Really, it's the brown paper strip wrapped around the cup that makes me stop. "Write it." Any poet seeing those particular instructions must immediately think of Elizabeth Bishop, "though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster," that famous last line in that most famous of villanelles. All that's missing from the Starbucks imperative is Bishop's carefully chosen exclamation point (we're only allowed a few of those in our whole writing careers, after all). And how strange it is to find echoes of "One Art" in a place that brews commerce by the cup.
I've been thinking about Bishop's command. What does writing do to the disaster? Does the act of making a poem confirm that loss is indeed loss, make the loss concrete and tangible as a page in a book? Does the poem defy or negate the loss? Is the bravery of writing down the disaster enough to counterbalance the absence of a mother's watch, a lovely city? The poem confesses how easy it is to learn loss, to experience loss. The full final sentence of the poem is "It's evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. And this is the irony of the piece--losing things is an easily acquired skill, yet facing (writing about) the ease with which we all become acquainted with loss seems an impossibly difficult challenge.
2011 was a good year. And it was a bad one. If I don't write about the losses of 2011, does that make them less real? Or more disastrous because I haven't faced them on the page? I don't know. I think Bishop would tell me, make something beautiful out of 2011, even if the year looks like (Write it!) like disaster.
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