At the risk of being too literal, the poem that comes to mind this morning as I sit with your inquiry is one I read for the first time a couple of months ago. Hala Alyan’s “Revision.” In it, she includes brackets, ones which are not filled with words. There is space. They are absent. And yet...
When I read the poem the first time, part of me wondered what words, if any, Alyan imagined in those brackets as she wrote the poem. With subsequent readings, I experienced the empty brackets more as an invitation into deeper layers of my consciousness, into my imagination.
I experience her use of the word “redacted” as a kind of presence of emptiness, absent presence, in the poem itself. Some of the questions, the question marks marks too. ("Why aren't you leaving?" "Why aren't you resisting?" "How deep in the earth can you burrow with your four hearts?"). And I experienced a deep space, an invitation to go inside myself with the lines:
We bear what we bear until we can’t anymore.
We invent what we can’t stand grieving.
(What happens when I can't bear it anymore? What do I invent? A son? What do we collectively invent when we can't bear it anymore?)... So although her poem doesn't include too much "white space" between lines, I found lots of space within those brackets, the question marks, and within some of the words themselves.
I typed it out below, but every time I try to either copy-paste or directly type it in, the formatting seems to be more spaced out (like 1.5 line space) than it is in the original. And since it's a poem, and this inquiry was about space, it seems important to point this out! If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd love to know. Ty!
-
Revision
"I heard you in the other room asking our mother, 'Mama, am I Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence."
- Ghassan Kanafani, in a letter to his son Fayez
I don't mean to hate the sparrows.
I don't mean to close my eyes and see fire, a flood of concrete,
leaflets the size of grotesque snow.
I don't mean to rehearse evacuation that isn't mine:
from the grocery store to the house, from the house to the river,
from the river to the airport. Here are the rules.
There is a road and it's gone now.
There is a sea and you can't drink its water.
How far can you carry a toddler? A middle-aged dog?
How far can you go in sixty-five seconds? Eleven?
If you have a favorite flower, now's the time to redact it.
If you have a mother, now's the time to move her to the basement.
If you don't have a basement?
I don't mean to profit from this poem but I do.
I don't mean to say I but I do. Here are the rules.
The rules are redacted.
[ ] is [ ].
[ ] is a red herring.
[ ] is a billboard with 583 names.
Here are the rules.
I had a grandmother once.
She had a memory once.
It spoiled like milk.
On the phone, she'd ask me about my son, if he was fussy,
If he was eating solids yet.
She'd ask if he was living up to his name.
I said yes. I always said yes. I asked for his name and it was [ ].
I dreamt of her saying:
[ ]
[ ]
[ ].
How deep in the earth can you burrow with your four hearts? Here are the rules:
There is no bomb shelter. There is no ship.
You can leave. Why aren't you leaving?
You can resist. Why aren't you resisting?
On the phone, my grandmother would call me her heart.
Her soul. Her two God-given eyes.
She'd ask if I wanted to visit Palestine again.
I never brought her back any soil, but she liked one story,
so I'd tell it again, about the man I met at the
bus station, a stranger until he spoke Arabic,
calling me sister and daughter and sister and I told her how
he skipped work and drove me past the
gardens to the highest point and we waved to Beirut.
I waved to her, and later she said she was waving back.
Never mind her balcony faced the wrong direction.
Never mind the sea is a terrible blue.
Never mind there never was a son. Here are the rules:
If you say Gaza you must say [ ].
If you say [ ] you must say [ ].
Here are the rules.
If there is a microphone do not sing into it.
If there is a camera do not look it in the eye.
Here are the rules.
You can't redact a name once it's been spoken.
If you say [ ] you must say [ ].
If you say Gaza you must say Gaza.
If you look, you must look until there is no looking left to do.
Here are the rules. Here's my mother-given name, here's my small life.
It is no more than any other. Here's my grandmother, dead for five years.
She's speaking again. She calls when I'm not expecting.
