The time of villages

How many words does it take to make a poem?  How much space should a poem leave?  How much should it constrain in order to liberate the space that it seeks to leave? I’ve come to think that the less words there are in a poem, the more freedom is left for what is said — and by said I mean not by the poet but within our heads, for words are prompts not vessels.  We make of words what we will, and it is a poet’s job to offer them and let them go.

The title of this blog is a poem; here, as a chant, it is again:

the time of villages

Five words, one line, unpunctuated, a monoku if you like, yet hardly itself a sentence, let alone, perhaps, a poem.  In writing the phrase, I had a specific set of thoughts, moments, images in mind. I could have gone on, but I felt that I had said all that needed to be said. For me, the poem is a lament and as such I believe that its force is political, for a lament describes not only loss but also possibility — it is a crying out for something. Which begs the question, for what?

Villages mean different things to all of us, and to each of us different things at different times and in different moods. Idylls, for example, places of escape; places, conversely, to escape from. And time? ‘the time’? Was there, is there, a time of villages? What is, what was, what could that be like? And there now, and in the paragraph above, I have begun to do what I shouldn’t do — to explain — and it is o-so tempting to go further and say (now and always impossibly) what for me in the moment of its writing the poem meant, but then I would undo it as poem and make of it an essay:

the time of villages