Tiny Poem Tuesday: Perspectives on Existence
Let's gather and read tiny poems by Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, and Mark Strand.
Happy Tiny Poem Tuesday everyone! It’s nice to gather with you this morning. I have found three poems that give different perspectives on humanity and how we exist on the planet. I am really excited about this post because all three of these poems have been sitting on my computer for years now. I never knew how to write about them, but this week they seemed to have all found each other. I’m excited to share these poems with you: “God’s List of Liquids” by Anne Carson, “World’s End” by Victoria Chang, and “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand. Let’s gather and enjoy them together.
This is one of my all-time favorite poems by my all-time favorite poet, Anne Carson. This poem grounds itself in the world: “a November night of wind. / Leaves tore past the window.” Carson presents an apparently normal fall evening. Though this is not a normal evening in a world we understand. This particular evening, God is creating the world.
Before I continue, I must point something out that Maya pointed out to me: God is not gendered in the poem. In the first draft of this post, I kept writing “He” not even realizing that Carson never specified any gender. The phrasing and the italics of the line “For I have made their flesh as a sieve” evoked Christianity and the Bible for me (maybe Carson’s intention), but that does not mean that God in this poem is He. For the rest of this post, I will use they/them pronouns when talking about God.
Further emphasizing this point, God in this poem is not in a heaven Christians would recognize. Instead, they are in a room in a house, holding open the book of life to the chapter “PLEASURE.”
I love the small detail of God “holding the pages down with one hand / because of the wind from the door.” Grand, existential poems are built on and grounded in casual actions any of us humans have done. It also fills the readers with questions. Why is God in a house? Why is the door open? If God controls the wind, why is it a windy night? God seems human in this poem. Though they have the power to shape the world, they let the world affect them. The door is open to feel the windy night.
At the top of the page in the section of pleasure, God writes, “For I made their flesh as a sieve.” Flesh is the barrier through which we experience our environment–it is solid, it insulates the gooiness of our organs and blood from the outside world. But God made our flesh a sieve, something that allows liquids in and out. Then Carson writes a list in alphabetical order that does not include all of the major liquids humans contain–where’s water? No, these are pleasurable liquids. Did God know that survival was not sufficient? This is a complete list of liquids of pleasure. What do you think of Memory and Time as liquids? What does it mean in this poem that God defined our pleasure by these liquids?
“World’s End” by Victoria Chang opens with two questions, which work quickly to pull the reader into the piece. The two questions allude to the overarching question this poem poses: what happens when the world ends? “Will earth stop spinning? / Will there only be hair left?” Now that you, reader, have been brought into the poem, Chang implicates you in the next line: “We are made of war–”
I love how little space a tiny poem has to work with. I love how the poet has to be deliberate and precise with each choice of words. Instead of taking space on the page to describe the destruction that humans wreak, Chang writes very concisely that humans are made of war. Every reader has an idea of what war looks like–the confusion, the devastation, flashes of fires, screams, mayhem. The war we embody mixes into the fabric of the earth, tags the oxygen and infects everyone around us. The war we carry is something we constantly deploy.
Chang’s use of the word deploy here is brilliant. The entire poem describes destruction and endings. The language in this poem is harsh. Deploy is the perfect word for this–we send out war in every breath, deploy destruction in every moment of the day. It leads us to the end of the poem–because of all that we deploy, “Our birth is easy on us / but hard on everything else.”
Source: Selected Poems (1980) by Mark Strand, published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Whereas “God’s List of Liquids” and “World’s End” take macroscopic views of our existence, Mark Strand takes a much more microscopic, singular look at existence. Strand places the speaker of this poem in a field–I picture one that is verdant and overgrown with a clear blue sky overhead. This first stanza uses such simple language to relay a grand view on existence–in a field, you are the absence of the field. I love the line:
Wherever I am I am what is missing
It wasn’t until I wrote that out that I realized Strand repeats “I am” at the end of one line and beginning of the first. Maybe I like this poem because of the scientific edge that it takes in the second stanza. Wherever the speaker moves, air parts and then refills the space behind him. This is a part of the world I forget often–there are molecules and atoms moving around us constantly. When we take up space, we displace the air around us.
What struck me about this poem was difficult to put into words until I talked to Maya. This poem struck me because the speaker defines himself as loss. In space, he does not contribute to wholeness. This keeps him moving, always hoping to keep the world whole. Why can’t he become a piece of where he is? Why can’t he stop?
Strand pulls the first two stanzas together in the ending of the poem, paying off the opening excellently. In the first two stanzas, the speaker talks about himself. In the end, the speaker says “we.” We people, we humans, with all of our interior lives, all have different reasons to live and move through the world. But the speaker has made his reason for moving clear: he moves “to keep things whole.” The phrasing of this final stanza seems to pose the question without putting it in writing: what is the reason you move through the world? Are you the absence of things? Or do you become the world where you stand?
If you enjoyed these poems… you can read more from Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, and Mark Strand here.
If you are looking for your next read… I just finished reading Heavy: an American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. This is one of the best pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever read—remarkably raw, and may change your perspective of existence.
If you want to try writing poem… write your own poem about existence—think about how you move through the world and center this on some image in your life.
COVER PHOTO: The Attributes of Exploration (1731) by Jean Siméon Chardin