Keef ibnik, she says. Where is he now? Let me say hello.
What could I say back? He's good, I tell her.
I pretend to call a child from the other room.
I pretend to hear the sea from here. I wave back. Here are the rules:
Reading through poetry is like swimming underwater and holding one’s breath. Then poems somehow give us gills and we manage to go farther and for longer. When you, Padraig, come up to share with us through Poetry Unbound, we marvel at the deep sea find. You disappear again on your journey beneath the surface, and we are moved to follow, find, and share. I’ll be sharing later, but for now, I must go beneath the waves...
I just bought your book POETRY UNBOUND and am thrilled with it. Your new book sounds wonderful, too. The space you write about - the freedom the poet gives the reader/listener to think for themselves instead of giving us everything at once is such a delightfful concept I never thought before. And I was an English major!
I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY again last night and have been thinking about growing up in the 1950's (I'm 76), and how proscribed our world was then, at least in America. Thinking outside "the norm"(whatever that is) is how a poem works, and I am grateful to you and all our poets/seekers/guides.
The haiku form has mystified and entranced me since I engaged with it 5 years ago. The beauty of a poem that is incomplete until a reader engages is a romance I’ve encountered with other poems but never so consistently as I have with haiku. This one above by Basho is from his encounter with an abandoned child on a river bank. It is simultaneously sad and grotesque, but gives space to ruminate and find a bizarre truth. I will write haiku probably for the rest of my life to open a door and invite others in.
As a child in Catholic school our class had to write a poem for our English assignment.
Mine was about our dog, I still remember it to this day. It takes me to a smile, a moment in my dysfunctional family where I felt important because I could recite it and have others smile too. (I’m 70ish)
So thank you for reminding me again that poetry can take us to happy places and even joy.
I will probably be thinking of that poem often, even though it’s been years since I have thought about it. Thanks for the question Padraig.
A cake. There lies space and in the space you have made, so many details I make.
I have just finished reading the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2023 (Australia) and the winning poem, The Crossing by Kevin Smith uses space that is deeply moving. I couldn't find a copy of the poem online to share however the judges, John Foulcher and Judith Nangala Crispin, write, The winning poem, Kevin Smith’s ‘The Crossing’ shows a sure command of language and form. In lines spread out across the page like the random rocking of the sea, the poem describes an ocean crossing undertaken by the narrator, his ailing partner, a young girl at the beginning of her life and an old man facing mortality. The crossing in question, then, becomes metaphorical, but the poem never overstates its premise; it is deeply moving due to its gentle restraint, the power of its imagery and the plain but elegant language it employs. The poignancy of its final lines remain with us both."
The bird soars, and the weather soars—
a coming storm against it. How reverent my beloved,
the wind raging in her face, when the kite finds at last
the dying light—the ferry pushing
hard into what waits.
(Note: This is one stanza of six; and the poems format has not been kept. The first, fourth and fifth line are spaced across the page.) The poem moved me deeply, its space in the layout, the words, the imagery, the story makes it a poem of spacious love and mourning.
I was reading Billy Collins' poem 'Imperial Garden' early this week where he offers us a taste of the silence that brews between a couple having a tiff in a restaurant. He brings light and air into the smouldering silence in his telling. I could hear it exactly.
And early this morning, wishing to calm myself before I was to lead an early online Sunday service, I picked up your book Readings from the Book of Exile and rested by the fire, reading
"The light looked in the
sunstained windows,
carved by careful hands
with crafted instruments,
like a locked out lover
lamenting his lost key."
And I sat with just that precious little verse for some long breath of space, and was calmed in the silent morning. Thank you.
You asked: "Is there a poem that uses space in a way you trust, in a way you can engage with, or imagine yourself into? What is it, and why does it work for you?”
