I have reserved this, my 1500th entry, for telling you just how much I think for-profit education sucks.

Suck it, for-profit education!

On a horrible, horrible message board I have recently made attempts to frequent, I asked if anyone knew of good magazines that focus specifically on one-line poems, or that make an attempt to feature them frequently. I should have known better than to pose the question on a message board full of “poets” who don’t read poetry, but frequently write poetry that they then post on message boards. (Again, this is what the dearth of good poetry message boards has driven me to.) I got no response, though when I mentioned Blink, a magazine I can’t seem to find any information for, one person replied that he had heard of Blink. I am afraid to ask him for more information– I’m almost certain he’s thinking of the Malcolm Gladwell book.

One unintended side effect of my post was that a short debate began about whether or not one-line poems are poems. This debate seems foolish to me– it may be a matter of preference, but if you can argue for the existence of the prose poem, you can argue for the existence of the one-line poem.

One poster said that one-line poems are not sufficiently fleshed-out to be poems, which is a complaint I have heard before. I’ve also heard the complaint that Kay Ryan’s lines aren’t long enough, so I’ve stopped listening to complaints about relative length: I have come to embrace possibility in poetry, provided that the poem is an encompassing whole.

I think, however, that length is at the crux of the argument against one-line poems, and perhaps against all manner of short poems. Some poets want complexity in everything they encounter, and feel that just a few short lines cannot possibly hope to contain any complexity. I tend to disagree, as would, I think, the folks at Bartlett’s, many of whom are well-aware of the great philosophical paradoxes that Yogi Berra was able to craft into just a few short words.

The desire for complexity seems reasonable if the demanding poet will admit that the complexity is an aesthetic preference on her part and not a necessary component of poetry. One of my favorite poems on Earth is Yeats’ “Politics,” which I don’t find to be terribly complex. It certainly isn’t a long poem. And no one has yet argued with me that “Politics” lacks the “fleshed-out feel” of a poem. Does the presence of a rhyme scheme constitute sufficient complexity? Or must there be, in addition to the rhyme scheme, a sufficiently pleasant pairing of words before the requirement is met?

I think you see where I am going with this– at what point does something pass through the gates of POETRY? Is there a quantifiable moment at which a set of words becomes a poem? I don’t tend to think so. I think perhaps that any set of words presented as poetry qualifies as poetry (and I believe you flarfists out there will agree with me); there may just be a moment at which a set of words goes from BAD POETRY to MODEST POETRY or GOOD POETRY. And once we start adding those qualifiers, we acknowledge that the interpretation of any poem is left to the subjective tastes of the reader.

I do, however, demand that the poem be “an encompassing whole,” and I am flexible on the definition there, as well. I find that “good” one-line poems are complete and still expansive, all in one line, though usually with the context provided by a title. I am as moved by an effective and precise one-line poem as I am by the whole of, say, “Ozymandias,” in much the same way that I would be as unmoved by an ineffective and imprecise seven-hundred line poem as I am by poorly-executed, greeting-card haiku. (I mention poorly-executed haiku because that seems to be the preferred mode of expression on the aforementioned message board.)

If some poets have become immune to the charms of the one-line poem, could it be perhaps that they have been subjected (as I have, on the aforementioned message board) to random lines of poetry masqerading as one-line poems, when in fact those lines do not communicate a thoughtful approach to the whole of the poem? I think the one-line poem is terrifically difficult to execute well; I would, in fact, put it on par with many other difficult forms. Thus, I think there is a need for the finest in one-line poems to be displayed along the finest more-than-one-line poems; the abundance of examples of fine sonnets has afforded readers the opportunity to study the form and readily identify bad sonnets, but there simply doesn’t seem to be a good collection of fine one-line poems.