While dreaming, perhaps, the hand
Of the man who broadcasts the stars like grain
Made the lost music start once more
          Like the note from a huge harp,
And the frail wave came to our lips
In the form of one or two words that had some truth.

—Antonio Machado tr. Charles Reynolds¹

Since Bly is a poet who creates books that are not miscellaneous gatherings but rather strive for unity of one sort or another, I have thought it best to base the organization of this study on the individual major collections as Bly has conceived and published them. This chapter, however, will depart from that scheme. Thus far I have skipped over with only passing mention a type of poem represented in both Snowy Fields and Sleepers Joining Hands: the tiny poem, the poem of three or four or half a dozen lines. I have not done so out of a feeling that these poems are minor. On the contrary, they seem to me a distinctive and significant facet of Bly's work, and so I want to give them some specific attention. Far from being merely a novelty or diversion, this form lends itself to some of Bly's talents and themes in special ways, and one finds within this category some of his most memorable and magical poems.

Many of the tiny poems appeared first, or so far have appeared only, in limited editions from small presses. A number of those I'll be referring to, for example, are from an exquisite, hand-decorated pamphlet, now out of print, entitled The Loon, from the Ox Head Press of Marshall, Minnesota. A small press publisher himself, Bly has always contributed to and drawn from this alternative publishing network on which the life and liveliness of poetry in America so largely depend. The list of books, booklets, and broadsides that Bly has published through small presses is a long one, and the titles he has brought out through his own Sixties/Seventies Press include a number of collections that have significantly influenced and enriched contemporary American poetry. It seems appropriate to mention small presses in connection with small poems, as both represent life far from the giganticism and commercial standards of mass culture, which increasingly dominate mainstream publishing in the United States along with the rest of the society.

In 1966 Bly edited and published an anthology of tiny poems called The Sea and the Honeycomb.² The book shows him at his trenchant best as an editor. It has an idea with some freshness to it—that the very short poem corresponds to the swiftness of brief emotions, emotions largely ignored in a poetic tradition in which the sonnet has been the shortest form respected—and an introduction and selection of poems that make the idea vivid and alive. The territory Bly ranges over for the poems is, characteristically, wide; the selection, unconventional and eclectic. Among the poets are Spanish Arabs of the early Middle Ages, the Japanese haiku masters, classic moderns from several countries, and the young American poet Saint Geraud (Bill Knott), something of a genius in the very short poem. Also characteristically, the book has a strong bias, and here once again the bias is against the rational element in poetry, and in favor of the associative and intuitive. It is particularly biased against the epigram. The epigram, ruled by wit, irony, and denotative statement, is not only disallowed from the anthology, but from poetry as well: the epigram, Bly says, is “not a poem but a versified idea. … a commentary on a suppressed poem.”³ The problem, to put it another way, is that the epigram tends to create with rational and witty statement a tight seal which prevents the waters of the unconscious from entering; it is, therefore, from Bly's point of view, an antipoetic form. (It's interesting to note that when rationalists complain about the sort of poetry they dislike they sometimes use the word “damp.” When Bly says that a poem has moisture in it, he is paying it a compliment.)

In his introduction Bly uses an analogy to make concrete his sense of the influence of discursive rationalism in a poem:

Many of the manuscripts we have of early Greek lyric poets like Alcaeus come down from copies made by scholars in Alexandrian libraries. Sometimes a scholar, after he had copied a brief, intense poem of Alcaeus, written several hundred years earlier, would add to it a composition of his own in the same meter, embodying his own thoughts upon reading the poem. Oddly enough today the same poet writes both parts. If he is skillful in rhythm and tone, the link is almost unnoticeable. An epigram is actually a piece written entirely by the Alexandrian scholar. …

An Alexandrian scholar is lurking inside most American poets: the American poet sitting at his desk writes a fine, intense poem of seven or eight lines, then a hand silently appears from somewhere inside his shirt and hastily adds fifteen more lines, telling us what the emotion means, relating it to philosophy, and adding a few moral comments. The invisible scholar is outraged at the idea of anyone writing a brief poem, because he is hardly able to get his chalky hand out of his cloak before the poem is over!⁴

