The ___ Poem in America

(in Building Block and Stanza Form)

By Jennifer Schneider

1:
The assignment seemed simple,
simple enough –
write on the tallest or shortest poem
in America. Writing instruments (vintage,
multi-color ink) at attention. Caveats in
five-point font – no fluff.  

2:
No dandelion wishes (weeds
in deceptive clothing) or umbrella-topped
Kool-Aid pitchers (water-tables recede as
temperatures rise). Inverse relations
multiply. Glass a perennially
fragile state of matter. 

3:
Skylines already dark. Skyscrapers
perennially coughing. Elixirs near expiration.  
Blackbirds flock to sagging wires. Tires
tower in junkyard lots. Forever homes  
in         expanding                   ex        p          and      ing
and contracting form. 

4:
I contemplate the task and the meaning
of the modifier. As shadows hug corners,
heights morph. Tallest. Shortest. 
-est. A quagmire. 
The adjective both dubious and deceptive.
A descriptor clothed in borrowed cloth.  

5:
Twain has said the road
to Hell is paved with adverbs, but is
the road
long or short, I wonder. And what about
the adjective. Wait. At the end of the alphabet.
there’s William Zinnser who wrote –

“The adjective that exists solely
  as a decoration is a self-indulgence
 for the writer and a burden for the reader.”

Ouch.
I wish for neither.

6:
I write,
I write with caution.
I dip my pen in ink I no longer recognize
and quickly become twisted.
Angles and angels
lurk in life-like form. Form
always shifting -- from adjective
to noun to verb. 
My stomach turns like a line break.

7:
I’ve been taught that length,
is quantifiable --
objective and overt.
No matter the metric or the unit of measure.
Count. Compute. Calculate worth.  
Inches are to progress
as heartbeats are to chest compressions.
Conversions both inevitable 
and life forms.  

8:
No.
Stop.
Recalibrate. 
I’ve been thinking about it all wrong.
Height is nothing more than weight, 
the weight of the subject and the delicateness,
the delicate mess of its disposition. 
Newton’s first law of motion teaches that 
objects in motion remain in motion
unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
Surely there are more than three forms of matter,
and infinitely more forces with surprising degrees
of longitude and latitude.  

9:
If all that mattered was a poem’s
height or an object’s
liquid, gas, or solid-state form,
I don’t believe I’d have converted.
To poetry. To form. 
Religion neither a guiding light nor a North Star --
mostly a form of speech that provokes questions.
It’s the poem, I believe, that tells me what 
to think.

10:
I drop my pen. Ink pools.
I like the feel of the puddle on my bare heel. 
Soles and souls homonyms,
overused, of course,  
that sometimes meet in the middle
of a line. 
Relatives often hiding. Behind shadows
and shadows of figures --
now gone. Soles and souls.
New forms.

11:
The tallest and shortest
poems in America share
more than form. They
share names --

Sexton, Anne and John
Scott, Tom and Frank
Tate, Allan and James
Burns, Robert and Lucy
Browning, Elizabeth and Robert
McGrath, Wendy and Thomas
Hill, Geoffrey and Selima

and sentiments –

Swift 
Walker
Marquis

more
mountains       hills                 storms 

12:
Names that stack, stack like
towers
in long and short form.
I no longer recall titles.
Descriptions dangle like the
children – missing
but for pint-sized milk cartons

Date Last Seen
Name
Age
Weight
Height  

13:
What’s height
if the pain of the point
persists 
even as
inches and meters
and measures
swirl.

Gun casings make marks with unnerving accuracy.
Gravel walks. Brick porches. Rec center yards.
Souls in rubber soles. One minute five, six feet tall.
Then, a horizontal form. 

14:
With madness a business, 
It’s business as usual --
Only height confuses.
The mountains closest
to the moon resemble
steppingstones. 
Goodnight Moon’s 130 words
transcend all forms of speech.  

And teachers continue to insist students line up
in alphabetical order, and according to height
in states of stillness.

15:
I fit poems with 1000 words in my pocket, yet struggle
to wrap my head (and hands) around haiku.
And Malala asked for an extra inch, maybe two, in height,
But was instead made as tall as the sky.​​​​​​​
Oh my.

16:
From afar all poems seem abstract
But it’s the smallest of details –
emojis and emoticons
characters encapsulated in tweets –
the cranberry button, the putrid belch,  
the droplet of blood-stained sweat, the unanswered text,
that linger,
linger longest,
typically, in solid, liquid, or gas states 

17:
What does height matter
when a single wrong turn
in America can spiral
in real time.
And a once-perfect fruit – apple, lemon, grape
can fold into its own skin
like the body of my great grandmother
who fled Poland, escaped Auschwitz, and later birthed twins.
Shrunken. The hospital bed now a shrine 
Where she once spun words like ammunition, her teeth gone.
Broth the only measure of her consumption.  

18:
I lose track of height and length and breath as she dines,
then dies. What’s height matter when the pain of the void
twists all notions of time?
I ultimately reconcile the assignment, and its simplicity, with
deception and laugh at the humor I doubt was intended. 
The height of a poem equivalent to

nothing
no one
everything

19:
The South calls. Perhaps
it’s her brother. Or her son. Or a
writer like Steinbeck or Falkner.  
No one answers. All southern charm,
all elders gone. 
Formerly imposing figures,
of top hats and thermal long johns, nothing more than bone. 

20:
Vonnegut warned of losses in pairs of two.
Religion on the alter. Debates over ashes and em dashes.
The assignment was deceptively simple. Tallest
and shortest a fleeting measure. A simple
refusal. I refuse to entertain
the poem that refuses to be written.
Instead, I count then consume.
Limon. Plath. Walker. Angelou. In unalphabetized
unmeasured order. 
And block, stanza, and horizontal form.

20.19.18.17.16.15.14.13.12.11.10.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.
1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.
​​​​​​​15.7.19.6.1.12.20.4.2.18.9.8.5.13.10.14.11.17.16.3.