I was recently fortunate to be invited to a private reading (in someone's apartment no less) by Samuel Menashe, and was quite impressed with his work. Dana Gioia has championed him--and wrote the introduction to his recent collected edition entitled The Niche Narrows. As Gioia writes in his intro:
Menashe has devoted his entire poetic career to perfecting the short poem–not the conventional short poem of 20-40 lines beloved of magazine editors, but the very short poem. As anyone surveying his Collected Poems (1986) will discover, few of his poems are longer than ten lines.
A few of his poems I found particularly striking:
Improvidence
Owe, do not own
What you can borrow
Live on each loan
Forget tomorrow
Why not be in debt
To one who can give
You whatever you need
It is good to abet
Another’s good deed
***
The Living End
Before long the end
Of the beginning
Begins to bend
To the beginning
Of the end you live
With some misgivings
About what you did
***
Sleep
gives wood its grain
Dreams knot the wood
***
The Niche
The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him
***
Telescoped
The dead preside
In the mind’s eye
Whose lens time bends
For us to see them
As we see the light
Shed by dead stars
Telescopes enlarge
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