Bly's analogies are persistently among the most provocative, telling, and downright interesting moments in contemporary criticism; and if epigrams frequently live by wit, so, in a different form, do Bly's analogies. A second, and a third, complete the introduction's advocacy of the tiny, nonepigrammatic poem:

Paradise Lost is a good example of the long poem. Milton is always there, holding his hand beneath you. He doesn't want you to fall. When angels appear, he suggests the proper attitude to take toward angels. In short, he tells you what to think. He has a huge hand underneath you. In the brief poem, it is all different: the poet takes the reader to the edge of a cliff, as a mother eagle takes its nestling, and then drops him. Readers with a strong imagination enjoy it, and discover they can fly. The others fall down to the rocks where they are killed instantly.

The poet who succeeds in writing a short poem is like a man who has found his way through a stone wall into a valley miles long, where he lives. He walks back up the valley, and opens a door in the wall for an instant to show you where the entrance is. The more imaginative readers are able to slip through in the twenty or thirty seconds it takes to read his poem. Those who expect the poet to give them ideas see only a vague movement on the side of the mountain. Before they have turned all the way around to face the poem, the door is closed.

Readers of recent poetry are used to staggering along under lines swelled with the rhetoric of philosophy courses, experiences under mind-expanding drugs, new criticism—in short, the world of prose. They find it hard at first to concentrate on a short poem, but eventually they learn to find some value in being dropped.⁵

The flying involved in reading tiny poems is a different matter from the flying I referred to in connection with Bly's wildly associative longer poems, such as “Hair” or “An Extra Joyful Chorus.” In both cases flying entails associative powers, but in the longer poems the poet carries the reader along with him on broad wings of flowing images and rhetoric; the challenge is not to lose our hold. In the tiny poems, as Bly's metaphor says, it is the reader who must be able to fly on his own.

How much can be accomplished, after all, in a handful of lines that abandon rhyme, the symmetry of set form, and the cutting edge of reason's wit? To some, such poems will seem, no matter whom they are written by, to be works of minimalism and not much more; they will seem to have given up too much—nearly everything. But keeping the Alexandrian scholar out of the poem entirely and relying only on a moment's sliver of seeing and feeling is a discipline that can lead to a freedom and, paradoxically, a great sense of spaciousness. Here is a brief love poem, “Taking the Hands”:

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages …
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.

(Silence in the Snowy Fields)

The word “cages” catches a reality of love, yet the birds in those cages sing within expanses of privacy and intimacy. In its five lines the poem follows a smooth arc of associations, from the hands' resemblance to cages, to birds, to the prairies and valleys where they also sing, and from the prairies and valleys back to the hands whose surfaces and creases they, in turn, resemble. The arc becomes a circle so quickly and effortlessly that we arrive back at our starting point before we had realized that we had left it. The fragment implies a whole whose borders are known only to the imagination, and the smallest poems sometimes contain the widest, freshest spaces.

As we know from haiku and the Imagists, the senses can sometimes be sharpened in the very brief poem. A single sight or sound is focused on, inhabited, as if it were a world. Often such sensory pleasure is central in Bly's tiny poems, as in “Grass”:

The cottonwood leaves
lie naked on the grass
still chilled from the night.

(The Loon)

But the objectivity of this poem is not typical. As noted before, objectivity is not high among Bly's poetic values, though he has great ability as sheer describer of the physical world. In the tiny poems as nearly everywhere in his work, subjectivity is invited in, and celebrated along with the world it apprehends. (There will be more to say about description and subjectivity in the following chapter, on The Morning Glory, where the blend is often extraordinarily rich.) Somewhere at the other end of the spectrum from “Grass” would be “A Cricket in the Wainscoating”:

That song of his is like a boat with black sails.
Or a widow under a redwood tree, warning
passersby that the tree is about to fall.
Or a bell made of black tin in a Mexican village.
Or the hair in the ear of a hundred-year-old man!

