Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: Last fall Assistant Editor Maggie Su wrote the blog post “Debunking miCRo Myths” to share our take on flash fiction. We publish poetry in our miCRo series too—thirty-two lines or less. Poems that length aren’t exactly uncommon, but we don’t receive as many poetry submissions as we do for prose in that series. What makes a great short poem, and why are they so challenging?
As a partial answer, I turn to Lucille Clifton, who when asked about her writing prolificacy during motherhood responded, “Why do you think my poems are so short?” (Of course, men are rarely asked such questions—but that’s a matter for when I have more space.) Like Maggie, I think shortness has an intimate relation to temporality, and Clifton’s response suggests that short poems are less concerned with occupying eternity than with the way the motions of daily living quite literally shape them. In this way, short poems are deeply concerned with time, embedded in it, as they mark it with their brief becomings. And Clifton’s poems are no less complex for their brevity.
Maggie writes that microfiction’s difficulty, and its success, resides in how the form both adheres to and resists rules. I like to think about poems as adhering to and resisting expectation. There are patterns and there is the breaking of patterns. For example, consider a sonnet. Once you recognize those fourteen lines, you might look for iambic pentameter, a particular placement of a turn if it’s Shakespearian or Petrarchan, maybe even a beloved to whom it’s addressed. Readers notice when these expectations are thwarted, and these disruptions are sites of meaning-making. But free-verse poems have to teach a reader their patterns before they can subvert them—a lot to ask in a short space. It’s worth noting that some poems try too hard to break expectation. A sudden twist in the final line can work (and who among us haven’t wasted our lives?) but can easily come across as gimmicky if the intent is merely to pull one over on your audience.
Expectation comes in many different forms too. There’s narrative expectation, metric expectation, expectation for the completion of metaphor and image. A poem can implant patterns into its reader’s brain, or play on ones that already reside there. I think, also, of the ways these patterns are sometimes based in hegemonic structures—whiteness or heteronormativity, their forms and syntax. Sometimes the body from which a poem comes is part of the pattern’s breaking.
Short poems can do all this, and more. The poems we’ve published in our miCRo series demonstrate the short form’s possibilities.
Prince Bush’s “The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel” uses punctuation to simultaneously ground its readers in invented form while complicating what is being said. Punctuation can open new ways of reading the poem, new commentary, without relying on additional word count. The semicolon, which suggests listing, a looking backward and forward, restricts Bush’s propulsive soundwork, so that the closing line screeches to a close. The effect is achieved as much through skillful control of syntax and punctuation as the words themselves. Bush’s poem also demonstrates how much titles can accomplish for short works. Here, the title poses a question, which in turn frames the poem’s couplets as a self-contained response.
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s “From an Agnostic” also experiments with punctuation, this time the parenthetical, as it looks at the ways Santería is misrepresented in media. Sometimes, the best way to undermine readerly expectation is to provide no relief from strict form. Lopez’s relentless anaphora offers no variation, and thus no release, insisting the reader return and return again to the poem’s imperative.
In a short poem, every line break is an opportunity for torque and turn. Erin Slaughter’s “No Horses” takes full advantage of what the line break offers as both long and short sentences build momentum through enjambment. The effect is one of accumulation as images crystallize and alternatives present themselves down the page. Despite its length, this poem leaves no sound or line unturned in its excavation of girlhood.
Another short-poem master, Emily Dickinson would likely (and rightly) disagree that short poems aren’t concerned with eternity. Of course, she wasn’t talking about short poems when she wrote “‘tis Centuries – and yet / Feels shorter than the Day.” Or was she?
So send us your kitchen-table moments, your small experiments, your briefest and best. You can read our guidelines and submit to miCRo here.
