One Art

“'Tis the damn season, write this down”

Community readers set the song's "write this down" beside Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art", a poem that rehearses the art of losing and then, in its final stanza, breaks its own composed surface with the parenthetical command to "(Write it!)" as it confronts the loss of a loved one. The instruction to put loss into writing — to master it by setting it down — shadows a song in which the speaker memorialises an old love she is choosing to leave behind.