Poetry as Aphorism

Let's touch lightly upon the poem as aphorism. Most poets don't deliberately write aphorisms and call them poems, probably because aphorisms are innately stodgy: they flaunt rather than hide their didactic role of summing things up, so that you can't read too many of them in a row without cleansing your palate between doses.

Hint: the aphorism too often can sneak into the last stanza as a way of validating and “clarifying” the good intentions of the poem.

However, the (often hidden) aphoristic tendencies of poetry can be fun to mess around with as a kind of literary device. I would even go so far as to say a well-placed aphorism can completely change the “body chemistry” of the entire poem, even if in itself it seems innocent of any such intention.

Here are a few one-liners from Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (died, 1990), ably translated by Paul Merchant in his book Monochords. Ritsos regarded them as daily warm-up exercises.

This bird, how will it teach its song to the fish?

The words left out of the poem are scared.

A cart and a house, with two starved horses You go inside and disappear.
 

To speak constantly about wrongs is like being wrong.

Ritsos was possibly writing one-liners in the tradition of Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) whose tendency was more majestic (tr. by Brooks Haxton in Fragments: the Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus):

The harmony past knowing sounds
more deeply than the known

 
Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so I am as I am not.

A contemporary poet, and there may be many others, who very deftly uses an aphoristic approach (think: summing everything up in the last line) is Lawrence Raab. Here's the final 1 ½ stanzas of his poem “Lost” (Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Fall 2017)

This may be why what's lost
stays lost, and why it can never

be only the actual
letter, or knife, or ring of keys
you've been trying
so hard all day to find.

And here's the stunning final line of one of my favorite poems by Jorie Graham, 'Subjectivity' – a long poem that labored mightily and brought forth a yellow butterfly!

a bit of fact in the light and then just light.

To finish, here's a poem of mine in which I deliberately succumb to the tangled logic that can be the death of a good aphorism.

I feel myself stirring
            into a pot over a fire
                         the ingredients for an aphorism

that will, later,
gradually kill me

when it is matched with something that
          bears a close enough resemblance to it

to obscure (and thus secretly validate)
all the parts of it that are not true.