"The Art of Losing": Loss in Literature and Film (NeMLA Panel, Niagara Falls, March 2023)
“The Art of Losing”: Loss in Literature and Film
Panel Session, NeMLA’s 54th Annual Convention in Niagara Falls, March 23-26
In her iconic poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop writes of “the art of losing.” The poem’s speaker first recounts the loss of small things such as “lost door keys” and “an hour badly spent”; then, the losses grow in import: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally, “even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).”