In Praise of Fragments

Shall I make a house with sticks?


A house of breath
For the freckled butterfly.

Will it come to me?


I grip a fistful of paper
There is ink on my fingernails

On the whorls of my palm.



What burns like paper?
Only the soul.


from In Praise of Fragments (Nightboat, 2020)

In my classroom, I begin every class I teach with a small journal prompt. I put a question on the board, sometimes related to the forthcoming lesson, sometimes not, and ask my students to respond to it however they want for five minutes. Sometimes the questions are playful — which character would you be in a stereotypical horror movie — and sometimes they’re reflective, like who is the first person you want to talk to, even if you don’t talk to them, in a moment of need?

The other day, I asked my class: If you could bottle up one memory or moment from your life, and revisit it in perfect detail whenever you wanted, what would it be and why?

I was struck, listening to my students, by the consistent ordinariness of their answers. The way one student wanted to remember a specific season in a specific country, playing baseball in a field for one long afternoon. And the way another wanted to bottle up another friend’s laughter, even when it felt quick or loose or dumb, even when it felt like nothing much at all.

I think I’m thinking of this because I spent some time this week with Meena Alexander’s In Praise of Fragments — published in 2020, two years after her death in 2018, and composed, as Leah Souffrant writes in her afterword, “in what we now know would be the final years of her life.” In that same afterword, Souffrant describes Alexander’s work as “greeting the unsayable of the soul…with such careful attention.” What a remarkable, beautiful description. And part of what Alexander greets in this collection is memory itself. One of my favorite moments from the book is when she writes, in one long, fragmented piece:

Sometimes I feel I am a shadow with two heads. One head in Manhattan, the other in a childhood place that exists inside me.

It’s an absolutely attention-driven, curious, wildly thoughtful collection. And there’s something about it — perhaps its presentness, perhaps its fragmentation — that makes you feel like you are holding a life in your hands, rather than a book. And it’s that idea — the idea of a life — that turns me toward the first lines of today’s poem:

Shall I make a house with sticks?

I could spend forever thinking about a poem that begins with such a question. This is one of the first poems of Alexander’s collection, and it feels as if the question is essentially asking: Shall I live a life? Because what is a life other than a house with sticks? What is a life other than something that may or may not feel solid and present in the moment, but, as you look back, shakes and sways with the blank space of memory, with what is left behind and out and away, with the open windows of a room once lived in but never finished? Isn’t that a life? Isn’t that sometimes, at least, how it feels to live?

And yes, as Meena Alexander continues, maybe a poem — or a life — is:

A house of breath

There is so much I love about this poem. I love the phrase whorls on my palm. If you say it aloud, your mouth thanks you. It does what it perhaps hasn’t done in a long time. It builds a ball of air along the roof of itself. And I love the tenderness in asking, of the “freckled butterfly”: Will it come to me?

But what I love especially is the way Alexander’s poem enacts the house built with sticks. I love the white space and the emptiness that moves between the lines of this poem. I say moves because I imagine, if this poem were a house of breath or a house built with sticks, that wind might be moving through it. Or water. Or some kind of life allowed in, or allowing itself in. Yes, turn this poem on its side, and it is a house of sticks with a sky as its roof.

And then the poem ends:

What burns like paper?
Only the soul.

The power of these lines is in the fact that they speak to two seemingly disparate ideas — to flame and fragility, life and death, spark and ash. I read them and feel my life as a balled up piece of paper. And I feel the flame, too, the quick spark of it. The burn. And then I know that I am here — right here, writing this — in the midst of that flame, that glowing orange dance with a hint of blue at its center. That’s where I am. And just as soon, just as quickly as a spark lit to flame — well, you know what happens.

And so I think I am turning to today’s poem because I am wondering if this is what a life looks like. Look again at today’s poem. Don’t even read the words. Look at the structure of it, the space it takes up on the page. Look at what is filled and what is not. Look at it — intentionally and perhaps unintentionally fragmented — and wonder if this is what a life looks like, if this is what we are, a bundle of memories with space in between. And questions. So many questions.

I just finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, and there’s a moment toward the novel’s end when the narrator writes a letter to Naoko, a woman he loves who has gone away into the mountains to recover and get better — to learn to be with a mind that feels as if it acts against her. The two of them — the narrator and Naoko — had lost a friend, Kizuki, to suicide years before, and in the letter, the narrator writes:

I felt guilty that I hadn't thought of Kizuki right away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. Back in my room, though, I came to think of it this way: two and a half years have gone by since it happened, and Kizuki is still seventeen years old. Not that this means my memory of him has faded. The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. What I want to say is this: I'm going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can't explain it any better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say.

