Recently I've become fascinated by very short poems. They seem to embody in such a stark way one of the defining characteristics of poetry - that it should be difficult and look easy. Also, because of their length they stay in my memory almost without effort - gaining my affection through familiarity, so to speak.

Here are two of my favourite very short poems. They're extremely different in style - one is funny and one isn't - but I think that both authors are rather underrated as poets.

1. GOD'S LOVE

God loves us all, I'm pleased to say -
Or those who love him anyway -
Or those who love him and are good.
Or so they say. Or so he should.

Vikram Seth


2. AFTER PRAGUE (FOR MARIA TSVETAYEVA)

He went. You said
you didn't want to live -

but there were other cities,
sixteen years,

before you reached the end,
alone in Yelabuga.

Hope is a long leash,
drawn in slowly.

Wendy Cope

How to define "very short"? Shorter than a sonnet perhaps?

One of my favorites:

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young birdcatcher
Swept off his tall hat to the squire's own daughter,
Thus letting the imprisoned larks escape and fly,
Singing about her head as she rode by.

--Robert Graves

I first encountered it as a "poem on the Underground" many many years ago in London, and it stuck with me instantly.

There's a newish zine out that specializes in only very short poems--Blink, I think it is called.

One of my favourites by Maori poet, Hone Tuwhare:

Haiku

Stop
your snivelling
creek-bed

come rain hail
and flood-water

laugh again

My current favorite metrical short:

Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool

<UL TYPE=SQUARE>THE POOL PLAYERS,
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.[/list]
We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin grin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.


And, my current favorite, non-met:

Rihaku (Li T'ai Po)

The Jewel Stairs' Grievance

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

Translated by: Ezra Pound

Ammons wrote this one, quoted from my memory. It has the delightful virture not only of being short but of actually making use of its own form.
Richard Wakefield

THEIR LOVE LIFE

One failure
on top of another.

FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON PARSLEY
Ogden Nash

Parsley
Is gharsley.

[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited November 27, 2003).]

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

--William Blake


A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe, That
fact has not created
in me a sense of obligation."

--Stephen Crane

And my favorite short poem of all, one of the best poems I know of any length:


Fire and Ice
Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

**
Richard, I love the Ammons you quoted. So much that I've committed it to memory!

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited November 27, 2003).]

I love all of the above. Roger, I thought I owned "Fire and Ice". Do we all feel like that about some of these essence poems?

I know I'm not alone in loving William Blake's:

The SICK ROSE

O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore ends,

I never nurs'd a dear gazelle
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die!

H.S. Leigh:

I've never had a piece of toast
Particularly long and wide,
But always fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side.

And let's not forget Nash's

Candy
is dandy
but liquor
Is quicker.

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited November 28, 2003).]

Just as a note, I Googled the Ammons, and it looks like your memory was slightly off.

Their Sex Life

On failure on
Top of another



------------------
Steve Schroeder

Though I'm not a great fan of W.S. Merwin's Purgatorio translation, I very much like some of his own poems. In addition to writing one of my favorite very long poems (the novel-length The Folding Cliffs), he wrote one of the shortest:


ELEGY

Who would I show it to?


There are also many beautiful translations of short poems in Robert Payne's The White Pony, an anthology of Chinese poetry from the Shih Ching to Mao. It's a wonderful book I'd urge everyone to own, if you can find a copy. Here's a sample, written by Tu Fu and translated by Hsieh Wen Tung:


QUATRAIN

Before you praise spring's advent, note,
What capers the mad wind may cut:
To cast the flowers to the waves
And overturn the fishing boat.

And Gavin Ewart who surely wrote the shortest;

Love Poem

You!

I had one myself which went;

Brewer's Droop

Two failures
Back to Back


Which may, inadvertently, (I was unaware of its existence) owe something to the Ammons.

Jim



[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited November 29, 2003).]

Merwin's "Elegy" is one of the funniest short poems I've ever seen. And Ewart's "Love Poem" is gorgeous.

Correction

Delete ‘Wax Effigy, some Pins, one Witch’.
Insert ‘One Lawyer, one Vindictive Bitch’.

ERIC MILLWARD

I think this is one of the most poignant love poems ever written (by Anon in the early 16th Century):


Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

Regards, Maz

John Ashbery:


The Cathedral Is

Slated for demolition

And one of the Great short poems:


At a Hasty Wedding

If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire
By bonds of every bond the best,
If hours be years. The twain are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.


