Good News from Hell: The Short-Short Poems of Thomas McGrath, Bert Meyers, and Gene Frumkin

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Here's one of the most striking poems I've ever heard, and it's all of two words:

Good News from Hell!

Central
Heating!

This poem by Thomas McGrath epitomizes the art of composing short-short verse: concision, precision, and nerve. The three poets I'll be discussing each possessed these characteristics, yet with unique sensibilities. Each of the three wrote longer poems, yet their short-short poems (which I'm arbitrarily limiting to no more than six lines) demonstrate as much, if not more, artistry as their longer work.

Thomas McGrath (1916-1990) taught at Los Angeles State College from 1951 to 1954, when he was fired for not cooperating with the House Un-Americaqn Activities Committee. It was while in L.A. he befriended and taught Bert Meyers and Gene Frumkin. McGrath is perhaps best known for his book-length poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, but he wrote short-short poems throughout his life. His short poems at times resemble haiku, aphorism, epigram, footnote, parable, cautionary tale, commentary, joke, and riddle. Often, a subversive humor can be heard, as in "Good News from Hell!" where Hades is spun as offering bourgeoisie comfort. Here are more examples of that subversive wit:

Indian Territory

The Cottonwood
Sends out its smoke signals.
We are surrounded!

Warning

So—
You recognize my footprint . . .
But don't think that you know
Which way I've gone!

Recognizing McGrath's footprint in these short poems, however, is not easy. In an interview with Julia Stein, McGrath calls for "localism": ". . . you have to know where the hell you're at. You have to know where your ass is sitting." He goes on to say the poet should know the local weather, neighborhood, "the color of people's eyes," and "the way they talk." He wants to know, from reading a poem, a sense of the poet's place in the world: "I'd like to know what time of day it is. What's outside the window? What city are you living in? What class do you come from? What do you do for a living? What are your pleasure[s]?" Much of McGrath's poetry provides this, but the shorter poems certainly do not.

Instead, the short-short poems seem to come from nowhere and everywhere. They lack "localism." Nothing is "tied down." "Indian Territory," for example, seems to locate us in the West of old, but then playfully makes nature into the feared enemy. This fear is timeless, universal, rather than located. One could certainly argue that the timeless, placeless quality of McGrath's shorter poems stems from the rootedness of the poet in a time and place, and that could very well be true. Still, the shorter poems have tossed overboard the captain, crew, and anchor. There's a wildness, a love of the spontaneous. Yet these poems can also bear deep emotion, as in "Poem":

How could I have come so far?
(And always on such dark trails!)
I must have traveled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved.

Though not of the "Deep Image" school, McGrath certainly knew how to use imagery. Here, the last line surprises us as the traveler's light comes not, as expected, from a star, but from the face.

Why isn't McGrath's work—short and long--better known? No doubt his revolutionary politics, his distaste of "pobiz," and his cantankerous nature all contribute to his neglected status. Yet McGrath's legacy continues, sustained by a small yet avid following.

Part of that legacy was McGrath as poetry teacher. As mentioned, one of those students was Bert Meyers, a "Marsh Street Irregular," that is, one of the poets who haunted the McGrath house on Marsh Street. Meyers (1928-1979) died at fifty-one, of lung cancer. Though he never attended college, Meyers was admitted to graduate school at Claremont College on the strength of his poetry. He later taught at Pitzer College. He published several books of poetry during his life. His collected poems, In a Dybbuk's Raincoat (Univ. of New Mexico Press) was finally published in 2007. Here are two short poems from "Images—for Odette" (his wife):

II

Shadows rise like water,
white fences comb their hair.

IX

After the rain
a streetlight hangs
the shadow of trees
like laundry.

These are quieter poems than much of McGrath's shorter work, poems much more "tied down" to a place and time, accomplishing that "localism" McGrath called for. Yet, in a group of unpublished poems called "Haiku—Various," Meyers reveals that same McGrathian swiftness and wildness:

all night long crickets
break their bottles in the dark;
men also seem to sing.

Meyers' short poems often rely on the image—much more so than McGrath—to provide the engine, as when the streetlight hangs tree shadow like laundry. That domestic act, hanging clothes to dry, here makes the shadow both familiar and surreal. How can a shadow be laundry? Who would wear such a thing? Do I?

Not only the images unsettle the reader in Meyers' haiku; there's a subtle, wry commentary that also gives the poems their bite: McGrath's "What's outside your window?" Crickets break their bottles—which must be laden with song. Yet if men also sing, there's a "seem" in the last line. Perhaps human singing isn't as sweet? If they too break bottles, could theirs be literal ones, unlike the figurative bottles of the crickets?

Meyers also employed direct statement in his haiku:

It makes me angry—
in vacant lots sunflowers
grow taller than men.

This poem opens with a declaration of anger—something not usually seen in haiku. The anger isn't at the sunflowers, though, which thrive where humans cannot. Rather, the anger is over the neglect that stunts human growth—physical, emotional, and spiritual. All this in three lines.

