The Art of Losing

"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."

This is not my favorite Elizabeth Bishop poem, though I know that many of my poet-friends worship "One Art." To be fair, "Wendy's Favorite Elizabeth Bishop Poem" would be a hard-won title, indeed.

In the first (and, it must be said, only) poetry workshop I ever took, more than a decade ago, the brilliant and generous Mark Doty looked at my terrible poems and said, "Study Elizabeth Bishop."

In the first writing class I ever taught, in the fall of 2006, we read and savored "The Fish" -- sans the final three lines. I asked my students to come up with their own final three lines, before we looked at the trio that Bishop had created. I was struck by how close my students' endings were to Bishop's. Half of them had Bishop tossing the fish back, as she actually did in the poem. The sign of perfect craftswomanship, I think.

"Telling True Stories" workshop at TSKW.

For the last two weeks, I've been Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West (TSKW). Last week, I taught a two-day workshop to a half-dozen Key West writers. This week, I was just settling into a new essay, when I was foolish enough to leave the door to the lovely Mango Tree House open while I was upstairs. I returned to my writing desk to find my phone and wallet had disappeared.

Yes, the art of losing is quite easily mastered.

I was impressed that someone had managed to come inside without making any noise, and even more impressed that the person chose to leave behind my laptop. (Perhaps it was the fact that it's so old and worn that the E, R, S, F, V, and N keys are blank and the Caps Lock and Page Up keys are missing altogether? Or perhaps s/he didn't want anything that couldn't be pocketed.)

624 White Street in Key West, where Elizabeth Bishop
lived in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Hoping the person might have only really wanted the cash, I walked the neighborhood, peeking into bougainvillea and lifting garbage can lids. I did not find my phone or credit cards, but I found something more important. I realized I've been staying just three houses away from the one where Elizabeth Bishop lived during her most of her years in Key West. A front-gate plaque from the Friends of the Key West Library informed me of this fact. Bishop's former home is a classic mid-nineteenth-century Key West home, a style called an "eyebrow house," because of the way the roof overhangs the second-story windows to create shade.

Key West's Old Armory.

She bought her White Street house in 1938 and lived there with her lover for several years. Read more about Bishop's time in Key West at The Queerest Places blog and The Academy of American Poets. She did not not just live and write on this block of White Street, she observed it deeply. She painted the Old Armory that now houses TSKW. Bishop left the island in 1944 and headed south to Brazil.

I will leave these inspiring studios and this magic island tomorrow, and in a couple weeks, I, too, head to South America. (I'm going to Venezuela for a two-week visit.)

Something lost, something gained.

Finding Wild Florida

"Lie with your ear to the ground. Let birdsong trace its complexities onto your eardrum."

Susan Cerulean, nature writer, Floridian, biologist and educator, writes these instructions in the elegant (if alarmingly short) anthology she co-edited, The Wild Heart of Florida: Florida Writers on Florida’s Wildlands.

Eighteen months ago I came to live – part-time and unwillingly – in Miami. I did not expect to find much wilderness. To my surprise, I have spent more time camping in South Florida than I ever have in Seattle. Perhaps that’s because Miami is easier to leave behind. Or because I prefer sweating to shivering. Whatever the reason (and in spite of the best efforts of developers, pro-business legislators, and oil-spillers), I recognize more tree and bird species in South Florida than I do in Western Washington.

There is no recycling in our eighty-unit Miami apartment building – though it’s called “Nirvana” (really!) – but less than an hour’s drive west of our home is a fifteen-mile bike-loop through the Everglades. Our metal coffee mugs are often rejected at cafes (public health hazard, they say), but eighty miles southwest lies the wonder of the Middle Keys.

 
On Long Key, you can pitch a tent just five feet from the calm emerald lips of the Atlantic Ocean. I did that this weekend and hardly left my campsite for two days. I sat at the picnic table and watched sanderlings flip small piles of dried seagrass in search of a meal. I scribbled in my notebook until Ursa Major rose like a question mark in the sky, asking Orion and the Pleiades what to make of happenings on the blue planet below. (A punctuation mark to the question that fills all my notebooks.) Orion pretended not to hear while Atlas’s daughters just shrugged. They’d never much cared for pointless questions.

I let birdsong and birdtracks trace their complexities onto my eardrum, as I asked myself another question that would only make the those seven sisters shrug: What will become of South Florida? 

For now, the sanderlings splay seagrass with their blunt beaks, until two black-headed laughing gulls swoop from blue sky toward green waves. Fifty (or seventy? one hundred?) sanderlings rise from the mudflat as a single being, flying away from the shoreline and then back and then away again, seeming to disappear like smoke. (And I pack up my tent and notebook and head to Key West.)