Jim Moore's "Against Empire"

Thoughts on smallness.

Against Empire

Small olives taste best.
Small stars shine farthest.
Small birds call
most sweetly. Small lives,
we are small, small lives.


from Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf, 2005)

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I love Jim Moore’s poetry. I’ve loved it ever since I first read it (and wrote about it) over a year ago. I love it for what today’s poem says about smallness, a love of which (by which I mean smallness, ordinariness, locality, plainness, and more) is echoed in so much of Moore’s work. In an essay of his that he wrote upon receiving the Guggenheim fellowship, Moore quotes Albert Camus, articulating one work of poetry as the work of “restor[ing] to every being and every object its miraculous value.” Yeah. Moore’s work does that.

Think of how today’s poem, through its use of the word small, doesn’t diminish the objects it seeks to describe. The small olives. The small stars. The small birds. Even our small lives. Rather, Moore makes one labor of this poem the labor of subversion by way of repetition. And the end result of that subversion? I’d argue it is a kind of expansion. Think of how diminishing it might feel, in such a day and age as this one, to be called small. And yet, in today’s poem, Moore asserts, over and over again, the beauty of smallness, and the brightness, and the sweetness.

And so, when Moore ends the poem with the claim that we live small lives, it is not the smallness of disenfranchisement or disappointment or not-enough-ness; no, it is the smallness of enough-ness, the smallness that says you do not have to be more than you are; you are, in your who-you-are-ness, miraculous. A smallness, one could say, of restoration. It’s a radical statement, even if it doesn’t seem so. But it is radical to make such a claim in a world that often ascribes value to acquisition, growth, and profit. A world that says we need to take up more space to be valued — to be more in order to be seen. It’s a world that patently does not say that one’s smallness is not just enough, but miraculous in its own right. 

Here’s something. In Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, she writes:

When we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part.

I like that. I like that a lot. And I think, as I think of all of this, of the opening to Moore’s poem, “Also Known As”:

If you are more close to the dying
than you would like to be, then it is time for the sky
to grow larger than the earth, than the sea even.
You need to go to that place where your story
is seriously quiet. Nothing in it counts
compared to the things the sky
calls out to: birds, clouds, the occasional cypress
that has reached beyond itself.

What is this if not restoration? What is it if not a reminder that there is a world we live in, one where, if we make ourselves small or quiet enough to listen or observe or pay attention, we might notice that, in the smallness we have made of ourselves, we are allowed to participate in a wild largeness, a grandiose goodness? And isn’t this smallness maybe a little more precious than the bigness we are told to become because so many powerful people have made it seem important to be big, their power stemming from an accumulation of things rather than a stepping away from their belief in the unlimited and into a recognition of the beautiful, humbling notion of one’s limitations in a world that reminds us every day, if we seek to be reminded, that there is more community in fragility than there is in exceptionalism.

Or think of this poem, “What to Write When a Landscape Is Too Beautiful,” from the same book today’s poem is from:

You do not need to say red poopies,
or even, silver light after rain.
God forgive me all pettiness:
olive trees, olive trees, olive trees.

Setting aside the fact that one of the things I love most about Moore’s poetry is his absolute obsession with olive trees, seeing as the book that today’s poem is from mentions the phrase olive tree at least a dozen times, what I love, too, about this short poem is part of what I love about today’s — not just the olives, but the reminder that to love even just one small thing is enough to be reminded of the large brightness that that such seemingly small love can bring. That reminder, that something small is enough — that is what I love. One tragedy of empire — of so many tragedies — is the way it makes us live our lives thinking nothing is enough. What kind of awfulness is that? It’s the kind of awfulness that might make you fail to enjoy the sugared, textured underside of a cookie bitten on a cool summer night while you walk past the dog park, where one dog is small enough to stand directly underneath a larger one, and where both dogs are willing enough to chase the same ball.

And I love, too, part of Moore’s story that I feel must relate — it must, mustn’t it? — to today’s poem. When he was 25 and teaching during the Vietnam War, Moore experienced the tragedy of losing two of his students to that same war. They were drafted, trained, and then killed. In an act of solidarity and protest, Moore refused his teacher’s deferment from the draft, knowing he would then be drafted as a result, and, when that draft call came, he subsequently refused to fight in the war. Because of that refusal, he spent nearly a year in federal prison. There’s a long poem he wrote (discussed beautifully in an old essay of Katrina Vandenberg’s) that is about this experience. It begins:

I know it sounds too much like poetry,
But it was dusk that made me a felon,
A winter evening in Moline, Illinois.
The next day I quoted Whitman
To my draft board, “Dismiss
Whatever insults your own soul,”
And sent my draft card back to them.