(This Tree Will Be Here for A Thousand Years)

That “is like” is a slender thread; I think it holds. This is decidedly not the more conventional poetic version of a cricket, chirping on some quiet Wordsworthian hearth, and the poem's appeal lies partly in its impulsiveness and humor. Beyond this, however, the similes do capture in their unexpected associations qualities of the song and its maker. Black seems the right color, tin the right metal, the hair in the ear of a hundred-year-old man the right hair, for the ragged, homely night-song of a tiny, dark, shiny, hidden creature. The sound has a feeling akin to some artifact produced in a Mexican village—certainly not in a factory in Pittsburgh or Japan. The widow at the foot of the redwood is like the cricket at the foot of nature; their cries have the same urgency and smallness. In this poem it is precisely in the balance between oddness and rightness that the poetry lies.

If, as Bly said in the introduction to The Sea and the Honeycomb, brief poems have a special relationship to brief emotions, we might examine a couple of his tiny poems from the standpoint of the emotion they carry. The most obvious effect of a poem of this length is the suddenness with which it accomplishes itself, and the attentiveness and quickness with which it credits its reader. Reading such a poem can be very much like experiencing an emotional sensation or awareness which arrives abruptly, and can pass again just as abruptly. But the poem remains on the page and can be reexperienced and lingered over, and beyond the effect of suddenness, what one often discovers in a good very brief poem is a subtle richness. The brief emotion may be powerful through its purity—just a single clear ray of joy, a single black grain of grief—but also through its delicate shading. For example, consider “Marietta, Minnesota”:

Wonderful Saturday nights
with girls wandering about!
New farm machinery
standing quietly in the cool grass.

(The Loon)

The youth and aimlessness of the girls, and the strange calm of large, brightly painted machines still and stolid on the grass, make a juxtaposition within which an atmosphere of countless evenings in countless small rural towns is captured. One could write a poem on the same subject in a different mood—it might include some young males leaning against their cars smoking—but here the sexual energy floating in the air is not surly but piquant and joyful. Not much may be happening in those towns, but the poet finds this night beautifully fresh and vivid, like the girls and the silent machines he notices. Yet the poem's mood does have its shadow, which is the knowledge of time implicit in its description of its moment. One can hear in the poem's chord of pleasure a note of sadness. One can hear it even in the word “wonderful”—not that Bly uses it with irony, but simply with the awareness, possibly unconscious just then, that part of what makes brightness moving to us is the fact that it fades. The perfect, unmarked machines will lose their oddly impractical brightness soon enough to time and toil, and something similar will happen to the girls. So there is poignance as well as vitality here; in poems, brief ones perhaps especially, what is not said often accents what is.

Another poem, “Kabekona Lake”:

Lots of men could sleep
on those fir branches
swaying near the widow's house!

The first two lines join two images, one realistic, one surreal. Energy flows between them tentatively; the branches and the sleeping men sway together duskily. But when we come to the word “widow,” a circuit completes itself, and in an instant we not only understand the association of the first two lines but also feel, in a delicate shock of recognition, a remarkable depth of love, loneliness, and sorrow. The poem's emotion is serious, but Philip Dacey, in reviewing The Loon, noted first its “humor, tact, and charm”⁶—and clearly those qualities are present as well. Once again a tiny poem possesses a fine emotional shading, a richness within the space of its fourteen words. (The poem has, incidentally, seventeen syllables, but that is no doubt coincidental. Bly has never been interested in the syllable-count aspect of haiku, but rather in its emotional and imaginative effect. In an interview he remarked: “The Japanese say the haiku is a poem in which there's a tiny explosion inside—and if that's not there—I don't care how many syllables it's got—then it's not a haiku. And that little tiny explosion brings the life to this creature.”⁷)

Bly ended the essay “I Came Out of the Mother Naked,” in Sleepers Joining Hands, with the following statement: “I see in my own poems and the poems of so many other poets alive now fundamental attempts to right our own spiritual balance, by encouraging those parts in us that are linked with music, with solitude, water, and trees, the parts that grow when we are far from the centers of ambition.”⁸ A poem of three or four lines may have a special value in this encouragement; with its quickness, smallness, and sharpness it slips past amibition into the present moment, just as a sudden clear perception can sometimes be an awakening:

“WATERING THE HORSE”

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

(Silence in the Snowy Fields)

One can feel here again the influence of Chinese poetry which I spoke of in discussing Snowy Fields—particularly in the theme often expressed by the old Chinese poets, worn out by official duties, beleaguered by tempestuous times: retirement, turning away from the world of affairs to experience a different life, as in this wonderful poem by the Ming poet Yüan Hung-tao, translated by Jonathan Chaves, “On Receiving My Letter of Termination”:

