Even staring out the window is changed, the private peak above it all brought down with the erosion of the poise between the viewable and the mused unseen. Dissolution so nearly changeless as not to appear is shifting the sands inside from what we watched, no more the steady stage the self-dramatic days play out on outside. The silent portent now allowed alert to things changing the light a darkness not the normal individual mortality, but as if the epochal heartbeat of larger elements, the seas, the air, had mutated, become chimera, grown wing, and routed ancestral time. Even staring out the window, the timeless is gone. We see coming in the daily migration of the local geese to the lake at evening the cities pull up and move in unlike consternation towards and away from the water that had been so calming to gaze out on, to live by, easy to not live according to. And now that seas are adding themselves into the land, horizons look ominously larger, the arrivant out of them, faster and clearer. Now, you see the view is turned on us to frame human agency become transparent, light as air, before the picture blackens as a consequence of our seeing too much of it as only for us to use and then use up. The eye is not filled with seeing, with only seeing, but with understanding the sight.
Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal offer a close read of Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem, "One Art." "Bishop wasn’t a confessional poet. She was a master at containing and concealing emotion. So how did this relatively buttoned-up poet come to write such a moving poem—one that still has the power to make many of its readers weep?"
"To translate Šimić into English requires constant pruning, knocking phrases down to their lowest common denominator. My goal was faithfulness to the original while maintaining the spare intensity of Šimić’s lines, and our conversations often grew heated. I came to crave the moment my father snapped his fingers to demonstrate that I had unlocked the mystery in English."
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