By Julie Swarstad Johnson

 

What kind of writing is possible in the moments between home and work, tending to children and attending to patients? Poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah responds by creating the textu, a text-message take on the haiku with only one formal constraint: it must use exactly 160 characters, the limit of an SMS message. Textu, Joudah’s third collection of poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013 as an e-book and re-issued in print in 2014, gathers nearly one hundred textus into a slim volume only slightly larger than a cell phone. Dense with allusion, compression, and intelligence, Joudah’s textus ask us to consider the weight of every line and line break, character and space, word and silence.

In the compact language a textu requires, the world fractures into rapidly revolving images and fragments of speech. “Your spine a river into the forest / can’t tell the neurons from the trees” begins "Textu," moving immediately from intimacy to anatomy to altered idiom. The limited space also results in poems that quickly turn: 

People are a vast deep sea
Oh to be away from them

is a ship
& dearly beloved when I think of thee

I shudder like a wet sparrow
Graves don’t thirst

(“Anonymous”)

The textu speeds to its conclusion, and the final line surprises us with what seems to arrive as a non-sequitur. The lack of punctuation—a feature common to the majority of the poems in the collection—exemplifies this feeling. Stripped of punctuation, Joudah’s textus take on the urgency of rapidly composed text messages, the directness of their content heightened by the absence of anything extraneous.

Joudah calls the 160-character limit the textu’s only formal guideline, but other repeated characteristics provide more immediately tangible structure: all but five of the poems appear as sets of three couplets and most contain about thirty words, including the title. Although the character limit guides the composition of a textu, these other characteristics make them recognizable. As a result, any break from the pattern surprises us.  Only twice does Joudah break from couplets in favor of a single stanza, and without the even punctuation of white space, the poems’ brevity becomes aggressive:

Stop it with the we already
are mucosal tourette or
sublingual compliance.
It is Christmas. Even the
wretched survive
indie style.

(“Martyrdom”)

In “Martyrdom” and occasionally elsewhere, Joudah exceeds the 160-character limit by stitching together multiple textus into one. These longer pieces allow Joudah room to develop images, scenes, and ideas. “The Old Man Who Wept” stands out as one of Textu’s most compelling poems, and its length proves essential.  The poem presents a man “& his wife // of 62 years” who “wept & suffered / chronic love” over the pressures of illness and caring for one another. In six joined textus, Joudah offers more nuance than elsewhere: eighteen lines in, the poem turns to the fragile relationship between the man and the speaker-doctor, a relationship affirmed in a gift of lemons from the man’s tree. The handful of multi-textu poems scattered throughout the collection provide a welcome respite from so much compression.

Titles frequently act as a key to the poem’s cipher in Textu, providing context necessary to unlock the poem’s contents.  “‘Neither for nor Against’” and “Emily” on facing pages turn our attention to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, while poems titled “87” and “102” are spoken in the voices of aged patients. “Next B-Day will be on the local news,” says the speaker of “102.”  Allusion—whether to other writers or ancient stories and myths—also proves crucial and sometimes limiting.  The title “Discipline & Punish,” for instance, invokes Michel Foucault’s famous work:

Zeus the 1st photographer
often using flash

documenting the world
bearing witness

It’s not his forms so much
as his high-tech criminality

Although the poem suggests intriguing doubts about documentary poetry, those doubts are much more vague and forgettable than the portraits in “The Old Man Who Wept.” A handful of poems, including “Discipline & Punish,” read like a note passed between graduate students, reliant on a shared core of knowledge.

Despite being inspired by an immediate and momentary mode of communication, Textu benefits from multiple readings, its layers often unfolding only after several approaches. Here, perhaps, lies the proof that Joudah has succeeded in creating a form that exceeds the simplicity of its origin. Textu serves as an example of what forms do at their best: they require writers to adapt to constraints and to utilize every remaining option. Textu reminds us of those simple facts and invites us to consider how the constraints of both form and life might invite us to use our own available resources to the fullest.