“A Gnat’s Horizon”: Brief Lyric Poetry in Meter & Rhyme
Brian Brodeur
Though “lyric” has become synonymous with “poetry,” much of what passes for contemporary lyric lacks the concision, formal play, and linguistic ulteriority traditionally associated with this genre. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how some renegade poets of the post-Romantic era through the current day have used the melic compression of brief lyric as a means of expansiveness. Longer than epigrams and shorter than sonnets, these poems achieve in five to twelve lines what much bulkier poems attempt in larger forms, doing more with less. We’ll focus on American examples, considering earlier poems by Dickinson, Robinson, and Frost through recent work by Rhina P. Espaillat, Kay Ryan, and A. E. Stallings. We’ll consider strategies for versification and economy of language in our own poems, drafting several brief lyrics that marry idiomatic speech with familiar poetic forms such as the elegiac quatrain, heroic couplet, and triolet.
