Ronald Wallace

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Writers Try Short Shorts!

Part II

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A comparison of the world's best prose poem of the last twenty-five years (according to me) with the world's best short short story (according to Florida State University in 1996) serves further to distinguish the short short as a literary form. The prose poem is Carolyn Forché's poem, "The Colonel." Forché, I recall from a visit she made to Wisconsin some years ago, commented that "The Colonel" wasn't originally meant to be a poem at all; it was a scrap of notes that got accidentally wedged in the manuscript of The Country Between Us. When her publisher found the "notes" and praised the "poem," she decided to retain it in the book. At any rate, I've designated it the world's best prose poem, at least for purposes of comparison. It's dated May, 1978, and it was written in response to Forché's visit to El Salvador.

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Perhaps the first question to ask is whether this is a poem at all. Forché said that, originally at least, it wasn't. It's written in sentences, not lines, and seems to be a piece of prose. How is it a poem? One might start with the language: it's in blunt, declarative sentences, relentless, unvarying, as if trapped in its own grammar, reflecting the sense of entrapment in the situation and theme. But the language is also beautiful, lyrical and musical. The sound of the words is important in and of itself. There's considerable internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration: "The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house;" "Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace." This is the kind of language one finds more readily in lyric poems than in short stories or essays. The vivid evocative imagery is also typical of poetry--the pattern of food imagery, for example, coffee, sugar, lamb, wine, mangoes, salt, bread, ears like dried peach halves. The poem is structured on a juxtaposition of the normal and everyday, the beautiful and savory--food, TV, family--with the inhuman and horrifying, the grotesque and unsavory--violence, murder, death. The juxtaposition creates a sense of unreality, a surrealism in what is a very casually described and realistic scene: daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol, and a man's scooped-out kneecaps. The fact that the cop show is in English suggests America's complicity in the scene. The tone, the author's attitude toward the subject, further underlines the horror--it's all reported in an almost neutral, factual way; the restraint, the enforced objectivity, intensifies the emotion. It's a bleak world in which the dead ears are still "alive" in a way, still bearing witness to atrocities. Thus, the piece has many of the elements of a poem--lyrical language important for itself; vivid evocative imagery; an attention to subtleties of tone; surprising metaphors.

It does, of course, also tell a story, but not in the way a typical short story would. Rather than a character in the story, or a narrator, or the author, telling the story, this piece evokes a story. It's an evocation of a world, a mood, a theme. Forché is talking more to herself than to us; we overhear her. If a narrator were to tell this story it would have a very different feel and tone: "I went to this colonel's house in El Salvador. We had dinner and I met his daughter and son. At the end of the dinner he spilled some ears onto the floor." Of course, what this version would also lack is the rhythm of poetry. The word "verse" comes from the Latin "verso" meaning a turning. Forché's poem is characterized by a turning and returning, a rhythm of repetition, a recurrence of grammatical and syntactical structures: "I was;" "His daughter filed;" "There were;" "the moon swung;" "Some of the ears;" "Some of the ears." This rhythm of repetition, as opposed to a rhythm of continuity, is typical of poetry.

Although such simplistic distinctions between poetry and prose are always suspect, they seem useful in distinguishing Forché's poem from Brian Hinshaw's short short story that follows. Forché's piece isn't, of course, a lyric poem; although its lyrical elements ensure its status as poetry, it would lose a great deal by being broken up into lines. It would lose some of the starkness of the prose, some of the impact of the juxtapositions, and some of the neutrality of the tone. It is, I would argue, a prose poem: the language and rhythm and voice of poetry in the shape and tone of prose.

Brian Hinshaw's "The Custodian," the World's Best Short Short Story for 1996 according to Sundog Magazine, is, by contrast, more clearly prose.

