Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Art Critic Aveek Sen on The Art of Losing, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Poetry in the city.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
Leaves shed trees. Bodies leave spirits. Lovers lose lovers. And a poetry book lost its owner. The much-marked and underlined paperback of Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 belonged to Calcutta-based art critic Aveek Sen.
One magical evening The Delhi Walla went to Kiran Nadar Museum of Art to hear Mr Sen talk about the ‘Art of Losing’–that’s a famous phrase from an Elizabeth Bishop poem (‘One Art’). Everyone in the audience–including author Dayanita Singh and artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta–was served with a printed copy of the text after which Mr Sen read out the poem from his own Hogarth Press edition (published in UK, 1984). He employed the next two hours speaking on our losses, and how losing something can lead to gaining something. He also considered the possibilities of exploiting loss to create works of art.
And what happened later?
Mr Sen himself suffered a loss. He lost his cherished Elizabeth Bishop edition.
Somehow the book miraculously found its way into my bag.
Mr Sen’s loss has become somebody else’s gain, or perhaps it is the other way around. In either case, it will be interesting to see the inventive ways Mr Sen will make use of this loss, though I’m eager to return his property to him.
Here’s the poem by Elizabeth Bishop.
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.
The difficult art of losing/gaining
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
how too delightfully albertine-like, mayank! it be too unproustian to take it back from you…or would it?
It will be too unProustian, I fear, Mr Sen.
Finders, keepers?