 Hello, this is Brian Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, and I'm pleased to join you to help celebrate National Poetry Month. The month of April 2020 has of course been a particularly unusual month for us as we struggle with loss and so much that is different from our normal routine. When the library asked if I would record a poem to help celebrate the month, my mind went immediately to a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorite poets. I'm going to read to you one art by Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911 and she's someone who learned at an early age something about loss. Her father passed away when she was only eight months old and her mother, who struggled with mental health issues, was institutionalized when she was only five. Elizabeth Bishop was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia, which figures frequently in her poetry. She's one of our great American poets of the 20th century, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and one art is one of her best known and most loved poems. It's written in the form of a villanelle, a 19-lined form, which is particularly intricate and uses repeated words and lines. So this is one art by Elizabeth Bishop. 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 except 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 vast are some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I missed 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.