Samuel Menashe

One of my favorite high school English teachers disliked the haiku because she thought that it was too small a space to express anything worthwhile. Although she was ignorant of the development of the haiku and its aesthetic resonance with the Japanese, I will never hold it against her. She was right in some sense: seventeen syllables is probably too small for the English language, which is uninflected and depends on pronouns and prepositions. Not that it is impossible to write a good haiku in English. Many good English haiku have been written, but they are still dogged with the name haiku, a faint sense of awkward overreaching, and an even fainter tinge of Orientalism. The idea of compression, however, on its own terms, is a good one. Each language will compress differently: haiku of Basho, short poems of Celan, epigrams of Martial, each use language sparingly and get the greatest meaning out of the smallest medium.

Samuel Menashe's poetry is not the English haiku: it does not have rules, it is defined by no set form, it simply has a character that makes it play out the way it does, a character so developed and so distinct that would be foolish to try and imitate it. Menashe's book, put out by the American Poets Project, is the first and probably last book I will ever buy from them. I got it only because Menashe's stuff has got to be hard to find, published mostly in the UK. I am highly distrustful of The American Poets Project, a subcategory of The Library of America. They claim to put out 'affordable' volumes of our greatest writers that will last. Now, I've definitely seen some LoA volumes in used bookstores that are falling apart, but we'll not go into it. The idea that a work must be preserved in such 'finely bound' volumes is little more than a scam. Whenever I think of someone buying up the Library of America, I'm reminded of the library scene in The Great Gatsby where his guests discover that the pages of all his “classic” books haven't even been cut. Yeah, right, like I'm going to pay $45 for a partial collection of Herman Melville's works when I could find much cheaper paperback editions. Good literature is preserved in the mind, not in a volume. For the physical preservation of books, we have these things called “libraries,” which can usually afford to rebind books so that they will be around for a long time. And, besides, LoA covers are so ugly. Who picked out that font? Who thought the black cover with red, white, and blue stripes would be a good idea?

Anyway, back to Menashe. His book was worth the $20, even if a lot of the poems in it are lackluster. Lackluster is the word, as none are bad. The good ones are excellent, compressed, and masterful. Menashe is one of the few poets I know who can close a circle within a couple of lines:

A pot poured out

Fulfills its spout

This is hard to do, and I'm glad that I found Menashe at a time in my life when I knew better than to try to imitate him. The poet he reminds me of most, however, is one that I did spend a lot of time trying to imitate: Emily Dickinson. Just like Dickinson, Menashe has his own strange yet familiar form, one that's undeniably his. Although Menashe has made a great effort to get himself published (like Dickinson, although she tried to deny that she did), he's had little success, and even when we're reading these poems out of this overpriced hardcover book (cover designed by Chip Kidd, even!) we still get the feeling that we're reading from some manuscripts we found in a drawer. Like Dickinson, Menashe has spent most of his life living in one place: he's been in the same apartment for the past 50 years now and his poems have a “letter to the world” quality to them:

That statue, that cast

Of my solitude

Has found its niche

In this kitchen

Where I do not eat

Where the bathtub stands

Upon cat feet ---

I did not advance

I cannot retreat

There have been few remarkable poems in my life that have made me exclaim “This is the best poem ever” (age 15, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) or “Holy shit” (age 19, Byron's “Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa”), and this is one of them.

There are weaker poems, however, that the reviewers printed by American Poets Project, like Stephen Spender and Christopher Ricks, did not dare to point out:

Always

When I was a boy

I lost things ---

I am still

Forgetful ---

Yet I daresay

All will be found

One day

I have a feeling that this is the kind of poem that the people at the American Poets Project thought would appeal to the common reader. Menashe's gift for cramming image after image into a poem of a few syllables is not present here. We assume that the things he lost as a boy were physical, while the victims of his forgetfulness as an adult are of more gravity, and that he is depending on some sort of salvation at death to return to him what he lost or forgot. However, this is all assumption and Menashe gives us nothing definite to go on. If he had named a thing lost as a boy, and a thing forgot as an adult, and then slapped on the last three lines, it would be a much better poem, but as it stands it is vague and whatever insight into the human condition or his own that makes Menashe's poems so powerful is lost. Menashe is not one of those poets who never names what he is talking about, he can't afford to take that kind of liberty. Most poets nowadays avoid naming the subject of their poems by sketching it with a few startling adjectives or making use of the “write it, not about it” method. In the aftermath of modernism, we consider it awkward and tactless to say what we mean. The say-what-we-mean tradition, however, has an illustrious history, going back to Homer.

Of course, trying to figure out what tradition Menashe comes from is useless and trying to see him as the founder of a tradition is stupid. Now that The American Poets Project has done its job by putting him out on the scene, I sincerely hope that another, better publisher will get a clue and publish a larger body of his work at a lower price.