Three Things: Lost Objects Edition
Last night I paged through The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), as I am wont to do every now and then, and landed on “Lost Things”:
They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a valuable ring, one a valuable button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am.
It got me thinking about (can you guess?) lost objects, and the stories around them — how they are lost, how they are found, what happens in between. The recent lost-and-found roll of film in Brooklyn comes to mind (the story’s conclusion here), but not all stories are quite so far-reaching, or so neatly tied up.
So what did I do next? I headed over to Flickr to search for three lost things in want of a story. I found a shoe, a teddy, and a pair of keys. Just for you.
by Jenny Murray via flickr
by mulberry leaves via flickr
by Jacob Shere via flickr
I hadn’t seen the Brooklyn roll of film videos, but one of the coolest things for me was the line in the first video, “I’d never been the victim of a random act of kindness.” I thought it was a really lovely little sentence that recontextualizes the word “victim” in an interesting way.
This Three Things got me thinking about the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15212). The last time I read this poem it was in the context of talking about revisions with some students I was working with. I’ve been revisiting some of the poems I began writing at that time using the, “art of [blank] isn’t hard to master” prompt. Even revisiting those poems felt like finding lost objects. Lost bits if poetry I’d nearly forgotten about from which I’m now far enough removed that revisions have gone very smoothly.
That got me wondering: How often do you (not just “Hazel & Wren” you, but everybody) go through your old notebooks or boxes/drawers of paper and notes? What do you do when you go through them? Do you revise old poems, or just reflect? Do you feel like you’ve regained something you lost?