“A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure.”

— Herbert Read

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

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Herbert Read 42

English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art 1893–1968

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.

“My poems please the brave:
My poems, short and sincere,
Have the force of steel
Which forges swords.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Source: Simple Verses (1891), V

“The best parts of this book grow out of poems and song lyrics.”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment on the scene in which Baoyu meets Hsiao-hung for the second time in chapter 25, as reported and quoted in Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature by Wai-yee Li (Princeton University Press, 1993), footnote on p. 168

“The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Poetry and Craft (1965)

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

“The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

(10 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she — the author — should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

“…I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can’t transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn’t exist for me…”

Lucha Corpi (1945)

On how she favors a musical quality to her poetry in the book Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets https://books.google.com/books?id=LkVO9mmfwZYC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq

“Quote of Rembrandt's, from his short poem, 1634; on his own drawing of a lord with beard, very probably representing the court-master Burchard Grossmann in his 'album amicorum' (translation from the original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn)”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

1630 - 1640

“The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout.
Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 31

“The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, let’s say, or Doc Williams’s Patterson…. The game is definitely an epic … formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

“A Kind of Love,” The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed (1993).

“A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure.”

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Herbert Read 42

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