title. The poem was written over the course of two weeks, an unusually short time for Bishop. Some of the piece is adapted from a longer poem, Elegy, that Bishop never completed or published. Drafts The poem changed in specific ways from the first to the final draft. Bishop's career was different from many of her colleagues, such as Robert Lowell, because she hated confessional poetry. "Besides they seldom have anything interesting to 'confess' anyway. Mostly they write about a lot of things which I should think were best left unsaid." Keeping to her word, Bishop heavily revised the journal entry of a first draft to remove her voice and anything specific that would give her away. For example, "exceptionally / beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person / (except for blue eyes)," changes to "(the joking voice, a gesture I love)," giving Bishop the distance she aimed for. When it was published in The New Yorker its publisher Howard Moss, responded that "One Art" was, "...upsetting and sad" and that Bishop had established, "...just the right amount of distance". Scholars have noted many features about the intentions behind the poem by analyzing the changing features in each consecutive draft, often using this analysis in their interpretation of the final poem from its drafts. In a conversation with film editor Walter Murch, Michael Ondaatje compared the creative writing process of "One Art", "In literature, even in something as intimate as a poem, those early drafts can be just as wayward and haphazard as the early stages of a film. Look at the gulf between the untidy, seemingly almost useless, the first draft of Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' and the remarkably tight and suggestive final version of her nineteen-line villanelle". Like editing a film, Bishop laid out a sequence of her thoughts and emotions and then came back and organized it into a villanelle like putting together a puzzle. In each draft to follow, she would get closer to reaching that form, with the structure, rhymes, and refrains as her edge pieces. After grappling with several drafts of this poem, Bishop said that this perfect villanelle finally just came to her. "I couldn't believe it -- it was like writing a letter." Bishop made sure to include "One Art" in her book, Geography III, which she had been working on for some years. Content Bishop's life was marked by loss and instability, which