by Chris Banks
I do not usually write short poems, poems under ten or twelve lines, let’s say, because to do the short poem well requires a lot of thought, compression of words and ideas, and ultimately, the short poem should contain a metaphor that creates a new more vivid reality or understanding. That is a tall order. Some short poems are parables or proverbs, aphorisms or analogies, but all of them, to really work, require that they dredge up something fresh, grab hold of something unfamiliar, or new, in a very, very succinct way.
My favourite practitioners of the short poem are poets like Mary Ruefle, Gregory Orr, Kay Ryan, and of course, Emily Dickinson. Check out the American poet Mary Ruefle’s poem “Deconstruction” and how it deconstructs the classic epic poem of The Odyssey into four short lines so a flicker of new understanding might be gained:
DECONSTRUCTION
by Mary Ruefle
I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.
Here, Ruefle takes the entirety of The Odyssey and makes it a parable about unpleasant truths when reflecting on the self, not just our evasions and erasures of the past, but also our earnest wishes to be made worthy of our own story. To be, in fact, the hero. This is a poem about the curating of memory, and how it leaves out the tarnished parts of our selves that do not fit with the hero narrative.
Another favourite short poem I like is Gregory Orr’s poem “How Lucky We Are That You Can’t Sell A Poem” which I have excerpted below:
HOW LUCKY WE ARE THAT YOU CAN’T
SELL A POEM
by Gregory Orr
How lucky we are
That you can’t sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.
That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?
The first stanza really is just a sort of sobering blunt statement of fact, which is to write a poem is ‘to do something useless in a world possessed by utility’, as the poet Ken Norris wrote some thirty years ago. A poem has no monetary value, the first stanza explains, which implies a further question, what is its true value? Thankfully, the second stanza answers this question suggesting you cannot put a value on a poem that changed one’s life. Indeed, the fact one cannot monetize a poem is what saves poetry from “selling out” and keeps it authentic, true, even priceless. This poem is scarcely nine lines and 34 words, but it packs such raw lyricism and emotional wallop that you cannot mistake the kernal of human truth it embodies.
I also like the American poet Kay Ryan for her ability to take well-worn idioms, and her ability to stretch them into micro-stories or mini-parables which is what she does in her poem “The Elephant In The Room”:
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
by Kay Ryan
The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.
There is the thrill of understanding and the finding of new truth simmered into ten short lines that takes an old, bald-tired idiom, and makes it not just vivid and real, but wildly entertaining.
As for my own short takes on the short poem, I have written a bunch of six couplet ghazals in my book Alternator, and this short poem “Fossil” from my book The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory:
FOSSIL
by Chris Banks
To match in words
the impression
some extinct creature
left in mud long ago –
to be that permanent,
and still not there.
I like the plain language, the compression of the lines, the juxtaposition of a poem’s wish for immortality with human mortality which gives this poem, at least for me, its jolt of understanding.
In my book coming out this Fall called Bureau of Useless Splendour (ECW press Fall 2026), I have also written a number of aphorisms in the guise of Chinese fortune cookie fortunes so I thought I would share a random one here:
Aspire to be a cloud. Let things pass through you. Be
strong, they say, but what they mean is, be cumulous.
This one makes me smile because it reminds me of being a first year high-school English teacher, and my old friend Peter Mansell, a veteran drama teacher, telling me to be a “sieve” and just let what kids say to you slide through you. I think this is what this little two line is saying and it flips the folksy wisdom of ’Be strong’ on its head.
Other Canadian poets like George Murray and Robert Priest have played with aphorisms, too, which is great since James Geary has written in his book I is an Other, “The proverb and its close relation, the aphorism, are the world’s oldest written art forms. They are also the oldest written examples of metaphor”(185). The short poem ties us to the earliest forms of poetic expression.
I thought I would leave you with one more short poem of mine, this time from a new manuscript in progress, which sort of simmers down late stage capitalism into two lines, but also that idea that poems given away are truly priceless as suggested by the earlier Orr poem. Here is it is:
MATERIALISM IS FALSE
by Chris Banks
is an idea I keep in a gold, heart-shaped locket.
It was mine, but I bequeath it to you.
The metaphor here is that ideas, poems, these things are valuable in and of themselves, but part of that value has to be decided by the reader. Junk jewellry or family heirloom? The reader decides for themselves.
Honestly, I love the short poem, the compression of ideas, and the economy of language, and I find short poems much more difficult to write than my standard 30-32 line poems. Small is beautiful. I always appreciate a poet who can take a well-worn idea or a long forgotten story, and turn it into a new metaphor, a brand new idea, as if hitting a light-switch you suddenly see something new or alien that was just sitting there at your feet the whole time.
Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
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