Songs are not always poems, but I think this song is a poem. The line that always calls out to me is this: " I am a lonely painter. I live in a box of paints.” Many of her songs are poems and this is not even her best one, but this line takes me to the heart of what a poem is — it’s like seeing through someone else’s eyes or feeling with someone else’s heart or living in their world through their words and images. And because it’s a song, you hear the words sung…my original relationship with poetry — the rise and fall of the words. Do you even know what the words mean? Does it matter? You hear the lilt, the rise and fall. Maybe I’m also still relating to the question from last week: Where are you?
The poet/songwriter tells you where she is, where she lives and she makes you feel it. She also, of course, paints the rest of the poem/song with her words.
I think poems are invitations to go for a ride, to look at something familiar in an unfamiliar way, to be confused or satisfied , or bewildered because you’ve brought the wrong coat and it snowed
I cannot let this moment pass without saying a GREAT BIG THANK YOU to you, Amy Chatelaine! I appreciate all that you've done to bring Poetry Unbound and the OnBeing Project to life these past few years. As someone who works behind the scenes on large, multilayered, public-facing projects, I can imagine how much love, sweat, and maybe a few tears that you've shed working to co-create these uplifting spaces.
It was great pleasure to meet you in person during my first Poetry Unbound program at Omega - from this encounter, I can tell that you are a deeply caring, insightful and kind soul. I'm sure that you will bring all of these gifts and more to your next project - I wish you all the best!
Your wonderful comments about what is a poem make me think of the profound balance between creating the tighest possible container of words in order to create the most vast amount of space or absence. The awareness that a good poem doesn't seek to control, but guide.
How I love that!
Which brings to mind at this moment Walmart by Donald Hall. The smart light humor in this poem makes it all the more profound.
I am thinking about my own relationship with absence- and empty spaces. How often do I want to fill up quietude with what I think is wise (or cute!)! How quickly do a flurry of fingers and a pile of text messages (or words) fill up an otherwise peaceful morning?
Does silence and space have it's inherent nature, or does my relationship with the context (myself) determine how I am perceiving the space? In one of my favorite poems, "Self Portrait", David Whyte ends by saying " In that firm embrace, even the Gods speak of God". It is followed by thunderous silence. No more words are needed (and perhaps if they were added there would be some desecration!)
One of my first encounters with poetry on the page was reading the work of E.E. Cummings. I was likely drawn to the amount of open space on the pages of his book, 95 Poems, as well as the invitation to wonder and explore a variety of meanings within each sparse poem.
One of his poems that stays with me is titled un(bee)mo (you can find it here when you scroll to the second poem: https://cummingsarchive.org/?page_id=586 and it's available in the book, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems).
For me, this poem is all about turning loving attention to one of the small living beings. The narrator has taken the time to slow down, to look at a bee inside a flower and wonder. The parenthesis in this poem offers a space that I trust: they hold the bee as the rose petals might, they hold a space for wonder, and in so doing, I am held.
The length of this very short poem, as well as the question it asks, is very much like a zen koan. I've interpreted it in many ways in the past. Today it feels like a call to wake up from my slumber (taking too much for granted and sweating the small stuff) and see that I am held and supported by life in the same way that this small bee is held by the rose.
Side note: in researching the best link to share for this poem, I found out that Cummings wrote a whopping 240 drafts of un(bee)mo. I'm not an advocate for editing that much, but I do appreciate that meaning can be made of so few words placed on the page in a way that at first glance appears nonsensical.
At the risk of being too literal, the poem that comes to mind this morning as I sit with your inquiry is one I read for the first time a couple of months ago. Hala Alyan’s “Revision.” In it, she includes brackets, ones which are not filled with words. There is space. They are absent. And yet...
When I read the poem the first time, part of me wondered what words, if any, Alyan imagined in those brackets as she wrote the poem. With subsequent readings, I experienced the empty brackets more as an invitation into deeper layers of my consciousness, into my imagination.
I experience her use of the word “redacted” as a kind of presence of emptiness, absent presence, in the poem itself. Some of the questions, the question marks marks too. ("Why aren't you leaving?" "Why aren't you resisting?" "How deep in the earth can you burrow with your four hearts?"). And I experienced a deep space, an invitation to go inside myself with the lines:
We bear what we bear until we can’t anymore.
