How does a poem begin?
“Less is.”
Michael e. Casteels, minimalism: an essay
I don’t know how poems begin or what makes a poem work. It feels like a genuine surprise each time something happens, let alone succeeds (an always-shifting terrain), and I never quite know how to start again. When I am asked (very occasionally) about the poetry I write, I respond that my work is minimalist, and then typically struggle to articulate why this kind of work attracts me. In what follows, I find that I’ve avoided addressing my own work in favour of speaking about the minimalist contexts within which it is written, but perhaps indirectly these notes speak to why I persist in following minimalist lines in my writing practice.[1]
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Minimalist poems prod at boundaries and definitions in ways that I have long enjoyed. They pose a fundamental challenge to the idea of what a poem is—the poem, that gloriously open literary form increasingly resistant to definition itself.
Poems are visual by nature—ask a child to differentiate between prose and poetry and they will do so by sight. The minimalist poem—its exploration of blank space and the field of the page, of silence, of possibility, of restraint—feels notably close to the world of visual art. It brushes up against abstract expressionism, and sculpture, and film in ways that can be difficult to see from inside the world of poetry but are often quite clear to those outside of it.
One site of overlap these fields and forms share is the troubled reaction they often provoke. Think of the response that Barnett Newman’s “Voice of Fire” received when Canada’s National Gallery purchased it for $1.8 million in 1989, which can be paraphrased roughly but not inaccurately as my child could have done that.[2] Minimalism—or work that eschews such a label but nonetheless uses a restricted number of elements—is often equated with the simplistic, or the inadequately thought out, or a scam. Look at what this person is trying to pass off as “art”!
When, in a past life, I used to teach at the University of Ottawa, I would spend one class each semester with my first-year “Literature and Composition” students—a course aimed at helping non-English majors improve their essay writing—looking at visual and minimalist art and writing from the twentieth century. It was selfish in so far as the work was interesting to me, but I also always found that doing so pushed the students to think through their own ideas about art in interesting ways. The poems were almost universally met with resistance, but the paintings and films weren’t. In particular, Norman McLaren’s animated films were always compelling, even for the most sceptical of my students. They had no difficulty accepting that works of film created with extremely restricted elements—the component parts of film really, light and colour and sound, nothing in the way of narrative or gestures at objective representation—were indeed works of film.
Something about the jump to written work, to poetry, elicited a different reaction. Written works broken down to single words, or syllables, or letters, were often seen as an affront to the idea of poetry. It was always interesting to spend a few minutes in that space with students—why is this not a poem, but that is a film? What do you think a poem is? Where would you draw the line between a poem and non-poem if we removed elements one-by-one?
In our current era of arts funding, juries, grants, and awards, the smallness of minimalist works render them difficult to evaluate. Is this poem enough? Can it possibly warrant a grant, or an award? How much real work did it take? Can it be substantial enough to climb out of the slush pile into print? It can wreak havoc on the standard 20-minute poetry reading, and doesn’t always lend itself to close reading in a classroom or workshop. The minimal—like poetry in general—is so difficult to commodify. When it does occasionally breach the surface of the culture, it can be met with ridicule and vitriol. It is too serious and too intellectual, but somehow also too simplistic. Minimalist works, when removed from their contexts—be it a book, or a particular artistic community, or historical moment, or print history—can be vulnerable to such critical reaction. (The response to Aram Saroyan’s endlessly lovely “lighght” is instructive here—a work both celebrated and decried in its moment and periodically since.[3])
All of which is, frankly, exciting to me. I like being troubled by the minimal work of art and I like that it can trouble its contexts and communities. I like the expanse one can find with a reduced palette; the opening yielded by close attention to something very small; the conflicts between the work and the ways it can be encountered. For me, it is a tiny wonder to return to Robert Lax’s new poems, or Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems, or Nelson Ball’s Force Movements, or Anne Carson’s If not, winter: Fragments of Sappho and find that the work is still compelling, that it still has things to reveal, that it still prompts some kind of exciting and generative response in me.
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I am using the term “minimalism” again and again without offering a definition. I am not going to hazard anything definitive here, but I will discuss one set of ideas that have helped to clarify my own engagement with minimalism.
Minimalism means many things in many contexts, artistic or otherwise. There is a wealth of writing about minimalism in visual art and music, and somewhat less about minimalist literature. I think in part that is an exercise in caution—criticism can sometimes hurt minimalist works. When pages are spent unpacking literary works of extreme brevity, something can be lost. The wonder, or the joy, or the integrity of the minimalist work can be at risk.
