'I Am Breathing--Still'

R.L. Barth is preparing a chapbook of poems titled Ghost Story for a publisher. One of its sections, “Snowfall in Vietnam: Poems/Maxims,” consists of ten one-line, five-syllable poems and accompanying titles, some of which are longer than the poems. Their extreme concision extends the logic of Bob’s earlier poems, which are tight and spare and continue the tradition of Martial, Winters and Cunningham. All are rooted in Bob’s experience as a young Marine in Vietnam in 1968-69. Here are some samples, first title, then poem: 

Snowfall in Vietnam:

“Leaflets fill the sky.”

 

A Chateau in the Foothills:

“Are these stains French blood?”

 

Death:

“I am breathing—still.”

 

These are poems that exceed the demands of imagism. As a newspaper reporter I was trained to expect ruthless editing. I came to understand that any copy can be trimmed and cut like a fatty steak. I long ago internalized that lesson. I still read like an editor, looking for flab to slice. Prima donnas need not apply. I’m predisposed to favoring parsimonious prose and verse, though not exclusively: At the same time I love the extravagant prose of Browne and Burton.

 

I like that Bob calls these poems "maxims," the prose form perfected in the seventeenth-century by François de La Rochefoucauld. A maxim expresses a harsh, unflattering truth with maximum brevity. A good maxim sets off a small moral explosion in the reader’s head. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines maxim as  “an axiom; a general principle; a leading truth.” Among his citations for the word is a passage from Troilus and Cressida, spoken by Cressida in Act I, Scene 2:

 

“Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is:

That she was never yet that ever knew

Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:

Achievement is command; ungain’d, beseech:

Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear,

Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.”