Orlando White

ON ONE WORD POEMS

At first glance this one-word poem appears disorienting; it takes a second for our eyes to adjust to it. Perhaps it’s because as viewers the extra y and e skew our perception a little. So we find ourselves scanning the word back and forth as if in a REM (Rapid Eye Movement) state. But what makes this poem effective too is its play on a palindrome. A palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same forward and backward. Some examples are “toot,” “minim,” “never odd or even,” or “draw o coward.” In his one-word poem, Saroyan gets us to understand his interaction with language. His use of a palindrome gets us, as readers, to look closely at language, to literally eye the word, but then he adds those extra letters and suddenly the poem becomes visible as an image. In Ian Daly’s essay, “You Call That Poetry?!” Saroyan says, “I got intrigued by the look of individual words; the word ‘guarantee,’ for instance, looks to me a bit like a South American insect.” The one-word poemgets us to think about the word as picture and reminds us, as poets, that to develop the mind’s eye we must open ourselves up to seeing language and to feel the energy of a letter. The origin of the A, for example, derives from a pictogram dating back to the 11th century in the Middle East. The A is an ox-head, and if you rotate it until its stems point upward you will see the ox’s muzzle in the area between the apex and crossbar. Once we are aware that the letter is a picture, it’s up to us, as writers, to imagine the ox ploughing the field of the page, getting it ready for us to plant and expand our imagination.