Levine: With the series between the Red Sox and the Yankees about to begin, I thought I'd read a poem about losing and the fine art of losing...

Levine: This was written by Elizabeth Bishop who was born in Wooster, Massachusetts where she may have inherited or at least smelled that terrible sense of defeat that Boston has suffered from ever since they sold the Babe to the new York Yankees. This poem is called, "One Art."

One Art

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.

For WNYC this is Phil Levine.

For more from WNYC's Poet in Residence, click here.

Poetry Links

www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org
Basic information about Elizabeth Bishop
Alfred A Knopf on Philip Levine
Information on many of Levine's books
Galway Kinnell Reads Walt Whitman
Kinnell reads Whitman's "To The States" and comments on it
Philip Levine on the Internet Poetry Archive.
Read Levine's poetry and listen to Levine read his poetry
The Leonard Lopate Show: Poetry Magazine
Hear Mr. Lopate talk about the 100 million-dollar donation from Ruth Lilly to Poetry Magazine
The Next Big Thing: Poetry Lives
Alice Quinn, poetry editor for the New Yorker and executive director of the Poetry Society of America, sorts through some entries to the Poetry in Motion Contest
e-poets Network Book of Voices
a list of poets and poems from the Chicago area-- you can listen to poets read their work
The Poetry Project
is at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, since 1966
Bartleby.com
A collection of books online, including a bounty of verse
An Audible Anthology
A collection of poems printed in the Atlantic Montly to read or listen to
Gumball Poetry
It's a zine, it's a website, it's a gumball machine that dispenses poetry!

A selection of Philip Levine's books

A New Selected Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Simple Truth
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Mercy
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
What Work Is: Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com