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Short: Poems
A short poem compresses images and actions into an impossibly small canvas. There's a blank page, and then just a few words burst up from it, directing your neurons to fire, layering images and hints of narrative.
In 1977, Samuel L. Delany wrote “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words” about how we experience compressed textual information. Judgement of meaning runs quick and deep.
Delany paints narrative subtlety in a single lovely sentence, slowing our readerly response to unfold the reality of a bit of text. “The red sun is” brings expectation, intimacy. “The red sun is high;” adds warmth, as well as a sense of place and time, a landscape's noon. “The red sun is high; the blue” sets us up for the broadness and normalcy of sky. Then, the beautiful twist. “The red sun is high; the blue low.” . . . . . Balancing those course corrections is especially difficult in a very short poem. In these I first aspired to what Delany calls “a resonant aesthetic form”.
This tiny book of short poems was published in 2002 by Tollbooth Press. Re-issued in 2018 by Burn This Press.
In 1977, Samuel L. Delany wrote “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words” about how we experience compressed textual information. Judgement of meaning runs quick and deep.
Delany paints narrative subtlety in a single lovely sentence, slowing our readerly response to unfold the reality of a bit of text. “The red sun is” brings expectation, intimacy. “The red sun is high;” adds warmth, as well as a sense of place and time, a landscape's noon. “The red sun is high; the blue” sets us up for the broadness and normalcy of sky. Then, the beautiful twist. “The red sun is high; the blue low.” . . . . . Balancing those course corrections is especially difficult in a very short poem. In these I first aspired to what Delany calls “a resonant aesthetic form”.
This tiny book of short poems was published in 2002 by Tollbooth Press. Re-issued in 2018 by Burn This Press.
31 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 1, 2018
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