"One Art" and Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere
I couldn’t get enough of Megan Marshall’s new biography of Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast. Bishop was reticent about her private life, so this biography, written by Bishop’s former student, is a revelation to me. I felt a little guilty for being so interested in things that Bishop likely didn’t want me to know; still, I couldn’t tear myself away.
To pair a beer with a biography would mean pairing a beer with Bishop herself. Perhaps I’ll do that once I finish A Miracle for Breakfast, though doing justice to Bishop is a dauntingly tall order. For now, I’ll pair a beer with my favorite Bishop poem, a villanelle called “One Art.” As you read it, notice its intense repetition, the way certain lines circle back.
“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.
Villanelles are a strict form: technically, the entire 1st and 3rd lines should repeat word for word at designated points throughout the poem, and the rhyme scheme for each tercet (three-line stanza) must be aba (in this case, “--aster,” “--ent,” “--aster” throughout every single stanza). Bishop plays with this form a bit (notice the imperfect slant rhymes of “fluster,” “last, or” and “gesture”) but adheres to it enough that poetry-lovers can spot its form from a mile away.
Knowing that it’s a villanelle means that you also know how this poem is going to end, exactly. The form dictates that it must conclude by repeating the poem’s first and third line as a closing couplet. So, from the very first stanza, you know that this poem is going to end in “disaster.” It’s inevitable.
And yet the speaker tries, relentlessly, to avoid this disaster. She nonchalantly brags about how very easy it is to lose things, even as her losses grow bigger and bigger. She starts by losing keys that will surely be found eventually, as well as an abstract hour or two. Next she loses an object with sentimental value - her mother’s watch - and then “loved” homes and “lovely” cities. Pretty soon, she’s losing geographical entities: “cities,” “realms,” “rivers,” and vast “continents.” The extent of these losses forces her to admit that she misses some of her losses, but she still stubbornly persists that they’re not such a big deal.
Samambaia, Bishop's first house in Brazil
It’s only when she lands in the final stanza that she encounters difficulty with loss, the loss of “you.” Throughout the poem, Bishop has been speaking in commands, and thus to an implied if unnamed second-person. But her shift to apostrophe (a mode in which the poet addresses an absent person or an abstract idea directly with the second-person “you”) stops us in our tracks. Who is this “you”? Love has made an appearance in the two stanzas leading up to this one (“loved houses” and “lovely” cities) but the incredible personalness of this final love is strikingly different, as if no repetition of love (or loss) could prepare us for this one.
No, with this love, she has to use parentheses to fawn over the specifics of the memory (“the joking voice, a gesture / I love”). She elevates her diction (“shan’t”) to fit her subject. She slips that subtle “too” into the line that we’ve heard three times at this point: every other time, it’s read exactly, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” but now, it reads, “The art of losing’s not too hard to master.” This heretofore breezy master of loss is forced to admit to some difficulty here. By the poem’s last line, she’s struggling mightily. She addresses herself parenthetically, commanding and scolding herself with not just italics but also the poem’s only exclamation point: “Write it!”. (And it is Bishop herself - her choice of the verb “write” makes her no longer just a speaker but, rather, an identified poet. This is personal, biographical: an elegy for her partner of fifteen years, Lota de Macedo Soares, and also (maybe, partly) a lament to Alice Methfessel, with whom she was going through a rocky patch when she wrote “One Art.”) She stumbles, stuttering over the comparison between loss and disaster, enveloping the parenthetical interruption of “Write it!” with “like”s: “... though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
Obviously, I’m gaga for this poem. I think it is perfect. Can you imagine writing a perfect poem?! This one took Bishop seventeen drafts, each one more on the nose, more just right, until she emerged with this classic.
The poem’s themes of memory, loss, circularity, and artistry make me think of sticking my nose into a bubbling glass of Jolly Pumpkin last week. When Jolly Pumpkin set up shop in Dexter, MI in 2004, I had just started graduate school down the road in Ann Arbor. I’m sure I didn’t come to Jolly Pumpkin until years after they had started brewing, as my enthusiasm for craft beer was still nascent in 2004. But when I did find Jolly Pumpkin a few years later, I felt proud that a local brewery was doing this kind of innovative work with sour beers. I drank a lot of Jolly Pumpkin while I lived in Ann Arbor, especially after they opened a taproom on Main Street. (After a decade away, I just had to look up the name of this very main street on Jolly Pumpkin’s website, and I see that they now have taprooms in Chicago, Traverse City, and Detroit - go Jolly Pumpkin!)
But by the time I left Michigan for Los Angeles, I was trying other beers. I was definitely happy to see Jolly Pumpkin in California bottle shops, but, figuring I should try new things made on my new coast, I always grabbed the bottle from Noble, from Saint Archer, from Golden Road, instead.
Until last week. All of a sudden, after years and years, I had a yen for a Bam, Jolly Pumpkin’s Sour Farmhouse Ale. I kept the bomber in my fridge until I had the opportunity to share it with a friend. As I poured it out, I could just sniff out the smell of nostalgia, and once I stuck my nose in that glass - bam! - a wicked sense of temporal homesickness hit me. My own madeleine moment.
Thinking of Bam next to “One Art,” I wonder if you can ever make a perfect beer, the way that Bishop spent her whole life chasing this perfect poem. Wouldn’t the perfect beer at least be more ephemeral than Bishop’s poem? “One Art” is cast in stone, locked in forever after that seventeenth draft. I have it memorized, and it will never slip or shift. Beer, on the other hand, is subject to the whims of nature. Even if the brewer is perfectly careful to not let any foreign beasties settle in on top of the intended yeast, even if the maltster has germinated the barley exactly the same as she did last year, nature still gets to decide how much sun that barley got that year, how much calcium has seeped into the local water that makes up 90% of the beer. Because it’s even more ephemeral than poetry, because it can’t be completely locked in or controlled by science, beer is an art. Like poetry. Like loss.
