Minimalism
I just turned in the first of my six applications for MFA programs. I don’t think I’ll get in anywhere, not yet, but it’s good to have the practice and to feel a sense of mission. One of the issues I’ve been grappling with in putting together my writing sample is how and how much to be minimalistic. It’s much more difficult to measure the merit of a meek poem than a broad, pretentious one. Here’s a poem by James Schuyler. It’s called “A Stone Knife.”
Sleek as an ax, bare
and elegant as a tarn,
manly as a lingam,
November weather petrified,
it is just the thing
to do what with? To
open letters? No, it
is just the thing, an
object, dark, fierce
and beautiful in which
the surprise is that
the surprise, once
past, is always there:
which to enjoy is
not to consume.
First off, I love unpretentious depictions of “just the thing.” I don’t know how many times you can write a poem about “just the thing,” but it would be interesting to find out. People often talk about how comedy is slighted over tragedy — an aphorism I don’t think has been true for at least 20 years — but I’ve never read an account of how meekness is slighted over grandiosity. Is that a legitimate complaint?
