SCORE 16 (issued in 2001): The Largeness the Small is Capable of, an anthology of poems five lines or less, now available as an e-book (free):

 http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-largeness-the-small-is-capable-of/9209496

From the editor’s intro:

the largeness the small is capable of*  was sparked by the surge of short poems reaching print starting in the mid-1980s. This surge has not let up as of August 2001. I had to start somewhere; I have to stop somewhere. But there are so many poems five lines or less that should be a part of an anthology of such poems.

Of course the short poem was not born in the 1980s - it’s a sibling of the epic and had brief, furious life between the World Wars through the Imagist and Objectivist movements - but under the sheer number of poems being written lay the question why so many now?

I’m now less interested in answering that question, averse to sociological speculation, but I am interested in showing off the quality, or quiddity, as Liz Was puts it, of the short poem.

What I think I found: short poems have the same range as longer forms, the same diversity. And why not? I might even argue that there’s more meaning per square foot (iambic or otherwise) in the short poem than other poetic incarnations.

Humor is prevalent. Political statement. Surprise endings, turns of phrase. Unabashed punning and other forms of wordplay.  Precision in choice of words, in choice of line breaks, in spacing of both. Brevity, yes, but depth too. Instantaneous meaning but also elusiveness. Clarity and opacity.

Yet for every characteristic (beside brevity) used to categorize short poems, along came poems to gainsay them. For instance, many of the short poems in print before the 1980s succeed essentially in the same ways as lyric poems, but how do Joseph Torra’s poems fit into any definition of lyric poetry? G. P. Skratz and others have described short poems as arriving in a divine flash, appearing whole, in need of little alteration, poems born full grown rather than shaped over time by the poet, but in what way are Jeff Conant’s poems born in a flash? Some say short poems give up their meaning at once, are immediately accessible. If you need that assumption undermined, go, for one, to Jake Berry’s poems.

But for all their various, vigorous presences, short poems often seem short-shrifted in literary journals, relegated to filler. As short poems are more susceptible to overcrowding than longer poems -- they need their space – this borders on travesty. But for economic reasons, I, too, am guilty of this travesty. Ideally the poems in this anthology should all have their own page but SCORE, alas, could not afford to print an anthology pushing 400 pages. 

The original format I intended: a section of “historical” poems, poems by established poets -- Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein (think much of Tender Buttons), Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Clark Coolidge, Anselm Hollo, Ed Dorn, and others -- an attempt to characterize the art form as it existed prior to the 1980s. But that study remains to be done. Cost of reprints -- $90.00 and up for poems by many of the poets named above -- was prohibitive. The second section would then consist of an anthology of a range of new poems by a variety of poets, an attempt to represent a spectrum. That became the work-in-progress, the on-going assessment of the artform. Without further ado, then, here are the poems that show you the largeness the small is capable of. Considerable!

 * Thanks to M. Kettner for the title*

Contributors include: Robert Grenier, Lee Ann Brown, Joel Chace, Jeff Conant, Ellen Cooney, Geof Huth, Michael Leddy, Joel Lewis, John Martone, F. A. Nettlebeck, John Perlman, Stephen Ratcliffe, Steve Sanfield, Nico Vassilakis, Bob Grumman, mIEKAL aND, Craig Van Riper, John Vieira

Comments

[Ed Baker]

Crag I dropped out 100 % 1975 through 1998 (did I miss much?) so I wasn't "there" when you collected all of this "stuff" since I've been more or less "back" (since then) I feel that i am Lost In The Phun House w out a paddle my greatwest desire is to drop out agan/now but feear that if i so do this time when i drop back in I'll be dead! thanx for clearing all up this my re:putation depends upon as I want to approach these things: literally and consequentially.

[Crag Hill]

Ed: This is a reissue of a SCORE 16, first published in 2001, not a recent project. It's incomplete for sure--I think there's still a HUGE need for a major study of the short poem. I'm not sure how I missed your work when I was collecting in the 1990s; I spread my nets pretty wide I thought. There was also a ton of work if I had the money to buy rights to I would have included. I also envisioned publishing each poem on its own page--the poems deserved it. I reluctantly brought out the collection through SCORE; I had no other avenues and the work had been gathering too much dust. I offer that 2001 issue now as a free e-book so the poems are read--there're no good on my shelf/in my files. Maybe it will spawn work on that much-needed "complete" study. Best, Crag

[Ed Baker]

glad that I didn't "make the cut" must be that I forgot to send you my yearly/annual dues! many here-in that I would be 'tickled' to be included with... and would have given you permission to publish or republish something of mine.... minus most of the "group" you embrace, many more included in your anthology who I wouldn't/don't care to be ... well.. a member of their "club" or "school" visually thinking that y'all are steeped in VISPO, gosh, you could have presented things visually appealing and gotten things at least placed on each page IN IT S OWN SPACE this lulu thing like Microsoft a colossal cancer!