We invent what we can’t stand grieving.
(What happens when I can't bear it anymore? What do I invent? A son? What do we collectively invent when we can't bear it anymore?)... So although her poem doesn't include too much "white space" between lines, I found lots of space within those brackets, the question marks, and within some of the words themselves.
The poem: https://www.guernicamag.com/revision/
I typed it out below, but every time I try to either copy-paste or directly type it in, the formatting seems to be more spaced out (like 1.5 line space) than it is in the original. And since it's a poem, and this inquiry was about space, it seems important to point this out! If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd love to know. Ty!
-
Revision
"I heard you in the other room asking our mother, 'Mama, am I Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence."
- Ghassan Kanafani, in a letter to his son Fayez
I don't mean to hate the sparrows.
I don't mean to close my eyes and see fire, a flood of concrete,
leaflets the size of grotesque snow.
I don't mean to rehearse evacuation that isn't mine:
from the grocery store to the house, from the house to the river,
from the river to the airport. Here are the rules.
There is a road and it's gone now.
There is a sea and you can't drink its water.
How far can you carry a toddler? A middle-aged dog?
How far can you go in sixty-five seconds? Eleven?
If you have a favorite flower, now's the time to redact it.
If you have a mother, now's the time to move her to the basement.
If you don't have a basement?
I don't mean to profit from this poem but I do.
I don't mean to say I but I do. Here are the rules.
The rules are redacted.
[ ] is [ ].
[ ] is a red herring.
[ ] is a billboard with 583 names.
Here are the rules.
I had a grandmother once.
She had a memory once.
It spoiled like milk.
On the phone, she'd ask me about my son, if he was fussy,
If he was eating solids yet.
She'd ask if he was living up to his name.
I said yes. I always said yes. I asked for his name and it was [ ].
I dreamt of her saying:
[ ]
[ ]
[ ].
How deep in the earth can you burrow with your four hearts? Here are the rules:
There is no bomb shelter. There is no ship.
You can leave. Why aren't you leaving?
You can resist. Why aren't you resisting?
On the phone, my grandmother would call me her heart.
Her soul. Her two God-given eyes.
She'd ask if I wanted to visit Palestine again.
I never brought her back any soil, but she liked one story,
so I'd tell it again, about the man I met at the
bus station, a stranger until he spoke Arabic,
calling me sister and daughter and sister and I told her how
he skipped work and drove me past the
gardens to the highest point and we waved to Beirut.
I waved to her, and later she said she was waving back.
Never mind her balcony faced the wrong direction.
Never mind the sea is a terrible blue.
Never mind there never was a son. Here are the rules:
If you say Gaza you must say [ ].
If you say [ ] you must say [ ].
Here are the rules.
If there is a microphone do not sing into it.
If there is a camera do not look it in the eye.
Here are the rules.
You can't redact a name once it's been spoken.
If you say [ ] you must say [ ].
If you say Gaza you must say Gaza.
If you look, you must look until there is no looking left to do.
Here are the rules. Here's my mother-given name, here's my small life.
It is no more than any other. Here's my grandmother, dead for five years.
She's speaking again. She calls when I'm not expecting.
Keef ibnik, she says. Where is he now? Let me say hello.
What could I say back? He's good, I tell her.
I pretend to call a child from the other room.
I pretend to hear the sea from here. I wave back. Here are the rules:
We bear what we bear until we can't anymore.
We invent what we can't stand grieving.
The sun sets on Gaza. The sun rises on Gaza.
On your [ ].
On your blue pencils.
On your God-given eyes.
He's good, I tell her. He's good.
He's crawling. Mashallah, mashallah.
Together we praise the sea and the son.
Together, we praise how much he's grown.
