If it were an essay it would only be about one thing

Tonight, a friend of mine asked, “If it’s verse without any sort of rhyme scheme or meter, what makes it a poem and not prose?”

We batted that one around a little bit, but since I’m only interested in definitions so far as they are useful for helping us find our way through life, the fine differences don’t concern me much. Then, a poet from Canada named Anne Carson came up. Carson’s work borrows from prose, leans towards it, shakes hands with it, but you can’t call it anything but poetry.

I read all three of the poems archived on The Poetry Foundation’s web-page for her, which, of course, is just a tiny sample. Her poem, “The Glass Essay,” struck me as one of those genre-bending lengths of verse that went right to the point of the question of what makes a poem. In the poem, you’ll find this.

At this time of year there is no sunset just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away.

I read poetry to find descriptions this good. It has all the punch of a real haiku-moment. Yet you will also find this:

I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge for all that life withheld from Emily. But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought.

Because the poem is also about the way she read Wuthering Heights and how she feels about its author.

You’ll also find this:

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.

But now he was looking at me.

Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude I turned my back because he likes the back. He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities I learned in that one moment when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me.

As it is also a break-up poem. I have to say, a compelling break-up poem. One that might haunt me as much as John Darnielle’s song “No Children.”

You’ll also find notes about her relationship with her mother. Where she likes to take walks. The images that came to her when she meditates. All in one poem.

If you asked me to pin the poem down, I would call it a break-up poem. She might tell me I’m crazy for that. Others might see at as autobio, with the break-up as but one detail. Or some of the most daring literary criticism yet attempted. Some might simply call it a snapshot from a hectic time in her life.

If you read it (and set aside a half-hour or so if you plan to), I think you’ll agree that the title is a good one. It reads like an essay. Yet it’s an essay that shatters like glass into many essays, yet they were all once one. Somehow, all the mad ruminations on a half-dozen subjects hang together here, but not quite as a whole piece. This is writing as a family Christmas tree. The ornaments are coming from a dozen households, from office parties, from crazy aunts, any hope of a singular aesthetic will be lost on that tree, but it’s still one thing and you know what it is as soon as you see it. And just because the ornaments on the tree look funny together, that doesn’t mean they don’t belong together.

For example, as much as I read it as a break-up poem, its most poetic element is the 13 Nudes, that is, the 13 images she gets of herself when she meditates in the morning. Here’s one:

Nude #9. Transparent loam.

Under the loam a woman has dug a long deep trench. Into the trench she is placing small white forms, I don’t know what they are.

She gives us these to spice the way through her long meditation. Are these pessimistic images caused by her break-up and her longing? Or do they simply reflect her pessimistic view of herself?

What is quite the point of this thing?

That’s what makes a poem a poem to me. Poetry permits a latitude with language that we won’t (and shouldn’t) tolerate in prose. Poets can juxtapose words or ideas without meaning in the sense meant by “What do you mean?” Poetry uses language and form in a painterly fashion rather than an expository fashion.

Yet, the best poets know what they are doing. They write with an intentional mysticism. Anne Carson, in “The Glass Essay,” goes much further than intertwining words and images in curious ways. She intertwines themes, whole theses. She writes at least three essays in one and calls it verse.

You may not quite be able to find quite what though poet “meant” when you read her, but she did mean something and that’s why you are very likely to find meaning.