The Cultivating Poetry column will explore both the writing and reading of poetry, and the practical ways this intersects with how our souls are formed. We will consider a range of poets, both contemporary and historical, looking for their invitation to us to see differently, to inhabit the world, together finding courage to live as a poeima in this beautiful, terrible world we have been given.
The villanelle had its beginnings over 500 years ago in pastoral Italy, likely taking shape from harvest songs sung in the late summer sun. It became a recognized form in the early 1600s when Passerat, a French poet, wrote popular poems using the form. The villanelle is marked by two repeating rhymes and two refrains. It contains five tercets with these repeating lines, finished by a quatrain that contains both refrains. In the last century, villanelles were used to explore a subject meditatively, because its circular structure defies any sort of narrative arc. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland conclude their description of the form by saying, “Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.” [1] The repetition of these refrains holds the idea up like a piece of cut glass, refracting new colors of meaning as the poem unfolds.
Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art” names the inevitability of loss as a skill she has honed to an art form—thus, the title. The first refrain begins an exploration of loss throughout the poem: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” I find myself holding a list of things I’ve lost beside her: yup, keys. Heirloom jewelry, check. When I arrive at her quatrain, it holds the same restraint her tercets have:
—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. [2]
Her parenthetical statement “Write it!” grabs my shoulders, and I feel seen in my struggle just this week to find words for a loss of my own. The grief of this interjection is only amplified by the restraint of the form. With this willful statement of struggle, the poem and its earlier list of losses takes on layers that the reader can’t see at first reading. As Bishop humanizes herself here, lamenting the loss of her beloved, we are invited to find words to form around our own nameless grief. Loss and grief bring an inevitable poverty, one that is never fully visible to the world outside, even when the losses are tangible. How does this poverty inform the way I move as a poeima in the world? What do I do when I have no words?
When Jesus hears of his cousin’s execution in Matthew’s gospel, He takes a boat to a solitary place. I can relate; when I am faced with loss, I need time to catch my breath. Perhaps out on the water, He let His lungs be filled by the same rouach—breath, wind, Spirit—that hovered over the waters at creation. When Jesus comes ashore, He is met by crowds who have followed Him around the lake, bringing their sick to Him to be healed. His time alone is cut short. Instead of telling them to leave, Jesus sees how they are suffering, and begins healing. Even in His grief, He is able to move outward; He does not curve inward in despair.
By the evening, Jesus’s disciples tell Him to send the crowd away to find their own food, but Jesus tells them no, He wants them to give the people something to eat. “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” the disciples reply. Jesus doesn’t question their offering, but tells the people to sit down, then takes the food and gives thanks. He breaks the loaves, and, as the story goes, thousands of people eat and are satisfied. And there are leftovers; twelve baskets full. [Matthew 14:1-21 NIV]
Jesus does not betray His need to grieve His cousin’s death. Instead, this loss serves as a backdrop for what Jesus chooses to do next, which is to offer Himself, embodying an invitation to those there, and to those who read. Loss is the soil from which Jesus’s generosity grows. Jesus, the Son of Man, decides to say yes to healing those who have come with their own desperation and grief, even in the midst of His own. He may not have had words yet for His loss; He was able to choose to live expansively in the midst of this narrow place of grief. His disciples offer a tentative reply when they bring Him five loaves and two fishes as the answer to what they have to offer the crowd. Jesus responds with a tangible parable of abundance—and the life of faith—in a basket of bread and fish pieces for each of His disciples to carry home. Even in the midst of loss. Or, could it be, especially?
Can I find a place of generosity when I am keeping company with grief? What might I have to give when what has been is no longer?
When the landscape as I know it has shifted, when my horizon is perpendicular to what I expect, and I find myself wandering in the wilderness, am I willing to find my loaves and fishes and offer them? What might it mean to offer what is most particularly mine to give?
One of the earliest known usages of the word “generous” comes from French generoux, meaning “of noble birth.” I can be generous not because I have a hoard of my own abundance that I can draw from, but because I am someone who was made in love, by Love, and in Love there is enough. I am a poeima. I am being written by a kind God who, in Jesus, shows that not only does God allow God’s self to be touched by loss and grief, but He also chooses to move in that grief toward pouring out for others. I, too, can continue to participate in being written, blessing my particular limitations, welcoming what I am and am not called to do.
A spiritual coach I know who is also an accomplished watercolor painter has begun to use painting to help her clients look at their uniqueness, the pain they have experienced in this place, and name the goodness that lives there, that they are invited to live into. It is a work of redeeming the imagination, which is part of becoming. [3] Our particularity, the ways this uniqueness has been marred, and our destiny are wrapped up together. It is where each of us is a poeima, and it is where our truest offering—our loaves and fishes—lies. This can become a place of tender hope.
I am guilty of measuring what I give against what I perceive others have, diminishing what I see until I am tempted not to bother. I contract; grief only compounds this. But then, the story about the widow, found both in Mark and Luke’s gospels, calls me out. I imagine the handfuls of coins clattering loudly in the courtyard of the temple as people toss in their offerings. This widow dropped two copper coins—the smallest of offerings. If I were her, would I even bother? But to Jesus, her gift was worth more than the larger offerings because “she, out of her poverty, put in everything.” (Mark 12:41-44, NIV) What good is it, then, to do the work to name my places of loss?
I cannot own what I have not named, and I cannot offer what I do not own. This naming is the work of a lifetime, swimming into the depths of a grief that cannot be rushed.
When I turn toward writing the things in my life that have cut me to the bone, the place where my body or my soul have been disfigured by trauma or shame, I am gathering a strange collection that no one else can gather, naming the particularities that only I am able to name. I have long resisted giving from this place, but keep finding that I must write if I want to be written.
When I sit at my desk in the corner of the basement, playing with best words, best order, this opens the door to the possibility of generosity. It invites order from the particular chaos of my own story, and a wholeness that welcomes not only the light, but also the shadows. I act on the belief that my truest contribution to the world will come from the places where I am most unique. I must offer what I do have, not what I think I should have. But what if embracing my poverty helps me to find what can be only mine to give? What if my two cents matter as much as the widow’s did to Jesus?
It is when I am giving from my true self that I can be most generous, because I am inviting a generativity from beyond me to flow through me, and as it does, to work into the soil in other’s souls. By her artful naming of her losses, Bishop invites me to turn toward my own, and in the naming, I am less alone. When I do this work of naming, there is an alchemy, a magic, a redemption where what is broken builds a bridge to someone else, where a starving place in me receives broken bread and fish, and both I and my reader are nourished. When I offer my own two coins, when I bring a few loaves and fishes, somehow, giving from what I thought was my lack, the world becomes less poor.
[1] The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland
[2] “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop.
The featured image, “Magenta Snapdragon,” is courtesy of Ariel Lovewell and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Amy Malskeit is a lover of words and stories and people. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Spanish, a secondary English teaching credential, and an MA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Lancaster University in Northwest England. Her years teaching middle and high school gave her a love for middle grade and young adult literature, and the awkward awesome that being a young adult means. She is a mother of two who plants her garden and makes her home in the foothills southwest of Denver with her best friend, Kevin. She loves the water, and feels most at home when she is near the Pacific Ocean. She reads broadly, and is passionate about exploring big questions and small moments through her poetry, essays, and stories.
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