Always always Hafiz, "Someone Untied your Camel: https://jackysunchaser.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/someone-untied-your-camel-by-hafiz/ - the words, the images conjured - the gentle voice and soft landing
Reading through poetry is like swimming underwater and holding one’s breath. Then poems somehow give us gills and we manage to go farther and for longer. When you, Padraig, come up to share with us through Poetry Unbound, we marvel at the deep sea find. You disappear again on your journey beneath the surface, and we are moved to follow, find, and share. I’ll be sharing later, but for now, I must go beneath the waves...
I just bought your book POETRY UNBOUND and am thrilled with it. Your new book sounds wonderful, too. The space you write about - the freedom the poet gives the reader/listener to think for themselves instead of giving us everything at once is such a delightfful concept I never thought before. And I was an English major!
I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY again last night and have been thinking about growing up in the 1950's (I'm 76), and how proscribed our world was then, at least in America. Thinking outside "the norm"(whatever that is) is how a poem works, and I am grateful to you and all our poets/seekers/guides.
The ancient poet
Who pitied monkeys for their cries,
What would he say, if he saw
This child crying in the autumn wind?
-Basho
The haiku form has mystified and entranced me since I engaged with it 5 years ago. The beauty of a poem that is incomplete until a reader engages is a romance I’ve encountered with other poems but never so consistently as I have with haiku. This one above by Basho is from his encounter with an abandoned child on a river bank. It is simultaneously sad and grotesque, but gives space to ruminate and find a bizarre truth. I will write haiku probably for the rest of my life to open a door and invite others in.
As a child in Catholic school our class had to write a poem for our English assignment.
Mine was about our dog, I still remember it to this day. It takes me to a smile, a moment in my dysfunctional family where I felt important because I could recite it and have others smile too. (I’m 70ish)
So thank you for reminding me again that poetry can take us to happy places and even joy.
I will probably be thinking of that poem often, even though it’s been years since I have thought about it. Thanks for the question Padraig.
A cake. There lies space and in the space you have made, so many details I make.
I have just finished reading the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2023 (Australia) and the winning poem, The Crossing by Kevin Smith uses space that is deeply moving. I couldn't find a copy of the poem online to share however the judges, John Foulcher and Judith Nangala Crispin, write, The winning poem, Kevin Smith’s ‘The Crossing’ shows a sure command of language and form. In lines spread out across the page like the random rocking of the sea, the poem describes an ocean crossing undertaken by the narrator, his ailing partner, a young girl at the beginning of her life and an old man facing mortality. The crossing in question, then, becomes metaphorical, but the poem never overstates its premise; it is deeply moving due to its gentle restraint, the power of its imagery and the plain but elegant language it employs. The poignancy of its final lines remain with us both."
The bird soars, and the weather soars—
a coming storm against it. How reverent my beloved,
the wind raging in her face, when the kite finds at last
the dying light—the ferry pushing
hard into what waits.
(Note: This is one stanza of six; and the poems format has not been kept. The first, fourth and fifth line are spaced across the page.) The poem moved me deeply, its space in the layout, the words, the imagery, the story makes it a poem of spacious love and mourning.
I was reading Billy Collins' poem 'Imperial Garden' early this week where he offers us a taste of the silence that brews between a couple having a tiff in a restaurant. He brings light and air into the smouldering silence in his telling. I could hear it exactly.
And early this morning, wishing to calm myself before I was to lead an early online Sunday service, I picked up your book Readings from the Book of Exile and rested by the fire, reading
"The light looked in the
sunstained windows,
carved by careful hands
with crafted instruments,
like a locked out lover
lamenting his lost key."
And I sat with just that precious little verse for some long breath of space, and was calmed in the silent morning. Thank you.
Thank you.
“I’m going out to clean the pasture spring
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
And wait to watch the water clear, I may
I shan’t be gone long. —You come, too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. —You come, too.”
Robert Frost
His brief but powerful phrasing, his spare, careful use of words, create spaciousness of thought, yet coziness of space. It’s entirely enticing.
