Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Small Works by Pam Rehm
Flood Editions, 2005

Pam Rehm’s sixth installment of poems, Small Works, is one of undeniable intimacy and closeness with her and the reader. After reading the 63 pages of this intricately and beautifully woven work, I was handed a piece of Pam Rehm’s mind. It is as if Rehm tore out the pages of her diary, put them in an orderly fashion, put a cover on the top of the stack and handed it to the publishers. The voice of these poems is clearly Rehm herself. The reader closes the book feeling they have met and had deep conversation with Rehm. Her poems are split into two parts, with the second part named “Acts”. Throughout the first collection there are several themes, of dark nature, that run through the poems. Acts has these same threads but in lighter, brighter tones. Memory, possession (and the loss of it), Seasons, and dark versus light, are the themes that Rehm’s unique poetic style work to illuminate and portray.

One of the first reactions when opened to a page of Small Works is how small these works actually are. Here, Rehm inter changes the space between lines, number of lines in the poem, the number of words in each line, but they all resemble each other. By laying out her poems this way, she goes the extra step to connect them all, making each poem physically and mentally alike. The amount of white compared to black ink on the paper causes several effects on how the poem is read. Each line is centered on the page, leaving equal room on the left and right margins and top and bottom of the page. The silence that is created by the lack of space used by the poem allows the reader a more focused attention to the words. Lines that are only one word seem to carry more weight than others. Instead of racing through the lines to finish a seemingly never ending poem, just to find the meaning at the end, Rehm’s styles almost forces the reader to savor each word. Like a chocolate candy with a caramel inside, we want so badly to bite through and get to the sweet ending rather than patiently wait for the outside to melt away. Each of Rehm’s candies reward us with the sweet core, only after melting away the outside.

Her style of writing is so pre meditated and calculated, specifically made so the reader becomes more interested in the meaning of the poem. In some of the poems Rehm almost tricks the reader into feeling closure on the emotion she has just raised within them by stopping at the beginning of one page, and beginning again on the next. The next page is a continuation of the same idea, but with different motivation. “Bow Down” is one of the poems that Rehm uses this method.

“Bow Down” is spread across five pages, with only 3 of the pages being used in their entirety. On the other pages there are only a mere four lines. This poem could be used to showcase everything that Rehm does to create and define herself as a writer. It has all of her typical themes of love and loss, a breaking heart, memories, and the use of nature. This poem is also typical of her poetic style, short, curt and with plenty of white space to allow the readers thoughts to grow and get comfortable. With so much white space left on the page the reader is allowed to create and manifest their own nest of thought within the one that Rehm has built and moved on from.

The second page of the poem contains only four lines. Rehm tricks us into believing that the poem has finished, but turning the page we find there is more to the story. Presented in any other format or style, the poem would not be read anything like it is read when laid out in this specific way. When we first believe that Rehm’s thoughts are finished, we are left with a very depressing somber outlook. “With the snow and the trees / everything / appeared to be melting”. ( Rehm, 19) Yet when we turn the page, Rehm takes her sentiment even deeper into her feelings of loss. It is not until the last page that we find the ‘you’ that we had been looking for all along. As the rest of her poems, the reader is forced to ride the waves with Rehm. She does not allow us to draw any true conclusions about what her final thoughts will be.

Although this poem is defining of Rehm’s style, in “Bow Down” we come across italics, which she seldom uses in her poems. Just as her few words cause them to each be weighted more than usual, because her use of italics is only occasional they are that much more powerful and moving. The opening lines of “Bow Down” knock the wind and expectations out of the reader. “The latch string pulled in / and it was The End” (Rehm, 18 lines 1 & 2). As we read on the first two lines are still trying to settle in our heads. Thunderstruck by the force behind the words we grapple to keep up with the rest of story. By the end of the poem, still chewing the stanzas and barley digesting the context, we realize that those first lines and all the others were not meant to be left behind. Rehm’s style purposefully makes us carry each line with us to the end, where we will find meaning when they are all equally appreciated.

Rehm has a very identifiable pattern throughout the book of great space between lines, centered in the middle of the page, almost as though the poems are hovering slightly above the page, unattached to anything. Maybe this was Rehm intent all along; her poems are not connected to the conventional structure of presentation of a poem. Yet there are some exceptions to Rehm’s usual style. We experience this straying from the norm several times in the first book. Most notably we see this other side of Rehm in the poem “Advent”. At first glance it is as of we are reading a poem written by a different author. Each line is close together, stanzas over ten lines long, opposed to the usual two to three lines, one stanza a page. There are still some similarities, the poems are centered and they are spread across an unnecessary amount of pages. (Necessary to Rehm’s style, but unnecessary in other contexts.) Similarly to the rest of the poems in Small Works, Rehm speaks so bluntly in “Advent”. She speaks about absolute truths that she has learned through life experience in her other poems but here in “Advent”, she seems to be speaking about truths not about life, but rather of her writing. This poem is one of the most clearly reader-addressed poems in the entire work. It is almost like a lecture Rehm is giving about her poetic style: “Should you turn away your eyes / the mystery is mine / All subtlety and mischief / I will not be without” These opening lines are clearly referring to all of the works we just read. Ironically enough “Advent” is the last poem of the first section of Small Works. Advent, the beginning or start of something ends the first part. I believe that in this poem Rehm is asking us to read the poems in Acts in a different, better way. She warns us that ‘secrets are ubiquitous’ and that ‘nothing is more portentous / that the silence of neglecting / effort”. Rehm doesn’t only address the readers, or maybe even her critiques, but possibly the one responsible for all the loss and darkness she feels in the preceding poems. “Advent” is wonderfully appropriate to end the first book. It has great closure for both the reader and Rehm.

We start “Acts” with a breath of fresh air. The majority of the poems in the first part were dealing with darkness, and winter. They had on overall downcast feeling that is not seen as prevalent in “Acts”. “Acts” takes up about 1/3 of the poems in Small Works. Her use of the title Acts is interesting in light of religious undertones in the first book. She makes several Christian biblical references that are seen more and more often leading up to the book of “Acts” (which is a book in the New Testament). Here Rehm truly shows her skill in choosing the titles of her poems. In the first section the reader tends to not consider the titles with much concern. Than we come to Acts and each title is act of something, whether they are an emotion, a thing, or an act of some kind. The reader is forced to consider the title while reading the poems. We face the difficult task of molding the two into one. For example in “Acts of Vexation”, I was perplexed at what the correlation was between the movie of the poem and the title. I ran into my first road block at the start of the poem “The only thing under the sun / I can run to / is Ecclesiastes”. Upon further examination I realized that which I was doing, was the point of the title. Over and over again Rehm almost tricks the reader into contemplating her works and taking them with more than a grain of salt. We have no choice other than to follow her lead. Rehm’s is of a sneaky nature, causing the reader to do what she wishes without them even being aware. The ‘hidden’ meanings are calculated to the utmost degree.

Pam Rehm has a particular, meticulously thought out and purposeful way of writing her poems. The structure causes an effect of the reader taking in each word with more care than usual. Her diary-like collection, Small Works, is just a taste of Rehm in her element. Small Works shows us the raw emotion of Rehm in a time of loss and pain. Her poems contain cold hard truths that she seems to have learned the hard way. The reading of Pam Rehm’s small works is a delightful and insightful experience that can not be replaced with anything else.

Further Reading by Pam Rehm:

Rehm, Pam.Polluck. Buffalo: Leave Books, 1992.

Rehm, Pam. Piecework. New York: The Garlic Press, 1992.

Rehm, Pam. The Garment in Which No One Had Slept. New York: Burning Deck, 1993.