One of my favorite books is The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons. The glory of Ammons is how he takes a single moment and frames it, very much like haiku.

Mirrorment

Birds are flowers flying
and flowers perched birds.

To see how much he accomplishes in the title and two lines is impressive. He also does comedic proverbs:

Lost and Found

Apostasy is such, if you doubt on,
You return by the road you set out on.

Their
Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

Brilliant. But despite the brevity he still operates with epiphany.

Hollows

The whirlwind lifts
sand into itself to hide

holy spun emptiness or to
erect a tall announcement

where formed
emptiness is to be found.

Transfer

When the bee lands the
morning glory bloom
dips some and weaves:
the coming true of
weight
from weightless wing-held
air
seems at the touch
implausible.

“Where formed/ emptiness is found” is perhaps the best definition of poetry ever offered. And from “Transfer” the whole poem builds to its final word and that word makes the whole poem work. Short poems can frame the words in a way that longer poems cannot. For the best use of the word “petulantly” see Robert Creeley’s The Gift.

From Shakespeare we learn that “brevity is the soul of wit” and Robert Southey improved upon this saying:  ”It is with words as with sunbeams.  The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” But they were both trumped by Dorothy Parker who said “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

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