You asked: "Is there a poem that uses space in a way you trust, in a way you can engage with, or imagine yourself into? What is it, and why does it work for you?”
For whatever reason, this question brought to mind a song by Joni Mitchell called A Case of You. https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=181
Songs are not always poems, but I think this song is a poem. The line that always calls out to me is this: " I am a lonely painter. I live in a box of paints.” Many of her songs are poems and this is not even her best one, but this line takes me to the heart of what a poem is — it’s like seeing through someone else’s eyes or feeling with someone else’s heart or living in their world through their words and images. And because it’s a song, you hear the words sung…my original relationship with poetry — the rise and fall of the words. Do you even know what the words mean? Does it matter? You hear the lilt, the rise and fall. Maybe I’m also still relating to the question from last week: Where are you?
The poet/songwriter tells you where she is, where she lives and she makes you feel it. She also, of course, paints the rest of the poem/song with her words.
I think poems are invitations to go for a ride, to look at something familiar in an unfamiliar way, to be confused or satisfied , or bewildered because you’ve brought the wrong coat and it snowed
“Dreaming Winter” ( James Welch) is that for me
Awareness...reawakening 🦋
“...the first job of the poet is to stop and look out the window.”
(Carrie Newcomer)
I cannot let this moment pass without saying a GREAT BIG THANK YOU to you, Amy Chatelaine! I appreciate all that you've done to bring Poetry Unbound and the OnBeing Project to life these past few years. As someone who works behind the scenes on large, multilayered, public-facing projects, I can imagine how much love, sweat, and maybe a few tears that you've shed working to co-create these uplifting spaces.
It was great pleasure to meet you in person during my first Poetry Unbound program at Omega - from this encounter, I can tell that you are a deeply caring, insightful and kind soul. I'm sure that you will bring all of these gifts and more to your next project - I wish you all the best!
In deep gratitude,
Lisa Hartjen
Your wonderful comments about what is a poem make me think of the profound balance between creating the tighest possible container of words in order to create the most vast amount of space or absence. The awareness that a good poem doesn't seek to control, but guide.
How I love that!
Which brings to mind at this moment Walmart by Donald Hall. The smart light humor in this poem makes it all the more profound.
I am thinking about my own relationship with absence- and empty spaces. How often do I want to fill up quietude with what I think is wise (or cute!)! How quickly do a flurry of fingers and a pile of text messages (or words) fill up an otherwise peaceful morning?
Does silence and space have it's inherent nature, or does my relationship with the context (myself) determine how I am perceiving the space? In one of my favorite poems, "Self Portrait", David Whyte ends by saying " In that firm embrace, even the Gods speak of God". It is followed by thunderous silence. No more words are needed (and perhaps if they were added there would be some desecration!)
One of my first encounters with poetry on the page was reading the work of E.E. Cummings. I was likely drawn to the amount of open space on the pages of his book, 95 Poems, as well as the invitation to wonder and explore a variety of meanings within each sparse poem.
One of his poems that stays with me is titled un(bee)mo (you can find it here when you scroll to the second poem: https://cummingsarchive.org/?page_id=586 and it's available in the book, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems).
For me, this poem is all about turning loving attention to one of the small living beings. The narrator has taken the time to slow down, to look at a bee inside a flower and wonder. The parenthesis in this poem offers a space that I trust: they hold the bee as the rose petals might, they hold a space for wonder, and in so doing, I am held.
The length of this very short poem, as well as the question it asks, is very much like a zen koan. I've interpreted it in many ways in the past. Today it feels like a call to wake up from my slumber (taking too much for granted and sweating the small stuff) and see that I am held and supported by life in the same way that this small bee is held by the rose.
Side note: in researching the best link to share for this poem, I found out that Cummings wrote a whopping 240 drafts of un(bee)mo. I'm not an advocate for editing that much, but I do appreciate that meaning can be made of so few words placed on the page in a way that at first glance appears nonsensical.