#5: three concentric circles

going long on length, with dutch museums, german lieder and a japanese classic.

Welcome to the fifth ever edition of Every Other Bee, a weekly digest of poetry designed around a particular theme. This week, I develop a litany on length.

Part I: The Goldfinch

Poem length is something I have a lot of thoughts about. Length in general is something I have a lot of thoughts about. I’m 5’9 which is average height for a man, but I’m, of course, a woman. My mother has been trying to get me to cut my hair since I first was able to grow it and I have been trying to convince her that actually I look very gorgeous with long hair since I first was able to speak. And I think there is one (1) perfect length for poems.

Shorter poems have their benefits—you can memorise them more easily—and longer poems let you dive deeper, find the nooks and crannies and attics and basements of an idea. But to me, the ideal poem is something long enough to gut punch you, to do a last minute tie-in to an idea introduced several lines ago, but short enough that you can read it and not get bored or lost in its intricacy.

An example of this platonic ideal is Stephen Dunn’s Poem for People That Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry: it’s an easy read, the simplicity of its phrasing and the enjambment of its lines speeding you through to its marvellous dénouement. Those final three lines are one of my touchstones, one of my treasure of memorised prose which operate as a form of emotional parachute in case of emergency. These three lines, alone, would be a perfect poem but I prefer them in juxtaposition to the rest of it. It’s a form of magic trick, the flourish all the more impressive because it is accompanied by a flutter when the rug is pulled out from beneath us.

My mother taught me to memorise poems. She was at school in the ‘70s back when the only type of learning was rote, so she’d get me to recite poems with her in the car in English (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (1832)), in French (Jean de la Fontaine’s Le Corbeau et le Renard (1755)), and in German, lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808), which you can hear sung here in Franz Schubert’s lied Gretchen am spinnrade (1814)). I’d practise with her, in particular, that last one: ‘Meine Ruh' ist hin / Mein Herz ist schwer / Ich finde sie nimmer / Und nimmermehr’, and she’d patiently correct my accent.

(There are times like this when I am writing something about my family that I realise how unusual my life is, if my mother was teaching me to memorise German poetry as a child. It is the same feeling I have when I cycle in the afternoons between the Art Deco buildings of my neighbourhood, the stained glass glinting in the sun and the sound of opera filling the air as the trained soprano who lives on my street sings an aria in her observatory. This is not, I don’t think, some form of universal experience at which the reader is nodding in recognition.)

Anyway, I digress. The point of this exercise was to say that today, we’ll be focusing on length: starting small, with the little ones which we can all learn by heart, then to the medium but perfectly formed ones, and then ending with the super long ones you need to clear an afternoon for.

Now if we think of short poems, we naturally go to the haiku. Here are a sampling of my favourites from the master Kobayashi Issa (all taken from ‘Selected Haiku by Issa’ (1994, trans. Robert Hass)):

All the time I pray to Buddha 
I keep on 
    killing mosquitoes.

Under the evening moon 
the snail 
      is stripped to the waist.

The snow is melting 
and the village is flooded 
      with children.

 New Year’s Day— 
everything is in blossom! 
    I feel about average. 

I love the wit of these, the playfulness, the way in which Issa manages to build up and demolish, to present the factual and the counterfactual, to proffer to the reader and then cut across, all in a few brief words.

To close out the classics, I adore Bashō, and his poem ‘“In Kyoto…”’ (2017, trans. Jane Hirschfield):

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

The efficiency of this language, this adaptation to a form, this reshaping of thoughts to fit in such a small box is, to me, so impressive, managing to speak through a whole theme in a number of words. And if I may offer you some advice: I cannot recommend enough trying to write your own haiku. It is more difficult and more satisfying than you think it will be. (And if you do write one, send it to me. I would love to read it.)

The haiku structure is one we’re all familiar with, but many of the famous English language poems said to be haikus don’t follow the 5/7/5 pattern, but still have that same feathery, delicate simplicity. Ezra Pound’s two line In a Station of the Metro (1913), for example, is considered by many to be the first English language haiku:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Langston Hughes’ Suicide’s Note (2002), too, is part of that newer school, haiku in spirit more than in structure, the keenness of the juxtaposition between title and content telling the full story, like the humour of Issa’s work:

The calm, 
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss. 

Winfield Townley Scott’s Late (1969) is the rare English language haiku which follows the rules, and I love how much wisdom and weariness is portrayed in its sparse lines:

Late, and leaves tarnish
    I spend so carefully now
       what I once squandered.

