Free Short Poems
Billi Plancarte
During the Carolingian period, such grid and figure wordplay continued. The 9th century poet Hrabanus Maurus was a Frankish benedictine monk who wrote poetry and encyclopdias, and was trained by Alcuin. He had a love for carmina quadrata et figurata. In his De laudibus sanctae crucis, there are 28 figure poems on a range of ecclesiastical topics.
As per usual, this is a short blog post that leaves out a lot of rich history of figure poems; however, I think these examples go a long way towards inspiring us to think more deeply both about the history of textual presentation and about how objects may have influenced their formation. Poetry was certainly inscribed on objects, but objects also left their impression on poetry. The placement of words helps to shape our understanding and even our enjoyment of reading, as does the background (e.g., paper, papyrus, parchment, cup, statue) behind the words. The beauty of letters and words as linguistic Legos means that they will continue to be broken apart, remade, and reformed to create unique poetic fabrics. Certainly it was the letter sculpture set against the backdrop of a Milwaukee sunset over Lake Michigan that always made this reader speechless.
A short poem may be a stylistic choice or it may be that you have said what you intended to say in a more concise way. Either way, they differ stylistically from a long poem in that there tends to be more care in word choice. Since there are fewer words people tend to spend more time on choosing a word that fits the subject to perfection. Because of this meticulous attitude, writing a short poem is often more tedious than writing a long poem.
Much though I love her insightful and often wicked little poems, and deeply though I sympathise with her for (as I have heard) the traumatic and embarrassing seizures that restricted her life, I still have difficulty with this specific Emily Dickinson poem:
Though most of his work is still untranslated (except into Russian, after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation,) there are some great English editions of some of his fiction.
Both of the short poems below are taken from Shirim (Poems), his first book, published in Vilna in 1920.
(Today\u2019s post begins with some thoughts about the state of this newsletter. If you aren\u2019t interested, please feel free to skip down to the poems!)
When I started this newsletter, over a year and a half ago, I was aimless and bewildered. I had just dropped out of a graduate program, and just quit a bad job adjuncting for a community college. I was reading a lot and writing a lot, and paying my bills through substitute teaching gigs for ESL teachers in the local public school system, which meant that I spent my days with kids from El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Yemen, Cambodia, and so many other countries. I woke up most nights with the physical sensation that I was wasting my life. It felt as if I couldn\u2019t lift a weight off from my chest. I was waiting for answers to that old question \u2014 \u201Cwhat do you want to be when you grow up?\u201D \u2014 to reveal themselves.
And so, because I wanted to share what I was reading and writing and thinking about with other people, and to push my skills as a translator, and because Yiddish poetry was a consolation to me in that difficult time, I began this substack. I would translate poems for it on days I didn\u2019t teach, which is how I was able to maintain that original pace of (at least) one new poem each week.
Much has changed since then. I\u2019m not, mercifully, as aimless as I was; I have invigorating projects and commitments. All this means, though, that I can\u2019t stick to the pace I once kept for this newsletter. So first of all, an apology, especially to those of you who became paying subscribers when I was sending poems and essays and hosting events more frequently than I am now: I\u2019m sorry that the number of posts here has diminished.
And second of all, a request: Over the next month or two, I\u2019ll be experimenting with new formats for and approaches to this newsletter. If you have suggestions or feedback about sustainable ways to keep sharing and celebrating Yiddish poetry and culture here, please don\u2019t hesitate to let me know.
And third of all, gratitude: when I started this newsletter, I sent it to a couple dozen friends and family members I thought might be interested. I had no \u201Cplatform,\u201D no \u201Cfollowing.\u201D It\u2019s hard for me to believe that these posts are now read by hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people around the world. Thank you for being a part of this; your reading and your support mean a great deal to me.
If you weren\u2019t deterred by that wall of text, I\u2019m excited to introduce a new poet today: Moyshe Kulbak. (Per contemporary conventions, I\u2019m writing his name as Moyshe, although in his Lithuanian Yiddish dialect it would\u2019ve been pronounced Meyshe.)
