Looking for Little Odes

by Darla Himeles

Last week, a friend noted that a couple of odes I’d written were unusually short and focused for the form.  An ode is traditionally longer than twelve lines, after all, and it is usually musing, philosophical, even meandering.  It was an observation free from judgment, but it made me curious: what makes an ode an ode?

Of course, many poets and poetry readers agree that tweaking forms, even breaking them, saves them from extinction.  If every sonnet written today were in true rhyming iambic pentameter, I dare say most modern readers would be bored — and we would not have such fantastic “broken” sonnets as Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the rites for Cousin Vit,” the sonnets that open and close Maxine Kumin’s Jack and Other New Poems, or many of Daniel Hoffman’s sonnets in Makes You Stop and Think.  Slant rhymes, irregular line lengths, and tweaked or tossed aside meters help make these sonnets fresh.

Right, but can an ode, which John Drury’s Poetry Dictionary defines as a “song or lyric, often passionate, expansive, exuberant, rhapsodic,” avoid much of the meandering and be direct, to the point, concise?  Surely the ode has evolved much as the sonnet has.  Drury discusses the varieties that have developed over time: Pindaric or choral odes (Sophocles), Horatian odes (simplified later by Keats in works like “Ode to a Nightingale”), Cowleyan or irregular odes (Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), and Neruda’s elemental odes.  How would Sharon Olds categorize her odes to hymens, composting toilets, and the like?  I suppose they, too, are elemental, “passionate and rhapsodic about the ordinary,” even if composting toilets aren’t quite ordinary to most of us.  And does it matter how she – or anyone – would categorize an ode?  Can an ode call itself an ode and for that reason be one?

Surely an ode can be small as long its heart is big and its song is praise.  I wanted to find examples to prove to myself that I’m not alone in this. As I started Googling and combing through the journals and poetry collections on my shelf, however, I couldn’t really find examples.

How about you, Getting Something Read reader, peripatetic web surfer?  Have you seen small odes here or elsewhere?  Do you write them?  Let’s make a small offering of praise to something in our lives this week.  Call it an ode.  See if we can start a tiny ode revolution.

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Links: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maxine Kumin, Daniel Hoffman, Sharon Olds, John Drury, Pablo Neruda, Links to Odes