. I take a breath. There are going to be a lot of Last Things in the next 90 days. I’m going to have to keep my shit together better than I am, I tell myself again.
But there are, as I said, times when I allow 10-20 seconds of crying. I decided that this is one of those times.
And it happens. No build-up, no eye-welling. My bottom lip goes out, like my daughters would do, when they were little, after they stubbed their toes or think someone has said something mean to them. The eyes grow moist. One, maybe two sobs. No noise made. Done.
Grace makes her way to the last line. For reasons I can’t decipher she has made the performative decision to shout the “Write it” part. Not just shout: she lets out a howl, a Riot Grrrl banshee barbaric howl fucking yawp.
Through my computer speakers it like Robert Plant or Sleater-Kinney.
At first, I decided that I couldn’t give Grace the perfect score. Bishop didn’t shout this, right?
I think back to all those drafts Bishop went through, and I think, no—this poem isn’t Bishop’s now. Not anymore. For those 96 seconds, it was Grace’s poem.
And Grace performed it perfectly. She got a 100.
Thank you for reading, as always. I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out!
Or maybe buy me a coffee.