Poetry in the city.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The Delhi Walla arranged to meet American poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Fact & Fiction Booksellers in South Delhi’s Basant Lok Market.

The city’s most eclectic bookshop, Fact & Fiction is on the verge of closure. Almost all its shelves are now bare. It was opened in 1984. Turning to the bookstore’s owner, Ajit Vikram Singh, and his longtime colleague Ravi Vyshumpayan, Ms Bishop says, “I have composed this poem to help all the people who love your bookshop to adjust to a life without it. I have titled it One Art.”

Ms Bishop shares this poem with us.

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.

A poet’s world

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