Mark Botha, in A Theory of Minimalism, provides one formulation that has stuck with me. He argues there are “two principle expressions” of the idea of “minimum”—the “least possible” and the “least necessary”—and that aesthetic minimalism is an investigation of the two:
Minimum names the absolute: it is the least possible, but also the least necessary. It is both an ending and a beginning, the terminus of patient processes of simplification, reduction, exposition, intensification, clarification, but also the site of sudden, transfigurative events and explosions of novelty. Minimum establishes a limit beyond which things lose coherence, disappearing into nothingness […] But minimum also marks a radix from which things acquire coherence […].
I find that this offers a helpful and open-ended way to think about this kind of work, one that is accommodating to all kinds of minimalist art and that doesn’t impose a single intent on varied efforts. The least possible seeks a reduction of the number and type of elements used in construction, whereas the least necessary seeks a foundation, perhaps from which to build. The minimalist work can move in either direction.
Botha continues:
Minimum constitutes an ontological threshold: on one side, being is expressed in terms of existence – the multiple configurations of real entities; on the other side, minimum gives way to pure being – multiplicity without configuration. In this sense, minimum clarifies the real by naming the point at which every given reality comes into or departs from existence, marking the passage between undifferentiated being and differentiated existence by revealing the least that is possible and the least that is necessary in a given reality. […] Perhaps because of its existential significance, minimum captivates us, marking a point of emergence and withdrawal, a moment of appearance and disappearance, an event of creation and destruction.
So the minimum is a horizon—on one side the poems exists, it comes into existence, it achieves poem-hood; on the other, it disappears into meaninglessness, no longer recognizable as a poem. This horizon is different for each person. There is no doubt in my mind that Aram Saroyan’s “lighght” is a poem, but I understand others will feel differently. Their horizons are located elsewhere. I think that identifying that horizon for oneself is a worthwhile thing to do. Once you’ve located it, you can push and pull at it. If you accept “lighght”, do you accept Saroyan’s letter ‘m’ with the extra foot? If you don’t, if you need more, how much more? And more of what exactly?
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On November 18, 1966, Phyllis Webb gave a poetry reading in Montreal at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) alongside Gwendolyn MacEwen. Twenty-five minutes into the reading, she read from Naked Poems, published in a staggeringly beautiful edition just the previous year by Takao Tanabe’s Periwinkle Press. Webb introduced the book as follows:
I want to move on now to my latest book called Naked Poems and which one of your local critics, or at least he wrote for the Montreal Star at this particular point, exclaimed of the price because there are so few words in the book. It's $2.25. These poems are very small, and therefore very expensive and came at a bitter price, I may say, to me. They came quite as a surprise. I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote them. The first fourteen or so I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here, and I couldn't quite take them seriously and then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic in them, and realized that here was something, almost a new form for me to work on, and it's very bare, naked, undecorated and I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to write a couple hundred of them, and I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem, and finally reduced them to, I don't know, forty or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation, let's say. I'm going to read the first fourteen which comprise a total poem. In a sense the whole book is a poem. And then I'll read a few more as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.
Webb’s description of writing the book—of seemingly encountering the book being written (my goodness, what are these little things doing here)—is striking in its openness and honesty. For anyone who had read her previous collections, Even Your Right Eye (1956) or The Sea is Also a Garden (1962), their response may well have been similar. It is difficult, some six decades removed from its publication, to imagine what the shock must have been, for Webb and her readers. Today, I expect that Naked Poems is often the first work of Webb’s to be encountered—widely anthologized, and studied, and taught, it is a singular work (as each of her books is) and it has endured. It was my first encounter with what I consider a truly minimalist Canadian work, care of Rob Winger who was teaching a fourth-year undergraduate course on Canadian long poems of the 1970s (gently expanding the boundaries of the decade to include Webb from the 1960s and Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies from the 1980s). I picked up the astonishing course books at Ottawa’s venerable Octopus Books and flipped through them on the bus heading home. Naked Poems, via The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, was a shock to my system. You can write poems like this? You can write an entire book of poems like this? It shook loose something in my own work that had been there without being named previously.
I was supposed to write about my own writing in this essay, and instead I am two thousand words in and find myself in this Phyllis-Webb-shaped digression, but that is because Naked Poems is an especially welcoming and wonderful door through which to encounter minimalist poetry. Naked Poems was, in a way, announced in the final poem of The Sea is Also a Garden, “Poem Against the Angel of Death,” which ends with Webb declaring “[…] I want to die / writing Haiku / or, better, / long lines, clean and syllabic as knotted bamboo. Yes!” It was a way out, a new form, something that allowed her to “get rid of all [her] affectations.” The book is concerned with expression, with the possibility of a “new alphabet”, with the limits of communication (and with many other things that better thinkers than I have carefully unpacked over the years[4]).
