'Now that that’s Over:' After Grief, the Quiet Poem

July 16, 2026

by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty

I’ve been writing some haiku lately. Not a lot, but so far twelve, and I can see the shape of a series, a progression of seasonal tableaux. While this shouldn’t be any kind of revelation from someone who’s spent a career writing and teaching poetry, for me it’s a startling turn from my maximalist approach to the narrative, documentary, and persona poems that have characterized my last three books. Most recently, The Bearable Slant of Light draws, for its long opening poem, on clinical records, persona, and collage poems in a kind of forced block of text. Lines are all lengths and arrayed across the page in a hyper-manic approach to composition by field. Reading it aloud often exhausts me. And I have read it aloud a lot in the last two years.

But at my last several readings I have been sharing some new work. And it’s quieter, and somehow more formal, if not always packaged in a received form. By way of a set-up, I explain that after you write a big book about the onset and course of your son’s bipolar that has all the feels—anger, fear, guilt, grief—something shifts. And now, I’m maxing out at sonnet length. I’ve dropped clinical documentation and personas; I’ve let go of narrative jeremiads. All of that earned its place in earlier work, including This Great Green Valley, which imagined revisionist histories of Kentucky’s pioneer history, and I can see the way that kind of expansive and transgressive approach widened both my writing and my reading.

But now I’m giving over to a quiet formality, writing poems with unassuming titles like “Now that that’s over” and “Beatific” (both sonnets) or “Pastoral,” a brief, brand-new poem that is almost entirely image-based.

And of course haiku.

The haiku seems to me to be the most formal of all poems, not only in its strict, but wildly simple, rules—three lines in a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5—but also in its feeling. Maybe it’s the long and unchanged tradition of this thirteenth-century Japanese form, or the persistence of its classic and timeless subject matter. The American Academy of Poets explains: “Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.” For these reasons, Ezra Pound was a fan, along with the rest of the Imagist gang who revolted against Victorian excess. In his manifesto, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Pound exhorted admonitions such as “Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs” and maxims like “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” (So much for the 800-paged, 120-sectioned Cantos, I guess). Imagists shifted poetry’s avant garde during and after the post-World War I era, a time of radical social and political upheaval as well as collective post-war healing.

But the Imagists were on to something, and we can see the continuing fascination with the haiku as well as its cousin the tanka in numerous contemporary poems as showcases for the image, even if they don’t follow quite the traditional form or are used for conventionally narrative projects. And clearly haiku is helping me give shape to something that is shifted in how I see the world and my place in it as a poet. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about—no—I’ve been haunted by Emily Dickinson’s great poem “After great pain a formal feeling comes -”, particularly the first two lines:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -

The astonishing simile here—pairing the organically electric Nerves now static as Tombs—speaks exactly to my sense that I must think and move and write with ritual purpose.

The poem continues:

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -

First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -

The poem indirectly invokes Christianity with the reference to “He”, but with a resolution of the self into an unredeemed soul “letting go -”. It ends, like so many of her poems, with a dash that might point to an indeterminate After, an ambiguous totality without clear beginning or end. The poem is cast in a thwarted ballad measure, with inconsistent quatrains and uneven meter, especially in the last two lines, as if stutter-stepping toward its opaque conclusion.

The work of the formal feeling is “Wooden” and “mechanical”; at best we can hope for “A Quartz contentment, like a stone -”. It is hard going of a particular type that anyone who knows grief, knows keenly as this kind of existence. Dickinson’s poem doesn’t tell us everything we need to live through “the Hour of Lead”—whether it be individual or collective grief. But haiku and other formally and subjectively quiet poems, which themselves “sit Ceremonious like Tombs,” can be a monument, a kind of witness to something that is “Remembered, if outlived,” and so too, the ritual of their enactment a way to move on.

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Lynnell Edwards, Ph.D., is poetry faculty with the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and Book Reviews Editor for Good River Review. Her most recent collection of poetry is The Bearable Slant of Light. More about her work at lynnelledwards.com.