Tiny Poem Tuesday, Connection
Let's gather and read poems by Langston Hughes, Florence Ripley Mastin, and Sean Cho A.
Hello lovely gatherers, and happy Tiny Poem Tuesday—the first one of 2024! The beginning of this new year has been a whirlwind. I am living happily in my new married life, I’ve been taking the next steps in my career, and I’ve been connecting with friends. Last weekend, I traveled to Detroit to see two of my best friends from college and watch the Lions win their first play-off game in ages (roll pride).
I thought the best way to start this year in tiny poems would be to focus on connection. Poetry embodies connection. The speaker voices their thoughts to whomever wanders upon their writing–you, reader. Poetry explores the human experience on every point of the spectrum from mundane to exceptional. In doing that, they explore all of the ways we connect with the people and world around us.
I wanted to capture a small sliver of this in tiny poems this week, so let’s reach out our hands and gather around the tender flame of connection.
Langston Hughes is an icon and a giant of American poetry. During his lifetime, he was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance movement in the 1920s. He was an early innovator of jazz poetry, a style of poetry that follows the flow and improvised rhythm of jazz music. Hughes aimed to capture the experience of African Americans who were finding their way after migrating out of the Jim Crow south a generation before. Hughes once stated that his poetry is about “people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.” (Poetry Foundation)
In this tiny poem, Hughes defines hope. He singles out loneliness as a time when many people may feel hopeless. In a poem of only 16 words, lonely is used twice! Hughes doesn’t claim to be hopeful all the time. He starts the poem with “Sometimes when I’m lonely.” As opposed to lingering in this loneliness, Hughes moves us along, telling the reader that hope pushes him through the loneliness and helps him remember he eventually won’t be lonely, he’ll find connection again, “by and by.”
I recommend reading this poem out loud to yourself—it has such a lovely rhythm to it.
When I first read this poem, I imagined the speaker holding a dark teacup where a voice poured out of. I loved the image, but it confused me considering the title of this poem is “From the Telephone.” When researching for this piece, I realized that Florence Ripley Mastin was born in the 1880s and telephones looked very different back then than they do now (I’m not always the sharpest tool in the shed). Upon my 4th and 5th and 6th reads, I could see the speaker cradling the earpiece, the “dark cup,” of an old telephone up to her ear. From that, a flower blooms, the voice of an unknown “you.” That line breaks me:
Your voice broke like a flower.
And that simile breaks me. The voice of the person on the other side is so delicate, swaying and trembling. It reaches out of the dark cup connecting one person to another across who knows how far a distance and caresses. This tender moment, the innovation of the telephone and how it connects people, lets you hear the voice of someone you love. We take phones for granted now as they’ve become so ubiquitous, and we often opt for texting now.
But when reading this poem, imagine yourself as Mastin, meditating on this object that connects you to the people you love most. Remember what the slim brick you keep in your pocket once was.
This poem by Sean Cho A. comes from the literary magazine HAD. I discovered this magazine one day while scrolling Twitter and I have been a fan and frequent reader ever since. A side note: whenever HAD accepts a poem for publication, they “give the writer a skull” and poets try to grow their skull collection by having poems published in this magazine (hence the header). I am obsessed. Anyways, I digress…
“An Actually Really Joyful Poem” immediately gripped me with its title. It feels like it is daring me to read it and prove it wrong (I couldn’t because this is actually really a joyful poem). This poem is the short story of a sentient brick. It realizes that it is stuck…forever. That’s a grim realization to have for any sentient being. With a few more seconds of thought, the brick realizes that it is surrounded, silently, “by all his friends.”
This poem is hilarious. The image of the eyeless brick looking left and right makes me smile every time I read it. And at the very crux of this poem is a sweet story about connection. Though the brick may be stuck in its wall forever whatever forever means to a brick, it will always be surrounded by all its friends.
Isn’t that what we all want?
If you enjoyed these poems… here is where you can read more by Langston Hughes, Florence Ripley Mastin, and Sean Cho A.
If you are looking for more poetry to start the year… I recommend reading The Best American Poetry of 2023, edited this year by Elaine Equi.
If you want to try writing poetry… write a poem from the perspective of an inanimate object—what would it say? do? feel?