Andrea Cohen's "Self Portrait with Eraser"

Thoughts on the small things that mean everything.

Self Portrait with Eraser

I drew the eraser
first because I knew

it better than I knew
myself and because

it had been around
the block before me

and because it would,
after having its way

with me, rub up against
everything I'd ever loved.


from Everything (Four Way Books, 2021)

---

A few blocks from where I live, there is a preschool that displays the art of its students on its street-facing windows. Every time I walk by, I stop and look at what’s new. Lately, as a result of what must have been an end-of-the-year project, the school has displayed a bunch of student self-portraits, each with a little artist statement that I imagine the students narrated to their teachers.

These self-portraits are a real joy to look at, in the way that any art produced by any kid is truly some of the most magnificent shit in the world. I’m talking pages that are filled with squiggling circles, ears the size of peanuts, mouths that slant and bend and defy mouth-like expectations. Pages that make you look twice at a face, that make you look closer, that make you wonder and smile and shake your own face and laugh. Pages with pencil lines erased and half erased, with edges crossed out and directed and misdirected. Pages with faces that take up the entire space offered, faces that exist beyond the page, faces that hint at infinity, faces that take up just the smallest amount of space a face can take up. Pages with smiles and pages with jagged-edged lips and pages with sharp downturned mouths drawn darkly and with a small hand, I imagine, gripped tight around a pencil pressed hard against the paper. Pages with hair that circles just above the head like a halo. Pages that make you think of other things: wonder, strangeness, bliss, joy, perception, what is changed and unchanged in the self as it grows, what is lost and un-lost, given up and then found again.

I am thinking of those portraits today because I am thinking of this poem. I am thinking of self portraits, yes, but I am also thinking of the strange and near-perfect beauty of what is created by children. I am thinking of that latter thing because that is what Andrea Cohen’s book that today’s poem is from — Everything — reminds me of. Everything is comprised almost entirely of short, succinctly-lined poems. These two, four, six, eight lined pieces of attention and wit and subversion that shock and surprise and move you. Reading through the book, I texted my wife photos of so many of Cohen’s poems and said there’s a real art to the tiny poem. And it’s true! There is.

In this contemporary moment of poetry that I participate in, there is certainly this notion of share-ability and virality, a byproduct, I’d guess, of our culture’s focus on consumption (which includes a focus on trying to consume less in a world that pings your subconscious in myriad ways to consume more) and the resulting consequences of such a focus — namely alienation, loneliness, desire, and more. When I had a relatively large twitter following, built almost entirely out of sharing photos of poems, I noticed that so many of the poems that garnered a high amount of likes or retweets were short. This was an easy thing to notice. The poems shared offered, I think, quick moments of attention that could steal back one’s attention from distraction’s original theft but then return such attention quickly again toward distraction. What a fucker, distraction!

Share a two page Larry Levis poem, with lines sprawling toward the margins, and you often — not always — wouldn’t get much interaction. Sometimes this made me sad. In my worse, least sympathetic moments, I felt some resentment toward the tiny poem. I thought it some lesser thing. But god, it only takes a single Andrea Cohen poem to remind me that there is something remarkable about poetry in its smallest form.

I mean, read this one, “Half Measures,” from Everything:

She lamented her half-
empty cup, how

big it was, how
much emptiness

she'd been given.

Or hello! Read this one, “Stop-Time,” from the same collection:

We give the clocks
a drink, so they'll

have something else
to do with their hands.

Or finally! This one — “Beating a Dead Horse”:

It still hurts
the girl whose
horse it was.

When I read these poems, I realize that one beautiful aspect of the tiny poem is the way it delivers and emulates the suddenness with which surprise and subversion occur within us (I am thinking now of how Carl Phillips writes, in My Trade is Mystery: “a piece of writing…is only as interesting as its capacity for surprise”). Bewilderment happens as a result of sustained attention, yes, but the result of bewilderment also happens at speed, in the short moment that an instant takes to happen. You know what I mean, don’t you? A flock of birds making a shape out of their collective bodies for just the longest — but always shortest — second. A cloud glimpsed as a shape that then immediately dissipates. A realization! Yes! You ascend the subway stairs and walk into the light of the city and remember something you once forgot! It’s quick, fleeting, you want to grasp it, you can’t. It’s gone. Forgotten again. In how long? An instant. The absurd almost-miracles of our daily lives occur in these smallest seconds that just as soon leave us. The tiny poem, short as it is, gives us those seconds back, and allows us to hang out with them for just a little longer.

In that sense, the tiny poem is no longer tiny at all. It makes me recognize that we often only consider size and scope in relation to immediately measurable metrics. For a poem, this might just mean its length, its amount of lines, and the amount of seconds or minutes it might take to reach such lines. But what about the time of consideration that occurs after? What about the way, walking past the self-portraits above, I found myself thinking of today’s poem? Or what about the long accrual of moments I will spend in the future, each time I look upon a clock, remembering the hands being given a drink? And then thinking even longer about strangeness, its immediacy, and its revelations? That time, less measurable and less immediate to the first act of reading the poem, is almost certainly longer than the time it takes to first read the poem. And that time keeps growing; it lives in other moments. It extends itself. It becomes part of a life. The small poem becomes no longer small at all. It never was.

Recently, my friend and fellow poet and brilliant academic George gifted me Adalbert Stifter’s Motley Stones, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole. As a side note, after just reading the translator’s note and the preface, I have never been more immediately fascinated by a writer than I am by Stifter, whose father died after being crushed by a wagon, who then fell deeply in love with someone whose parents told him — after he talked with her for years! — that he could never talk to again, who was forever obsessed with natural landscapes and rock formations and wrote beautifully about them while teaching elementary school students, who was sad and depressed his whole life, who Kafka nicknamed “my fat brother.”

