MINIMALISM IN POETRY

Minimalism was foreshadowed by several twentieth century movements that believed poetry should be more authentic, homespun, contemporary and accessible to the general public. As practised today, minimalism may derive more from Dadaism, concrete poetry and haiku, and it certainly presents parallels to the visual arts. {1} {2} {3} {4} Minimalist poetry focuses on bare words or phrases, sometimes rearranging them on the page so that their most basic and individual properties disclose something unexpected about themselves.

Though slight in themselves, these little exercises can be thoughtful, entertaining and provocative, exploiting language as does all poetry.

William Carlos Williams

In his own work, books and diary jottings, William Carlos Williams advocated poetry based on live contact with the world. Art should make more vivid what is already there. Poems arise from moments of heightened consciousness in individuals whose sensibilities had been developed and extended by writing a responsive poetic line. His own work exemplified:

1. the discontinuous nature of experience (i.e. composition by juxtaposition)

2. a syntax and diction based on the spoken language

3. observations brought to prominence by framing techniques and not encumbered by connotations, deep questions, symbolism and the like.

Trite and banal, mere chopped-up prose they might appear to the uninitiated, but they were honest and American and the way forward. {5} {6} {7} {8} {9} {10}

William Carlos Williams was not an amateur, and his better pieces did achieve their modest aims. Rather than argue their merits in vacuo, let's compare two pieces of writing. Both are celebrated, unvarnished descriptions of the local scene. The first is the fragmentary opening of William Carlos Williams' Spring and All (1923): {11}

The second is in the regular — to our ears initially monotonous — measure of late Augustan verse:  a short section from Delay has Danger (Tales of the Hall) by George Crabbe (1754-1832): {12} {13} {14} {15}

Crabbe’s piece is telling a story, using conventional couplets to depict rural life in a realistic and unpalatable manner — more than the pastoral tradition encouraged, or even Wordsworth much attempted. Williams is simply presenting the scene as it strikes him. With Crabbe’s piece we can note that 1. the Fenland scene is aptly described, 2. the description sets the mood, 3. the youth’s musing on his surroundings give the story a wider significance, 4. the storyline engages our interest and leads us over the banalities of description, 5. the sense is always emphatically clear, 6. considerable variety of expression exists within the regular verse.

The Williams poem illustrates its author’s views on poetry. Keenly perceived and convincingly natural, it serves no end beyond making us see the commonplace more acutely. And see it through the author’s eyes. Modernist poets are not self-abnegating, not a medium through which to view the world with a little selection and personal colouring. There is no dichotomy between life and art: their experience is the world they present. For this reason, Modernists have generally avoided the novelist’s art, making the actual composition the subject of the poem, a way of giving coherence to what would be otherwise be fragmentary and discontinuous.

Black Mountain School

The Black Mountain poets — Olson, Creeley, Duncan — employed open forms. Poems were expected to grow out of the writing process, rather than being fitted into any pre-existing plan. Nonetheless, for all the manifestos and theorizing, many of their more popular pieces are straightforward and traditional, differing only in using colloquial language,{16} whatever is commonly claimed. {17}

As always, the groupings cover many aims and styles. Robert Duncan's vocabulary was Romantic or even archaic {18} — 'putting back all the things I have labored a lifetime to remove', grumbled Pound after one of Duncan's visits. An undemanding example: {19} {20}

Unwittingly, Duncan became more a precursor of minimalism in this extract, however, where the fractured syntax follows the poet's breaks of thought: {21}

Minimalist Poetry

Neither the poetry of William Carlos Williams, nor that of the Black Mountain School was minimalist, but by stripping poetry down to its most basic expression, and outlawing most literary devices, they focused attention on individual words, the properties of those words, and how they could be exploited by typography or rearrangement on the page. {22} {23} {24}

In its small way, minimalist poetry has become celebrated, and poems that are fairly traditional sometimes get promoted as examples of this latest trend: an example: {25}

True minimalist poems are very different: briefer, innovative, more cerebral. Typically they use:

1. the fewest words to make their point.

2. typography or visual devices and/or

3. elements smaller than words: letters, typographical marks.