I can’t help but return to Botha here, who described the minimum as a horizon which can “[clarify] the real by naming the point at which every given reality comes into or departs from existence”—I think we can see this in Naked Poems, both in its content and in its form. Webb didn’t know what these poems were at first. Botha describes the minimum as an emergence into form, a coming into being. Naked Poems was a novel coming into being for Webb, she did not have a name for it yet, and I think it can offer that same experience to many readers sixty years later. The book represents one foundation of the modern and post-modern contemporary long poem in Canada (Robert Kroetsch characterizes Canadian long poems of this era as “dwelling at and in the beginning itself” and cites Webb’s “short long poem” as an origin). It exists precariously at a site of entering into or departing from existence, and its minimalist form in this very specific way seems to work hand-in-hand with the coming into existence of the poems’ content (the “new alphabet [gasping] for air”). The precarity of the book, of the poems, of the content, of Webb’s decision to write and publish these works—this all collectively articulates something (to me) undeniably minimalist.
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I’ll close with a few words trying to connect some of these thoughts about my interests in minimalism to the community and publishing context within which I write and publish.
I think that the small press has a minimalist gesture at its heart, which I acknowledge sounds absurd given the proliferation and amplification that follows from it naturally. However, if we retreat to Botha’s terms, the minimal as a horizon, a point at which things come into existence, then I think we can very easily see chapbooks, and leaflets, and weird little publications, and public readings, as precisely these moments at which things come into existence. The trade book is obvious and visible and not to be disputed (ok we can happily dispute it!), but the weirder smaller expressions of the small and micro press (see it is right there in the name) offer a kind of test to the reader who encounters them—Are these poems? Are these books?—and to the writers and publishers trying to make them—What can I do with my limited tools and resources? How many do I need to make it? How few can I make?
These are minimalist questions.
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None of these notes have been intended as an argument that minimalist poetry has value (of course it does!), or that minimalist works can be thought of as poetry (of course they can!). These are givens to my mind, whether or not you agree. These notes are rather an exploration of some of the things that minimalist art has done to my reading, and to my writing, and to my experience of language.
The minimalist work is a challenge on the page, a challenge in performance, and a challenge in the culture. It can be inhospitable to criticism, but enormously welcoming to readers. The minimalist poem can feel bottomless, something that can be considered for decades, or it can be instantaneous, something you can grasp in a single moment and feel no need to write an essay about.
Works Cited
Botha, Marc. A Theory of Minimalism. London / New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Caruso, Barbara. Wording the Silent Art: Essays and Writings. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2001.
Casteels, Michael e. minimalism: an essay. Kingston: Puddles of Sky Press, n.d.
Kroetsch, Robert. “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.” Open Letter Fifth Series, No. 4 (Spring 1981).
Webb, Phyllis. “Poem Against the Angel of Death.” The Sea is Also a Garden. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1962.
--. Naked Poems. Vancouver: Periwinkle Press, 1965.
[1] When I received the kind invitation from rob to contribute to this folio, the questions he sent were “What makes a good poem?” and “How does a poem begin?” I have absolutely no idea. I considered sending those five words as my response (which I typed with absolute sincerity after thinking for a while). When I expressed my reticence to rob, he came back with “well […] what are you doing?” and “how do you see a poem?”—questions that I feel more able to approach. I should add, with apology, that these notes wildly exceed what would have been reasonable for the “wee write-up” rob asked for, and that I see the irony of writing quite so many words trying to say something about minimalism.
[2] See Barbara Caruso’s essays, “Voice of Fire. The controversy” and “Voice of Fire. The painting” in Wording the Silent Art: Essays and Writings (The Mercury Press, 2001) for a characteristically thoughtful unpacking of the controversy and sensitive examination of the painting itself.
[3] See Aram Saroyan’s “The Most Expensive Word in History” (Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer. Coffee House Press, 1992) for an overview of the composition of the poem and the controversy with which it was met.
[4] See Pauline Butling, John Hulcoop, Stephen Collis, Rob Winger, and Laura Cameron for some of the many ways into Webb’s work.
Cameron Anstee is the author of two collections of poetry, Sheets: Typewriter Works (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and Book of Annotations (Invisible Publishing, 2018), and the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015). He is the editor and publisher of Apt. 9 Press.