I was so struck by this paragraph, struck by that phrase — Kizuki is still seventeen years old, and struck by that idea that what we share with others can vanish, can never come back. It reminds me of how Meena Alexander’s book begins with a prelude where she writes:

All of us live with ghosts.
This is part of what makes us human, the flesh of the invisible takes up residence in us.

We do live with ghosts. They sleep in our memory and surprise us in our present moments. They are forever the age they were when they were lost. Still seventeen. Still seventy. And though they remain, in some ways, they are also a testament to what can vanish — what can never come back. In a way, they remind us that we live, that we remain.

Maybe part of life is this combination of verbs — verbs like staying and remaining, and verbs like vanishing and forgetting, verbs like remembering and longing, verbs like grieving and losing, verbs like emptying and decaying, verbs like going and leaving, verbs like moving and wandering, verbs like loving and wishing, verbs like dying, yes, and verbs like living, verbs like living still.

And so, when I think about the idea of the fragment, I think of how much my conception of it has changed. Or, I guess, I think of how that word — fragment — speaks to so much. We live a fragmented life, a life of fragmented attention, a life that parcels our time into fragments and makeshifts us through the day. And, in that sense, a fragmented narrative — a story told with so much white space, a story that feels disassociative, or cut short — can enact the feeling of the sudden strangeness of living in the modern world.

But I also think about how, regardless of modernity’s effect on our collective attention and awareness, we live fragmented lives by the design of our humanness, ones that are always reaching back to piece together a past that becomes, the moment it happens, impossible to piece together. In this sense, a fragment can be an enactment of attention. This feels both tragic and true. Though sustained attention feels like a whole thing, it often clues us in to what we are missing, or what we have missed — the wholeness of our incompletion. You sit by the window, watching the pigeons circle from ground to rooftop and back, and you think of all you’ve forgotten. You, wanting to remember the color of someone’s hair as the sun touched it at a certain hour, reach back into the past, and come up with only air — no light to shine through it.

That’s a fragment, isn’t it? A fragment of love, a fragment that leaves a soft ache in your chest. A fragment nonetheless. And perhaps what’s sad about this world is that it makes certain fragmentations — ones of distraction and curation especially — so obvious to us. We know our attention is fragmented, and we know our lives — if we choose to portray them in such a way — can be fragmented into squares on a phone, can be chosen and arranged and erased at will. Such applications of fragmentation try, I think, to make us convinced of a wholeness that will never exist. Or maybe they make us forget that it’s okay to pay attention and witness the white space of our memory, what has vanished and what has gone away, what has been missed and lost, and what still remains. I think of my students, wishing to remember the most ordinary things in a world that so often pushes us to only think of the extraordinary and then be distracted for the rest of the time that sits between. When we are distracted into a more fleeting fragmentation, we forget that we are already fragmented by our humanness — fragmented and fragile, but together enough to fill in the space between.

The realization of the latter offers, to me, a pathway to compassion. Just recently, I read a conversation in Image Journal between the poet Shane McCrae and the theologian Rowan Williams. In it, McCrae makes the point:

Engaging with poetry helps people stay vital.

And in response, Williams discusses the notion of difficulty in poetry — the difficulty of de-centering oneself in order to fully extend one’s generosity to a text or a person. He says:

It’s perhaps putting it a bit strongly, but there has to be a sense in which poetry is about a path to compassion.

I think that’s a beautiful point. It’s like saying fragile and fragmented, we continue — but only if we pay attention, if we acknowledge, if we listen, if we see what is in between: those gaps of us, what we must span bridges across in order to connect our fragmentations.

So yes, praise the fragment. Praise the fragment that is the result of attention. Praise the fragment of loss. Praise the fragment of forgetting and then remembering. Praise the fragment that gives rise to the a-ha moment. Praise the fragment of each page turned as you flip back through a book. Praise the fragment between each heart beat. Praise the disordered fragments of a day. Praise the long fragment of silence. Praise the fragment of in-between-ness, distance and then intimacy, and then distance again. Praise the brief fragment that is each life, each fragment of ash that comes after fire. And yes, praise the wholeness that love brings, even with — or because of — our fragments.

Some Notes

I think that I may have a long form essay going up in Longreads sometime this coming week — about presentness, vulnerability, illness, and more. Give it a read, maybe, if you stumble across it.

A recurring 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.

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Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

Meena Alexander's "In Praise of Fragments"