“No Small Thing” Weaves the Many into the One

“No Small Thing” Weaves the Many into the One https://ift.tt/hWZ52RK

A great poem is a part through which we see the whole, a grain of sand — as Blake said — that is all else too. Concentrating the entire universe into the singularity of “I,” the poet makes the plural, for a moment, one. That is the miracle. 

Gabriel Fried’s No Small Thing contains more than its share of such miracles: works of a quality few living poets can match. Even some of its smaller-scale pieces contain more than their slightness might suggest. Here, for example, is the entirety of “Flier”:

Come to my sermon! 
After school! By the swings! 
Popsicles + Benedictions! 
While supplies last!

All those exclamation marks! Such prodigality with popsicles! The charm here is the chutzpah of the young, an expression as universal as it is individual.

Other poems take similar risks but don’t quite succeed. Too many of these pieces ask too little of themselves, like “Scrap,” which sadly lives up (or down) to its title. Blake also said “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough,” and I wish more of these poems had failed for being too much instead of too little. If I had the vision of Blake, I think I could believe Fried’s title, that there’s no small thing. But looking, as I must, through eyes of mortal clay, some of these poems seem small indeed. 

But I forgive myself for walking past the fragments since there are great works here I’m busy making beelines for. “The Mole,” for instance, is a first-rate poem. A group of boys stands staring at a dead mole on the ground. That little corpse, that singularity of death holding the boys in orbit, prompts the following reflection: 

Who’s to say what best
prepares us for the world
that we will one day
lumber through as
middle managers.
Is it really tenderheartedness?
Or is it sidestepping
the surrounding violences,
redirecting them toward
the unarmored, whose
panicky perfume is
radiant around us,
a splotch of memory
staining the asphalt
where we pick teams,
decide which side
we fight for.

It is a poem about us all, our tenderheartedness and cruelty, our strange divided selves, our sad bullying times. We are a country of extremes, brimming with middle managers but lacking middle ground. 

Many pieces here are similarly somber, elegies if not overtly in that mode. They don’t let us forget how much we have to mourn: disease, sexual predation, atheist grandfathers, racism, all treated without melodrama or self-pity, for which I am grateful; my passions were most stirred by Fried’s dispassion, his heartbreakingly plainspoken reportage, such as in “HIV Triolet”: “I sat in his Wrangler one seedy time. / We were thin for different reasons: / I was fourteen; it was 1989.” 

And then there are the crimes that we commit when we think God is on our side: in “Manifest” we get a kind of anti-ode to our ancestors’ arrogance, “the time we finally reached the western edge / of the continent… when / all we could think to do was turn around, / retrace our steps, in search of what we must have missed[…]” There is great sadness here. What we are grieving isn’t just the sins of manifest destiny, but the sense of wonder that believing in such destiny entailed. What can we feel awe at anymore? Instead of a new star swimming into our ken we’re left with slinking guilt. Instead of wild surmise a shoulder shrug.

But mourning is not all. There’s some transcendence left, as this book knows. We get a schoolyard evangelist who, when he’s at his best, serves us a eucharist of Triscuits and Juicy Juice that has been “blessed with stream water the dogs lay down in,” proving that even snack time can be sacramental. There’s a sense of incredulity in “Questions about an Atheist” that hints at something more, something beyond: “What surprises him in the darkened hallway? / Who crackles Copy that or Ten-four?” It’s Rilke’s question, “Who, if I cried out would hear me among the angelic orders?” 

For Fried the answer can’t be “no one.” His answer is in fact the book’s best single work, “The Majesty of Piero della Francesca.” If I was the Princess Maria Theresia of Thurn and Taxis, I would set Fried up in the Duino Castle and not let him leave until he gave me several dozen more poems like it, poems with a similarly wondrous grace and scope.

The subject is Madonna del Parto, a fresco painting of the pregnant Virgin, an image as provocative as it is holy, “the graphic slit in her dress suggesting the imminence / of a birth she seems poised / to perform herself…” It is an image that constellates, in sacred form, the book’s major fixations: sex, childhood, God. The poem’s pace is so effortless we hardly know the spell that’s being cast until we’re stumbling out of it, rubbing our eyes. Like the speaker in the presence of the painting, we are changed by the poem, “We, who / otherwise might never know / the rapture of true communion” are “granted transcendence for a spell…” 

One of the things the speaker wishes to transcend is his “agnostic hunger for transfiguration.” He laments “not being pregnant,” and expresses a need to overcome the “conventions of the body.” Gender fluidity is a theme right from the book’s first poem, which starts like this:

An “I” that’s plural calls for bifurcated lines, and so we get a poem that is both singular and split, the latest in a long tradition (going as far back as Tiresias) of poet-prophets subverting gender norms. “I am the poet of the woman,” Whitman writes, “the same as the man.” Virginia Woolf said Coleridge said “a great mind is androgynous… He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

Maybe he meant that; maybe he didn’t. What Woolf does not quote is an 1805 notebook entry in which Coleridge asks: “Who that thus lives with a continually-divided Being can remain healthy?”  

Divided, undivided: is there a contradiction here? If so, that contradiction is the very life of poetry, which is a weaving of the many into the one. Our inner divisions may be drawn down strictly gendered lines; we may rejoice, as did Whitman, that we contain multitudes; or we may utter with Iago: “I am not what I am.” In any case, the best poems in this collection make one of the many, and the many one. This is the power of the lyric “I,” the pronoun we all share, the only word in which our beings coalesce as much as individuate.

This book might have been twice as good by being half as long, but in that half are poems I’ll keep returning too because they show me who I am. Such is the paradox. The poems say I am me, and far away someone replies: yes, and you’re me too.

POETRY
No Small Thing
By Gabriel Fried
Four Way Books
Published March 15, 2025