Welcome back to Tiny Poem Tuesday, where tiny only refers to the number of words on the page and never to the impact those words have, and in this week’s case, the amount of space the words take up on the page. Both of this week’s poems are by Layli Long Soldier, a Native American poet of the Oglala Lakota Nation. I am so excited to share these poems with you.
Long Soldier plays with form and construction in these two pieces from her collection WHEREAS: “Obligations 1” and “Obligations 2.” These two poems are not meant to be read linearly. Instead, each line gives the reader a choice–a phrase or a word–to build their own poem. There are so many ways to read each of these poems. The best part about these poems is exploring them–thinking about the choices that Long Soldier made, why she included different phrases and why some phrases were repeated.
The speaker of this poem is presumably a young narrator–likely a woman, likely a voice of Long Soldier herself. Simultaneously young and growing older, in the span of one poem, the narrator is young and learned from someone how to speak and taught others how to speak, whether it be truthfully, carefully, or meaningfully. What I love about the form of this poem is that all of these occurrences happen at once. It mimics a lot of what we experience in life–rarely is one event isolated from others. Our lives are this aggregation of happenings, building on top of each other, and funneling into something conclusive.
I love the repetition of “to speak” as the only choice in the sixth line. The whole point of this poem is about learning about when to speak and how to speak, and whether it feels like “digging stones” or “threading grasses / from our chests.” What beautiful imagery, both of them so at odds with each other. This poem works well because it gives the reader a choice of what to hear and see, but Long Soldier relays all of the emotions she wants to get across, too.
Why call these two poems obligations? To better understand the titles of these two poems, I look to the most important lines–the ones that are repeated. In “Obligations 1,” the phrase “to speak” is repeated, and in this second poem, it’s “the grief.” To me, these are the obligations that drove Long Soldier to write these poems, the emotion that she needed to express. There is a need to speak, to learn to do so truthfully, despite the pain or pleasure it brings to the chest. In the case of “Obligations 2,” Long Soldier leads the reader down a path toward grief, something that eventually makes its way “across our faces.” No matter what path you take to the end of the poem, you must learn to speak, and you must confront the grief–an obligation to finish the poem.
I love how Long Soldier uses these short phrases throughout the piece–they are so transplantable, and yet so powerful. In fact, in another project, Long Soldier further experimented with this form where she printed and knitted these poems into quilts, which you can see here. This poem is as much art with language as it is visual art. And despite the tiny number of words, these poems have weight–every poem that you can make with these scattered phrases.
If you liked these poems… I recommend reading this other poem by Layli Long Soldier and check out her collection WHEREAS.
If you are interested in visual poetry… you may enjoy this article and subsequent examples of visual poetry.
If you want to try writing poetry… try writing your own “Obligations”-inspired poem. You’ll get so many poems for the price of one.