In this example, the i's stolen from missing turn up with the thief: {22}

As letters are dropped in the following piece, we move from the eternal questions of the world to modern rejection (with an overtone of the Anti-Christ) to a group of individuals (a we) and finally back to the intangible again (awe). {22}

And here it is the ECHO that is being 'reflected', and the counter-image is indeed thin and insubstantial: {22}

Other Forms of Minimalism

There are many types of minimalism. In Hugo Williams's amusing Old Boy, the banality is deliberate, a desire not to say more than the facts strictly warrant: {26}

But a poem may also be minimalistic in another sense, of course, and make a point of having nothing to say: {27}

Is It Poetry?

Clever, and sometimes amusing, but is it poetry? Minimalists develop certain aspects of words that are always the province of poetry, and their typography takes fewer liberties than those allowed Arabic or Persian verse. Within their limits, the pieces can be very successful — often more so than other styles today. Poetry just about, then — which is as its authors intend: no larger statements or emotional colouring.

References and Resources

1. Artists by Movement: Minimalism. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/minimalism.html. Brief entry in Art Cyclopedia, with prominent artists.
2. Minimalism. Jun. 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism. Minimalism in the visual arts and music.
3. Minimalism. Stanley Fish. Jun. 2004. http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/06/2004062501c.htm. Note on minimalism in literature and public life.
4. Is less more? Jonathan Freedland. Dec. 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,609721,00.html. Guardian article on minimalism in the visual arts.
5. William Carlos Williams. http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=120 NNA. Bibliography, poems, letters and a translation from the Chinese.
6. William Carlos Williams. Cary Nelson. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/williams.htm. Another excellent site with good selection of poems.
7. William Carlos Williams. Paul P. Reuben. http://www.en.utexas.edu/wcw/index2.html. Good bibliography: part of the Perspectives in American Literature series.
8. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). Michael Eiichi Hishikawa. http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/w/williams_wc20.htm. Internet resources for Williams.
9. William Carlos Williams Review. http://www.en.utexas.edu/wcw/index2.html. Excerpts free online, otherwise $15/year.
10. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to Pound, Eliot & Yeats (Belknap Press, 1976), 246-275.
11. Spring and All. William Carlos Williams. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15536.
12. Crabbe, (George). Alfred Ainger. Feb. 2004. http://www.fullbooks.com/Crabbe--George-.html Extended four-part essay and quotations.
13. George Crabbe: Tales of the Hall. http://www.bartleby.com/221/0709.html. Excerpt from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–21).
14. George Crabbe. http://www.poetry-archive.com/c/crabbe_george.html. Texts of three short poems online.
15. George Crabbe. http://www.poetry-archive.com/c/crabbe_george_bibliography.html. Poetry Archive's listing of books etc. for sale.
16. I Know a Man. Robert Creeley. April 1997. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/creeley.know.html. Homepage of Seamus Cooney.
17. On "I Know a Man" http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/creeley/man.htm. Short critical articles on the Modern American Poetry site, somewhat overwritten.
18. On Robert Duncan. Michael Palmer. Spring 1997. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/palmer/palmeronduncan.htm. Article on Modern American Poetry site: note polysemous and the reference to Duncan's free use of ornament, of archaic diction and grandiose rhetoric.
19. My Mother would be a Falconress. Robert Duncan. 1968. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15709.
20. On "My Mother would be a Falconress". http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/186. Short critical articles on the Modern American Poetry site.
21. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to Pound, Eliot & Yeats (Belknap Press, 1976), 515-527.
22. MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing. Bob Grumman. 1997. http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm. Excellent introduction from the Light and Dust Poets ezine. I have modelled the section on this article, but there is (or was) a flourishing school of British minimalist poets who conducted none of these experiments but turned out basic and repetitious lines in the manner of Robbe-Grillet. It was these that Kennedy, Gioia and Bauerlein were probably thinking of in their Handbook of Literary Terms, and to which Gruman objected: Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera Blog. 2004. http://www.geocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog/OldBlogs/Blog00164.html NNA.
23. [New-Poetry] P**m Robert R.Cobb. Apr. 2001. http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/2001-April/001865.html. New Poetry thread comments on Gruman's article and minimalist poetry generally.
24. Minimalist Webring. http://x.webring.com/hub?ring=minimalist. Brief listings.
25. missing you while I read about Africa CE Laine. Fall 2004. http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v6/e3/lainec.htm
26. Old Boy. Hugo Williams. 2002. http://www.thepoem.co.uk/poems/williams.htm NNA.
27. Septuagesima. John Burnside. 1992. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_burnside/poems/5934