My aim is to sound so pure and so liquid that travelers will take me across the desert with them, or to the North Pole, or wherever I am going.1
Louise Bogan, in a letter to Theodore Roethke, September 1937
In this letter, Louise Bogan goes on to say that D.H. Lawrence took "the Oxford Book of English Verse with him through Arabia. What more could poets ask than that?" (this)
But on a smaller scale, what sentences burned their way into Lawrence's consciousness? Flashing forward, what tumbles through the intellect as you, say, queue up for the bathroom in the back of a Lower East Side bar you didn't want to go to in the first place? Or in the styrofoam-cupped waiting room of a JiffyLube where the magazines still have Kelly Clarkson on their covers?
What, when we are severed from our dog-eared copies of Bishop or Chaucer, Lowell and Frost, do we remember of those books?
Quiz
Instructions: 1) Read the following poets' names. 2) In the space provided, write down the first direct quote that you associate with those poets. 3) If nothing comes to mind, move on to the next poet and repeat from number 1.
1. Robert Frost
_____________________________________________
2. William Shakespeare
_____________________________________________
3. Geoffrey Chaucer
_____________________________________________
4. William Carlos Williams
_____________________________________________
5. Sylvia Plath
_____________________________________________
6. John Ashbery
_____________________________________________
7. Kanye West
_____________________________________________
8. Robert Lowell
_____________________________________________
For each of the above, your answers probably boiled down to a few lines of poetry, which you remembered not by chance, but because of just how keenly those lines affected you, or at least for how well they seemed to alter the way you interacted with the world.
And that's what, we hope, we'll do through Cellpoems. While one-hundred-forty characters provides little room for elaboration, scant breath to establish any sense of momentum, and no ground to stand on for, say, a narrative, they gave enough space for Lorine Niedecker to include an entire transformation of winter to spring--including an appeal to the sense of sound, vision, sadness--when she wrote:
How the white gullsOne-hundred-forty characters gave A.R. Ammons enough space to establish (and critique) a one-dimensional persona in his poem,
in grey weather
Soon April
the little
yellows 2
Old GeezerAnd there is another sort of short poem, one which evokes Descarte's definition of wonder:
The quickest
way
to change
the
world is
to
like it
the
way it
is.3
A sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary." (from The Passions of the Soul, published 1642) 4________________________
***
Specifically, a poem that deranges what I thought I already knew, or allies recondite tropes in an illuminating way:Poem to Poetry
Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, a field -- like the space
between a sleepwalker's outheld arms...5
Somehwhat similar to Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro," Bill Knott's short poems stick with me like sausage gravy, but in a much better way. Here's a link to his blog, where he constantly published work in progress.
What are your short poem favorites, and how do they manage to do so much with so little?
1. Louise Bogan, A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press, 2005.
2. Rene Descartes, The Passions of the Soul [1642], trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p 56.
3. Lorine Niedecker, The Selected Poems of. Edited by Cid Corman. Gnomon Press: Kentucky, 1996.
4. A.R. Ammons, Selected Poems. Library of America, 2006.
5. Bill Knott, Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999.