The time has come to devote myself to my hiker's stick;
I must have been a Buddhist monk in a former life!
Sick, I see returning home as a kind of pardon.
A stranger here—being fired is like being promoted.
In my cup, thick wine; I get crazy drunk,
eat my fill, then stagger up the green mountain.
The southern sect, the northern sect, I've tried them all;
this hermit has his own school of Zen philosophy.(9)

A difference, of course, is that Yüan's poem describes a turning in a lifetime; Bly's, a turning of consciousness at a certain moment of a single day. Yet in a fundamental way they represent the same movement: a breakthrough into a state of being that is rich through simplicity and immediacy, a breakthrough into “what is.” “Watering the Horse” is not a renunciation of ambition; it only says, “How strange to think. …” One does not write twenty books without ambition. Yet we need those moments when it all falls away. Ambition per se is not destructive, but that which never allows us to see the flake in the horse's mane takes the universe out of our lives. It is not irrelevant that an animal is close by when such a moment of awareness takes place—the animals are, apparently, masters of being at home in the senses and the present—or that it is a thing as ephemeral as a snowflake that acts as catalyst.

Bly's tiny poems take quick, often affectionate jabs at the preoccupation and clutter of our lives, as in “August Sun”:

Strips of August sun come in through shutters.
Baskets of unanswered letters
lie on chairs.
Some foolish man must live here!

Busyness, one of ambition's lower relatives, is addressed specifically, though inversely, in some of the tiny poems. A number of them celebrate “doing nothing,” a kind of anti-discipline which can lead to unusual transformations and satisfactions:

“A DOING NOTHING POEM”

After walking about all afternoon
barefoot,
I have grown long and transparent. …
… like a seaslug
who has lived along doing nothing
for eighteen thousand years!

(Jumping Out of Bed)

Not only is the seaslug devoid of ambition, but evolution itself has seemingly left it behind. But the poem takes pleasure in imagining such an extraordinary, primal leisure. I think of Whitman, like Bly a poet of the road, saying in Section 27 of “Song of Myself,” “If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.” As human beings we resist that thought, but it is good to keep it in mind for the sake of perspective. Meanwhile, both Bly and Whitman recognize the place of loafing and regression in inviting the soul.

Many of Bly's tiny poems contain animals, partly for reasons mentioned above. He is both delighted and moved by the intentness of nature, of creatures going their own inscrutable ways:

“DUCKS”

Two white ducks waddle past my door
Moving fast:
They are needed somewhere!

(Ducks)

Paradoxically, the poem expresses this very inscrutability by explaining the ducks' motivation, and in distinctly inappropriate human terms. It gives the wrong reason, and thereby somehow manages to get at the truth.

At other times other moods surround a visitation from the animal world:

“ALONE”

The river moves silent under the great trees.
A fish breaks water,
and then, a few feet farther down, again.

(The Loon)

A man feels more alone—yet sometimes, perhaps, less lonely—for being reminded of the animal other, sharing the stream of time with him in a nearly complete separateness. Or possibly I intrude the man where none is intended. Bly may be focusing on the absolute aloneness of a fish jumping in a silent river, with no observor at all to “see” the scene for us, evoking a solitude so great that the human conception of loneliness seems for a moment small and incongruous, out of place in this universe, this calm eternity.

At the same time that he is aware of the otherness of animals, Bly reaches out across the gap between them and the human. Perfectly poised and deeply penetrating, the following poem seems to me among the best of Bly's tiny poems:

“THE LOON”

From far out in the center of the naked lake
the loon's cry rose …
it was the cry of someone who owned very little.

(The Loon)

The words “center” and “naked” stretch out the line, but in their effect they move us toward the recognition, made explicit in the final line, of an essential state of being—the voice of a creature, of the thing itself, life simplified and clarified, coming suddenly across the water. Such a response to the cry of loons may have been one reason why Thoreau was fascinated by them, though in “Brute Neighbors,” where he gives literature's bestknown account of an encounter between man and loon, he emphasizes rather the unpredictable energy of the bird, appearing and disappearing and laughing in the waters of the pond. In the poem the bird, and the natural world of which it is a part, is again distant from us, “far out”—yet why is it that the cry of the loon goes so directly to the heart? Why does it seem, in fact, to rise in the heart and in the mind at the same instant it rises from the lake? There is no explanation for that, but we can note that Bly shares with Thoreau an exceptional ability to translate into words the language they both hear the natural world speaking to the human soul.