I loved Motley Stones and would only recommend it to you if you’re down to read a series of comma-omitted stories set in the Alps about sometimes strange, often angelic, wonderfully lasting characters who spin and take part in fairy-tale-like yarns about people getting lost or people dying or people fending off wars or people hiding in basements forever. The point, though, that I want to make — because I’m trying here to make a point — is that Stifter writes an immaculate preface to the work, and there are two moments I’d like to highlight. Here they are:

It was once said against me that I fashion only small things, and that my people are always ordinary people. If that is true, I am now in the position of offering readers something smaller and more insignificant still, namely an assortment of fancies for young hearts.

But however powerfully the Tragic and the Epic may work, however broad their strokes, however superb they are as artistic devices, it is always in people’s ordinary everyday infinitely recurring actions that this law most surely forms the fulcrum, for these actions are the lasting the underlying ones, like the millions of fibrils of the tree of life.

The tiny poem, like the ordinary thing, like the surprise second of surprise that you meet on the corner of a block — the glint, my god, of the evening light on brick — is one of “the millions of fibrils” that make up this life. In that sense, we are bound up in such tininess, such smallness, such ordinariness. Shame on me for thinking, as I once did, that a tiny poem was a lesser thing.

And so, just to come back to today’s poem. Look again at it. There is so much at work within it that magnifies the essence of it, that makes it become a resonant thing. Where do I start? How about the sonic repetition of the opening three lines, the rhyme of drew and knew and knew that carries the poem forward?

I drew the eraser
first because I knew

it better than I knew

Or how about the fact that it is only one sentence, with words like knew and because that repeat and cause a bit of confusion at first, a welcome confusion, a kind that makes you return again to the words, to spend more time with all of the smallness of the poem, and allow it to blossom into something larger?

Or how about the way the physical motion implied by the poem works alongside the thematic resonance of the poem? The way that the speaker draws an eraser on their self portrait instead of their own face, and the way they justify it, how the poem almost erases itself as it moves down the page, how the face is never hinted at, how it is only the fleeting ineffableness of life that is rendered, and how this becomes beautiful, and how the poem echoes on despite its own fixation on erasure?

Or how about something even more minute? How about the fact that every single line of this poem is either five or six syllables except for the final line, which is seven? And how about that final line — everything I'd ever loved — and how it lands so deeply, and reminds you, the reader, of loss, of the inescapable nature of it, of what is impossible to contend with despite the fact of its forthcoming contention? And how about how it might land even more deeply because of that slight difference in length, that one extra syllable, that small and tiny thing contributing so greatly to something large?

It’s hard, too, to not think about another wonderful writer of small poems, Charles Simic, who, in Scribbled in the Dark (which has perhaps the best cover of all time), has a poem titled “Dark Night’s Fly Catcher.” It reads, in full:

Thatched myself
Over with words.

Night after night
Thatched myself

Anew against
The pending eraser.

It’s wonderful to put these two poems in conversation. It’s wonderful, too, to join them with the self portraits by the children I mentioned at the start of this newsletter. In these poems, written by adults, there is this ever present awareness of the erasure of a life. But I think, too, as in all poems that surprise, there is the child within. Notice the final lines of Cohen’s poem “Adjacent,” where the speaker, managing some internal conflict, listens to the bustle and noise of another room, and returns again to being a child:

I was in the room 

with the adjoining door,
listening, the way a child 

warm and dry might 
listen to rain.

The best part of the self portraits I mentioned above are the artist statements provided by the kids. They are transcribed verbatim, holding the authenticity of voice of each child. I am thinking of them now because they operate in the same way that today’s poem operates. They offer a real sense of surprise, and joy, and bewilderment, and strangeness. The kind of shit that might change your life, if you get the recipe right. No, it will. It always does, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Under one of the self portraits, one of the kids — ostensibly named Tyler — says, simply:

This is my Tyler.

Under another, one kid says:

I am Benjamin in this picture. My hair is brown and short. I am smiling because I am funny.

Under one more, a student says:

When you make yourself so you don’t forget yourself.

What are these if not tiny poems? And, in being tiny, what are these if not poems that speak to the large beauty and strangeness and god-you-have-to-fall-in-love-with-it-ness of the world? Because yes! To someone named Tyler, a self portrait is your Tyler! And yes! To someone named Benjamin, this self portrait is your Benjamin! Fuck yes! Of course it is! It’s part of you! Just as a poem written by me or you is part of us, is part of our lived experience, our wonderful complexity, filtered through structure and intention, or the intentional lack of structure or intention, into some attempt at conveying whatever we live through and just then, in that moment, found a path to describe, even if that path led nowhere, and perhaps especially if it led nowhere.

We make ourselves so we don’t forget ourselves. I read that now, in the wake of Cohen’s poem, and I am dumbfounded by the sheer on-the-nose-ness of that child’s statement. It makes me realize that I think we know about the eraser from a long time out. And so we make ourselves so we don’t forget ourselves. We write, or we scribble in the margins, or we just simply live, which is no simple task at all. And we love, certainly. And we commit to doing a thousand ordinary things each day. A thousand small things. A million. The trash taken out, the wait you forgot to kiss me goodbye. That kiss in the doorway. That small peck. That little bit of love. We do this over and over again, making tiny poems out of our everyday. I want to be reminded of this forever. To walk past the self portraits. To see you, walking on the street. This is my face. This is who I am. And to know that who you are is an endless amount of self portraits, drawn everyday, escaping erasure until the final erasure you know will come but will never know it comes until it does. A life, we call it. So much more than that, isn’t it? Beyond words, isn’t it? And still we turn to them.

---

A Note:

If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.