‘funeral for my mama’
— Reneé Bibby
I am not myself a poet, but I discuss poetry quite often with my students, whose fever pitch of anxiety about poetry is rivaled only by their terror about math. There are many great writers and poets out there who will take a more elaborate and eloquent analysis of poetry, for today I want only to talk about form. About the poems that revel in the unbound space of words on a page the way that fiction cannot. Poems like Zein Sa’dedin’s ‘funeral for my mama.’ Not a single comma or capital letter breaks the flow of thought. The breath between words stretch wide, a tension assuaged by a break to the next line. The unusual form won’t scare a novice reader away—the poem is understandable, the emotions raw and tender, and in a method that fiction writers don’t usually get to use, the form is a representation of the content; grief fractures the sentences on the page. Every line break, white space, and word supports the sadness so profoundly it becomes, in many ways, a perfect example of the power of poetry.