--Thomas Hardy

I was going to add this to my Cynic's Corner post, but that’s already too long and Cunningham was a modern master of the epigram. Frank

Memoir

Now that he’s famous fame will not elude me:
For 14.95 read how he screwed me.


[24]
Good Fortune, when I hailed her recently,
Passed by me with the intimacy of shame
As one that in the dark had handled me
And could no longer recollect my name.

J.V. Cunningham

Here are several I came across recently when revisiting an anthology edited by Wendy Cope. The first may have been in the back of my mind when Tim Murphy and I started the recent versified jokes fad here at the 'sphere, a craze that culminated in a special issue of "Light."
RPW

A Joke Versified, by Thomas Moore

"Come, come," said Tom's father, "at your time of life,
There's no longer excuse for thus playing the rake --
It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife."
"Why so it is father -- whose wife shall I take?"


Family Court, by Ogden Nash

One would be in less danger
From the wiles of the stranger
If one's own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with.


The Englishwoman, by Stevie Smith

The Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.


Mrs. Hobson's Choice, by Alma Denny

What shall a woman
Do with her ego
Faced with the choice
That it go or he go?

Epilogue

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old one
a new one has sprung.

Grace Nichols

Swinburne's cheap shot at Oscar Wilde:

When Oscar came to join his God,
Not earth to earth, but sod to sod,
It was for sinners such as this
Hell was created bottomless.

Making a case for his belief that the Haiku form is not well suited to English, in his collections "A Net of Fireflies" and "A Chime of Windbells" Harold Stewart presented translations in a more indigenous form of couplets, like these:

ON A DRAWING BY SOKEI-AN

The black cat’s face: an unexpected dawn
Has swallowed midnight in a wide pink yawn.

Hô-ô

PERFECTION

The host said not a word. The guest was dumb.
And silent, too, the white crysanthemum.

Ryôta

THE MASTER STROKE

A seedling shoulders up some crumbs of ground:
The fields are suddenly green for miles around!

Hô-ô

FIRE AND WATER

Can these be sparks of rain or drops of light?
Fireflies darting through a shower at night.

Moritake

OLD FRIENDS

Ah, leaves remaining, ask the autumn squall
Which from your bough will be the next to fall!

Sôseki




[This message has been edited by Mario Pita (edited December 15, 2003).]

The shortest poem I have ever heard is this one, entitled

"Fleas"

Adam
had 'em.


As far as I recall, this was written by that fine poet - Anon.

Does anyone know a shorter one?

Mark, I do. John Mella published it, and I do not know the author.

Dust

I must.

I have to say that Mario's quoted translations from the Orient took me apart. Talk about compression.

Mario
At last! Harold Stewart is so right and aren't they marvellous?
Thanks for posting them.
Janet

Dear Mr. Pita:

Bless you.

nyctom

Tim,

That must be the winner - your short poem is a whole foot shorter than mine.

I did compose a single word poem 20 years ago for my daughter's name - Rayne:

The first three letters are of light - the whole word a homophone of rain. And she will certainly reign over my heart forever.

Actually, I remember Jeffers used the name "Reine" for a character in "The Double Axe". I liked the name and fiddled with the spelling.

And Spenser uses the spelling "Rayne" for "rein" (FQ 1.4.9.5), and for "reign" FQ. 2.7.44.1), and for "rain" (FQ. 7.7.23.8).

Cheers

Nope. That's not the name of that poem.

It's called:

Lines on the Antiquity of the Microbe
by Strickland Gallilan

Adam
Had'em.


[This message has been edited by diprinzio (edited December 16, 2003).]

The Thin Man
by Donald Justice

I indulge myself
In rich refusals.
Nothing suffices.

I hone myself to
This edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon.

Nemerov wrote a bunch of good shorts. Here's a few:

Power To The People

Why are the stamps adorned with kings and presidents?
That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

Morning Sun

How many more this morning are there dead of
the peace I came to bring a sword instead of?


The God Of This World

He smiles to see His children, born to sin,
Digging those foxholes there are no atheists in.


A Life

Innocence?
In a sense.
In no sense!

Was that it?
Was that it?
Was that it?

That was it.

D.H.Lawrence wrote quite a few short and sharp poems - these two from the posthumous "More Pansies" are among my favourites:


Retort to Whitman

And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy
walks to the funeral of the whole human race.

