Less is more or less (part two)

(If you've missed it, here's Part One)

One-line haiku

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Since the 1960s, some poets in the English-language haiku community have experimented with so-called "one-line haiku". The first such one-liner to receive serious recognition was Michael Segers's piece that appeared in Haiku Magazine in 1971:

in the eggshell after the chick has hatched

The general rules of thumb to describe a one-line poem are:

• A one-line poem that does not exceed one line of type on a page and is intended to be read as an unbroken line without reference to any other line that surrounds it.


• A one-line poem does not include forced pauses, indicated by space, grammar, syntax, or punctuation.

Predictably the earliest one-liners date back well before this time.

A few examples:

HEROES

Bridges of bones they have built over the centuries. (Florentin Smarandache)


My shoes have an unfaithful sole (Daniel Eatock)


PHOTOGRAPHY

A child on the beach may be important. (Joe Brainard)

To my mind that last poem so reads like a poor man's 'Red Wheelbarrow'.

This is an interesting article on the subject: From One-line Poems to One-line Haiku.

The thing of course about haiku in its original form is that there are no lines breaks and it is a Western approach to the problem of translating them that decided to treat each syllabic unit as a distinct line. Here are three rather tragic examples by Ozaki Hōsai (1885-1926):

I've become completely alone and the evening sky

In a kindling fire I can see all my furniture

All day I haven't said a word, a butterfly casts its shadow

One-word poems

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In another essay by Bob Grumman, Mnmlst Poetry: Unacclaimed but Flourishing, Grumman suggests that one-word poetry probably dates back to the 1920s with the experimental poems of the Dadaists but didn't find its feet until the late sixties and early seventies with the work of Aram Saroyan and Richard Kostelanetz.

The first poem Grumman cites in his essay is 'Light', one of the one-word visual poems of Richard Kostelanetz's sequence, Genesis. In which each of his poems represents one of the seven days of Creation in a different, page-filling typography.



This is what he has to say about this poem:

"LIGHT," the first, is printed in pedestrian stencilled lettering – but dazzles because (1) it arrives on a black page immediately after a white page; (2) its letters are boldly solid rather than diffidently outlined like the smaller letters of the sequence's title on the previous page; and (3) its letters are fused, which makes them seem not a recognizable word, but light itself – until they clarify as an appropriately fully-unified, over-flowing proto-word for . . . Everything.

To be fair, the poem has the two elements I mentioned earlier – ignoring, for the moment, the peculiar graphics – in that the title of the collection grounds the work but the poem depends heavily on its special presentation. My question is how does this differ from the visual art of someone like Yves Klein? The picture at the top of this article is one of his. I'm not saying that it matters but is this poetry or art?

A true example of a one-word poem is John Byrum's 'Utter':

UTTER

Again I'll leave it up to Grumman to make a case for this piece:

To state its title is to describe it completely, for it comprises just the single, normal word, "utter," in capital letters on an otherwise blank page. I have much sympathy for anyone whose response to this is consternation. What in the world is the point of it?

Well, when I first saw it, I was much helped by my previous experience with works like Kostelanetz's Genesis. I automatically thought of the opening of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word." "UTTER" thus seemed to me a command to express oneself, be an artist, climb into the grand creative power of utterance: UTTER! Such a command was particularly appropriate in the magazine where I first encountered it, a newsletter for a poets' association.

Then the idea of what "utter" means as an adjective occurred to me--and expanded into thoughts of how utterance relates to absoluteness, and how it is exclusively the act of uttering that can truly complete any part of reality, by naming it into full comprehensibility. The power of utter, the utter power of it!

Also in the poem for those who listen to it long enough are the pun, "udder," and auditory hints of "upper" and "under." For so short a work, the poem is thus extremely sensually and connotatively rich.

Now, I've got to give the guy credit. He's worked hard to make something out of nothing, well nothing much, and he's done a decent enough job but I think any one of us could take a word on a blank page, or even part of a word, and write down our deductions. Here's one I just thought of:

unfini

Knock yourselves out.

There are poems that pretend to be one-word poem like this example of 'fusional poetry', as Grumman calls it, by George Swede:

graveyarduskilldeer

Here we have three words jammed together: "graveyard", "dusk" and "kill" with "deer" tagged on at the end. Once again I turn to Grumman for his thoughts:

Here three words are spelled together not only to produce the richly resonant "double-haiku," graveyard / dusk / killdeer // graveyard / us / killdeer, but strikingly to suggest the enclosure (like letters by a word) of two or more people (a couple--or, perhaps, all of us) by an evening – or some greater darkening.

Probably the most infamous example of this style of poetry is by Aram Saroyan:

lighght

"Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end," said Saroyan, "A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant." My first thought about a poem like this (I will not debate whether it is a poem or not) is, "Am I supposed to take this seriously?" and then it struck me that maybe my problem is that I'm looking for profundity where there is none. Ron Sillman said of it that it "just sits there on the page doing not much of anything" and I tend to agree with him. The best I can make of it is that it is mimicking the kind of optical effect you get when looking straight at a light source. Light can illuminate. It can also blind. Nathan Austin provides a counter-argument in his blog This Cruellest Month.


