Lately, I seem to have been writing either very long poems or very short ones. No middle ground. In the draft of my second collection there is one long sequence made up of 50 poems, buttressed by two 40+ liners. It took more than four months to write and at least another month to edit and I think it’s finished now. Maybe. But those short ones keep snagging at me, sitting outside my door like the dog, pining to be taken for a walk.
The clarity of a short poem, a striving for something the captures the truth of a moment, doesn’t mean there’s a lack of complexity within it. But it can feel as if there is judgement around the shortness of short forms.
Marjorie Lotfi shared feeling mortified after telling an eminent Scottish poet that her students enjoyed his work because it was ‘simple’ (she apologised, he said not to, he was delighted). Judgement abounds around aphoristic insta poets (recalling Julian Stannard’s ‘Tutorial’ poem in The Dark Horse about ‘a rather large girl’ and her love of internet poems); around anyone these days who commits the sin of becoming Mary Oliver; about not being ‘clever’; about accessibility and all the cheapening that implies.
Nobody needs me to tell them that simplicity does not mean simple. Think of:
the bonsai
Louise Bourgeois’s Spider
Joan Didion
the sea.
“If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?
Thomas Berry: ‘The world is leaving its lyric phase.’
How do we find, as Heaney said ‘images and symbols adequate to our predicament’?”
– Kathleen Jamie ‘Summer’ Cairn (2024)
But what of the lyric address, the self-centred, individualistic ‘I’ that so often squats at the heart of the short poem? Its freighted carpet bag of politics (small p, big deal)? My ‘I’ is not the I of a Scottish laird. My symbols are not your symbols.
I do believe in the shared experience the lyric tries to express. Not as an I but as a we. Not as something that is always and forever tied to a real world identity, but as something that’s tied to our kin. Our kinliness, our kind. Our kinship.
Simplicity on the page allows an escape from the complications of daily life, parenting, juggling work, worrying about the future.
Politics again.
It gives me the illusion of calm (even as I recognise it as illusion), a place to lay my troubled thoughts for a moment. An antidote to the spiralling chaos outside, the fakery, the dead cat diversionary tactics of public life.
Simplicity can be a quiet resistance that stills the mind, gathers the fortitude needed to move through these distressing times.
A moment of noticing (Pádraig Ó Tuama) while we work out what it is we can do.
Out now
Broken Sleep Books Anthology 2024
Coming up
15th March ST. ANDREWS StAnza Poetry Festival DIRT poetry walk 3.30pm, reading of ‘Chapel’ with Alice Willitts and a new DIRT collaboration with Alycia Pirmohammed & Hannah Copley.
16th March ST. ANDREWS Stanza Poetry Festival Poetry As Protest. 4.30pm.
So needed to read that right now. Thank you.