Katie Couric on Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art'

For National Poetry Month, PBS is airing the second season of its series, Poetry in America. In a recent episode, Katie Couric shares her response to Elizabeth Bishop's poem about love and loss, "One Art." In conversation with Jeremy Hobson, Couric explains, "there are many, many poems that I love. But for some reason, I selected 'One Art' by Elizabeth Bishop. I think it's because I've had so much personal loss in my own life, and that this poem is so complex and so fascinating. It's really the poet herself trying to convince herself that something is true, which just isn't the truth — and that is that the art of losing isn't hard to master." Picking up from there: 

On the grief many people are feeling right now and how she would describe what we're losing in this crisis

“I think this poem could not be more relevant than it is right now. Because there are so many different kinds of loss and there are so many different kinds of grief, and I think that we've lost a lot right now. Hopefully, it's temporary, but I'm sure that this experience is going to leave scars for months, if not years to come on a lot of people. Because they've lost people they love, they've lost huge milestones in their lives — the chance to celebrate them. I think of all the people who've lost an opportunity to celebrate their high school years or celebrate a college graduation. I think there's so many different degrees of loss that are going on, people are experiencing collective and individual grief.”

Read on and tune in at PBS/WBUR-Boston.