Retort to Jesus

And whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body.




------------------
Mark Allinson

I'm going out to mash a slug or two.
They're wasting my tomatoes, oozing slime
On everything I own. I think it's time
The bastards learned a lesson.- You come too.
--Bruce Bennett

I looked at this thread a while back and wondered when someone would post Stevenson’s Requiem, which was once (if it isn't now) one of the best-loved short lyrics in the language, though perhaps not in the US. I remember when I first read it as a child, those eight lines went effortlessly into my memory. And surely memorability is a major test.
....

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

....
But what would one of the more theoretical critics in our Deep End make of this, I wonder?

L1: Under the wide and starry sky

(First line should establish the norm of the meter: change Under to Beneath)

"starry sky" is a cliché. Try "Beneath the wide and dark night sky"

L2: Dig the grave and let me lie.

Oh-oh. Sense alert! You want your grave dug at night? The gravediggers will claim overtime. Anyway where else could you lie but under the sky? The whole thing's a poeticism. So take out L1 and 2.

L3: Glad did I live and gladly die.

Where to start with this?! Poetic inversion AND a wrenching of grammar to fit the meter. If you lived gladLY, surely you died gladLY? So try something like "I lived gladly and died gladly".

L4: And I laid me down with a will.

More archaic poeticism. Illogicality, too. You laid yourself down, after you were dead? Even if we let that pass, your laying yourself down with a will is just repeating that you were died gladly". So omit L4.

L5: This be the verse you grave for me.

Archaic: try "Inscribe this on the grave for me".

L6: Here he lies where he longed to be

Fix meter and inversion with "He lies here where he longed to be".

L7: Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

(Rhetorical repetition and, again, inversion. How about "The sailor's back home from the sea"?

L8: And the hunter home from the hill.

Implied verb here. Better make it explicit. Two anapests in here, too. The hunter doesn't really go with the sailor, anyway, so I suggest "The prisoner at last is free."

Putting the rewrite together:

I lived gladly and died gladly.
Inscribe this on the grave for me:
He lies here where he longed to be.
The sailor's back home from the sea
The prisoner at last is free.

Yep, that'll do it!

Don't take me too seriously, folks!

Henry

Henry,

that last post was fantastic! And well over due. I was waiting for a post that would show how pedantic prosody may be used as a weapon against the art. If something is working, why shoot it down for not obeying the tic-toc rule of the clock? Unless you have a hatred of an inspiration forever beyond your grasp - like Blake's rationalising Spectre, " Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy."

But I really came on to post one of my favourite epigrams: Donne's "Hero and Leander".

Both rob'd of aire, we both lye in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.


I love the way he weaves all four elements into these two lines.


------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited December 22, 2003).]

Although probably found more prolifically in other places, I found this poem in This Book Will Change Your Life by BENRIK, Authors of Works of Literary Distinction at Commonsense Prices -

A cat
Sat on
A mat.

------------------
-SRyan

Authorship
by Jame Naylor

King David and King Solomon
....Led merry, merry lives
With many, many lady friends
....And many, many wives,
But when old age crept over them,
....With many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
....And King David wrote the Psalms.

I knew that.

I love that Naylor poem, and just discovered it in, of all places, Good Poems, by Garrison Keillor. But since GK recently read a Gwynn poem on the air, I shouldn't be surprised he has good taste.

I know this is the "Mastery" thread, and not a place to post one's own poems, but since the thread seems to have run its course, and I have a poem that is just six words long, I hope it won't be amiss if I post it here:


Robert Frost's Puppy

He wrote doggerel
for Kennedy's inaugural.

**

And, as long as I've broken the ice, I'll post one more ultra-short one:

My Grandmother, The Actress

Of the two famous playwrights
who charmed and beguiled her,
Oscar was Wilde
but Thornton was Wilder.

Roger, I'm fond of that neat little poem by James Naylor, but I have its title as Conscience — which seems more appropriate than Authorship. I like your own two, especially the second.

Since we seem to have moved on to the light, I’ll offer this old punny limerick:

There was a young fellow from Clyde
Who fell down a sewer and died.
....The next day his brother
....Fell into another
So now they’re interred side by side.
....
And rhyming along the lines of your playwrights one is this, by Housman:

THE SHADES OF NIGHT

The shades of night were falling fast
And the rain was falling faster
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor.

The early Yeats was good at poems of 8 lines or
less. Here's one:

A DRINKING SONG

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.