It\u2019ll be hard for me to stop wondering about this Bear Academy, but regardless: Kulbak received a traditional yeshiva education, and began to write Hebrew poetry during World War I. After the war, he moved first to Minsk and then to Vilna, where his first poetry collection was published in 1920 to great acclaim.
After a stint in Berlin, and several more years in Vilna, where he played an important role in that city\u2019s Yiddish cultural scene, and became a beloved teacher in the local Yiddish gymnasium, Kulbak moved to Minsk in 1928. He continued writing, focusing especially on long poems, drama, and fiction, until September 1937, when he was arrested on false charges of espionage, one of many Minsk artists and intellectuals persecuted in a wave of Stalinist repression. After a month of imprisonment, Kulbak was executed on October 29.
Though most of his work is still untranslated (except into Russian, after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation,) there are some great English editions of some of his fiction.
Both of the short poems below are taken from Shirim (Poems), his first book, published in Vilna in 1920.
The first of these two poems opens Kulbak\u2019s debut poetry collection, functioning as a kind of epigraph. How moving, over a hundred years later, to think of the young poet, then in his early 20s, choosing these lines about the Yiddish language to introduce his work to an audience of Yiddish readers.
What is Yiddish here? It is elemental: its words are sparks and small flames, casting light and heat. It is also, therefore, dangerous. Yiddish has a real power, and if you\u2019re not careful you can get burned. And Yiddish is an animal. There\u2019s so much symbolism, of course, in the identification of Yiddish words with white doves, but I\u2019m thinking beyond the obvious association of doves with peace, and with the story of Noah, to the fact that doves, unlike many species of bird, can be both wild and domesticated. Doesn\u2019t that capture something about language, about poetry, about words themselves? These creatures at the border between wildness and domestication, tamed and untamed at once, capable of flight, singing in our bodies\u2026.
What to do, though, with this second poem, this odd piece of writing? My use of the phrase \u201Cwelter and waste\u201D here is a nod to Robert Alter, who uses it in his translation of the first line of Genesis, though it originates in Wallace Stevens\u2019 \u201CThe Planet on the Table.\u201D I chose this phrase in order to invoke what I see as Kulbak\u2019s reference to a biblical, primordial state of desolation.
Wherever the poet goes, everything he finds is empy and inchoate. He wanders and wanders, and seems to find only an uncreated creation. I don\u2019t quite know how to read this poem, but it reminds me of a comment I came across recently, in Claire Schwartz\u2019s interview with H\u00E9l\u00E8ne Cixous. Schwartz says that \u201CFor [Edmond] Jab\u00E8s, the word\u2014a mark on the blank field of the page\u2014distances us from the primordial nothingness of creation, but also touches the void by displacing the thing in the world to which it refers. Negating as it asserts, the word ceaselessly renews its relationship to nonexistence, becomes strange to itself.\u201D
I had to read that out loud a few times to start to get a handle on it, but I take it to mean that language simultaneously erases and channels absence, emptiness, nothingness. Kulbak finds emptiness everywhere, and turns to language in order to make something real. But the words he finds, the poems he crafts, even as they create, still reenact the desolation whose place they take, whose emptiness they fill.
What\u2019s with that brrr! at the poem\u2019s end, though? Perhaps it\u2019s the poet letting go of language in response to the desolation he finds, and reverting instead to a pre-verbal expression of embodied experience. Or maybe it\u2019s just a young poet reveling in the newfound freedoms of post-World War I writing. If you have any thoughts about it, I would love to hear them.
The connection for me between the poem and the nocturne is that sense of uncertainty in the early parts, the parts that are tentative, but which are slowly building up a kind of subterranean pressure, so that when it finally breaks out, you feel like you should have known that thing was about to blow the whole time.
That sense of the uncanny seems to permeate everything the speaker sees. He looks at dandelions and thinks of suicide. He is surprised when his friend is alarmed by alarming things like purple urine or personal flammability. There are robots on the table, yes, but is there a robot in his heart? Is his imagination alive and active or is he talking in his sleep? Is this whole poem just a fever dream or hallucination?
Underneath the knee-jerk reactions, though, is an important question about clarity in poems. How much of a poem should be available to us at first reading? What does it suggest when poets deliberately use language that they know will be foreign to many of their readers?
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