The Custodian

The job would get boring if you didn't mix it up a little. Like this woman in 14-A, the nurses called her the mockingbird, start any song and this old lady would sing it through. Couldn't speak, couldn't eat a lick of solid food, but she sang like a house on fire. So for a kick, I would go in there with my mop and such, prop the door open with the bucket, and set her going. She was best at the songs you'd sing with a group--"Oh Susanna," campfire stuff. Any kind of Christmas song worked good too, and it always cracked the nurses if I could get her into "Let It Snow" during a heat spell. We'd try to make her to take up a song from the radio or some of the old songs with cursing in them, but she would never go for those. Although once I had her do "How Dry I Am" while Nurse Winchell fussed with the catheter.

Yesterday, her daughter or maybe granddaughter comes in while 14-A and I were partways into "Auld Lang Syne" and the daughter says "oh oh oh" like she had interrupted scintillating conversation and then she takes a long look at 14-A lying there in the gurney with her eyes shut and her curled-up hands, taking a cup of kindness yet. And the daughter looks at me the way a girl does at the end of an old movie and she says "my god," says "you're an angel," and now I can't do it anymore, can hardly step into her room.

The question I initially posed about "The Colonel" was whether it was really a poem. Maybe it was a short short story. The question one might ask about "The Custodian" is whether it is really a story. Perhaps it's a prose poem. "The Custodian" seems, however, even more clearly a story than "The Colonel" does a poem. The language, for example, which in "The Colonel" is lyrical and dense and important for itself, in "The Custodian" is more idiomatic, conversational, prosy--not lyrical at all. The story is told, not evoked, and the whole is structured on a variant of the classic story form, which moves from a beginning in the middle of things, through some exposition and a rising action, to a turning point, climax, and resolution. The short short story is too short to follow that whole curve, so it often follows a variant (and this may be one major distinction between the short short and the regular short story). Structured more like the joke, the short short often begins in the middle of things, skips the exposition or summary, proceeds with the rising action to, if not a turning point or climax, an epiphany or revelation, which is often like the punch line of a joke.

"The Custodian," for example, starts in the middle of things by introducing the main character and the job that defines him, and how it might get boring unless he "mixed it up a bit." Examples of "mixing it up" follow--how he can make his patient sing any song, how he makes fun of her, how her daughter misinterprets what he's doing as loving care and so unintentionally shames him that he'll never do it again. The custodian has an epiphany (a punch line that suggests the joke's on him), a spiritual revelation that changes him. This narrative curve distinguishes Hinshaw's short short story from both Forché's prose poem, and from a regular short story.

Further, character is important to Hinshaw, in ways it isn't to Forché. Forché, the author herself, is the speaker of her poem, and she's talking as much to herself as to us; a character in the story is the speaker of "The Custodian" and he's talking to us, the audience. In Forché's prose poem, the colonel is a type, and the speaker is our eyes and ears--there's no real growth or change or development on the part of anyone in the poem. In Hinshaw's short short story, the narrator is an individual--the reader gets a clear sense of him through his idiomatic speech, his attitude to his job, and his sense of humor. And the narrator learns something about himself and life in general, and changes as a result. The daughter's misinterpretation of his actions makes him see his patient's humanity and his own crassness, and he feels he will never be the same again.

So, to summarize the differences between Forché's prose poem and Hinshaw's short short story: Language is used differently: in Forché, it's an end in itself; in Hinshaw, it's a means to an end. The narrative mode is different: in Forché, the narrative is evoked through a rhythm of repetition--we overhear the narrator; in Hinshaw, the story is told through a rhythm of continuity--the narrator talks more directly to us. The concern for character is different: in Forché, the characters are types and less important for themselves than for the emotions they evoke; in Hinshaw, the characters are more important as individuals. The structure is different: Forché moves by repetition and juxtaposition; Hinshaw uses a variant of the classic story form, moving from the middle of an action, through several scenes, to a revelation or epiphany for the central character.