Because they are different from us, animals are associated in our minds with what is hidden from us as we remain sitting in the small room of ordinary human consciousness:

“FALL”

The spider disappears over the side
of the yellow book, like
a door into a room never used.

(The Loon)

The sense of other rooms, of the hidden “other,” is a sustaining mystery in Bly's poetry. We have seen it in the landscapes of Snowy Fields, in the visionary glimpses at the end of The Light, and in the spiritual record of “Sleepers Joining Hands.” But here again the tiny poem seems especially well-suited for describing the experience, as for example in this one, in which the presence of that “someone” who moves in the music of Bach is felt:

“LISTENING TO BACH”

There is someone inside this music
who is not well described by the names
of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts!

(“Six Winter Privacy Poems,” Sleepers Joining Hands)

At times “the other” makes itself known not through an animal or inspired music, but in an intuitive knowledge of another self besides the “I.” One of the finest renderings in poetry of the other who both is and is not oneself comes in this poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, which Bly has translated, “I Am Not I”:

I am not I.
                                        I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.(10)

Here is a similar poem by Bly which, in its own way, is just as fine:

When I woke, new snow had fallen.
I am alone, yet someone else is with me,
drinking coffee, looking out at the snow.

(“Six Winter Privacy Poems,” Sleepers Joining Hands)

“Drinking coffee, looking out at the snow”: these details communicate the shadowy presence with utmost calm and suggestiveness; it is physically there. Again, as in the Bach poem, “someone.” As Jimenez says, we sometimes visit, or are visited by, someone beyond us, this one; and sometimes that someone is forgotten. For Bly, the possibility of the visit is the possibility of ecstasy, of vision, of new life. The visitor may be many things. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the visitor in his poetry.

The soul of the tiny poem is its suggestiveness, spareness, and swiftness. It lets go everything but the moment of perception, emotion, and intuition, and by doing so it achieves both clarity and mystery. I have tried to move quickly in this survey of Bly's tiny poems, but writing about them one does feel somewhat like the Alexandrian scholar, with his chalky white hand. Having noted a few of their primary effects and recurrent themes, I would like to end this chapter by taking a liberty, and allowing the reader one, by quoting two more tiny poems—the first of which appeared in Poetry magazine,¹¹ the second from “Six Winter Privacy Poems”—without comment.

“THE MOOSE”

The Arctic moose drinks at the tundra's edge,
swirling the watercress with his mouth.
How fresh the water is, the coolness of the far North.
A light wind moves through the deep firs.
My shack has two rooms; I use one.
The lamplight falls on my chair and table
and I fly into one of my own poems—
I can't tell you where—
as if I appeared where I am now,
in a wet field, snow falling.

Notes

1. The Sixties (Fall 1960), 4:9. Charles Reynolds contributed a number of poems and translations to The Fifties/Sixties. He was identified in the contributors notes as living “in seclusion in the Black Hills of South Dakota.” Like Crunk, the magazine's regular critic, Charles Reynolds is Robert Bly.

2. Bly, The Sea and the Honeycomb. Beacon Press reissued a number of titles originally published by the Sixties/Seventies Press. In the cases of these books, the page numbers in my citations refer to the Beacon editions, as these are likely to be more accessible to the reader.

3. Ibid., p. ix.

4. Ibid., pp. ix-x.

5. Ibid., pp. x-xi.

6. Dacey, “This Book Is Made of Turkey Soup and Star Music,” p. 43.

7. Bly, Talking All Morning, p. 190.

8. Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands, p. 50.

9. Yüan Hung-tao, Pilgrim of the Clouds, Jonathan Chaves, tr. (New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1978), p. 31.

10. Bly, ed., Lorca and Jimenez: Selected Poems, p. 77.

11. Poetry (August 1981), 138:284.