So, a few weeks ago, Bull City Press published Michael McFee’s The Smallest Talk, a book of one-line poems. Michael and I have traded e-mails about one-line poems for a while now, and he’s agreed to let me publish bits of those conversations here, because they’re kind of fun, and no one talks about one-line poems.

Ross: The Smallest Talk both delights and confounds readers. My favorite responses thus far have been from people who don’t traditionally read poetry, most of whom are very enthusiastic about the book, but ask things like, “Is this allowed? I mean, these poems are only one line. Are they even poems?” What do you think? Is this allowed?

Michael: That’s how I felt when I first read William Matthews’ book of one-line poems An Oar in the Old Water: delighted and confounded. Delighted by the dark wit and concentration and obliquely subversive tone of the poems — they made me inexplicably happy — but also confounded by the fact that they were only one line long. Was such terse impudence allowed in the longwinded chambers of Poetry?

The answer was, and is, yes.

As I kept reading Bill’s book, and started reading other one-liners — by poets in the Greek Anthology millennia ago, by the formalist Yvor Winters, by contemporary imps like A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery and Tom Andrews — I realized that the challenge of composing a complete poem in a single line has intrigued poets for a long time. It looks impossible, but somehow (once you start thinking and writing that way) it’s not; and if the one-liner does its job well, it will do what every other poem does, whether a
tart epigram by Pope or Paradise Lost — that is, create its own entire self-contained verbal world, one to which not a word can be added and from which not a word should be taken.

Poetry is already the smallest talk possible, the most compact and deliberate and charged use of language. A one-line poem simply takes that squeezing of the material as far as it can go on the page and still be a poem.

I’ll post a little more of the conversation every so often. In the meantime, you can see Michael read from The Smallest Talk Saturday, March 31 at 11 AM (McIntyre’s Fine Books in Fearrington Village) or Sunday, April 1 at 3 PM (Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh). Or you can buy the book.

For some reason, when I log into GMail, the sponsored link at the top of the page is “How to end a friendship.” What in my GMail is making the adbots think that I need to end a friendship? If I do, I’m looking at you, Jennings: my lolcatz obsession kept me up all night. When Ladybug and I couldn’t sleep, we grabbed a laptop and scrolled through pages and pages of the things.