Poetry Friday: Remembering Samuel Menashe

Economy of language.

It’s a phrase thrown about in praise of poems. What exactly does it mean?

Does it mean the poem doesn’t sound like everyday speech or dialogue? Because there are some great poems filled with dialogue and spoken phrases.

Does it mean that small words – articles, conjunctions – should be avoided whenever possible? Not unless you want all of your poems to sound like haiku.

I looked up the phrase “economy of language” and found a great article, “What is Poetry?” by Mark Flanagan.

Flanagan writes: “One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page.”

Yet, Flanagan goes on to advise poets not to “shackle your poetry with definitions.”

There’s another favorite phrase in the writing-class world, “Show me, don’t tell me.”

Today, I’d like to show you a master of economic writing.

Rue

By Samuel Menashe

For what I did   

And did not do   

And do without   

In my old age   

Rue, not rage   

Against that night   

We go into,   

Sets me straight   

On what to do   

Before I die—

Read the rest of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.

I love the way the poet plays with sounds, re-mixes a famous phrase from Dylan Thomas, and stays (no matter what William Carlos Williams says) in the world of ideas, rather than things, in this twelve-line poem.

The poet Samuel Menashe died at the end of August. He was 85.

From the Poetry Foundation, which gave Menashe a Neglected Masters Award.

Menashe had a gift for pulling key ideas out of language, without tipping into explication and losing the poetry. He was the first poet to be given the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation (2004).

Menashe’s obituary in the New York Times includes a paragraph describing how he came to poetry.

After serving in WWII, including the Battle of the Bulge, “’I came back, I heard people talking about what they were going to do next summer,’ he told The New York Times in 2003. ‘I was amazed that they could talk of that future, next summer. As a result, I lived in the day. For the first few years after the war, each day was the last day. And then it changed. Each day was the only day.’”

That was when he began to write.

The obituary I liked most (for its descriptiveness) comes from The Economist, which says of Menashe’s work:

“They were very short poems. Many were only four lines long. He began with more, but then worked to make them as concise as possible. They were honed down to the essence, sculpted like stones. He left them on scraps of paper all over the apartment.”

If you happen to be teaching economy of language with your creative writing class, instead of giving them a definition, show them Menashe’s work. They will see poetry with new eyes. You can find more of his poems at Archipelago magazine.

Enjoy your Poetry Friday, everyone. Today's host is Amy at The Poem Farm.

I'll be getting ready for the Baltimore Book Festival and 100,000 Poets for Change this week -- both are next Saturday. Hope to see you there!