Pwoermds

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The term 'pwoermd' was coined by Geof Huth who defined it as:

PWOERMD: any one-word poem, such as Aram Saroyan’s famous 'lighght' or Jonathan Brannen's 'pigeoneon' {This word is a veritable pwoermd itself, since the "pw" at its beginning mirrors the "md" at the end, leaving the pseudo-archai-poetic "oer" in the middle of the word.}

poem + word (w/ the letters from each word alternated to produce the neologism)

Other examples of this would be:

eadacheadacheadach (Glenn Ingersoll)


th’air (Greg Wolos)


em ty (BP Nichol)

This is what Ron Sillman has to say about Geoff Huth:

Huth, if you read his work or his website, is the most serious theorist of visual poetry I’ve ever seen. He is, in a sense, exactly what the genre needs, a systematic thinker and a goad, someone who will – by example if nothing else – prod others to try harder, do better.

I have spent some time on Huth's site which I found quite a long time ago and Sillman is right, Huth is very serious about what he does but does the word "wobbly" suddenly become profound if we get James Earl Jones to intone it? I'm not sure that poems like 'em ty' are any more than a visual pun and John Brannen’s 'laugnage' simply emphasises what the psychologists have been telling us for years, that our brains can uncsrmable qutie cmopilctaed blcoks of ltetres as lnog as the frist and the last ltetres are crroect.

As an exercise for myself I've been taking part in The Unskilled Poet's daily challenge. Some of the results have been interesting in particular the fact that I wrote my first – and probably last – one-word poem, two if you count the title (I'm old-fashioned that way). It seems like as good a place to leave this. I left some notes on the site when I posted the entry if you're interested.

EMPTY


un
(fu
ll)

fi
ll
ed


31-01-08

One-letter poems

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In 1973 Joyce Holland edited a collection of 104 one-letter poems called Alphabet Anthology. That must have been hard work. (Sorry, that was bitchy). In the index she listed the totals of the individual letters chosen by contributors as their poems. The most popular was 'O'. No one submitted 'C'.


No-letter poems (The Emperor's New Clothes)

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It had to happen. Blank space is what Hugh Kenner liked to call the 27th letter of the alphabet and its use in poetry is something I may come back to in the future. Rothko and Malevich did all black and all white paintings, Cage wrote music without any notes and in 1978 Richard Kostelanetz "wrote" not one but two books consisting of nothing but blank pages, but they have covers with titles: Tabula Rasa: A Constructivist Novel and Inexistences: Constructivist Fictions. Not actually sure if there's any poetry in the second one but Vsevolod Nekrasov has since published a poem with only a comma in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

An immediate question is: "Is this a poem?" More basically: "Is it even a text?" If you found such a piece of paper on the floor or the street, you would not consider it so. It's doubtful you would even notice the comma on the page. In his interesting post What One Note Holds: The Short Poem Mark Granier cites a couple of poems, one by Don Paterson, 'On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him', and James Wright's 'In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems' where the title is all there is to the poem; not even a comma of content other than that. (That article is worth having a look at if only for Granier's own poem 'Haikush').

I think this is an important point. If we can go back to Dave's post about Duchamp's urinal in my answer I mentioned context:

Irrespective of Duchamp's motives I think Fountain did something very important, it made people re-evaluate what exactly art is. It brought into question context. When something is displayed, placed on the proverbial pedestal, it requires re-evaluation. The latrine was not being used for the purpose for which it was designed nor was it in situ in a Gents and by giving it a name Duchamp was providing a means to consider that lump of porcelain as art.

If I found a scrap of paper with 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' torn in half I would still recognise it as a poem, it wouldn’t matter how it was torn. It's not only a poem when included in a collection of poetry or in a poetry magazine.


Where now?

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What will the universe do once it has imploded? The only thing left is for it to begin expanding again. It will, of course, bring the baggage of the old universe with it. If there is one thing that proponents and practitioners of minimalist poetry have taught us would be to learn to fully appreciate the word, every word.

Imagine if when you were born you were allocated a lifetime's worth of words there and then, and then one day you realise you're starting to run out and you might not make it to the end with your vocabulary intact. That's the thing about words, we never have to worry about running out and yet, just like we do, our words can get tired, especially the ones we use over and over again; they empty themselves of meanings right in front of us. Old age does that too: we can't find the right word for the job; we end up like Beckett's narrator in his deathbed poem asking over and over again, "What is the word?"

I sat down a while ago and tried to write a definition that would cover all types of poetry. Of course I was on a hiding to nothing attempting that but in preparing this entry I ran across something Robert Bly said, that he felt every effective poem should have an "ah" factor. I guess if a minimalist poem has that effect on you then it's done its job. The problem is some of them make us go "eh?" or just leave us speechless.

SILENCE

FIN