But these poems, as short and exquisitely formed as they are, are simply not fully satisfying for me. They’re like tiny little sugar candies where you have to eat five or ten or twenty to be truly full. They’re pop punk songs you need to listen to on repeat because they’re over in a minute and they get you so amped that you have to start again from the start. They’re like those famous paintings in The Louvre or, speaking closer to home for me, the Mauritshuis: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch (1654). Their smallness is slightly a disservice to them: they’re too perfect, too manicured. My natural impulse is to want something larger, something a bit messier, a bit more lively.

Part II: Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeannette de Lange

That’s where we reach what is to me the height of the medium: the medium. To me, it’s like those midsize portraits they have in the Rijksmuseum, which aren’t particularly famous—especially when compared to their southern cousins in the Mauritshuis I referred to earlier. One example of the secret treasures of the Rijksmuseum is this painting I spotted two Sundays ago while doing my semi-regular pilgrimage to Amsterdam.

Jan Toorop’s Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeannette de Lange (1900). See also: me, reading my newsletter every week.

This is also like I like my poems: a mixture of different ideas, a little chattier, a little more humble. By way of illustration, I’ll begin my medium section with an all-timer, a poem which cannot possibly be improved upon in my humble opinion, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Modern Declaration (1939):

I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never
       having wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of
       the rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied
       these loves;

Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors hav-
       ing grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of 
       these loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them
       by a conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink
Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the
       fingers of their alert enemies; declare

That I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied
         interests win the war,
Shall love you always.

When I tell you that this is a poem that I regularly read aloud, and that I’ve read it aloud to people in tones of awe at anything this gorgeous ever being written. It exists in my personal hall of fame, if only for the fact that it made me realise, with a jolt of surprise, that chiropractors already existed in 1939.

Another excellent and more recent example of the medium is Maya Salameh’s ‘Pictures from the Camera We Threw Away (Shahwah)’ (2021):

I split the fridge’s innards for carrot cake and think about 4:45pm the reek of gasoline
he looks at me like the back of my mother’s Corolla Christ
opher Columbus has been decapitated in Boston the summer is still new and
stubborn he tells me about his sisters and he really does love them the sky full of three
pits on the floor he can buy them branded backpacks with the Adobe check in a
recession I can only promise mine diagnoses my brother keeps ask
ing for Roblox gift cards such beautiful words but none I can eat I am nineteen
and I’ve just finished Giovanni’s Room and I believe grief is endless I cobble
together the pen amputated under my mattress let the wax m
end my throat I am running out of diaphragm this at least feels consensual in
my parents’ kitchen there is good bread and the Brillos with the smooth ink and I
tuck my spoon into a bed of frost
ing think about guavas and clouds and wine kiss like the next sixty days won’t be an
anaphora in my throat when I am drunk afterwards we keep intermittently
messaging flirting as perfunctory exercise each of us proving our teeth I watch July
in the rearview calligraphy smeared on the roof and if I squint I am irredeem
able and perfect and our highway is littered with green stalks

This has the perfect amount of meat for it to be a satisfying meal: with its use of enjambment as purposeful chaos (‘Corolla Christ/opher Columbus’), and its juxtaposition of ‘I believe grief is endless’ with Roblox gift cards, of being ‘irredeem/able and perfect’ at the same time.

Adrienne Su’s ‘Escape from the Old Country’ (2006) isn’t enjambed, but it is the perfect length to walk with you down a beautiful wooded path and then kick you in the teeth with its ending:

I never had to make one,
no sickening weeks by ocean,
 
no waiting for the aerogrammes
that gradually ceased to come.
 
Spent the babysitting money
on novels, shoes, and movies,
 
yet the neighborhood stayed empty.
It had nothing to do with a journey
 
not undertaken, not with dialect,
nor with a land that waited
 
to be rediscovered, then rejected.
As acid rain collected
 
above the suburban hills, I tried
to imagine being nothing, tried
 
to be able to claim, “I have
no culture,” and be believed.
 
Yet the land occupies the person
even as the semblance of freedom
 
invites a kind of recklessness.
Tradition, unobserved, unasked,
 
hangs on tight; ancestors roam
into reverie, interfering at the most
 
awkward moments, first flirtations,
in doorways and dressing rooms—
 
But of course. Here in America,
no one escapes. In the end, each traveler
 
returns to the town where, everyone
knew, she hadn’t even been born.

Jessica Le’s ‘For my new year’s resolution I want to get a full-time job’ (2021) has that great character of a medium poem, starting and ending at the same place: from ‘on the edge of the couch, TV girl ponders cut fruit.’ to ‘TV girl gets up, then sits down.
joins her father silently cracking peanuts open.’

Laurie Ann Guerrero’s ‘Last Meal: Breakfast Tacos, San Antonio, Tejas’ (2016), too, performs the same trick. (In my opinion, all the best poems are circles.)

