It’s pretty short, so I’ll just give you the full poem. This is “Married,” by Jack Gilbert.
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
Read it again if you can.
What fascinates me about this poem is how present his emotion is, yet how unspoken. It’s like he’s screaming without words. Everything is action; “crying” is the closest we get to an emotional word.
And there is a scene to the storyline, but the objects are ordinary. He doesn’t use a plain ole adjective (though I’m no grammarian) until the last line. We finally get a particular object—a potted plant, and in the dirt we find “a long black hair.” And the most fluorescent thing in the whole poem is his wife’s fruit plant. (
Gilbert varies our vision throughout, too. Our lens focuses in on his writhing at first, clouds up in the middle as time carries on, and sharpens at the end.
Why is everything so plain? Why does he simply title the poem “Married”? Why is the most elaborate description that the hair in the dirt is a “long black” one?
Understatement—less is more. Gilbert says as much as he does by saying as little as he does. The first line(break) grabbed me, and I felt where he was without his having to say so. If the poem ended at the first line, which it does for a moment, all we would know is that he “crawled.” Why did he crawl? Maybe he didn’t know what else to do.
He tells us why he’s crawling, a few lines down—just to find his wife’s hair. As if this is all that remains of her, he is crawling around his apartment, for at least two months (and maybe more, if “two months” refers to each of the places where he finds her hair). A year later, it means something to him that he had found a hair of hers that just could not have been another woman’s.
Why is understatement so effective? Why is the smallest breath can exhale such feeling? And when do you find understatement most helpful? Are there times where you feel the need, in your poem or essay or story, to overstate?
~david d
David--I'm so glad you checked out Gilbert's book from the BRC. His voice is powerful, and he has a way of embodying ideas in his work that is deep and moving.
ReplyDeleteI have never been able to master understatement. I feel like if I tried, I'd inwardly be screaming at myself to add some emotion and description. Then again, my short stories have a tendency to lack description and emotion on occasion, but that's always looked at as a thing to be remedied. Perhaps it's different in poetry, but I think it comes down to the intentionality of what you're doing. Intentionally being so plain and direct is almost a type of description in itself. I love it, but at the same time, I have no idea how to accomplish anything of the sort in my own writing.
ReplyDeleteDavid, thanks for sharing this poem. I'm glad you gave us the whole thing to read. It was short but said so much. I think I was stunned almost, or really surprised, by the theme of the poem. Searching for his wife's hair! This just struck me as odd, and it seemed like something a person in grief would do. It's almost like he's driven to distraction or craziness by his sorrow at her loss. I think you said it well: less is more. Less really can be more. Superfluous words only muddle things up and veil/disguise what should be said plainly. So much truth can come from simplicity.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this was understatement as much as powerful statement on what it means to be married (thus the title of the poem). The most powerful pieces of writing that I have seen are always the ones that focus on the little everyday details of life, showing that they are what really matter. If he was going for something special to remember his wife by, he could have gone for the wedding photos, or some other one-time memo. But he doesn't. He looks for hair, the simplest everyday piece of his wife that he knows. Maybe he's trying to show us not so much that his grief made him do strange things, but more that the things worth clinging to and remembering in life are the ones that are the most natural parts of who we are and what our world is like. The poem wouldn't have had the same ring if it was about something bigger or grander.
ReplyDeleteThat was really awesome. I've read that poem before, and it never ceases to amaze. You're right, it says so much in so little time. I think that understatement is really powerful in times of intense emotion or strong action. At that point, the situation should speak for itself, only accented by the few details that are given. This was a great post!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that poem! It's amazing how such a simple poem without any emotional drama or colorful language can accomplish in such a small space. This is definitely a case of less doing more. This is also something that I struggle with in my own poetry. I keep getting caught up in the emotion of what's going on until almost everything concrete melts away. This post was a great reminder for me on how simple something can be to accomplish so much feeling.
ReplyDeleteWow. I really appreciate that poem. I think the reason it so powerful is not only the understatement, but the honesty. Maybe the understatement empowers the honesty. He's not trying to hide anything from us. He's just going for it, telling us how it is. The poem is also full of action. Action tells the emotion. We don't have to sift through monotonous details. We know his crying and we know his wife died. Those give us details enough. I think the reason why I overstate so much, versus being honest, is that I shy away from being vulnerable in my writing. I'm not sure that my audience can or wants to handle what I will give them. I'm learning I have to get over that or my writing will remain quite boring and cryptic.
DeleteOne thing I noticed was that Gilbert only uses "I" in the first and last parts of the poem, and everywhere else the subject is implied. I think this gives the poem a lot of its emotional intensity in those sections.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!
This is so beautiful. The "crawling" speaks to so much: his emotion, his actions, his physical state, his relation to other people, etc. I think there is something wonderful about stating something in only a few words and less blatantly because it invokes a bit of mystery. There is something pleasing to understanding and discovering the emotion behind something without being directly told exactly what is going on. Maybe this is something of an accomplishment for humans? I think we value impressions of things because there is a loveliness to the discovering. We are all rather wild at heart and the process of the journey is a fantastic thing. This poem is like a stamp on a brain - we are given a snapshot or several and then left to fill in the blanks. This is wonderful.
ReplyDeleteGreat poem! It's always been really difficult for me to master the art of understatement. I think part of my hang up is that I'm not trusting the reader enough to figure out what's going on (so I tell them...over and over, with exaggerated words and lots of adjectives). I'm working on paring down one of my drafts right now, so this was helpful to read.
ReplyDeleteWhat a passionate poem. You're right, it has a silent scream sort of quality to it. His understatement is effective because he lets his reader read in between the lines. He lets his reader feel instead of telling them how to feel. The response is the reaction of this understatement. Is it alright if I say I find this rare in most poetry written by a hand of a women? I like the masculine feel of this pain. It's real.
ReplyDeleteWow, that is an amazing poem; he really shows how to master understatement! I think the power of it comes maybe not so much in the simplicity of it, but the raw reality of it. In grief, we cling to the tiniest things sometimes, how those little things, only to be described in the simplest way, are what allow us to hold together. The smallest significance means a lot when grief goes completely wild.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of it comes from the concrete details that he gives, like crawling, pulling hairs from specific things (the drain, the vacuum cleaner, etc). Understatement is really hard to pull off, and I think that the topic/subject has to match the style. Gilbert just nailed it.