Cleave Poetry

By Editor in Chief Mary Bast

Typically for these blog posts, I search the web for lessons and links relevant to the work we've published. And as a poet I've experimented with poems broken into parts. But I've only found one site that refers to these as "cleave" poems. The Cleave hasn't been active since 2010, but I like the description there of "a poem that is really three poems:"

• two parallel vertical poems (left and right)
• a third horizontal poem that fuses the vertical poems

The verb "cleave" is a perfect label, with its two opposite meanings: (1) "to sever or divide along a natural grain or line" and (2) "to stick fast, to become strongly involved or emotionally attached to."

Last year's Poetry Editor Kaye Linden and I particularly love Jacob Trask's "Splintered" (Bacopa Literary Review 2016) because it does all of the above, and also reflects upon itself in its title and its shape:

                Splintered

     the crack   in the frame
      is thin   almost nonexistent
    it runs   parallels
  from top   peak
    of jamb   too far
        almost   impossibly
   to the floor   it's in my head
    only through   this determined
     observation   everything
              all of it   the thought of it even
has been found   scarred, maybe
 deeply fractured   broken

Jacob Trask is a graduate student studying English with a focus in creative writing, The College at Brockport, State University of New York.