This post is the work of current Stegner Fellow Andrew Grace.–TM
I want to write about the state of the American short poem. I hesitate to use the term “minimalism,” since it implies not only that a poem is brief, but also that its style is spare, which is not necessarily the case with today’s practitioners of short poems. In fact, I think it is especially interesting when a poem is both brief and linguistically rich. The poets I want to focus on are those who are 1) alive and 2) who work, if not exclusively in short poems, then predominantly in them.
What constitutes a short poem? To throw out a basically arbitrary number, let’s say 15 lines or less. Granted there are other ways for a poem to be considered short besides line count. For example, would Rae Armantrout be considered a practitioner of the short poem? Many of her poems are several pages long, but through her line length and amount of white space on the page, the actual number of words in the poem is usually much less than, say, a sonnet. Take for example her “”Piecemeal”:
A boy severs his fingers,
by accident, in my imagination
where his first thought is
“My mother
will be so frightened!”
*
Horn jags
from a stereo
as evasive
maneuvers:
extruded ink
jets, sea snakes
turn mouth-forward,
bodies snapping
as if
out of sight,
as if
*
over and over
were a scouting party
that arrives,
piecemeal,
in the third
person
(from Veil)
There are 61 words spread across 38 lines (including section breaks). Surely, by virtue of its economy of words, we could call this “short.” So one could say that a short poem is any poem that values spareness and reduction. But for my purposes in this blog, I will be looking at living writers who predominantly write poems that are about 15 lines or less.
What interests me in this particular moment of the American short poem is that the tradition seems to be shifting away from the Imagist, Eastern-influenced poem (i.e. “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Red Wheelbarrow”) towards more linguistically innovative poetry that plays around with disruptions in narrative. In this blog I hope to take a look at poets like Saskia Hamilton, Graham Foust, Adam Clay, Joseph Massey, Robert Grenier and others (any suggestions?) that are finding new ways for the short poem to function. I’ll dig in a bit deeper next time, but for now, here are some of my favorite very very short poems.
Charles Wright
“Bygones”
The rain has stopped falling asleep on its crystal stems.
(from China Trace)
W.S. Merwin
“Elegy”
Who would I show it to
(from The Carrier of Ladders)
Graham Foust
“At the Movies”
I laughed behind
your hand
(from Necessary Stranger)
Robert Grenier
“I’m Beginning to Feel like a Prophet”
that means there’s a long day certainly
(from Phantom Anthems)
Nick Flynn
“Prayer”
Who are you talking to? she asks, the room empty.
(from Some Ether)
Joseph Massey
“Greyhound, North Through Sonoma County”
II.
Window
night makes
a mirror of–
my face
supplants
the landscape.
(from Property Line)
Adam Clay
“Elegy”
I took cold water from the river in my hands, drank,
And looked down to see a rock black with the memory of my face.
(from The Wash)