Isn’t there, in these lines, something about smallness? Something about the ordinary act of walking at dusk, of sending a card in the mail? And isn’t there something about how empire can punish such small acts with massive consequences — nearly a year of one’s freedom, completely gone? And yet, in there, isn’t there something, too, about what power such small acts must have, if they are met with such brutality by the full force of empire? And so, in such smallness — isn’t there something large?

Such questions remind me of another line at the heart of Ali Smith’s How to Be Both:

When you’ve nothing at least you have all of it.

It’s a cheeky sentence, uttered by the protagonist’s mother and then repeated a few times throughout the novel. It’s cheeky for its playfulness, for its way of finding a bit of light in harder times. It’s cheeky, too, because of the way, after reading it, I’ve found myself looking back on a phrase like nothing is enough and saying to myself it is enough, isn’t it! It is a sentence that has grown on me lately and deeply, probably because of its playfulness, as I’ve found myself substituting words into the sentence. When you’ve yourself at least you have all of you. When you’ve one tiny thing at least you have one tiny thing. Something like that. These small phrases of small truths. We hold on to them — or at least I do — when the world, or what we have made grow within it, feels larger than it should. 

And it does feel larger, at times, than it should. In Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh writes:

The availability of enormous quantities of content obscures the basic uniformity of its creation.

And in Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser mentions capitalism’s “relentless drive to limitless accumulation,” and argues:

We must make the question of growth…a political question, to be decided via multi-dimensional reflection.

And in Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff characterizes the mindset of billionaires as those who “must only be satisfied with an infinity of choice and absolute liberty.”

So yes: the world often feels larger than it should. Think about all the emails you’ve received in the time you’ve spent reading this, and all the emails you had to sift through to find this one (thank you, then, for even searching for it — a tall task, I know). And think about how these words that I’m writing are a kind of content, a word that will always make me cringe, a kind of content amidst massive piles and litanies and scrolls of other content — this largeness of seemingly infinite choice and choicelessness that we move within, sometimes without thinking, and sometimes with thinking, and sometimes to prevent ourselves from thinking. Large world it is. A large world getting larger. And it is within that imposed largeness that we come to our ideas of what is true and what is valuable. And what, too, is just.

I say all that to also acknowledge that I could understand, perhaps, someone’s inclination to turn away from a poem such as today’s. To dismiss it as something even too plainspoken, or false. I think the empire that Moore speaks against in this poem today is an empire that makes us more easily dismissive. Quicker to ridicule. And yet, it is true that small stars don’t actually shine brighter than larger stars.

But still, what I notice in today’s poem — especially when I consider not an idealized politics, but a lived-in politics, an act of protest against a seemingly indomitable force, and how hopeless such a thing can feel, (which is why, I believe, such an act of protest is worth doing, because such hopelessness is an awful feeling to hold, this feeling that your smallness is not enough)¹ — is a truth worth holding on to, even when it feels too easy to dismiss. Or maybe and especially because it feels too easy to dismiss. Because though it is true that small stars don’t shine brighter than large ones, it is also true that larger stars burn more quickly and don’t last as long. I guess, if you consider the factor of time, then, maybe small stars do shine brighter. They last.

And so think about that, then. Think about what smallness says about power that profit does not. Think about what smallness says about brightness that accumulation does not. Think about what smallness says about longevity that the unlimited does not. When we hear, over and over again, the virtue of profit, or accumulation, or the unlimited, we ascribe value to such things. We say I must be bigger to be better. We say I must expand in order to succeed. And yet, the truths of such statements are only validated by a society that venerates those truths. And that is part of the damage of empire; it becomes a consumptive thing, taking over our bodies and our brains, guiding the back-channel thinking of our every action. I want to cherish this place that this poem makes, this place carved out of the wall of empire, this place where I read that a small life can be beautiful. A place where I read that a small star shines brightest. A place where such a statement is true. Because it is true, isn’t it? When you consider what empire ignores? That this, all of this — this stuff of accumulation and conquest — will go away someday. That the largest star will burn out long before the smallest one ever does. 

Edward Said said that “every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others.” Instead of waiting for an empire to come along and prove his statement wrong, I’d like to turn again to this poem, which proves itself true to me, over and over again.

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Some notes:

1. Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.

2. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

3. 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.

1. A parenthetical phrase within an em-dashed phrase! A tiny pat on my tiny back from my own tiny hand.