Blank space
Image: David van Dijk on Unsplash
In broadcasting, you’re instructed to avoid ‘dead air’. If you’re applying for a job, you may be dreading the question about that gap in your resumé. Why are we so scared of a little blank space?
I often think about the Miles Davis bon mot that says, ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’. It suggests that a solo instrument is always in a duet with silence and a writer is always in collaboration with the empty space on a page.
A poem gets a lot of its power from the space around the stanzas. The language is condensed, compressed like a coiled spring as a result. The blank space is not a trick, nor is it a waste – it is an essential part of the poem.
In the age of physical printing, the blank space surrounding a poem may have seemed like a luxury a printer was unwilling to abide, or a reader unwilling to pay for. In an age of digital publication, even digital space has been commodified within the attention economy.
Any news article you read online is linked to 10 more, any space an advertiser can purchase has already been sold: all space is real estate in the attention economy. As Brian Eno said in an interview, we see 10,000 ads a day, which makes it harder than ever for us to know what we like.
Alain Badiou in Conditions contends that, ‘To love poetry is to love not being able to choose’. While incorporating blank space into the poem is an expensive decision for the poet, it is also a demonstration of trust that the poet gives the reader.
In an interview, Jenny Odell, the author of How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy, defines the attention economy as:
this perspective in which time is money, and you should have something to show for your time – either getting work done, or self-improvement, which I would still count as work. Anything that detracts from that is too expensive, from the time-is-money perspective.
What we learn from the poem’s use of blank space is to consider how a moment of pause can be essential to deepen our appreciation of what we have.
