Bite-Sized Poems That Pack a Punch

Published on the Loft Literary Center’s Writers’ Block blog, Sept. 12, 2016

Short poems are ideal for the 21st century, where readers’ attention spans are ever diminishing and many choose to digest their news in 140 characters or fewer. It’s common advice, in both copywriting seminars and creative writing classes, to write like every word costs you something. With short poems, one must imagine he/she is not a Kardashian, but rather someone on a street corner begging for spare change, hoping to get enough coins for the bus. (Or to use a less extreme analogy, those of us still paying off our grad school loans who must live thriftily).

In my upcoming Loft workshop “In Brief: Writing the Short Poem,” we will be reading and experimenting with verse in its smallest increments. Though some writers long to join the ranks of Homer and Whitman and pen epic poems, I have always been drawn to the more modest offerings of poets like Emily Dickinson and former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not all short poems are light in terms of tone or substance. Consider Ryan’s poem “Album”:

Death has a life
of  its own. See
how its album
has grown in
a year and how
the sharp blot of it
has softened
till those could
almost be shadows
behind the
cherry blossoms
in this shot.
In fact you
couldn’t prove
they’re not.

It’s an unassuming little poem at first glance – and yet Ryan is tackling one of the great poetic obsessions: death. The paradox of the first two lines—“Death has a life/ of its own”—stops me in my tracks. Ryan’s choice to personify Death is not that unique, but her depiction of Death as a scrapbooker of sorts, collecting deaths in an album, is striking. The following lines, about how much the album “has grown in/ a year” resonate especially with me at the moment, given how many major artistic figures we’ve lost in 2016. Death’s album has gotten some colorful additions lately indeed.

Confession: I am not entirely sure I have solved the riddle of this poem. Are there “shadows/ behind the/ cherry blossoms” and what do those shadows represent? The turn in the last three lines, when suddenly Ryan addresses us (“you”) adds to this sense of uncertainty—we are now woven into the fabric of the poem, but left in a kind of limbo, unable to “prove” anything about shadows that may or may not be there. Those shadows could be a trick of the eye, or obscured by memory—after death, we can only rely on memories and photographs to reconstruct the past. Ryan has, in 15 lines and 45 words, subtly revealed the limits of our faculties. We rewrite the past as things fade out of focus—is this good or bad? Ryan leaves that for us to decide, ending the poem with that almost maddening point, that we are somewhat powerless to know for certain how death and time have altered our sense of reality.

“Album” is a dizzying, exhilarating poem—it’s a poem that demands to be read again and again because of its Sphinx-like quality. It also bears all the earmarks of Ryan’s best work—a brilliant economy of language, very short 2-5 syllable lines,  and a dense soundscape. The rhyming of hard monosyllables “blot”, “shot”, and “not” add little jolts, giving the poem a clipped rhythm which is both jarring and illustrative of death’s finality. It’s an unsentimental rumination on Death—but the poem doesn’t leave me feeling cold or afraid.  And its concision and restraint—all the things Ryan leaves unsaid—are what I admire most about this and many other short poems. They may appear unassuming, but they can contain multitudes.