Let me be your last meal.
Let me harvest the notes
I took from your mother’s
watery hands, street vendors
in Rome, Ms. Rosie
from our taquería, you:
in the sun, in the open air,
let me give you zucchini
and their elusive blossoms —
my arms, my hands.
Pumpkiny empanadas
of my feet, pulpy as a newborn’s.
Guisada’d loin of my calf
muscle. On a plate white
and crisp as the ocean,
lemoned eyeballs like two
scallops. The red, ripe
plum of my mouth.
Perhaps with coffee,
you’d have the little lobe
of my ear sugared as a wedding
cookie. The skin of my belly,
my best chicharrón, scrambled
with the egg of my brain
for your breakfast tacos.
My lengua like lengua.
Mi pescuezo, el mejor hueso.
Let me be your last meal:
mouthfuls of my never-to-be-digested
face, my immovable femur
caught in your throat
like a fish bone. Let my body be
what could never leave your body.

I’ll conclude here with Matthew Rohrer’s ‘Poem Written with Issa [“A friend e-mails”]’ (2014), which is clearly inspired by the haiku masters (as indeed, its title and the titles of its companion pieces which draw on Bashō and Buson suggest), but flourishes in its medium-ness:

A friend e-mails
how much are you
enjoying yourself?
a dripping faucet
loose cat litter
no doubt about it
a good world
is difficult I say
as if I were
tilling a field
ashamed of myself
I apologize
to the sleeping child 

One thing I like about Rohrer's poem in particular is that I have no clue where the fuck the sentences are.

Part III: The Night Watch

Long poems, to take my art metaphor to its final resting place, are like those huge paintings of battles which take up half a gallery wall. They’re technically very impressive, a real feat of engineering, a shit-ton of paint, but there’s something about not being able to see the trees for the forest. I find it hard to find one wonderful detail on them, because I am so thoroughly overwhelmed by the bigness of it all. The most famous big guy painting here in The Netherlands is Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642). It measures some 379.5cm × 453.5cm (12’5.5” x 14’10.5”) and it’s been the subject of a massive restoration project here, and I honestly couldn’t care less about it.

One of my favourite big poems, which by contrast I deeply care about, is Sumita Chakraborty’s Dear, beloved (2017). I’ve tried throughout this newsletter to reprint whole poems as much as possible so you’re reading the small ones as small, the medium ones as medium, etc, but there is absolutely no way I’m including this opus in full, so I’m extracting my favourite part, which comes more than two thirds through its lengthy recitation:

It will always be still the dull twilight of early morning with us.
This is one of the curses of living. In the end, my visio alone
will sing and dance, breathing heavily. Every day the sunbeams
in it turn a brighter pink. Dears. Beloveds. All of you.
Your blood is bewitched, and bade to move into places
it wasn’t meant to go, steeped deeply in poisons
it can’t purge. You share the look on your face
with all the others, whether deer, child, or man.
If you look deeply enough into any other pair of eyes,
your heart valves start to change allegiances. Your body’s lakes
fill with the other’s want, until all you want, in turn,
is what the other wants, which rises in you like seawater.

(FYI, I absolutely do the Leonardo diCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) point at the poem when Chakraborty drops the ‘Dears. Beloveds.’ and it’s completely fine if you do too.)

Wong May’s ‘Buying Camels in Dresden’ (2013) is not quite Gallery Wall in size, but it’s more cumbersome, slower, less wieldy than some of her shorter works. I love, in particular, the way it starts:

Like all great rivers
The Elbe is familiar at first sight.
The barges
             spic & span as the front parlors
Of model homes in Saxony —
The steam paddle-wheelers & other
                                               vessels,
No less impeccable — all run
With a near soporific efficiency.
You lean out
                   & the land starts up:

This portion near the end of Emmy Peréz’s ‘The River on Our Face’ (2016) is another DiCaprio moment:

I want to hear parrots
                 sabal palms
                 try again
With the river on our face
                 I want no medicine
                 no ambition
                 with the river in my face
I used to love you
                 with the river in my face
I still love you
                 when the river's on my face
I made a foot-deep grave
                 with the river on my face
I loved other rivers
                 with el río grande~bravo on my face

I remember reading it for the first time, lapping up ‘I want no medicine / no ambition’, ‘I used to love you’, ‘I still love you’, ‘I made a foot-deep grave’ like some form of literary agua bendita. After all, maybe the gallery walls are just there to remind us to every so often be brave enough to dive deep into the prehistoric ocean in search of a hidden pearl.

Join me in a week’s time for an investigation into impossibility. In the meantime, if you haven’t liked this post (or even if you have), you may contact me at everyotherbee@gmail.com.