Poem # 25: Interregnum

The first stars
emerge

ministers
of the new regime.

*

Something small today; unusually so.

The danger of epigrammatic poems is that they will seem too slight for the page. Typically there is one quick gesture, observation, play on words. Why not go further? Usually, I do -- often losing the initial spark.

These poems depend on white space: the reverb in the reader's perceptions. Here, stars appear against a darkening sky -- the negative of the page, I suppose. But my own pleasure in the poem is in discovering the near-anagram: "emerge" to "regime" -- one letter short of a match! It makes for a slight mirror-effect. I had "appear" instead of "emerge," and tinkered with other verbs before realizing the metaphor itself (centered in "regime") offered a solution.

One of my mystical aesthetic principles about poetry is that the poet should aim to minimize the number of sounds in the text; to seek out fugal repetitions at various levels (not only rhyme, but consonance of other kinds) as a sort of purification of the poem -- a necessarily failed effort, of course. I suppose it's a Swedenborgian notion having to do with angelic dialects: the Old Mystic (as I recall) imagined the angelic tongue as consisting of but one word (Om, no doubt).

All poems will necessarily fall short of some vision or plan that sparked the process; each individual work is a record of "failure." That failure is the reason to attempt writing another poem, or for another poet to keep writing after you.