In 2001, I began writing five-line poems—loosely based on the tanka form—and sending them around by email to a few friends, some of whom sent back their own “five-liners,” as I had begun to call them. I didn’t count syllables for each line, as in tanka; instead, I let the lines fall along natural syntactical units. By the mid-2000s, I had written more than 700. In 2015, Steve Miller at the University of Alabama’s Book Arts program brought out a limited edition letterpress book, Until That Yellow Bird Returns, which gathered together 100 of these “small” poems.
The first one I wrote, looking back now, seems like a manifesto:
I love best
the smallest poems.
They say “I want”
but know
they have to settle.
I have always enjoyed small poems that contain a largeness, an implication so rich that I continue thinking and wondering about the poem afterwards. Could a poem exist solely in its possibilities? Shouldn’t it pose and then answer? Shouldn’t it state and then develop? In fact, most of the poems I write, I would say, develop an initial premise by proceeding through considerations of time, action, gesture, contemplation, connections, questions, and the like. I value such ways of thinking, but just as often I like poems that “want” but “know/they have to settle.” Such a poem seems sometimes to mirror more closely the experience of being human, if not the experience of being an author.
Below is a sampling of the five-liners that appear in Until That Yellow Bird Returns:
This morning
a leaf fell so slowly
I rifled through
several decisions,
making none of them.
~
I wish the glassblower
knew me
and would spend the day
revealing all the fragile shapes
breath can be.
~
Some days I’m out
walking a gravel road,
just one more Luther
lost on his way
to find the church door.
~
Given a choice
between emptiness
and fullness,
I choose the hand
of the one asking.
~
Some nights
Calvin steals into my heart
only to find Whitman already there,
praying over a dead man
no one will ever see again.
~
Who should mind
all this stammering we do
when its source
is fascination
and the fact we vanish?
~
Sure, holding a skull
Hamlet moves us,
but give him
a cucumber
and see what he says.
~
In some country store
half a century passes in idle talk,
just one more
undocumented Renaissance
known only by the locals.
~
In the empty chapel,
I whisper, “Holy, holy…”
and then
for no good reason
I dance a swift jig.
~
Big-Subject Death,
you are not so big.
Swallow me some day,
you’ll still not be satisfied.
Even small-I was satisfied.