A Sad Story, Briefly Told: A Poem by Simon Armitage

Psychoanalytic clinicians are no strangers to incomplete narratives: to stories assembled from the bits and pieces of our patients' unreliable and unsystematic reports about their lives. We take what we can get, gather the details, and together with the patient, construct a more coherent and, hopefully, a more liberating narrative. We know we never have the whole picture-we're always connecting the dots, making constellations from only the most visible stars.

Poets study a version of the same problem: how much do you need to know to know the story, how much will you have to say to tell it? Often, because in poetry brevity is its own pleasure, the question becomes, how little can you say? Here's a wonderful lesson in concision from a contemporary British poet who I suspect will be little known to most readers of DIVISION/Review, Simon Armitage.