I like short poems best, probably because I’m lazy or rushed, but possibly because their succinctness requires that the poem maximizes the language, and that impresses me. It also may be that in their brevity are easily digested, and in a single, whole chunk they can be stored in memory. Though his explanation is often oversimplified or misunderstood, Poe does a better job of targeting the effectiveness of short bursts of poetry in “The Philosophy of Composition” wherein he argues:
What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.
Poe’s definition of a “brief” poem is longer than mine–for Poe the effect of a poem derived from a “unity of impression” that he believed was disrupted by breaking off from and returning to a poem. So “long” to him, though relative, was defined by the need for multiple sittings. I count a short poem as one half-a-page or less, and blame a short attention span for this preference. I do enjoy long poems, but I wonder at the pleasure I derive from short poems (sually when I’m reading a long poem and my mind wanders, or I wonder if I didn’t pay close enough attention to a stanza that I should have, and if either of these will prevent me from being astonished in the end).
This brings me to “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry”, a fine anthology of contemporary poems based on Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 project. Though I had “finished” with this book some time ago, I added this book to my Sunday stack because I couldn’t remember more than a couple poems from the anthology, and wanted to review it and consider why more poem’s didn’t stick. It turned out not to be any fault with the anthology, which I found still awfully strong, but rather a failure of my own brain, for even with the book closed I saw dozens of dog-eared pages gaping at me, like a playful pop waiting for me to return. As I worked through these marked poems, it was instantly obvious that most were what I’ve termed “short”. Here are three that quite pierced me, that I would have no excuse for not remembering again:
"White Towels" Richard Jones I have been studying the difference between solitude and loneliness, telling the story of my life to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer. I carry them through the house as though they were my children asleep in my arms.
"Only One of My Deaths" Dean Young Because it seems the only way to save the roses is to pluck the Japanese beetles out of their convoluted paradise and kill them, I think for a moment, instead of crushing them in the driveway, of impaling them on the thorns. Perhaps they'd prefer that.
"Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?" Robert Hershon Don't fill up on bread I say absent-mindedly The servings here are huge My son, whose hair may be receding a bit, says DId you really just say that to me? What he doesn't know is that when we're walking together, when we get to the curb I sometimes start to reach for his hand
I could include more short poems from this anthology, though now I’m more curious to open up other anthologies and check my dog-eared poems’ lengths. I don’t recall ever studying the length of poems in school, but I’m sure there’s good stuff written on the subject which I’ll probably never get around to uncovering. The best thing I can say about my own preference to short poems that doesn’t indict myself is that short poems are harder than long poems, elegant, compact, imbued, necessary. A poet can take as long as s/he wants to explain the point, to tell the story. But how much can you cut away? Rather, how much can be more efficiently substituted without sacrificing aesthetic?
P. S. In customizable card games, as in many subjects, one is always aiming for the shortest, most efficient route to success. Because every turn allows only limited actions, advantage is held by the player who can maximize those actions, and much of that maximization comes from the design of one’s deck. Last night, after several games of Lord of the Rings with my friend Gavin, I immersed my mind in possibilities for a new deck, considering card choices by recognizing in each the balance between cost, effect, permanence, and reusability, and looking for whatever relative advantage might be hidden in each. As I did so my mind turned to poetry, and I was pleased to find a real aesthetic satisfaction in the design and construction of a deck of cards, though less intense, lasting, and meaningful than that I find in poetry.