In "Sunflowers," this image takes on the role of victim:

No one spoke to the sunflowers,
those antique microphones
in the vacant lot.
So they hung their heads
and, slowly, fell apart.

Rarely do commas—one before and after "slowly" in the last line—play a crucial role in a poem. Here they slow the decomposing of the sunflowers, which die from lack of contact. Once again, the poem subtly comments on the world through use of a simple image.

Meyers' poems often appear simple, yet that apparent simplicity can mislead. This is true of "Lullaby, " quiet, as the title suggests, yet chilling:

Lullaby
1963,
Cuban missile crisis

Go to sleep my daughter
go to sleep my son
once this world was water
without anyone

What eerie words of comfort. The use of rhyme and syllabics give the poem a Mother Goose-like quality, and the words seem to provide consolation--humans might wipe themselves off the planet, but there will still be a world of water, as it was in the beginning. Thus will the nuclear apocalypse remove all trace of those who threatened life, while the oceans, from whence all life came, might regenerate new life. Meyers once wrote that beneath the "clear and finished" sheen of his poetry, ". . . anxiety remains like a monster beneath the clear surface . . . ." The monster of human destructiveness certainly lurks beneath "Lullaby."

Bert Meyers' death at the young age of fifty-one no doubt accounts for the main reason so few know of his poetry. One can only hope that his collected, In a Dybbuk's Raincoat, will help rectify this.

Like Meyers, Gene Frumkin (1928-2007) was a "Marsh Street Irregular." Frumkin has written fondly of those evenings: "Frequently, Tom and his wife Alice asked us over to share a meal and try out ideas into some part of the night. . . . It was all a Socratic banquet and the savor of it still remains alive in the buds." Perhaps the sign of a great poetry teacher is that his students write nothing like him. Frumkin's short-short poems are vastly different from McGrath's, as well as Meyers'.

In a note about his poems in the 1970 issue of Crazy Horse, a poetry journal founded and edited by McGrath, Frumkin writes with concern that his recent work may seem "blurred" or on the "margins of intelligibility." He worries that his inclusion of "the privacies and surrealities" might "obstruct the sense of the poem" rather than "enhance it." Nine years later, with the publication of a chapbook entitled Loops (San Marcos Press, 1979) consisting of twenty-five pages of short-short poems, Frumkin is no longer worried about those "margins of intelligibility." In fact, in the preface, he warns of "sometimes thumbing one's nose at meaning . . . ."

Frumkin tells us: ". . . Loops was composed on the basis of non-sequitors, incongruities, and misconceptions. . . . These poems spoof, but they are serious in their spoofing." To add to the playfulness of the poems, they contain no punctuation, though at times extra spacing implies a pause. The poems are four to six lines long, each uniquely shaped, separated by three asterisks.

Here are some examples of Frumkin's "loops":

I thought strongly of God and was not
satisfied It was like thinking of a
particular moment nine years from now
One must feel God in the bones you said
If so
He is a mild Pentecost in my left knee

***

The grasshopper has alighted on my porch
I invite him to enter the house
He does
I leap to the rosebush
and rest for a while

The tone is conversational, reflective, whimsical, addressing all manner of issues, from God, to love, to what lands on the porch. Think of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein chatting at a diner with a jukebox playing a sax solo by Franz Kafka. In the above loop, the grasshopper takes on the role of the human, and the human leaps to the rosebush. There's often a surprise in the closing line—or should one say loop—as in this poem:

My birth certificate is fictitious
as verified by scholars and critics
who specialize in such study Now I cling
to a spurious notebook
Whatever has occurred to me
is white and pocked with dogprints

The "white and pocked with dogprints" implies the notebook and yet also the accidental, the unknown. This unknown pervades Loops, where the writer, freed from the burden of making meaning, allows meaning, if it must be made, to make its own way. Frumkin foreshadows L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, yet with influences of deep image, "leaping" poetry, surrealism, and philosophical aphorism. This next loop leans more toward the philosophical, yet undercuts it in the last line:

Scholars and critics agree surrealism
is a trope of incoherence Language
must communicate like an orderly column of troops
or at least like a tropical night
The sunflowers nod their heads then drop off

There's that subversive wit, which we saw in McGrath. Frumkin never included Loops in any of his many poetry collections. Whatever the reason, Loops bears evidence of an original mind at play, one not easily characterized or labeled by poetry critics. This difficulty of tying his aesthetic to any one poetry camp explains one reason for his lack of recognition.

The need of public recognition never drove Thomas McGrath, Bert Meyers, or Gene Frumkin. They wrote shorter poems for the same reason they wrote poems of longer length—a poem is a poem is a poem. The good news from hell is that while these three poets are, in the world of American poetry, largely invisible, their work, relegated to the infernal regions, continues to generate heat.