Poetry: A Pocketful of One-Liners!
The poet's smallest building block.
Because April is National Poetry Month, I've been focusing a lot on poetry these past few weeks. The Project Gutenberg article I'm working on is for a work of poetry, my Book of the Month will be a poem collection, and I've practiced writing some poetry of my own.
I've always found poetry to be somewhat intimidating. I'm much more comfortable creating prose narratives and playing around with plot and characters; sticking to strict patterns of form and making my own life and self into a subject never really appealed to me. When I decided to study and practice poetry, then, I knew I would need to start simple. And it turns out that many great poets have created works using the simplest form there is: a single line.
The formal name for poetry of this type is "monostich," a term which was in use as early as 1920. Poets like Walt Whitman, Yvor Winters, John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg have all experimented with this form. It can also be considered a variation of the haiku, since Japanese-language haikus are traditionally printed as one line.
I encountered the idea of one-line poems while reading A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass, which provides several lovely examples from multiple poets. Inspired by what I read there, I immediately got to work writing a few one-liners of my own. From that writing session, I picked out the ten poems I liked the most, and that's what I've collected here for you. They are fragments that came to me in an instant, each one containing a singular little thought of its own. Several of them have titles; others do not need them. I enjoyed putting them down on paper, and I hope you enjoy reading them as well.
Smart girls don't cry, they just get mad
MORNING
Coffee black as night and harsh on tongue
SUMMER
There's so much heat in blazing cloudless blue
Apologies are a seldom-practiced art
No nation is exempt from history
360
The car spins round on ice and my heart stops
ICEBERG
When your hand is cold enough it burns
DISCOMFORT
It all was going very well except for the underwire
SHARPIE
Purple ink dot blossoms on my palm
Snow upon snow makes cold silence
And in the end you blow up what you made
