The Art of Losing

"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." - Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Loss has always had a strange aesthetic in literature. Why? Because it is rarely presented purely as absence and is instead framed as the condition through which the world becomes newly visible. So when Bishop talks about "the Art of losing" in One Art I think she's talking about the way loss seems to heighten our perception, and perception is ultimately what creates art. I love the term "master" in the context of Bishop's poem because mastery implies dominance over something, but she flips it to suggest that "mastering" loss is simply to accept how it changes our outlook, and really it is mastering the artistic expression of that new outlook which is the real power. This is not to say that art can only arise from loss or that art "solves" the pain of loss, but there is a fascinating relationship between creativity, loss and how we interact with the world that I keep coming back to as I navigate adult life.

When I was writing my dissertation back in univeristy, I spent a great deal of time thinking about loss in the poetry of Mark Doty and John Ashbery and what interested me most was not simply the expression of grief itself, but the depiction of the plenitude that follows after it. Most of Doty’s beautiful poems often begin in utter devastation - someone gone, a relationship dissolved, an identity ruptured - and yet the world that remains is not diminished but somehow heightened. For example, in Atlantis, written after the death of his life-long partner, he describes grief as a state in which “the visible world is all that remains.” The line seems stark at first, but it carries another implication: if the visible world is all that remains, then everything in it suddenly matters more. Indeed, colour, light, passing strangers, the ordinary surfaces of life begin to glow with an almost unbearable clarity in his works.

Fundamentally, grief seems to alter the scale and texture of the world, making even the smallest appearance of beauty feel charged with significance. For instance there's this dazzling passage which describes the sudden sight of two white swans lifting from a pond:

I’ve seen two white emissaries unfold like heaven’s linen, untouched, enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring, too cold yet for green, too early/for the tumble and wrack of last season to be anything but promise, but there in the air was white tulip, marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul lifted up, if we could still believe in the soul, after so much diminishment ...Breath, from the unpromising waters, up, across the pond and the two-lane highway, pure purpose, over the dune, gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable as this shining acreage; the future’s nothing but this moment’s gleaming rim.

The movement of the poem mirrors the movement of grief itself. The landscape is sparse -“too cold yet for green,” caught between the decay of winter and the promise of spring" - yet out of that barrenness comes an unexpected vision: the swans rise “from the unpromising waters,” their flight briefly transforming the ordinary scene into something almost sacred. Doty’s hesitation - “if we could still believe / in the soul, after so much diminishment” - is crucial. Loss has made belief difficult, of course, and yet the image of beauty that follows somehow sustains itself and lifts in spite of such pain.

What the poem eventually offers is not consolation but a shift in attention from futurity to presence. The future, Doty suggests, is “unreadable” (which brings it's own connotations of instability and possibility) and what remains instead is the brightness of “this moment’s gleaming rim.” Ugh the nuance is so beautiful. He is delicate in capturing the paradoxical nature of loss as something that both destroys certainty whilst also creating possibility in the form of sharpening our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Thus, the world, stripped of its guarantees, becomes suddenly vivid.

Ashbery, in his more elliptical way, suggests something similar. His poems drift through rooms, cities, and conversations where the self is no longer stable but porous, shaped by fleeting encounters and unexpected proximities. In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, reflecting on Parmigianino’s distorted image, he writes:

“The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest? The surface of the mirror being convex, the distance increases significantly; that is, enough to make the point / That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept / In suspension, unable to advance much farther / Than your look as it intercepts the picture.”

This passage captures Ashbery’s peculiar sense that identity exists somewhere between interiority and external encounter. The soul “establishes itself,” but only within the limits of perception and suspended in the space between self and world created in fleeting momemts of time. In this image specifically, the convex mirror both contains and distorts the figure, reminding us that the self is never entirely secure or self-possessed but that it instead, emerges through looking, through relation and through the moment of contact with something outside itself.

At the time, I treated it as a literary question: how poetry imagines the self after loss but what I was really encountering was something closer to a philosophy of living. Life moves in ways that can devastate and delight with equal force, and over time you begin to trust the motion itself - the strange rhythm through which loss becomes, almost imperceptibly, a form of gain.

Over the past year, a number of things fell away from me. I left my job, the place I had been living, dealt with the ending of a relationship and drifted from a couple of friendships that no longer felt alive or good for me. At the time, these departures seemed like really painful separate events, each with its own practical reasons and emotional complications, but looking back, I see that they formed a single gesture: a clearing.

Loss, when it happens in clusters like this, has a deeply unsettling effect. The structures that once organized your life - work, home, intimacy, social gravity - suddenly loosen and for a while, the sensation is simply vertiginous. You realize how much of your identity had been quietly scaffolded by these arrangements and without them, the self feels strangely provisional.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much space this clearing would create. Space not just in the practical sense of not having to dedicate time to these things/people and of course gaining my own physical space to live in, but in the deeper sense of attention. When the familiar architecture of life falls away, the world begins to appear again with a kind of aggressive brightness (which is overwhelming in brilliant and bad ways!)

For instance, I started meeting people in ways I hadn’t before. Not through the structured channels of work or long-standing social circles, but through the loose and often surprising pathways of chance. Strangers who became companions for the day on a 8 hour jeep ride in Madeira, wonderful people at random parties sharing their stories and conversations that unfolded with an unexpected intimacy. Essentially, I just kept meeting people who appeared briefly but altered the emotional texture of a day and who knows where such chance encounters could lead.

What struck me most was the generosity of these encounters. Without the expectations that accompany established relationships, they often felt lighter and more open. You could be curious about someone without needing to place them inside a defined role in your life because the exchange itself was enough.

This is something I now recognize in Doty’s poetry. After loss, the self begins to experience relation differently. Instead of being oriented around one central attachment, it becomes attentive to a constellation of presences: the passing stranger, the stray remark, the sudden beauty of an ordinary moment. The world, previously background, moves into focus.

Ashbery’s work captures something similar, though in a more playful register. His poems wander through scenes where identity is constantly reshaped by encounter and self becomes a kind of field through which voices, gestures, and impressions pass. Crucially, there is a loss in this instability, of course, but also a profound sense of freedom.

And that is the word I keep returning to: freedom.

Not the triumphant kind people talk about in clichés, but a quieter form; the freedom that comes when you realize that life is larger than the structures you had mistaken for it. The freedom of discovering that the world contains far more people, places, and possibilities than the small orbit you once inhabited.

In this sense, loss has its own strange generosity. It dismantles certain forms of belonging, but in doing so it invites others.

I sometimes think about how Ashbery’s poems rarely conclude with resolution. Instead, they drift toward openness, leaving the reader in a space where meaning continues to unfold. Life, it turns out, has a similar rhythm in that loss rarely closes the story. More often, it changes the direction of the narrative so what seemed, at first, like a series of endings can now be understood as the beginning of something very refreshing and very new.

When I talk about newness I also don't mean some dramatic reinvention, but something simpler: an openness to the world and to the people who inhabit it. The strangers who surprise you. The conversations that occur to delight you and the feeling that your life, instead of narrowing, has quietly expanded.

If there is an art to losing, as poets suggest, it lies not in learning how to endure absence, but in learning how to recognise the life that begins to gather in its place.

"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."