VerseDay: minimalism
After last week’s fun little exchange over poetry-related topics my fellow scrogues and I agreed to make Thursdays Poetry Day here at S&R. Let me kick things off.
Since we’ve also been chatting behind the scenes about the relative wordiness of things we’ve seen and written, I’d like to make today’s subject minimalism: let’s talk about poems that don’t use many words (a tough subject for me, because I love using too many words).
Here’s one I wrote not long back, working against all my instincts:
—-
The Wisdom of Rat
Seeker Rat climb
Trash Mountain.
Say to
Guru Rat:
my line o’ work,
got to know the man
I’m dealin’.
How I gonna know the man?
Guru Rat stare out over
Trash City.
Say to
Seeker Rat:
all there is to know
about the man
is what he throw out.
—-
Your turn.
lullaby pit 
I write fiction, not poetry, so I’ll quote a favorite by a proto-minimalist:
A Man Said to the Universe
A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
— Stephen Crane
You know, Jim, sometimes I think I have you pegged and others not so much. I was sitting here trying to guess where the return was coming from, and I would have bet money on this uncharacteristically brief bit from Whitman, which I believe I may have first encountered in one of your classes?
VerseDay: The afterglow of HumpDay. Great idea.
I won’t try to compete with Whitman, but this one I scribbled a few months ago for my cubicle cage.
Not-So-Idle Thoughs
Regardless of where your body lies,
Your mind goes where it wants.
My body is stuck here at work,
But my mind is out to lunch.
http://anonymous.trout.googlepages.com/poetry
Wonderful – that feeling happens to me at least once or twice a day….
I was going minimalist, Sam, and when I think minimalist, Whitman isn’t always the first one who comes to mind. I actually thought of this one first:
The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
And this by Whitman:
The Untold Want
by Walt Whitman
The untold want, by life and land ne
Once wed.
Now dead.
No dread.
Not fed.
One of mine:
It has come again
Unwanted, unlooked for, unprepared
Am I for the
Shock, surprise, startled
To find these feelings
Reawakened, returning, renewed
With the full moon.
When did you become a poet? I like this.
I’m not a poet, I just fake it pretty good sometimes. That one is from back in college sometime – I wrote “Dec 4” on it, but I forgot to write down the year.
I went through a phase in college when I wrote poetry all the time. Most of it’s pretty long and most of it was to keep me sane as I was dealing with women, college, women, working at the dining hall, and more women. I figured that if I poured my feelings out into the paper, I could make more sense of them or, barring that, at least box them up long enough to be able to do the other stuff my degree required.
If it weren’t for women very little poetry would ever have been written. 🙂