Of course, it might be argued that these distinctions may just be true of Forché and Hinshaw; they may not characterize prose poems and short short stories in general. In fact, my students at Wisconsin and I test them every time we read a new short piece or write one of our own. We also test distinctions between the short short story and the regular story, noting differences of character, style, narrative mode, tone, pacing, and dialogue, in a semester-long course I teach annually. What began as an experiment ten years ago--a one-time-only "special topics" course--has now become a permanent part of the undergraduate creative writing curriculum. Mildred I. Reid and Delmar E. Bordeaux, in Writers Try Short-Shorts! (All Known Types with Examples) long ago argued the virtues of such a course.

It is, however, to the beginning writer that the short short story has especially endeared itself. He finds this brief form a valuable proving ground for assimilating fiction techniques in a most economical manner. Here he gets the opportunity to try his wings on brief flights in preparation for the longer soarings necessary for the short story or the novel.

With the short short story, the beginning writer finds also a ready market for his work. An established name is not needed to sell a short short even to the best of markets. All that is required is that the story itself be good, and all markets are wide open to the most obscure unknown.

For these reasons the short short story recommends itself highly also to high school and college classes in creative writing. In addition, the teacher of such a class finds the short short story, once he understands its principles, simple to explain. Assignments in this form are easy to correct and criticize, and the enthusiasm which students show for the short short makes the teaching of it a pleasure.

There are other reasons for teaching and writing the short short. Over the years I have found that many beginning fiction writers, unable to sustain a narrative for more than eight to ten pages, try, nevertheless, to do in those pages what Flannery O'Connor, or John Updike, or Joyce Carol Oates, or William Faulkner did in thirty to forty pages. The result is often a truncated, unfinished piece. The short short form encourages a young writer to match more appropriately his or her subject matter to the space available. Using published short shorts as models for beginning students is perhaps more realistic than expecting the students to emulate the longer masterpieces that appear in most of the college fiction anthologies.

But even for more advanced writers, the short short can prove salutary. Not only does it promote economy and precision of language; it can open up rich new areas of subject matter and mode. The length of the short short, I have found, encourages young writers to experiment more, to explore wild and often bizarre territory. Without the sometimes daunting pressure of having to sustain a narrative for twenty or more pages, students are more likely to pursue odd premises and take risky chances, moving outside the known and autobiographical to the unknown and fanciful. The range and variety of theme and subject matter I find in my short short classes far exceeds that of my regular fiction workshops in which the same kinds of stories tend to show up semester after semester. Short short classes always seem to promote the surprising and unusual.

Of course, it is not only students who remain intrigued with the possibilities of the short short. Many established fiction writers today have tried their hand at the short short, and many poets have used the form, as I have, to segue into fiction. Short shorts provide important links in the sequence of stories I recently published as Quick Bright Things, and I currently find myself writing a novel. And not a one-page novel, either.

Short short stories have been around at least as long as people have had the language to make them, and they will probably survive as far into the future as one can imagine. Their special popularity today may, in part, be due to the speed at which we live, in which the attention span of "one sitting" by which Poe defined the short story, has become shorter and shorter. But the great short short story expands well beyond its minimalist limitations.

Jerome Stern, who administered the World's Best Short Short Story competition for years before his untimely death, once described what, for him, a winning short short must do. He compared reading it to entering, on a sunny day, a dark room in which a party was going on. At first his eyes, unaccustomed to the dark, would see almost nothing, just movement and shape. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he would begin to see people, and then details of furnishing and decor. Every time he left the room for a breath of air, and then returned, he would see new things--the party and the contents of the room would in some ways be familiar, but would also have changed. He could go back again and again, and always find something new; it would never be quite the same. Invite him to that party, that room, he said, and he'd be happy. You might even end up with a hundred dollars and a crate of Florida oranges.

Originally published: "Writers Try Short Shorts!" The Writer's Chronicle 33.6 (2001): 40-46.

The article continues with Part III which presents the selected bibliography and an excerpt from Wallace's Quick Bright Things. Choose Part I to return to the beginning of the article.