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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.
A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
“I'm in mourning for my life,” explains a Chekhov character in The Seagull when asked why she only wears black. One mourns for life in order to live it, to understand its limits. Elizabeth Bishop knows this. She also knows that writing helps us raise and recall our losses so we can move ahead. If every word is an epitaph, as Emerson has expressed it and later Eliot in Four Quartets, each one encodes our passing, each one is “filled with the intent to be lost.” All texts, in a sense, write loss, and moving from one word to the next and in between them, they never settle down. But the process of losing, for Elizabeth Bishop, is not an art like any other, and it requires that we let go to gain mastery, that we neither monumentalize our experience nor fix what is always in the process of dissolution, that we recognize how inseparable our living is from our art. Poetic form and the lyric have been historically assigned the role of masking or denying the power of loss, instability, time.1 In Bishop, however, writing is a way, not to overcome, but to come to terms with loss. Through a psychoanalytic reading of her confessional story “In the Village” along with some of her more rarely considered prose pieces, and finally with “One Art” (a poem from which the opening lines are quoted above), I show how writing becomes a means of mourning and how for her, a poetics of loss imbricates a writing of a fluid and unfixed self.2 My use of Freud as well as some poststructuralist and feminist responses